By By Lee Weyhrich
I'm a pretty good handyman when I need to be, but I have determined there are some household things that kind of take care of themselves.
Take socks for example, if you leave your socks on the bedroom floor long enough they will eventually disappear to be replaced by clean socks in the drawer (if you are married, if you have a puppy they will be replaced by unidentifiable fluff balls in the living room).
Another example would be the fence in my backyard. When we moved in, our privacy fence was laying on the ground courtesy of Hurricane Ivan.
One morning, with the help of our neighbors, we got the fence back into place and braced it. I planned to mix some Quickcrete and pour new footings for the posts so it wouldn't fall back over, but I didn't get around to it that weekend.
I didn't have a free weekend to work on it for three weeks and by the time I got ready to get the concrete, the fence had sunk back into the ground and no longer needed support. I wouldn't trust it in another hurricane, but for now it at least looks good.
Some problems don't go away that easily.
Monday at Poarch a man by the name of Rodney Williams spoke about his drug addiction to crystal meth.
Williams was in to a lot of drugs. He was into more drugs than most major hospitals.
He transported drugs, made drugs and sold them. He also became addicted to them.
"I kept thinking, 'one more hit and I'll get where I need to be,'" Williams said.
His problem didn't just go away when he ignored it. It came back stronger each time and consumed his life.
Eventually he became schizophrenic and accidentally blew up his house with him in it.
After that he found God and straightened up his life.
Back in the '80s we had a lot of commercials with Ronald and Nancy Reagan talking about how bad drugs were. They started the "Just Say No" campaign to help fight against the new drug, crack cocaine. Then all their congressional buddies that signed off on the campaign sat around congratulating themselves on how successful it was up until the moment they cut funding.
In the '90s we had Bill "I didn't inhale" Clinton in office and he, too, did a half attempt to stop the drug problem. Only by then we had ecstasy, a drug that makes you extremely happy and loving to your fellow man, at least until you overdose and begin frothing at the mouth, bite your tongue off and have a heart attack. We also had crystal meth, a drug made out of household chemicals that gives you paranoid psychotic episodes, can cause major strokes, and actually makes several brain cells explode at once with each hit.
The point is that some problems don't go away, and if you do the cheapest thing you can to fix a problem you'll likely get back the cheapest results.
The drug problem is not just the problem of the federal government. It is a problem in our county, our city, our neighborhoods and possibly in our houses.
It is our responsibility to be educated in these matters so that we can see the signs of trouble before they consume the people we love.
Lee Weyhrich is the managing editor of the Atmore Advance. His column appears weekly.