Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero
By Peter John Gardner

I spent the more interesting half of my teenage years in a town called Vero Beach. Vero is a quiet little town on the east coast of Florida that mainly attracts retired folks. One doesn't move there looking for opportunity. It's a place that you go to when you want to settle down somewhere quiet. Due to the rampant elderly population in the town, city officials never really gave much thought to the younger people living there. If you're a teenager in Vero Beach, there was nothing to do but go to the mall, wreak havoc at Wal-Mart at night, and find places to skateboard that are just hidden enough so that you don't have to worry about a cop telling you to go skate somewhere else when there isn't anywhere else to skate. So what happens when you have a decent size youth demographic in a small town with nothing to do? Many (not all) turn to drugs. When you have nowhere to go on Friday night, having some friends over and getting high is a viable option.

Less Than Zero has sort of the same setting, but instead of a bunch of bored poor kids getting high, it's a bunch of bored rich kids getting high. This movie is sort of like a post-high school brat pack movie. These kids aren't dealing with petty high school problems anymore, they're all getting fucked up and having promiscuous sex with each other. The plot involves Clay, Andrew McCarthy, coming home from college during a winter break to find that his ex-girlfriend, Jami Gertz, and his best friend, RDJ with another bad haircut, both have nasty drug habits. Contrary to the book, Clay is portrayed here as a boy scout type that aims to rescue his friends.

What bothers me about drug use is not the user, but the way some non-users treat drug users. Friends shouldn't abandon each other simply because one doesn't know what to do with him/herself other than self destruct. I see drug use as a cry for help. Most drug users don't want to be users, but they self medicate because that's the only way they know how to deal with their pain. People think that drug users are doing it to themselves and that it is their own fault that they've fucked up their lives. That is true, but I think it is a friend's duty to try to help the user out of whatever is bothering them so much that they feel the need to escape reality and slowly self destruct. It's a tough thing to do, especially if the friend in need is addicted to something heavy like heroin, and it takes multiple tries to pull them out of their own abyss. Drug addiction is a choice, yes, but it's also a symptom of a deeper issue, and abandoning a friend that has gone down the road of self destruction is just pushing the problem away, just like how the user is trying to push their problems away.