Sixty-Four Arrested in NE Oklahoma on Drug Charges

Sixty-four people were arrested in Northeast Oklahoma for drug use and trafficking by the Rogers County Sheriff's Department. This occurred during the course of one weekend in January 2011. The arrests resulted in more than a dozen young people finding themselves parentless. When I was in Jr. High the school I attended showed filmed reenactments and some live footage of actual deaths and psychological disorders caused by drug abuse. A teenage girl high on hallucinogens dove head first into the deep end of an unfilled pool. There was live footage of both a young man and an unrelated young woman who had abused LSD and who were both incarcerated in mental institutions. It had been several years since either of them had used the drug but both still had horrible hallucinations and neither had the slightest idea who they were or where they were.

After seeing those films the only way that I would ever have taken, drugs would have been if someone had knocked me out, strapped me down and forced them on me. Some parents thought these films were traumatizing and unnecessary and they rebelled until the films were removed from the public school system. My Mom agreed that I was somewhat traumatized. I spoke about those films for months and remember them with clarity forty-five years later. A small amount of trauma proved to be a good thing for me. I am sixty years old and have never abused drugs.

The closest call I ever had with drugs came at a club that is now a lumberyard. A female that knew me handed me four or five marijuana joints and went to get some friends to partake of them. As she came back around the corner of the building with those friends, I was squashing the marijuana with the soles of my shoes into the gravel driveway. If it had not been for a very large male who had watched me, stepping up behind me and asking me if I needed a ride home, I would have been toast. He took me to find my date and I went home. He asked me, "What on earth caused you to do that?" And, I told him about those films. He said, "Well evidently you didn't go to school with them?" He was so right.

When I was in my first year of college, there was a young man who took LSD regularly. After he had been missing from classes for three days he was found in an unused old part of the bus barn. He had dressed in a sheet and made himself a crown of thorns and brambles. He had constructed a makeshift cross and had nailed both feet and his left hand to his creation. He was out of his mind, semi-conscious and in dire need of medical attention. Of course, it was photographed and although those pictures were never published (he was a minor), the students that found him secretly circulated them throughout the school. He did eventually recover but less than a year later he killed himself diving out of a third story window.

When I was in my twenties and working at a local hospital a boy in his early teens was rushed into the ER. He was a known "huffer" of paint and chemicals. He had mixed peanut butter and paint thinner and shot a syringe full of it into a main artery in his arm. He was high from huffing paint thinner at the time. A couple of boys also high from "huffing" paint thinner had watched him do this. He was life-flighted to a major medical center in a major city not far away. There a team of experts was hopelessly confused by the mixture and the toll it was taking. Those specialists stood doing everything possible and watched him die. Since I was small I have been told, "Beware that sin will take you places that you never meant to go and keep you longer than you ever meant to stay." That young man just wanted to experience an "all-time high." His intent was not to take his own life, I'm certain that death never crossed his mind, but death is what he accomplished and death lasts a long-long time.

In the 1960's and 70's these occurrences made a mark. They took a toll. In 2011 often, things of this nature are taken for granted. There has been so much of it, too much of it. We are all somewhat desensitized. Rogers County is a small county, rural for the most part, covering 711 square miles. The population in 2009 was 85,654. Sixty-four people here in one weekend is earthshaking.

In my lifetime, I have seen many people get high on alcohol in public places and make complete and utter fools out of themselves, often waking up the next day having no recollection of their deeds. As for me, I have always chosen to remain in "my right mind," and in control of my words and actions. Lord knows I can mess up big-time being stone-cold sober. There is no room for uncontrolled speech and actions in my life.

About ten years ago I purchased a freshly remodeled 4 bedroom, 2 bath, 2 story home with a detached 2 car garage on a huge corner lot filled with native pecan trees directly behind two large churches. I thought I had done well. The majority of my neighbors were elderly, passed seventy. During the course of the last ten years, many of them have passed and new folks have moved in. About two years ago, the man that was Chief of Police at that time asked me why I had purchased a home at the corner of "sin and hell?" Around the corner to the south of me and just a few houses down my neighbor was arrested for making "shake and bake" meth. Down the street to the west and less than a block away, another man was making meth and using "black tar heroin." To the north, less than three blocks there were two separate houses where the woman of the house was found to be addicted to hard-core drugs and making bad life choices in the presence of minors to support those habits. To the east neighbors both man and wife that I often communicated with and thought I knew where selling marijuana and "crack cocaine" to area minors. How many more drug users live beside me? How many live beside you?

I had sixty-four county neighbors arrested. Can I stand in judgment? NO. I can't say, "How do they mix charcoal lighter and drain cleaner or whatever it is they mix and smoke it, eat it, shoot it up, or in some manner partake of it." From the time I was 13 until I was 42 years old I smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. I actually lit up treated paper, tobacco covered with insecticides, nicotine, tar, and who knows what else, probably dead bugs and pulled the smoke and fire into my own mouth around my gums, across my tongue, down my throat and into my delicate lungs and thought I enjoyed it and had to do it. I was addicted to nicotine. I have overeaten all of my life and I still do. My food choices have resulted in me suffering from gout and type II diabetes. Therefore, it is hard for me to point a finger without the others pointing back at me.

It is so easy to say,"I'd never do that." In my six decades of living, I have learned that it is even easier to just say, "Thank you God that I've never fell prey to that affliction." Drug abuse is an affliction. In 2011 we must all pull together to be part of the cure and not just a wagging tongue. These sixty-four people are someone's sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and mothers and fathers. They are ill and they need our help. In 2011 let's all find our own way to take a stand against drugs.