Personalities

This was the leading sentence in a NYC Daily News article:

More than 300,000 high school students used steroids last year, jeopardizing their health and sometimes altering their personalities, Newsweek reported yesterday.

This is a subject I have thought of often as it relates to illegal drugs. I am employed at a financial institution that often requires temporary workers to help with spontaneous abundance of work. Because of the immediacy of projects, my place of employment often is desperate to hire many such workers, and becauseof this desperation they often chose workers badly. I look at some of the choices of temp workers management has made and know that some have been on hard illegal drugs for sometime and have just come up for air, newly released from rehab. Some have the verbal cadence of heroin addiction and the loping and sometimes jolting walk of a crack head. I see clearly that these are persons who though may be clean are still and will be forever affected by the illegal drugs that they have taken. Many of their personality traits are one of self-righteousness, being preachy, and wanting to help people inappropriately They, though often they don't discuss that they were hooked on drugs, have common traits of a person actively taking drugs. A drug addict obsesses on their next high and the procuring of such and I believe those who are reformed need new things upon which to obsess.

Illegal drugs alter the personality of those taking them and for hard core drug users who stop, the effects linger. There is a commonality of a mean steak in those formerly and currently addicted, and it never abates. When in the throes of addiction many have done deceitful and mean things to get drugs, and that mean streak, even after addiction, never leaves. All of the traits mentioned, when presented in a work environment via the presence of reformed drug addicts, makes for problems. We receive temps who are on a high of completing rehab and are preachy and anxious to do the job and talk of themselves in boastful way, and push the mantra of their rehab which is to help others even when they say they don't want help. Obsessively searching for something to attach themselves to prove their worth. That is usually the first phase. They are blissfully happy and basking in their new found sobriety. However, after time, when they discover they are part of the rat race of workers and wonderful things will not happen to them because they are off of drugs, the second phase results, when the adulations received from counselors in rehab are no longer present and either there is recidivism and they disappear from the job or are fired because of infractions, or they become sullen and the mean streak appears and goes into overdrive. There have been several instances of temp workers going around stating they are going to get permanent employess fired by spreading malicious rumors. One such person was seen scurrying about to different supervisors, trying to plant the seed of a rumor, and was discovered doing this when several of the supervisors happened to discuss having the same lie told to them by that one person.

The personalities of persons who were deep in the throes of drug addiction is often one many do not want to encounter. The same can be said for reformed drug users as they seem to never lose that obsessiveness, and should they have gone through rehab, have an added inappropriate personality trait of self-righteousness and unsolicited helpfulness. The pain that lead them to drug addiction in the first place rears its ugly head and though some don't slide back into drug usage, they do things, gossip, manipulate, stir up trouble, cause drama, to numb the pain.