Youth and Viagra
Am the warden of a boys hostel at the College in San Diego. Am responsible for the welfare of over 160 children ranging from ages 17 to 21 years. Many of them are from nearby places. About 21% are international students from Asia and African Countries. There are a few Mexicans too. Managing diverse cultural groups is always a challenge. But I have been at this job for the last fifteen years and am used to such challenges by now. In fact I enjoy the job so much that I would not have wanted to ever switch jobs.
When children join college after passing out of school, they are like headless chicken. This is when they want to behave like adults and experience life without parental controls and restrictions. They think they are adults, but in fact they run helter skelter without knowing what they are doing or where they are going. This is all a part of growing up and fun. Three years down the line, after a few drinking brawls, brush with cops and several girl friends and parties, they ten to sober down and get more focused into studies.
I have always tried to be very free with the boys but made sure that they know their limits. One cannot rule with an iron hand always, but it is important to draw lines and boundaries specially when there are multi lingual and multi cultural groups. I do have to keep a watch on the youngsters and not so much with the seniors. In fact seniors are my informers who let me know what’s going on.
Last year an incident took place which paved way for a lot of changes to be introduced in the campus. I got the news that the freshers who had just joined hostel a few months ago were on to something, but nobody could tell me what was happening. I had to seek help from the seniors who took a while to find out that a group of over twenty boys were on to some kind of drugs. All of them seem to be consuming oral tablets in the hostel everyday. Well the news was shocking and I couldn’t believe it. We had to move carefully to ascertain the facts. We somehow managed to get hold of a bottle full of tablets they were consuming and I sent it to the local drug store for verification because it did not look like some sort of drug to me. It appeared to be some kind of multi vitamin tablet. The chemist immediately confirmed that the tablets were indeed not abusive drugs but a PDE 5 inhibitor called Viagra. Now who doesn’t know about Viagra? Everyone knows what Viagra is. Now that we had some clue to what was going on, I was relieved because it wasn’t a drug problem. To me this appeared to be some kind of curiosity that has led these teenagers to experiment with Viagra.
We confronted the children along with a group of doctors who explained to them medical facts about Viagra and how it is used to cure a condition known as erectile dysfunction and not that it would help the youth and men increase their libido. They were given the knowledge of harmful effects of consuming Viagra too. Well now this problem has been arrested. I have realized that it is lack of information that pushes youngsters to venture into such experiments. I intend organizing sessions on Aids and other issues too and create a platform for them to get to know truth and facts.