Somebody is making apple pie and the smell carried to our flat. My son, who is now twelve years old, announced, “I can smell cocaine.” So we had to have that conversation again. It’s OK, he knows what coke is and he knows it’s only cool in memes, but it still concerns me.
I’m on Facebook mainly for the memes. They’re a pleasant escape from reality, whether they be echo chamber jokes for the groups we find ourselves in, or political statements. Or the increasingly common cocaine memes.
I don’t have much more of a point to this… it’s just something that needs to be said. Cocaine is cool in memeland and that is something that more of us need to be concerned about. Children are on TikTok, Instagram, and I don’t know what else… Memes are a global phenomenon that we (well generation X for sure) didn’t have, but they sure do now. And children all over the world are learning what’s cool and what isn’t in a way that many of us never did.
Back in late 2009 when I went to rehab, in Natal at the other end of this small country I grew up in, although I was there for meth, nearly everyone else was in for cocaine, either powder or crack cocaine. So this culture where cocaine is cool is something to be concerned about.
Speak to your kids… It’s important to understand how their views are formed, and how much they “learn” from memes. At the very least, if they have this “cocaine is cool” attitude, it’s time they learn that memes aren’t always the best source of knowledge.
Update: I can’t emphasize this enough… We’re a long long way from beating addiction if children are growing up with a subconscious suggestion that cocaine is acceptable and pleasurable before they are even old enough to be exposed to it directly.
Skeptical Exaddict 