Rocketman

 🚀⏳️Rocketman

Content warning: This post discusses cocaine use, addiction, fentanyl and death.

I watched Rocketman last night.

Poor Elton John. What a hard life he had.

And yes, I know Elton is a man, but sometimes I watched that movie and thought, some men are pigs — and that is an insult to pigs.

The man Elton loved was sleeping with everyone, seemingly without any concern for what that was doing to Elton. There was something especially cruel about watching Elton love someone who was treating him so casually.

But what really struck me was the cocaine.

I remember a very different era of cocaine use.

It was almost glamorous. It was associated with money, celebrities, rock stars, movie stars and places like Studio 54. For a while it was even called “the rich man's drug.”

People forget what eventually came out of that glamorous image.

Addiction.

Paranoia.

People sleeping with guns under their pillows.

Noses damaged from snorting.

And that little drop of blood from Elton's nose in Rocketman said more to me than a whole speech could have.

There were plenty of horror stories. The glamour was only the front door.

I think people who grew up after that era may have a very different understanding of cocaine. And even people in their forties may not remember how deeply embedded it was in celebrity culture.

Today, there is another terrifying difference.

The drug supply itself can be unpredictable. Cocaine can be contaminated with fentanyl, and someone can die without ever intending to take an opioid. Naloxone can save a life when opioids are involved, but it doesn't make cocaine safe.

So when I watched Rocketman, I wasn't just watching Elton John's story.

I was watching a piece of history.

A time when some of the richest and most famous people in the world could make cocaine look glamorous — while behind closed doors, people were destroying themselves.

Elton survived it.

He got help.

He got sober.

And that matters.

Because somewhere along the way, I think we lost part of the message.

The message shouldn't have been that rock stars did drugs.

It should have been that some of them survived them.

And maybe we should have listened more carefully to the survivors.

There is another Elton John song that has always stayed with me, Rocket Man.

Mars isn't the kind of place to raise your kids, Elton sang.

But sometimes I think the real question isn't whether there is life on Mars.

It's whether we are doing enough to protect the lives we have here.

Because there are no second chances for everyone.

Some people make it home.

Some don't.

Questions for the Reader

- If you tried cocaine when you were young, what made you stop?

- Did you know then what you know about cocaine now?

- Does someone in your family use cocaine? How has that affected you or your family?

- How has cocaine use — and the way society views it — changed during your lifetime?

- Was cocaine ever considered glamorous or harmless when you were growing up?

- Have you, or someone you love, ever been to rehab?

- What helped the most?

- What hurt the most?

- What do you wish someone had told you before you started using?

- What could adults do differently to keep young people from becoming addicted?

- Are we actually teaching young people about addiction — or are we simply frightening them with warnings?

- What would make a young person feel safe enough to ask for help before things become an emergency?

- How do we save young lives when the drug supply itself can be deadly?

- And perhaps the hardest question of all:

How do we fight this terrible war on people caught in the fentanyl crisis without losing sight of the human beings on either side of the addiction?

What do you remember?

What have you survived?

And what do you wish the next generation would never have to learn the hard way?

#Rocketman #EltonJohn #Cocaine #Addiction #Recovery #Fentanyl #DrugAwareness #AddictionAwareness #RockAndRollHistory #SaveLives