As children grow, parents pin hopes on them. But hope could be shattered into irrecoverable pieces when drugs drag them away from the right path. Research has shown that the earlier the drug use is initiated, the more likely a person is to develop drug problems later in life, putting a family hope in its children on hold, maybe till eternity. Drug addiction has swept children out into a dead end, destroying many families. And it is not only the child affected by the menace of drugs, but also parents. Drug addicts' mothers are most the likely most affected of all. “I am a mother of a drug addict who started using drugs when he was sixteen plus,” said Jameela Abdulhady 70 years old and a mother of six. “I got divorced a few years after the marriage and my son is 43 now,” she said. “Nothing has changed ever since he started drugs,” she lamented. Like many other drug addicts' mothers, Jameela has lived in fear with an unpredictable drug addict who might lose his mind any minute and do the unthinkable. “My son never lasted for over a month in a job, asking me for money all the time,” she said. His brothers were the only source I would resort to fetch the money for him, she explained. Only a SR100 bill would keep him quiet for a day, she said. But the price for drugs could go as high as SR5000 a month out of his mother's pocket, she said. The mother said she found herself forced to give him the money knowing that it was going into a drugs dealer pocket so as to keep her son away from looking for the money somewhere else. She was afraid of a crime committed by him to get money. He could disgrace the well-established name of the family, she said. “My youngest son has become my biggest burden,” she said. “We took him to several hospitals in the Kingdom and abroad but in vain,” she said. He had not the will to quit. The mother called the police on her own son a few times to take him in for a while. But every time he was released from jail, he got back into the deadly habit. With emotional speculation sneaking into her, she said “I feel that my son is punishing me for getting divorced from his father.” Jameela's story with her son has developed within a set of sociocultural trends leading to juvenile addiction, a specialist said. “The circumstances a family goes through can lead to juvenile addiction, especially during childhood family turbulence of parent divorce and separation, or even death of one parent or both,” said Azza Abu Bakor, a sociologist at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah. The family, she said, has a great impact on children during their early lives, she said. Family members who indulge in drugs could have an equally influential impact on children's behavior. Youth substance abuse can lead to many other problems, including the development of delinquent behavior, anti-social attitudes, and health-related issues, she added. If Jameela has had a hard time with only one child, how about a mother with three drug addicts. Parents might not even want to entertain this fact for a minute, let alone to live its reality. But Hamidah Al Ahmadi did. An illiterate widow and mother of four children has been truly unfortunate with three drug addicts. “My husband died rich, leaving a big fortune that attracted their bad friends to prey on it,” she said. It started with one of the three who did heroin and got hooked, spilling it to his other two brothers. “He became addicted and he made his younger brother try it before I noticed any changes in their behavior,” she said. She felt they were changing, but she followed “Don't tell” policy. “I thought that people would say that I failed to bring them up properly after the death of my husband,” she said. Unknowingly she provided them with the money to buy drugs, but it was too late to realize that she lost one of them to an overdose. “The country is still lagging behind in the treatment of drug addicts,” said Abu Bakor. “Treatment seems to focus only the physical part where the drug addict is brought into hospital and given medication, failing to address the needs of drug-affected families,” she explained. “The opportunity to develop family-oriented support and treatment must be taken into consideration,” she argued. The Kingdom has severe penalties for the import, manufacture, possession, and consumption of alcohol or illegal drugs. Based on a ruling by the Ulema, drug smugglers might face the ultimate punishment. First-time offenders faced prison terms, floggings, and fines, or a combination of all three punishments. __
