I’m not buying that “Anonymous” crap. Sparks claimed that this was a journal of one of her patients, a teen addicted to drugs that ruined her life. Sparks has this amazing luck with finding kids with hot button issues that also loved journaling AND letting their therapist have all their old diaries. These teens also were really focused in their writing, only covering said moral panic issues and not the usual crap that all of us other teens wrote about.
The irony is that Sparks wrote the book as a cautionary tale for teens and drug use, and the book has made it onto several banned books lists for the stellar reasoning of it “promotes drug use”. Sometimes real life is the best satire.
The book follows your average girl next door. She’s got a family, she is comfortably middle class, she might be a bit too interested in boys, but what teen girl isn’t? Then she gets slipped drugs at a party and her whole life unravels! She starts using, she starts dating a drug dealer, she starts selling drugs! TO KIDS! She runs away from home, she gets into prostitution, she has bad trips! She starts to get clean, but then she overdoses and dies. Drugs are bad, m’kay?
I’m not saying teen drug abuse isn’t a problem. But maybe we can act like other classes of people, outside of comfortable suburbia, are also effected by addiction? And that just saying “don’t do drugs” isn’t a real answer when kids get curious. And that drug abuse is linked to many other things, like mental health issues, and to treat addiction, you have to treat the underlying symptoms, including societal issues. And that scaring kids straight is kind of a shitty way to teach kids a lesson.
