When I first came to college, I met a guy who had came across the country to come to school here. He became a good friend of mine. It was outgoing, charismatic, and one of the funniest persons I've ever met. He always hung out with my group of friends and went to parties with us. He was involved in athletics so he wasn't allowed to drink or do drugs. However, he always had a good time and it was great having him around.

Unfortunately, tragedy struck and he was cut from the team. This was a huge setback for him because he had been so involved in this sport that he needed to re think a lot of things. He started drinking, which we were all good with because we all drank and it was fun to see him try new things. Naturally, anybody who starts drinking has a "freshman" phase where they learn their limits so we had to deal with him being very drunk (which given the amount of times he dealt with us, it only seemed fair).

This went on for a while until he got a job at a local grocery store. He met some people there who turns out all smoked. Most of the time, half the staff was high at work. Now naturally when you befriend people in that environment, you're going to get into that stuff. So he started smoking. Again we didn't mind because he was still fun to hang out with (in fact we found he was much more tame when he was high as opposed to drunk, go figure). However, he started to hang out more and more with the people he smoked with, and less with us. We would often see if he would hang out, but it ended up being he couldn't because he got high and didn't want to go out. Well naturally since he couldn't hang out as much, he was asked less to hang out. Not that we didn't want to, it's that you tend to forget about people if you don't maintain contact.

This started a downward spiral that involved him not hanging out with us anymore, and his other friends were flaky to begin with, so he hung out with people less, and it started to eat away at his confidence. Which made him resort to weed for relief. He would get high, couldn't hang out with friends, lowered his confidence, resorted to weed. A vicious cycle if you will.

Eventually, it just got too much for him and he dropped out of school and returned home. I still talk to him now and then but his problems aren't resolved. He still smokes a lot and doesn't see many people. It's really sad and I wish I could help, but there's not much I can do at this point.