Irony Of Fate With Drugs
This film was very compelling. Three separate situations occurred at the same time and each of the stories were twisted into one, about the war on drugs. I would say that Caroline fits in with retreatism because she turned to the life of crime when she didn’t have to but chose to. She was unable to cope with the stress of being a showcase student and the press, due to her father being a member of the government. Caroline is sixteen years old, she volunteers to read to the blind one day a week for two hours. She is in a private school and is third in her class. She is a member of the National Merit Finalist, on the math team, haiku team, Spanish club, vice president of her class, and a member of the volleyball team.
When her father returns home after a business trip, Caroline Barbara Wakefield, (Caroline’s mother) confesses to her husband that their daughter is on drugs and has been for the last six months. Ironically, her father, (Judge Wakefield) is working towards the war on drugs. Meanwhile, Caroline is out with three friends drinking and doing drugs when her friend overdoses. They panic and decide to drop their friend off at the emergency entrance when they are stopped by the police. Then, they are taken in for questioning until their parents arrive.
After the incident with her friend, Caroline seems to slowly deteriorate and gets herself farther into the drugs. She gets caught doing drugs by her father and is forced to attend a meeting for her addiction. Caroline speaks out at the meeting, “I’m angry at a lot of stuff, not sure what”. Then she enters into a treatment facility so that she can be free of disease but she isn’t ready to surrender her addiction. She keeps searching for a way out and she finds it. At that point, she did not care about anyone or anything else.
Deviant behavior is caused by the effect of anomie. An anomie is a severance in American Society dealing with individual goals and lawful means of achieving them. The effects of anomie are: frustration, fear and anger. Robert Agnew assumed social circumstances have a scope to provoke negative affective states. Retreats are former conformists, law-abiding citizen that believes in the “dream”. Retreats ultimately feel repugnance for the humiliating side effect of the “dream”. They are the people who once tried to be a part of society but were rejected or lost interest and decided to go the other way. Categorized as retreats are psychotics, pariahs, hobos, drunks, addicts, dropouts, and rejects.
There are so many people going down the same road that Caroline did and it is very sad to see what people do to themselves. When you take yourself down that road of addiction, it is so hard to come back from that. The worst thing about it is that the family of the addict are usually the ones that suffer the most. They have to watch someone they love to go down the road of addiction and then the addict does not care to come back from it. Some people have children and are great parents but then get on drugs and leave the children to fend for themselves. Drugs take our loved ones away from us and we can only be there for them when they decide they have had enough.
