At some point I tried drugs, and it turned out that I loved them.

February 15, 2014 11:08 AM

"I don’t feel like I deserve a second chance. I just want one." He lost it all to meth. The marriage. The money. The job covering crime. "Everybody that I talked to later said that they knew. Knew I was doing it. The police, who were my sources, City Council members, knew I was high. I was like why didn't they say something? They just accepted it."

The writer of the piece, Todd Frankel, did an interview about the story. The pullquote is from this video interview of Scott, which also appears atop the main article.

posted by cashman (25 comments total)

Supernormal stimulus.
posted by hank at 11:18 AM on February 15, 2014 [3 favorites]

He didn’t touch drugs until he was 30.

Well, there's your problem right there, dude. And going straight-in with coke? Phew..
posted by wcfields at 11:45 AM on February 15, 2014 [6 favorites]

Good article, thanks for the read.
posted by maryr at 11:50 AM on February 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Very tough thing to break away from. He needs to see something bigger than him- like his need to be parent for his children. Even if it is an internally quiet thing, it needs to be there.

Very good read. And hard.
posted by Nadie_AZ at 12:03 PM on February 15, 2014

Reminds me of Night Of The Gun.

He needs to see something bigger than him- like his need to be parent for his children.
That's what worked for David Carr.
posted by thelonius at 12:58 PM on February 15, 2014

The problem with the most incideous drugs is that it obliterates your wanter. That is, with most vices, we have base desires for something unhealthy, but often a second order desire that wants to be different, for the other good things in our lives, like health and relationships. If you have something though that kills that second order wanter from the moral equation, you can be thoroughly screwed unless something can miraculously break through, and that isn't always possible. This, too me, is when drugs are at their most frustrating and terrifying.
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:10 PM on February 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Awful situation, I hope he finds a way to stay clean and get his life back on track.
posted by arcticseal at 1:21 PM on February 15, 2014

Wow. That link brought 2 pop up advertisement windows and a video commercial. Most ever, for me.
posted by uraniumwilly at 1:56 PM on February 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

The idea that pain is not central to the human experience, equal to and alongside joy, is the tragedy and has been for ever so long. To yield, to merge, to figure out how to get your arms around it, the crazy mix, that's the trick. To stay vital and true and authentic is healing, to go through not around is healing. The warm mask or blanket or muffled feeling, which is what my own dabbling in opiates produced in me, years ago, eats time, eats it. Stage IV here. Wanting anything other than every real minute is so hard for me to comprehend from my vantage point. So so sad.

posted by thinkpiece at 9:14 AM on February 5

posted by mikelieman at 2:13 PM on February 15, 2014

He still looked a faint bit like he retained membership in that world of upper-middle-class ease. But he no longer owned a single pair of khakis or a white collared shirt.

lol white people

"Hey bro how you been? Whoa that's fucked up. Dude dude dude, no lemme write about it. We'll get ahead of the story, right? I'm not gonna lie though, man - you need to get your shit straight. I know you know the judges and all so you'll get deferred until hell and gone and then get drug court and it's not gonna be that big of a deal but DUDE, c'mon."

A middle-class white boy is about to get his sorry tail dragged into the System in a big fat horrible way.

Cry me a fucking river.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 5:20 PM on February 15, 2014 [3 favorites]

I pitied the man who had no khakis, until I met a man who had an iPhone 4
posted by thelonius at 5:33 PM on February 15, 2014 [8 favorites]

Cry me a fucking river.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 8:20 PM on 2/15

Eponysadistical?




My only qualm is that the article seems to give meth too much weight. I've seen many of these same instances in conjunction with booze, gambling, whatever.

It's not like meth, crack, booze, the casino or oxycontins are insta-junkie... It's just when someone is broken and thinks they've finally found a magic "fix," especially in a substance or vice, then all hell tends to break loose. Unfortunately, for them and everyone around them.
posted by Debaser626 at 5:52 PM on February 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

What was painful to read is, the guy still thinks he can outsmart his meth addiction. He still thinks he's different from other drug users. I hope he can keep out of jail, but it seems unlikely, given the way he's thinking and acting.
posted by thelonius at 6:11 PM on February 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

Wow. That link brought 2 pop up advertisement windows and a video commercial. Most ever, for me.

Yep. Welcome to stltoday.com, the website of my hometown newspaper. It used to be when you clicked on the text of articles there, it'd bring up even more popups, so if you're a compulsive text highlighter like me, you'd end up with a whole stack of 'em. It doesn't seem to be doing that at the moment, though.

Sigh. I was disappointed—but not surprised—to find that this was a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I feel like I've heard this guy's story before, but maybe I'm just thinking of David Carr.
posted by limeonaire at 6:30 PM on February 15, 2014

Where's a reporter get the money to do coke?

Passing judgment is easy, the distance is safe.
It is. It really is!

Y'know, how sad is it if you mess up your life, lose your job, get divorced, lose custody of your kids, and you don't have a meth habit?

