The instinct of most families who are dealing with a member coping with addiction, whether it be hard drugs or prescriptions or alcohol, is to give them as much love and support as they seem to need, which for addicts is an almost unlimited amount. This protective instinct exacerbates the addiction as the consequencelessness of the addict’s actions combined with an increasingly distorted perception of reality will lead to behavioral escalations dangerous to both the addict and those around them.
Case in point, on Dreamin’ Demon I just read the story of Ashley and Rebecca McMillion. The McMillions are a methed out, pot smoking couple from Arkansas who lived in an 16 x 8 foot storage shed Marilyn McMillion, Ashley’s mother, purchased for them to live in. Marilyn put the shed on her property, the better that her son and his wife could avail themselves of her help and support. Thus cared for, the drug addled couple gave birth to a daughter they named Cozy.
With new daughter secured in a shed that boasted a television and air conditioning, Ashley and Rebecca continued their main pursuits of cooking meth and smoking pot. At some point Ashley began raping the baby. Marilyn claims she was unaware of any of this:
SEBASTIAN COUNTY, Ark. — A man, woman and infant were found living in a small shed in Midland in Sebastian County, and police said Ashley Mcmillion repeatedly raped a 1-year-old n that shed.
Ashley allegedly committed the crime just feet from his mother’s doorstep.
“We bought that to put a roof over their heads so I could feed them. I thought it was helping, not hurting,” said Marilyn Mcmillion, who bought the shed for her son and daughter-in-law to live in.
Mcmillion said she didn’t know what the conditions were inside the shed.
“How could you not know? Well when you go to work 40 hours a week and then yard work, garden work. How would I know?” Mcmillion said.
Police said they found drug paraphernalia and marijuana inside the shed.
Plausible, but it is unlikely she would have allowed the two to live in a shed unless she knew there was some reason they couldn’t live on their own, and at the same time didn’t want them in her house. I would suggest that she wanted provide the minimum care for the addicts, and she didn’t want them to lose their child.
Which was of course a mistake.
Addicts will devolve until they get clean. Anyone who has seen the crack whores, homeless teen beggars and desperate men in pawn shops has seen the work of addiction. No one in the grip of the addiction is truly in their right mind, no one is trustworthy as long as they reject sobriety. And as long as they are getting high they simply don’t see it.
All addicts must hit “rock bottom” for them to realize they have a problem, which is the first step toward recovery. The sooner they hit their bottom the better off they’ll be. Had Marilyn allowed them to live on the streets where all addicts end up the child may have ended up in another home where she wasn’t raped by her father. Had Rebecca ended up living on the streets she may have cleaned up rather than have a baby with a man with no home. As long as they were cared for they they had no impetus to get clean, and their baby paid for it.
Handling addicts with kid gloves never works. Trying to provide for them so they won’t end up hooking or stealing only delays the inevitable. I don’t know if Ashley McMillion, without a meth and pot habit, would have raped his daughter but I do know that Rebecca’s drug use enabled the rape. She claims she saw the rapes but, in her stupor, didn’t believe her own eyes.
I guess we have seen her rock bottom, too bad it was also her daughter’s.
This is disgusting.
I may be misinformed, but wouldn’t Marilyn have been able to smell them cooking up the meth? I don’t know personally, but I’ve been told that it’s a very distinctive odor, and that it’s a very strong odor, that you just can’t do it in a “well-ventilated area” unless you have no neighbors.
Marilyn could probably have better served her granddaughter by reporting her son & daughter-in-law’s condition to the authorities, taking custody of her granddaughter, and booting the parents off her property to keep her daughter from witnessing their self-destruction. She could have prevented her granddaughter’s suffering.
I’ve witnessed, first hand, how much damage enabling drug addicts will cause. It’s not pretty. The parents don’t realize that they’re allowing their child(ren) to do irreparable damage to their bodies and to their minds (literally, to their brains.) The more damage done, the less chance of that individual ever becoming the person that the parent(s) remember them being before the addiction.
Marilyn obviously didn’t do her son any favors, and certainly didn’t do her granddaughter any favors. As for the baby’s mother… I don’t care what kind of a “stupor” she was in. She actually witnessed this happening and did nothing. She’s just as guilty and should never have contact with that child again.
Cooking up meth also requires so much equipment I just can’t believe she didn’t notice it, and the smell of marijuana.
Marilyn definitely has at least moral culpability in this child’s abuse. I think she acted with good intentions, hoping to keep them alive, but so few people know what drugs do to people.
Oh, the ones with addicts in their lives do know… they just choose to ignore it, and the fact that their enabling behavior only makes matters worse.
That “tough love” we hear so much about… it’s tough on the one who must be tough, but it’s really what the addicts need. They can’t see what harm they’re doing to themselves or those around them so long as there is always someone else there to help clean up the mess as they go. And, in the long run, being tough now makes life oh, so much easier on the loved ones than enabling. Enabling an addict only drains the enabler of energy that they’re not getting any return on, and likely never will.
Also, enablers choose not to see how their own behavior causes harm to the other loved ones that must be around the addict. I know this first hand, as well. This particular case is an extreme case, but there are far, far too many of these extreme cases to ignore the problem.