Preventing Drug Abuse through Community Intervention
HealthAuthor Sandeep Shrestha Publish date : 25th August 2020
Synopsis of Movie – Requiem for a Dream
In a waning community in Coney Island Brooklyn, four lives chase after their dreams. A widowed mother, Sarah, influenced highly by a TV shows, hoping to appear on TV, an addict son Harry, dreaming to make it big, by selling drugs, his addicted girlfriend Marion, relying on drugs and her boyfriend to make it through, and a drug dealer friend Tyrone, dreaming to earn big. But in their quest for success, they rely on drugs. That quickly changes their dreams to complete failure, a waste of precious life.
Sarah is obsessed of one TV game show and dreams to be on it wearing her red dress that her husband really adored. Harry is a heroin addict hoping to make it big with his drug dealing friend Tyrone. Marion is cocaine addict depended on Harry to provide her support and the drugs. Life takes a spiraling turn when Harry and Tyrone get busted. Harry’s forearm vein is really infected and has to be amputated. Tyrone is put in jail, dreaming of what life could have been otherwise. Marion is used as sex slave by other dealers to get her daily dose of drugs. And Sarah, with a dream of fitting in her prized red dress, takes addicting diet pills on doctor’s prescription. She is forced to skip meals, she hallucinates about food, her fridge talking to her, appearing on TV, and finally, the audience finding about her true identity behind that beautiful red dress and makeup and laughing at her. She reaches extreme high from hallucination and is taken to the hospital. Drugs end four dreams, four lives.
Reflections
Watching this movie, many thoughts ran down my mind. I started to question life and why people choose a path that they know is not good. How can a son take away her mom’s only TV and only thing she relies on and sell it for drugs? How can a doctor prescribe addictive and harmful drugs? Shouldn’t a son stop her mother from taking those diet pills, when he knows that it actually is a harmful addictive drug? How can a son lie to her mother that he makes money as a distributor of goods for a big company, when what he really distributes is drugs? How can a girl reach the length of doing anything just to get her daily dose of drugs? How can a man inject drugs in his already swollen and infected arms? How can community watch all these, when they have the power to prevent it and stop it?
Role of Communities in Drug Abuse Prevention
I believe it is the community that shapes our lives and our dreams. Life and imagination is highly influenced and at the same time distorted by community, and our idea of community. Community only recognizes someone with status or a role. So everyone wants to be known in a community, be someone, have an identity, a role, and stand out. This concept of community, a sense of belonging often disillusions individuals from who they are into believing and wanting to be someone else, or to be better off. Whatever we yearn to be, is to be accepted in the community and be recognized as someone. To be recognized, people do things that are really not good for them. So, isn’t the path we choose in life, and the dreams we chase after shaped by our community?
It is the responsibility of each community to prevent such hallucinating dreams. There should be community outreach program, which helps each and everyone in the community to know what is happening in their community and what each individual can do for the betterment of their community, and their nation, and entirely for the earth. Reasonable and reachable dreams are good, but the community should help each other out in terms of what may result in a bad outcome. We, as a member of community should accept each member for who they are and not expect anything much or anything less from them.
Community Awareness and Intervention
Drug addiction and drug dealing has become a major problem in almost all communities world wide. We should educate people of drug abuse and its illegal trade. The US once allowed marijuana cultivation in Afghanistan which was illegally provided in the streets of US. Doesn’t a government have a role to protect its people than providing them drugs? For these kind of things, we should act on our own, one, two, and everyone. It is better if we start out from small, educate each other, help the community, teach everyone, and slowly spread the good cause throughout the community, nation, and the world. Let us unite to prevent drug abuse, drug dealing, and death.
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