I started with opiates the summer between high school and college. I was smoking weed regularly at the time, and one day at work the kid I worked with said he was grabbing some vicodin, and asked if I wanted in. We had a lot of work to do, and he told me how much it helps him get work done. I had been prescribed a few for recovering from an operation a few months earlier, and although I had gotten a buzz from them then, I didn't really get high. Anyway, since I was prescribed them before, I wasn't afraid to take them again, so I accepted the offer. I felt amazing on them, and this quickly became our Friday routine. I kept it at once or twice a week for a while, and the dealer worked next door so it's not like it was far away.
I made it a year keeping my use to mostly weekends, and I never tried anything stronger like oxy because I had a friend that was hooked on it and he would look pretty scary when he was nodding with one eye rolling in the back of his head, and his face turning pale. I stopped hanging out with him because it was no fun to hang out with someone that is nodding that hard when you are just trying to smoke a blunt and chill, plus I didn't want to be seen with someone in that condition. My point is, he scared me away from using oxy at that time.
After about a year of using vicodin on weekends, I started using it a lot more regularly. I kept up at this pace of using vicodin for another 10 months until it was barely working. I'm pretty surprised that I was able to get high off of vicodin for close to two years without increasing the dose much, but that came to an end at the start of the summer going into my junior year of college.
I remember trying percocets around that time and feeling a lot more from them, but for some reason they were pretty hard to come by. That's about the time I got an oxy connect. He was someone I knew from being in the weed game for a while, so it wasn't a big deal for me to call him after I heard he was selling. That was the summer of oxy. It was when I realized how many people I knew that were using it, and it was also when I first started hearing about heroin.
I got busted with pills that summer, but it didn't slow me down much. I continued blowing all my money on oxy that summer, and in the Fall I started court mandated outpatient rehab. I went back to only using a few days a week, allowing enough time to piss clean on the one day a week that I could possibly get tested. Outpatient was a joke though, because I knew everyone in there, and after meetings we would get together and pool our money to buy oxy for cheap.
That November, I called my usual oxy dealer and he said that all he had was dope. I wasn't even withdrawing at the time, so wasn't desperate to get well, but I guess I just wanted to get high still. I rode the H train from November to February, which is when I finally slipped up and failed a drug test. Got sent to inpatient, and when I got back I started on suboxone. I only got high off of dope 2 times in the 18 months I was on suboxone. After that I went away to school, far away from any dope. I made it two more years with just using while I was home during school breaks.
I graduated and am now back home in the land of dope. My usual summer run didn't have to come to an end because I didn't have to go back to school since I finished. I kicked before it got that bad, and am not just chipping 1 or 2x a week, using about 1/4 of the dose that I used to take. I still sniff my dope, although I have tried IV a few times but it worries me too much and I don't like the rush. I'll probably end up using 3-4x a month for a while. I drink very heavily when I don't have opiates around, so it's better for me to stick with occasional opiate use.
Regrets? Mostly financial, and of course getting arrested sucked, which is mostly a financial issue though. Not being able to do other stuff with friends because I have spent all my money on dope is a pretty common regret, but if I was out with friends we would be drinking like crazy so it's not like I'm picking the less healthy one.