As I walked over I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. One of the kids asked if he could bum a cigarette. I gave him one and we talked for a few minutes. It came up almost immediately that I was new in town, and he told me what to expect when I started school. Looking back, it was typical stoner conversation, "School sucks because we don't fit in, the teachers try to fail us, the cops in this town sucks and everybody is out to get us."
Another kid came up and whispered in his ear then walked off. He turned to me and asked, "Are you cool?" Not knowing what that even meant, I said yes. He asked me if I smoked pot. I had no idea what pot was. I knew that I smoked cigarettes, so I said yes. We walked into the gazebo on the square and entered into a circle of kids passing around joints. I took my first hit of marijuana. I coughed like I had tuberculosis and everyone laughed. I continued to smoke in that circle.
By the time I left that night I was stoned and drunk. And I had friends. The two years that I had lived in Branson I had only made one friend. The entire time that I had lived in Peoria I had made one real friend. Both times, they lived right next to me and I was the only option their age. This time, it was different. I had multiple friends and most were older than I was. Suddenly, I had found my place in the world.
It felt good to be accepted. That weekend I went to a house party with the same kids. There were more kids there and some grown-ups. I smoked and drank again. That night I also used cocaine, tripped acid and had sex. Now I had a lot of friends who felt just like I did. Some of us were born to alcoholics and drug addicts, some of us were abused. Most of us were both. We were different, but we had each other.
I had found my niche, and the days of partying and fighting had began. I soon smoked every morning on the walk to school with a couple of friends. We did rush/poppers between classes and smoked again on the way home. We drank most weekends, fought a lot and took white crosses constantly. Cocaine was rare, it was only with adults at big parties. That was my 7th and 8th grade years. When I moved to Eldorado, it was just more of the same through high school.
I would never change all that I did and all that happened to me. It has all made me stronger and wiser. I do wonder what I would have done if it was someone other than my teachers and the "Just Say No" program telling me not to do drugs. Would I have done them? If someone could have told me where I would end up ten years later that I could relate to would my use of stopped, stayed the same or increased? I will never know.
All that I do know is that no intervention ever worked, and my use just increased. I ended up moving to Hollister, Missouri the summer before my senior year and hung out in Branson at the lakefront then went to keg parties most nights. I was also introduced to methamphetamine when I got to Branson.
That was were things really started to get bad, but I could always justify it. "I am only snorting and smoking it. It's not like it's going to kill me." I dropped out of high school because it got in the way of my partying. I could not place school and learning above partying and having sex. My journey from abuse to addiction landed me in jail and on house arrest. When I was 20 I graduated to prison. I got out when I was 21 and by that time I had spent about 10% of my life behind bars.
I still justified my drug use and the hustling that I did, because it was fun and I enjoyed doing it. I liked my life. You could even say that I loved my life. When I got out of prison I used meth intravenously for the first time, and my life was never the same. I still wanted to live, because shooting up felt like nothing I had ever done before. It was the most intense feeling that I had ever had. Now I know why.
Here is a quick lesson in brain chemistry. Dopamine is responsible for generating feelings of pleasure in our brain. It is the chemical that is released when we have an orgasm. When you do cocaine it releases almost twice the amount of dopamine that an orgasm does. Methamphetamine is 3 times stronger than cocaine. Our brain releases over 600% more dopamine when we do meth as when we have an orgasm. That is a level that is biologically impossible to reach without drug use. As addicts we soon find that nothing comes close to the euphoria we feel when we do meth, and we crave it. Soon that high becomes the only thing that matters, and we lose interest in everything else!
I slowly began to phase out my friends and family that did not use. I wanted nothing to do with them. I did not want to hear them preach at me. I began to miss family events like birthdays and Christmas. They were just not that important to me. I wanted to get high, and I was enjoying doing it. I could justify my drug use, because I was working full time (and hustling the rest). It got to the point that I would sleep one day a week, on Sundays. I would stay up from Sunday night through early Sunday morning.
I had a car accident a year or so after that, flying a Firebird 97 feet and 32 feet into the air. I was in the hospital for a while on opiates, and if you forward 6 months from the wreck I was addicted to opiates also. My use continued, and it got worse and worse. When I was 26 my sister found me unconscious in my bathroom with both of my wrists slit and blood every where. She called an ambulance, and they were able to save me.
My sister made me promise that I would never attempt suicide again. I promised her that I would not. I meant the promise when I made it. I even kept that promise, kind of. More on that later. I continued to party, and had gotten put back on probation just as my parole was ending. I rode out my probation for the first several years. I was always able to stop using 48-72 hours before I saw my probation officer and I would flush my system or use a Whizzenator. I thought that I was doing okay, but I was wrong.
