Dead Girl Walking

Written by Bernie Weisz Historian Pembroke Pines, Florida e mail address: [email protected] Dec. 12, 2008 Title of Review: "A Never Ending War Story!" This 30 page book took me a half hour to read,of which I unfortunately found to be morbid and very depressing! I got the feeling I was at a "Narcotic's Anonymous" meeting listening to the speaker talk about "war stories" (their "drugalog" about the how, when, where and why of their particular story of drug abuse) with only the last 2 paqes devoted to recovery. This author, Caroline Polk-Palmer, states on the back dust cover "Life is truly not your own, especially when abuse, prostitution and drugs become a way of life. I wrote this book to give courage and hope to others who are currently going through the same pain that I had in the past. I want my book to be a lantern that will help light the path to balance, spiritual peace and higher self esteem". However, how does she try to give that courage? This answer never comes. Why nobly giving credit to God, Polk only "gets clean" the last two pages, while the rest of the book, from beginning to end, is a running commentary of prostitution, selling and using crack cocaine. Polk simply cannot stop. Arrested multiple times, and having eight children in the midst of crack cocaine use, nothing deters her. Why is crack so addicting? Cynthia Kuhn in her book "Buzzed" insightfully writes: "animal experiments point out how uniquely compelling cocaine can be. If animals (rats or monkeys) learn to press a lever to deliver an intravenous dose of cocaine, they will do so up to three hundred times for a single injection, and if they have free access to cocaine, these animals simply keep taking it until they have seizures. Once scientists realized how powerfully reinforcing cocaine was in this form, they stopped doing these experiments out of concern for animal welfare. While most animals will not voluntarily injest dangerous amounts of alcohol, nicotine, or heroin, they will take cocaine until they kill themselves. Recovering cocaine addicts tell a similar story. Usually the only thing that stops a serious addict during a binge is running out of cocaine. One user described it like this:"If I had a room full of cocaine, I would of kept using it until it was all gone, and I still would have wanted more". This is the exact situation with Polk's book. Nothing stopped her. Trading sex for crack, having crack babies, being arrested, being almost killed by deranged, drug-crazed john

שנה

2006

שפה

English

הוצאה

iUniverse, Inc.

מהדורות

2

עמודים

50

ISBN

9780595410170

מקור הנתונים: Wikidata