When you read the paper or watch the news and see people that are about your age passing away, it makes you think about the choices and decisions you have made.

There is so much sorrow with death, but especially for the death of a youth. There is the cliche that "only the good die young."

So much hope for the future seems to be invested in the younger generations, that somehow they will be able to atone for the sins of their fathers, overcome adversity and fix the world's problems.

Maybe it is because when we say, "Only the good die young," it seems like a missed opportunity. That even if someone had made mistakes in their youth, they still would have a chance to redeem themselves in adulthood. They would get to have all the experiences — families, careers, dreams accomplished and struggles overcome.

I feel like I have so much more life to live, but at the same time the deaths of other young people stand as a haunting reminder of the temporary life. With the rise of drug-induced deaths, especially the rise of heroin use in St. Charles and St. Louis counties, I wonder what message is getting across to youth as narcotics being any solution to any problem.

Recently, I went on a road trip to southwestern Missouri. Driving hours through the mid-Missouri countryside you get to take in the beautiful wildlife and changing colors of the vegetation and the peace of being alone and driving. I also thought about how much people complain about the stresses of life, their circumstances, hardships and despair.

Yet we drive around in large objects of metal at high rates of speed and so often choose not to end our pain by means of this deathtrap. It could be the fears of what the afterlife holds, or the hope of a better future or even the pain it would cause others around us, but I think we do not live our lives to just avoid pain. I think we live our lives despite pain because we so desire to have joy.

That is why an escapism philosophy and mentality toward drugs is not reality. Using a drug to be free from emotional pain or stress only holds a momentarily bandage effect and doesn't solve anything. The problems are still there and they will at some point have to be dealt with.

To think that using a drug to reject any authoritarian figure whenever parental or institutional is illusionary. It seems recreational and gives an apparent sense of freedom, but it was never really freedom at all. The cruelty of addiction, which is what recreational use quickly and unexpectedly turns into, is that in the moment the person is crying freedom — whether from the status quo or their legalistic parents or even the culture they were raised in — they are really wearing chains. The drug they are using to reach that sense of freedom has a stronger hold on them than any authority ever did.

The cruelty of it is that the people who care about that person have to watch them go through self-destruction. They have to watch the one they love grasp at false freedom.

It is ironic that what they thought would be freedom was really bondage and what they thought was bondage was a much brighter, fuller and more vivid perception of what it means to be free.

Evan Loveless of St. Charles County is a student at St. Charles Community College. Opinion Shapers are chosen annually to write columns on topics of interest to them.