My addiction had gotten so bad that I shot up right before I saw my probation officer. Literally, the day before and again on my report day. When I got in, she took one look at me and said, "If I were to test you right now, what would I find?" I told her that I didn't know what she wouldn't find. Just like that, I was on my way to rehab.
I won't get too much into the details, but before I went to rehab I put everything that I had left in a spoon and used it. It should have killed me, but it didn't. Instead my sister drove me to detox. While I was in rehab, I thought that maybe they were right and I needed to quit. I completed residential, but did not do outpatient aftercare. I was doing great, or so I thought. I even started an NA meeting in my home. I was all about showing everybody how wrong they were about me, thinking that I would relapse. In the end they were all right. I made one major mistake, I kept the friends I had before I went to rehab. It is hard to stay clean when you are playing in the mud. I was bound to fail.
Finally one day I needed money, and the only way I knew how to make it was to do a burn. I made a batch of dope, and just like that I was back out there. It was actually worse this time around. The first 7 years of my life I had never overdosed. I overdosed 3 times over the next year. I always had to do more than everybody else.
I had a death wish. At one time, I would watch how much I did because I did not want to over do it. This time around, I didn't care. I had discovered something. I could not quit. I thought that I had it beat, but I discovered that methamphetamine owned me. I would do opiates, benzodiazepines, hallucinogens, powder and rock cocaine. I would shoot up ice water and liquor just to feel the needle. It did not matter what you had, I would do it.
I soon found what my true addiction was. I was addicted to more. I wanted anything you had and would do all that you had. If it was sex, drugs, liquor, fighting or money. I wanted it and I wanted it all. The only thing that I did not want was to live. I would go to dope cooks houses that I did not even know, hoping that they would kill me. If I knew that someone was spun out and sketchy, I was there and would refuse to leave.
I had friends, but I couldn't trust them further than I could throw them. I had good dope, money and a house. They loved me for that, but they would steal from me given a chance. They were just like me, all about themselves. Sure they would have helped me hide bodies, but they would have hid mine too if the money was right. It was the drug world, and sometimes people just disappeared. Everyone thought that they had moved, but we usually knew better. Those were my running mates. I WAS NOT ALRIGHT!
I had promised my sister I would not kill myself, but I never told her that I wouldn't let someone else kill me. I have had people come at me with guns and knives. I egged them on. I WANTED TO DIE! I ended up with holes in my body that I was not born with. I did stop breathing on several occasions, but I always came back to life. I hated my life, but it was all that I knew!
The reason that it all got so bad was that I had been running from feeling my whole life. I was abused as a child and felt like a loner. The only time that I felt like I fit in was when I was doing drugs with other people. We shared a connection. Drugs were the only stable relationship that I ever had. It never tried to take advantage of me, never lied to me and I always knew what to expect from it. Plus the rush was unlike anything that I had ever felt. But the downside was intense. I loved drugs, I loved the way they made me feel but I could not stand the people it brought into my life and I hated the person that they made me. They made me evil!
By the time I realized what it was doing to me, it was too late. I can remember seeing one of my friend's friends after he had overdosed. I walked into the bathroom and he was sagging against the wall and the toilet, dead. As I looked into his eyes I could only think one thing, "That sure looks nice. He finally looks calm and peaceful. I bet that feels great."
You see he no longer had to worry about the things that we as drug addicts have to worry about. He no longer had to fear someone sketching out and thinking he was an undercover or wearing a wire. He didn't have to play curtain patrol every 3 seconds because he knew that either the cops or the COMET (Combined Ozarks Multijurisdictional Enforcement Team) Drug Task Force was out there watching him. He no longer had to fear his friends, family and girlfriends were either turning him in or conspiring against him. His race was finished, he was done. He was at rest forever. I wanted that.
To give you an example of where my life was at this time, if I got arrested with money in my pocket to bond out I would stay in county jail for a week or two. I could catch up on sleep, eat a bunch to gain weight and relax. I was calmer and less stressed in county jail than I was on the outside of jail in the real world. I wasn't institutionalized, but life as a drug addict is not all that it is cracked up to be. The combination of drugs and no sleep coupled with low-life friends (because I was a low-life too and we attract people just like us) sucks! It can only take you to dark places.
I WAS A SOLDIER FOR SATAN! I can remember holding a cocked and loaded gun to my temple, contemplating pulling the trigger and hearing voices from these shapes that were darker than dark shout at me, "Do it. Pull the trigger and come home." I have seen shadow people in the corner while I was high and sometimes when I was not high watching me, always watching. I have held a gun to someone else's head and been cheered on and encouraged by the same shadow people many think are fake. I tell you this for certain, after a while we become Satan's soldiers and do his bidding.
