"Brief" Background
I first started using drugs when I was really young, way younger than anyone should be when they first start with drugs. I had just turned 11 when an older kid at my school asked me if I wanted to try weed. I had just seen Half Baked, so when he said something about weed the first thing I could think of was this really cool movie that I thought was hella funny. I smoked, I guess, it was mostly just me trying to inhale smoke and cough my lung out at the same time. Idk if I got high, I just fell asleep. So when I had another opportunity to smoke, I jumped on it, thinking I knew what was up. I got really, really, really stoned the second time which began my love-affair with intoxication, in all its forms. My entire HS experience was working to make money to spend on weed, while going to school just enough to keep my grades up. The day I truly knew I LOVED drugs was the day I had my appendix out. I waited so long and I was in so much pain they just started pumping me full of IV morphine in the hospital. At this point I wasn't hooked, but I was in love.
Fast forward to first week of college. I had just arrived to one of the most epic hippy/druggy/stoner/party schools in the US, and was about to begin my journey to the abyss that is my life today. I still smoked weed, but I also started drinking, a lot. Then the drugs started. First it was E, then it was acid, then it was coke, then it was, well... everything. At first I thought I would set up some ground rules, i.e. no getting high before class, no coke, only drugs from plants. Each rule I made, and each rule I broke. Lots of them. In under 4 years I had managed to try every mainstream drug known to man. Enough was never enough. Then from the age of 21 and on, I started selling a lot of weed, and my main customer was a mafia-connected coke dealer... let's just say that my drug use got real intense real quick. All of a sudden *I* was connected. My phone was blowing up every 10 minutes, I was THE man to talk to about weed in this college town. People knew who I was. My friends and I were known. I never paid for drinks or drugs, and I got laid all the time. Sounds fucking awesome? Well, it was. For the little while that it lasted at least.
Then the worst thing I could have ever wished upon someone happened to me. It turns out I have a genetic neurological disorder that decided to kick in about this time. I started having seizures, not from the drugs, but just from my fucked up brain. I pretended everything was okay, but it really wasn't. Instead of chillin and smoking weed during the day and partying at night every other day, it became drink all day, do coke all night. Sleep at 9am, repeat. Even my party buddies from the beginning of college couldn't hang with my crazy new lifestyle. I went from being the weed man, to the drug man. Everyone knew I was fucked up 24/7, so if anyone needed any drugs they would come to me. I made a ton of money, but I also dipped into my product a little too much. Soon, I started having more seizures. I became afraid to go out. I had a script for 6mg of klonopin a day, and I would just numb myself with that before doing coke, by myself, in my room. At this point I was also drinking, at the very least, a 1/5th of whiskey a day. Usually more.
Then finally I met a wonderful girl. She partied at my house and she could just see that I was miserable. That I was so alone despite being around so many people. She took care of me and made me happy for the first time in years. How did I repay her kindness? By ruining her life. After chillin out for awhile, she kinda realized I was bored, socially. She started encouraging me to hangout with my old friends again, worst idea ever. I started right where I had left off. Like nothing happened. This time I got VERY self destructive too. I just wanted to do more, and more and more of anything and everything, coke, ketamine, e, LSD, coke, alcohol, coke. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars a night. In one summer I remember making at least 50k selling drugs and a couple months later I had NOTHING left. That's what happens when you do 5,6,7g's of coke a night, every night. The opiates hadn't even started yet...
