Drug Addiction Stories

Robin was beautiful in high school. She wasn’t the most popular girl but she had some friends. She wasn’t into sports or ROTC. She liked to party. She drank and got high. She had a single mom who partied all the time and we had it made because her house was known as Party Central.

I would drink now and then with Robin but for some reason, I never got into trying the drugs. Maybe it was because when I saw her doing them, something bad always happened. She would fight with her boyfriend, fight with her mom, get in trouble at school for not turning an assignment in. With Robin, life was never dull but it wasn’t always fun, either.

The summer between our junior and senior years, I went to stay with relatives. I loved being with my cousins and thought it was cool that my mom let me. She had an ulterior motive, though, one filled with love. She didn’t want me hanging out with Robin all summer.

When senior year started, Robin wasn’t there. She dropped out. She was pregnant. The baby was born with birth defects because of Robin’s history of drug and alcohol use. I went to see her and the baby in the hospital. My heart broke as Robin said she couldn’t wait to leave (the baby would have to stay a bit longer than her) because she was “dying for a joint”.

I stopped being around Robin altogether after that. Sure, we would run into each other from time to time. We each ended up having three children. Two of hers had medical or mental problems related to Robin’s drug use.

A few weeks ago I ran into Robin at the convenience store. I was literally shocked. She is actually a few months younger than me but she looked older than my own mother does. My fiance was shocked when I introduced the two of them. As we got back into his car, he said “That’s the friend from high school you thought was so pretty?” I said yes, she had truly been beautiful.

Even now, at 40, I am learning lessons from high school. My fiance had taken a picture of us standing together with his camera phone. We showed it to my daughter and her friends. He told them “If I had met your mom and this lady the same night, it would have been no contest. Your mom is beautiful.” The girls saw what drinking and drugs can do to age a beautiful young girl so that 40 looks so much older. While I felt somewhat sad about what had happened to Robin, I was grateful that my daughter and her friends could learn from it without doing so the hard way.

I grew up being in the shadow of others. I was Donny’s sister, David’s daughter, Margaret’s daughter, Lisa’s friend. I was never just Tory. I was second to everyone else. I came up with a great idea for our history paper when Lisa and I were in junior high. Even as Lisa stood there and told our teacher the idea was mine, she applauded Lisa for “allowing” me to share the credit. 

In high school, Lisa was out sick for a week with the flu and I was invited by another girl, Stacy, to go to a party. ME. Not Lisa, not Donny, me. So I went. It was there that I became acquainted with a new world. It was there I met crystal meth.

When Lisa came back to school, she noticed the change in me immediately. I was dressing “goth” she said. I told her she was just jealous. She warned me to keep away from my new friends. I told her she was being spiteful because they wanted to be friends with ME.

As the days went by, I got more involved with crystal meth and my new friends. One Tuesday afternoon, I got home about an hour late from school to find my family, Lisa and a lady there. They told me they cared about me. Not because I was just a sister, just a daughter, just a friend, but because I was Tory. They said they missed me. They called it an intervention.

The lady told me she was a counselor and that it was not too late to get off crystal meth. She said I had a wonderful family and best friend who did not wait until I was hurt or in jail to get help. It had only been about six weeks. They were not going to take chances with me. As soon as they confirmed I was involved with drugs, they sought help.

Lisa was one of the speakers at our high school graduation two years later. She had been on the honor roll all four years. She told the audience she would not have maintained her high grades if not for the creative and inspirational ideas of one person, her best friend, Tory. She looked over at me and everyone stood up giving both of us a standing ovation. My parents were beaming from ear to ear even though I had not won any awards.

I am Donny’s sister, David’s daughter, Margaret’s daughter and Lisa’s best friends. My name is Tory and I am the luckiest girl on earth.

I watched the mailman walk away from my mailbox. I did not really want to go out there and get the mail. No, I wasn’t hiding from mounting bills or bugged about wasting my time wading through junk mail. It was a letter from my boyfriend. There was always a letter from my boyfriend in the mail, telling me how much he loved me and how much he needed me. He was not writing from a combat zone overseas. He was not writing from college. He was writing from the penitentiary. He was serving a sentence for armed robbery. He had been in for eight months and had a little over nine years to go. 

We had gone together since high school and gotten hooked on crystal meth the summer following our senior year. We had just thought to try it one weekend with friends but before we knew it, we were both hooked. Neither of us could keep a job for very long because when we got a fix we would miss work. Desperate for cash to feed our addiction, my boyfriend pulled an armed robbery and got caught.

He was inside and clean for the first time in three years. I was still trying to get a fix where and when I could. He was begging me in his letters to get clean so that when he was paroled, we could be together and start a new life.

Thanks to my own foul up by drinking and driving one night, I was clean and had been for about a month. However, I was also finding out through my counseling sessions that deep down, I did want to change and I wanted to have a real life.

The days went by, I got a job and I attended support meetings for my crystal meth addiction. I also attended alcoholism meetings as mandated by the court. I got a job and as the next month went by, I realized I had held the job past getting my first paycheck. I usually got high then and never returned to work.

I had shared with my boyfriend getting clean but as even more time went by, I found myself wanting to experience other things in life such as well, a normal relationship. I began dreading his letters more and more as I yearned to be out living life instead of letting it pass me by. Still, I opened his letters, read them and answered them. Then one day came a different letter. He told me it would be his last letter. He said he wanted me to get out and have a life not tied to him. He was giving me what I had been wanting. That was when I knew I still loved him. I told him I would wait.

Eventually he was paroled. He came home and began rebuilding his life. He got a job through a friend of his brother’s and we are living in a small apartment. We both go to meetings, sometimes together, sometimes separately. We take it one day at a time but we are together and we are clean.