By Sophia Abbasi

The first time I met Alex it was at a school dance. She was friendly, smart, outgoing. Alex had been involved in so many activities in and out of school – hip-hop, basketball, track – she even started her own environmental club at school.

I’m not sure what caused the sudden change. In school there is a crowd of misfits who pride themselves on being bad and rebelling against conformity. Perhaps the importance of being well liked meant that Alex had to be friends with this group. And when Alex first told me she smoked cigarettes occasionally I didn’t really know what to think. Then I learned that she was going to what seemed like every single part in town, bragging about every explicit detail of what went on.

While we’ve all been taught that doing drugs causes dependency, I didn’t believe it would happen to my friend. All of a sudden Alex stopped going to dance classes. She stopped trying hard in school. She was high all the time. I was worried.

Smoking pot had become Alex’s way of making friends. It had taken control of her life. She started taking other drugs – crack, LSD – you name it, she took it. But she had this aura of invincibility. Nothing would ever happen to her. Alex boasted she would drive home high. She smoked pot four times a day. She had allowed kids who were drunk to drive her home from parties after she was stoned. Gradually, all of her real friends stayed away from her. No one wanted to be friends with someone who is stoned all the time.

One night I did the hardest thing I had ever done in my entire life. I picked up the phone and called her parents. I told them I wanted to remain anonymous. I told them to check her pockets and make sure she had no money. The whole time I was on the phone I was shaking.

I avoided Alex at school after that. One day I realized that I hadn’t seen her in a very long time. I called her home to find out that she had been put in a rehabilitation center after having overdosed in front of her parents. Her heart rate had been 150/160 – she could have died.

The scary thing is that once Alex returned to school, she still tried to find ways to do drugs. Even though her parents were having her tested every week – even though she was on probation in and out of school, her mindset had not changed at all. She had learned how to bypass drug tests while she was in rehab. What happened to the wake-up call? Why couldn’t she understand that substance abuse was taking a toll on her body, killing her slowly? Why couldn’t she see that she didn’t have to be “cool” to be my friend?