This is when things got even worse. One day I decided to take a trip back home. On our last night there I got drunker than usually. I climbed up a tree with a bottle in my hand, and I had a seizure. Or so I was told. I woke up in the hospital 7 days later. I had broken both shoulders, torn ligaments and tendons in both, and I shattered my knee into little pieces. I left the hospital with a prescription of 3xOC 80mg. Within a few weeks 240mg of OC wasn't enough even though I was essentially opiate naive before the accident, 6 weeks before. No shit, that's how fast that shit happens. Enough was never enough. I started blowing 300-400mg's of oxy a night. I remember the first time I did 400mg of oxy in one day, I started crying and crying and crying and all I did was do more to try and make the tears go away. I remember blowing OC after OC and passing out, waking up, gasping for air,slumped against a wall, covered in drool, and doing more OC to try and make myself calm down. I got that horrible opiate meanness, and I told every one I knew to fuck off including my amazing gf at the time. One of the most ashamed things I ever did is tell my gf that I didn't need her anymore. I just ignored her. I stopped picking up her calls or texts, and eventually I told her to go fuck herself and leave me alone. Only after a year did my oxy script get slowly lowered. Funny thing is oxy was actually rather easy for me to come off of. For some strange reason, and no one ever believes me, I don't suffer from withdrawals to opiates (although you have to remember I have a rare neurological disorder, so my brain's different than yours). So when I started getting less and less prescribed, I was okay. That being said, I still wanted to get high. I didn't know anyone in my hometown anymore so all I could do was collect my small script of opiates, take my kpins, and drink like a fish... all by myself. Then I started getting into RC's you could buy online. I'm so ashamed to say that I would order so much, have so much RC's, then forget what random white powder was what and would try it anyways. Then I found out how to buy all the drugs I could imagine online. I substituted heroin and opium when I couldn't get OC. I was as fucked up as possible, all the time. At the very, very least I would get drunk every night and always ate more kpins than I needed to (8-10mg). At the end of every month I would withdraw off kpins and I had more seizures (benzo withdrawal is hell, btw). At this point my drinking was so bad that I would get DT's if I didn't drink. If I had no money, I would steal alcohol. I got arrested, got kicked out of my own place, was robbed at gun point in my own apartment, got robbed from people I thought were friends, got in many fights, the works. Then one night, I did a little too much of everything. By a little too much I mean 15mg of klonopin, 250mg of oxy, 1/5th of rye whiskey and 2 pitchers of beer.
I just remember thinking right before I shut my eyes, that this was the nicest and best sleep I had ever felt. If it wasn't for the fact that a few of my oldest buddies were over, it would have been my last. 10 days later, I woke up in the ICU, with a doctor pulling a tube out of my throat. I was essentially dead when I got the Narcan. My kidney's had shut down for awhile, I got severe pneumonia, my heart was fucked up, and my brain lost too much O2 for a little bit. My parents and my HS friends came to visit and all of them just looked at me like WTF happened to this kid? Instead of this smart, outgoing, kind, and funny kid that they remember, there is this disheveled, sickly old man. A homeless, drug addicted, old man. All the surgeries I had were undone. Docs found out about all the shit I took that night from my very last friend, and they figured no one would ever take this amount of stuff for fun. They thought I tried to commit suicide so I had to go to a mental hospital. Now I have the body of a 70 year old man. I can barely walk, and I can't really work. I'm 26 years old, and I have no friends, no lover, no money. I lived with both my parents, but my whole drug problem destroyed their marriage so I just live with my mom, who thinks I'm fucking pathetic. Who knows what kinda damage I did to my already damaged brain, but I don't feel like I used to. I've even heard my friends have told people that I'm not the same. Honestly, death is better than this life. If it wasn't for my family I would have killed myself a long time ago.
So now I'm one of the poster boys for those anti-drug ads. I'm not saying that if you love drugs you'll end up like me, but it is a distinct possibility.
What I am really trying to say is that with incredible highs comes incredible lows.
What substances were/are you abusing.
Everything, but the drugs that were my downfall were Klonopin, alcohol, cocaine, and opiates.
Duration of Addiction/Dependence
I was a stoner/party kid since I was 15, shit started getting out of control at 20, by 22 I was a full on alcoholic, had a cocaine problems, and was a poly-drug user. By 23 I traded cocaine for opiates. I'm 26 now.
How did drugs negatively impact your life. Feel free to discuss IV complications and/or overdoses.
I Lost my family, lost the greatest girl ever. Ruined friendships. Ruined other's lives. Lost all my money. I now have the body of a 70yo man. The injuries sustained while being fucked up have made me this way. I can barely use my right arm and my left knee barely works. I'm in constant pain from the injuries sustained while fucked up. Since doctors know I love opiates, they wont give me what I really need despite the fact that I'm in more pain than I ever was. One of the worst things is the label that comes with being an addict. People look at you different, they talk behind your back as if you don't know what they're saying. They treat you different. There aint no coming back from that. Once people think you are an addict, they don't change their opinion. That's why it is so hard to get clean. What's the point? You're already labelled for the rest of your life. Oh, and I got old... not in years, but in appearance. When you see Charlie Sheen on TV and say to yourself "Damn that guy looks bad for his age" Well, now I look into the mirror and I think the same thing about myself.
Warnings and Advice
IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. I'm not trying to say drugs are going to ruin your life, I'm just saying that they can. I never planned on this lifestyle. It is not glamorous, it is not fun. It is painful, and it is LONELY. I have to deal with these consequence, I made the wrong choices and I write this as a warning to others. If you start seeing ANY self destructive behavior you should probably stop using. Responsible use / chipping might be possible for very, very few, but just assume it isn't. If you think that you are being responsible, you probably aren't. It is a really slippery slope, there is NO end to the downward decline and once you get low enough, there's no going back.