I think we allow a lot of people to just slip through the cracks, drug habit or no. It takes someone in your life to support you, straighten you out, drag you to rehab, whatever. And it sounds like this guy had a lot of people in his life.
Apparently a lot of intelligent, observant people if they're reporters working around him. And he slipped and no one caught him.

Did a nice story on it though.

We really need each other. We've got a big invisible web of support around us and so often we forget that we need to grab someone else that might be slipping.
posted by Smedleyman at 7:21 PM on February 15, 2014 [3 favorites]

So he divorced his wife and left his three children to shack up with a 20 year old and do drugs? Yeah, I don't even hope he comes clean. That's not going to happen. The best thing for his family right now would be if he disappeared and never returned. I have no empathy for this asshole.
posted by domo at 7:23 PM on February 15, 2014

Where's a reporter get the money to do coke?

(Ex) wife's a doctor.
posted by Scram at 10:02 PM on February 15, 2014

I have no empathy for this asshole.

You'd hope that people would have empathy for you if you needed help though, right?
posted by jaduncan at 2:28 AM on February 16, 2014 [7 favorites]

I have no empathy for this asshole.

I'm pretty sure the asshole isn't the guy who wants to get clean, here.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 5:34 AM on February 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

I don't really have any confidence this guy is going to clean up. He's already been in rehab multiple times with no effect, and he seems in the article as if he feels he's too good for rehab and that he can solve the problem himself (if so, why hasn't he already?) In fact, one gets a general feeling of arrogance from him. I don't think the reality of his situation has really sunk in, and if it hasn't yet, it might not until it's too late.

Also, while the video might be different (didn't watch it) the guy doesn't seem to be nearly concerned enough with his ex-wife and his kids.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:02 AM on February 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Simple Weed Question Destroys Drug Czar's Chief Deputy
posted by jeffburdges at 4:49 PM on February 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

A middle-class white boy is about to get his sorry tail dragged into the System in a big fat horrible way.

Is that kind of the point? I read the angle as a kind of "it could happen to you! yes, you, comfortable Sunday newspaper reader!" Here's an average, educated suburban guy with a house and a job and a family and he threw it all away. Drugs, or rather, addiction, can do that.
posted by maryr at 7:41 PM on February 16, 2014

I don't think the reality of his situation has really sunk in

He seems to be trying to un-think what he has done.
posted by thelonius at 9:49 PM on February 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

I read the angle as a kind of "it could happen to you! yes, you, comfortable Sunday newspaper reader!" Here's an average, educated suburban guy with a house and a job and a family and he threw it all away. Drugs, or rather, addiction, can do that.

Yeah, I read it that way too.

What scares me is you can not be addicted to drugs and your life can still go straight down the toilet.
I'm not sure what to pull from this story, in that, no one seems to be really helping the guy.

I have no respect for him. If he siphoned money from his wife to get his fix, that's all the worse. But lacking that respect doesn't mean I wouldn't help the guy if he were in my circle.

It's weird how we have to check someone by some moral judgement reader to help them. And we're happy to make them or their story famous, and by extension help sell floor wax and used cars, but nothing for the person themselves.

I don't think you should have to be morally pure to get support. In fact, the more of an asshole someone is, the more likely their lives are going to go to hell.

I mean, it's addiction, yeah. But we play the moral blame game as soon as something happens to anyone else. Probably a selfish internal gear we're all wired up with that looks for ways to not involve ourselves (or make a few bucks off of it, if we're real bastards - like, say, the drug dealers here).

But I see nothing beyond the "it could happen to you." Maybe a "don't do drugs" message. But what the hell ARE we supposed to do? Does this guy's family have a fund for him to get rehab? Anyone plug him in to a group support thing?

Isn't it interesting how, unless there's a church or something involved, a group of anyone, junkies, alcoholics, ex-cons, whomever, have a vaguely disreputable air to them? Despite the quintessentially altruistic goals involved?

It's just strange our minds don't go through a sort of step system like doing CPR when someone drops.
In the same way, some big fat guy has a grabber, no one stands over him saying "Shouldn'ta had all those 'burgers you fat asshole!"

I think this story is here because - with the addition of the drug thing - we like to think it won't happen to us (because, hey, I don't have a drug problem) and so we can self-righteously ignore people who fall through the cracks.

And I think Satan (Milton's) is right. It's better to be hated than ignored.

Probably why so many people have to swim so far down to hit bottom just to get some attention.
posted by Smedleyman at 4:00 PM on February 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

The predominant characteristic of a junky is selfishness. My loathing of this gentleman does not stem from the fact that it's his own actions causing his downfall. That's human and a lot of people can identify with it. It's the willingness to screw everyone - friends, family, children - over in pursuit of their vice that causes people to dislike junkies. You can't trust them until they've had their own epiphany and actually change. Nothing can hurry this revelation along and a lot of the time it never happens. This guy is still selfish and thinking of himself first. He will not get better until he is ready to get better.
posted by domo at 11:35 AM on February 18, 2014 [2 favorites]