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.