They’re not going to improve. Once an addict, always an addict. As unreliable human sources tell me, about one third of alcoholics over sixty are dead, one third are still fighting their addiction, and the other third are clean. I’ll explain why I think all of them are either the first or the second, and never the third.

You see, when you’ve had an addict for a deceased father, you formulate opinions about addiction that don’t fade away. However, telling people of these opinions upon the fact that the person is now dead gets frequently awkward, so I find that I have to express it in the most subtle way possible…

These addicts aren’t going to rehabilitate themselves, you idiots.

The school today had an assembly. Now, it wasn’t any normal assembly. It was the kind of assembly that gets you out of a class you’re all too reluctant to be in because your grades aren’t keeping up with the profession you want to spend your life working on (see: Physics). It’s the kind of assembly that the staff wants the entire school to see. It’s the longest kind of assembly there is, and it includes three convicts, two officers, and one formal speaker.

It’s “Project Pride,” and quite frankly, it is the most humiliating thing a prisoner can do. Not only does it flaunt their great weaknesses, but proves the point that addicts just never learn, they simply regret. There were three guys, but one stands out more than the others. That’s probably because his name was restated so many times that you might have become confused and thought the whole assembly was about him.

Leon, as is his name, steps forward to speak. The formal speaker man stresses that his prison uniform, his story, etc. is all real, not scripted. So of course I must assume that they’ll suck at public speaking, and I’m not proven wrong – his speaking contains more “ums” and “uhs” than any sixth grader could pull out of their system. It’s truly horrid, and it makes listening to his story a workout for my mind, because hidden within those extraneous noises is a coherent story, and I have to find it.

It turns out that this man was smart, but did drugs and screwed it up. There’s a shocker.

Now, what really got me was that fact that he had so many numerous times to prevent his being jailed that it actually makes him look pathetic. How many times do you have to go to rehab before you realize you have a problem? How many times do you have to realize that you have to a problem to actually stop doing it? Here’s the answer: If this is the second or third time you’re admitting to yourself or someone else that “drugs are bad” or you have “a problem,” safely assume you will have that problem forever. This man, Leon, had about three chances to stop doing drugs – and he actually did, for a time - before getting jailed, and he couldn’t even do that. He was clean, then saw his friends for one summer, just one summer, and was back on the drugs. How stupid was he to think that he could have been over it so easily?

The shameful thing about it is that the school sets these people up as examples, but all too late. If people are going to start doing drugs in high school, by now they’ve done it already (see: Wyatt Regan and co.). If they haven’t, chances are if they start now it’s because of how wonderful these presenters made getting high look.

“It was something I’d never done before, and when I tried it, I loved it. It was the best feeling I’d ever had.”

That’s something that’ll stop kids from getting drunk!

“After getting high, it felt so good that I just didn’t want to go to school anymore. I just wanted to stay home and smoke pot.”

After hearing that, I’d never want to smoke pot again.

“I always drew the line at heroine, because that was the drug that the huge addicts did. Those guys ended up dead.”

Alright, now we know that as long as we don’t do heroine, we’ll be just fine.

Two of these quotes, the first and last, are from another speaker. She was a woman who, honest to God, loved to hear herself talk so much that she must have wasted time in her prison cell practicing public speaking. She spoke longer than any one of the presenters – even longer than the third guy, who spoke about how his brother boozed up, crashed his car into a house and died while he was incarcerated. And she always used the phrase “in my heart.” Lady, if you had a heart, it was gone with your liver a long time ago.

She’s an excessive alcoholic. I almost thought she would be more normal, something we could compare ourselves too. They spoke highly of her – said that she had a high paying job, had never been in any trouble, but made one bad mistake and got herself locked up. I really believed it was true.

I couldn’t believe how wrong I was. She’d been drinking since she was in her early teens, and – no surprise – she kept the habit all the way through her life. She never got “in trouble” for doing anything only because she never got caught. She was still doing it, however. Somehow she got her way into a job at AT&T and, one day, drove home drunk. Her car hit a “deer” and she continued driving home. Later she found, on the side of her car, a human forehead and a chunk of hair.

If anyone thinks that these people are going to be rehabilitated successfully, please speak. They all show signs that they will, after being released, return to the life of drugs and pill popping, running from the law, dealing dangerous substances, even if they preach that it was the wrong decision. You can tell that these people are weak-willed because they say it. They say how many times they’ve addressed that they made a bad choice. Well, if you thought it was a bad idea when you were seventeen, and wanted it to fix it then, why the hell are you standing here talking about how much of a problem it is and how you want to fix it now that you’re twenty-three and forty-five?

If you’re not really going to do anything (and you aren’t), please don’t preach to a multitude of students who, by the way you talk, are just itching to make the same mistakes. Not only do you make the mistakes look good (your enthusiasm about alcohol and marijuana might clue them in), you make yourself look bad. We can all see that you’re hopelessly addicted. The only thing more pitiful than having gotten yourself thrown in jail is going to a school and pleading guilty about it. We don’t need to hear about how much you regret it, or your imaginary plans to fix it after you’re released.

And prisons/parents/etc., stop sending them to rehab. It doesn’t work. In fact, it probably lowers their self esteem enough that they’ll do more drugs afterward.

If you can’t fix ‘em, nix ‘em.