Helplessly I watched as they loaded my friend into the back of an ambulance. Somewhere deep down in-side of me, I had know this day was coming for a long time. Matthew had chosen a path rich in thorns, but few in flowers. The life of a teenage drug dealer is not the best to lead. For some though, it is a easy and quick way to get cash.

Those of you who have not been faced with drugs probably think Matthew to be ignorant, if not trash. That would be untrue though. It is his choices, not him that were ignorant and trash.

Take a moment now please, imagine life in his shoes. Imagine the pressure to do drugs when both parents do them, not to mention quite a few friends and people you admire. Also add in the fact that you never have money to do or buy things you want, and selling drugs could bring in big buck. Tempting? I know, but unlike Matthew I resisted the temptation, instead of embracing it. Does that make me a better person, or him a lesser one?

Before you go trying to answer that, let me tell you about Matthew. Maybe if you know a little about him, you might better appreciate the “pull” to that kind of life. If you have ever faced the temptation of drugs, then you can somewhat understand his choice, whether you embraced it or not.

Matthew’s parents were both washed-up crack addicts. He lived with them till he was six, and then he was sent to live with his aunt. Apparently children services found his parents unfit to raise a child, can you imagine? Well anyways, moving Matthew did little if nothing to keep him from drugs. You see the aunt had a fifteen year old son named James, and guess what James enjoyed to do? Yep, drugs. Mostly weed. Guess who became Matthew’s role model ? Again yes, man your on a role, it was James.

Now I’m sure you can see were this is going, right? Monkey see, monkey do. I don’t know exactly when Matthew started smoking weed, but I do know that from there on he was locked into a downwards spiral from which he could not escape.

If you don’t know, weed is often called the “stepping stone” drug, the first step in a long line of drug abuse. What was the second step? That came in middle school, with the helpful push of some friend. For Matthew it was pill popping, simply because it is so easy to get them. Really, all you have to do is open up the medicine cabinet.

Midol, vicodin, he’d pop whatever he could get a hold of. It didn’t end there either. No, it only got worse. By tenth grade Matthew had went “hardcore”, doing drugs like crack, coke, and meth. He even did a little acid and shrums here and there. He even started selling.

And so we come back to the beginning. It was our senior year when it happened. Matthew was never good in chemistry, but he had actually begun making his own meth to sell. It saved him some money, but his stuff was just crap. So as you can imagine his “customers”……well they weren’t too happy with him, and one thought it to be a good idea to put a slug in him.

Matthew spent a long time in the hospital, and then some in jail. He lived though, and even went clean. His new addiction is books; he reads whatever he can get a hold of. In a way I guess you could say getting shot saved him.

Well now I have told you his story, and so I ask again, because I chose not to do drugs and Matthew chose to do them, does that make me a better person? Does it make him lesser then I? No, it just makes him human. After all was it not Christ himself who once said “let he among us, who is without sin cast the first stone.”?