Shadow people are real, and so is possession. When I was on meth and would get mad people have seen my entire eye turn black. I have glimpsed myself out of the corner of my eye in the mirror and saw the demon that had possessed me. How can you not fear life when you are possessed by demons and they are all around you. When you see perfectly sane people doing insane things, that is not the drugs. That is the evil that pervades them. METH IS EVIL!
I know that some may think that I am crazy when I talk about this. I know that our minds can play tricks on us, especially when on drugs and not sleeping for days and weeks at a time. Imagining that you see people in the trees and seeing and hearing something in the room with you are two completely different things. I have talked to many a drug user and we have described seeing and hearing the same things. How is having the exact same experiences in different towns at different times possible. The only way is if it is real. I would see the same things in the corner daily, but in different corners. I believe that when we use we weaken our resolve and we become an easier target for the devil. If meth is evil, then when you do it demons can walk in through the door that you have already opened. I and many others have seen and heard them.
How can you ever be happy. I feared life because I never knew what I would do next. My family thought that I was undependable but did not know half the truth. I never knew what I would do from one second to the next. I would be sitting shuffling cards one minute and go to the bathroom and come to an hour later playing Russian Roulette the next. I have months of my life that are just missing. I have no recollection of them. I sometimes still have nightmares of me doing things that I do not remember.
Add to that all of the damage that was caused by the dope I had a part in making and the drugs I sold. How many people got high on my drugs then beat their wives or children? How many people got high off of what I created and raped or molested somebody? How much money did I get that should have been spent feeding neglected, starving children? How many people overdosed on my drugs?
That is why towards the end of my addiction I was afraid to live. I knew all that I was responsible for, all that I had done, the things that had been done because of my drugs and that evil owned me. I WAS EVIL! Nothing good ever came of drugs, only evil! People in my life were only pawns and I had to use them before they would use me. Nothing good ever came of me, only evil. I hated myself. When I looked into the mirror all I saw was an evil person, a junkie and a convict.
Don't get me wrong, I did not want to be that way. I tried everything secular to get off of drugs and away from alcohol. I was in jails, prison and rehabs. I saw psychiatrists, psychologists and counselors. I was given one mental health diagnosis after another and switched from medication to medication in order to fix me. I was beyond fixing and there was no natural cure.
The problem wasn't that I was broken. I couldn't be fixed. The problem was that I had become evil. Friedrich Nietzsche talks about this, "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." My soul had become corrupted and I was left hopeless. Pretty nasty combination. I was devoid of all hope, and even though I wanted to die I was still here. I could not defeat drugs no matter what I tried and there is a reason for that. There is nothing worldly that can defeat spiritual corruption.
That is all I do now. My life is a 12th step! My transformation has been talked about in multiple blogs on my site Spiritual Spackle. I share about recovery and the power of Christ when ever and where ever I can. I have talked on the radio, television, at colleges, churches, recovery centers, recovery groups (Narcotic's Anonymous, Celebrate Recovery, etc.), seminars, conferences and to youth groups. I am now a substance abuse counselor. It is why I am starting a non-profit to share the dangers of addiction and the power of recovery with people across the state, eventually across the country and hopefully the world. Across the world is not out of reach, my blog has been read in almost 100 countries.
GOD HAS PLACED ON MY HEART THE IMPORTANCE OF SHARING THE EVIL OF ADDICTION AND THE WONDERS OF RECOVERY WITH AS MANY PEOPLE AS I CAN. Please feel free to repost and share this blog and my site with as many people as you can. We are on facebook under Spiritual Spackle and Better Life in Recovery . Stay tuned as the non-profit BETTER LIFE IN RECOVERY begins to come together and let us know if you can help in any way with it coming to fruition. Here is a link about what we are doing and what our needs are: http://spiritualspackle.blogspot.com/2012/05/better-life-in-recovery-documentary.html I also am a little over half done writing a book that should be out next year about my addiction and what I learned in overcoming it tentatively called Spiritual Spackle.
Thanks for taking the time to read this blog. It is probably the longest I have ever written, but it is also the most honest I have been. Methamphetamine, and addiction in general, are evil and linked to at least 80% of the evil in this world: murders, rape, child abuse, child molestation, suicide, cruelty to animals, etc. We need to bring an end to it, and I am hoping that Better Life in Recovery will help us reach youth with a more effective intervention than what is currently being done.
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