Today the meth warning poster that shows those hot-ass before and after shots of meth heads when they’re reasonably attractive or kinda fat in the first picture and methed out and skinny in the second picture is going to be replaced with a newer, bigger poster with even more of those pictures than before. It’ll have more of those pictures than before because the local law enforcement agency that deals with meth related crime wants the surrounding community to know that meth is a bigger problem than before and the easiest way to do that is to show more people being affected by it.
There will also be a bigger picture than all the others, a picture of a particularly dramatically transformed meth head to illustrate the destructive power of the drug and the havoc it can wreak on a seemingly together person. This larger set of photographs will be of you.
The first one will show a picture of you in high school. You’ll look young, pretty and smiling. It will, from what you can tell, be from just after you lost your virginity and just before your parents finalize their divorce. Your smile will be genuine, but it will be from one of the rare moments between the horrible days that made up your childhood. It will make you remember not only the good times, but the bad times.
It’ll make you remember being abused by boyfriend after boyfriend and potential stepdad after potential stepdad. Installing your own deadbolt in your room so they wouldn’t be able to break in anymore. Then buying drugs, first just weed, then acid. Fucking boys you didn’t even like just to feel something while you waited for your drunk mom to bring someone new home. Then meth would come, and with meth would come a hard four years of sucking strange on the side of the street and blissing yourself out so that it would be harder to remember.
The second picture will be from your mugshot, from just before the cops put you back into the home where you started working, the place you’re now staying in between shifts at the Arby’s. You’ll still look a great deal like your portrait, though Arby’s will have provided you with a bridge to replace your missing teeth and enough money to afford makeup to cover the obvious scars left by your youth.
Looking out at the poster from the drive through window you’ll wonder if the people outside can recognize you, wonder if they’d care if they could, wonder if they even notice it the way you do, the mistakes of your life staring back at you, twenty feet tall.
Congratulations New Face of Meth!
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