Blaming the drug, rather than the person on the drug
Alcoholic Myth-of-the-Month: “It’s the drugs’ fault”
“All of the problems I have had are because of my granddaughter’s friends, her drug-using friends….It’s not her fault; it’s the people who sold drugs because they weren’t taken off the street.”
So said Jack Whittaker, who was the winner of the biggest undivided lottery in U.S. history two years ago with a $113 million lump sum, when his only granddaughter, Brandi Bragg, 17, was recently found dead of a drug overdose.
Whittaker and others said Brandi’s instant access to great wealth brought her new friends and dangerous “habits.” Yet, Whittaker failed to take into account his own behaviors and genes, along with the warning signs of inherited “habits.”
Whittaker, arrested twice in the past year for DUI, had recently been ordered into rehab. Bragg was reported to have lived with her grandfather before getting her own apartment, suggesting the likelihood that alcoholism had already struck two successive generations of the Whittaker family (the most common reason for parental abandonment) and, therefore, greatly increasing the odds that it would hit a third. Wealth is the addict’s biggest enabler and Jack Whittaker insured such enabling.
Brandi not only had her own apartment while still a teen, but also, incredibly, had several vehicles, including a Hummer and Cadillac Escalade. And, Grandpa Whittaker gave her plenty of cash. He did this despite knowing who her friends were. An 18-year-old friend of Brandi’s was found dead from an overdose just a few months earlier – in Whittaker’s house.
Drugs are omnipresent, the legal drug alcohol just one of them. Rather than pinning the blame for problems on “drug-using friends,” we might start with Whittaker, the alcoholic grandfather. While having the disease of addiction is not her fault, the use and untimely death is certainly not the fault of “the people who sold drugs” or the law enforcers who failed to take them off the street. The fault, instead, is of those who enable. Observant cops might have apprehended young Brandi for a DUI any number of times. Unfortunately, they often fail to pay heed to the early warning signs and are limited by law from testing traffic violators for DUI unless they observe the more obvious signs of inebriation (of which the classic sign of alcoholism, unnecessarily reckless behavior, is not one). But the biggest enabler of all was the grandfather who doted on his granddaughter – to death.