Drug Addiction Stories

Whenever I see a young woman acting a little off, I think back to Marci. I was in college and she was in the dorm across from me. Every time I went out to grab a smoke, she was there. She was watching me from her window. 

Marci was beautiful. I admit, I was into her. However, Marci had a bipolar disorder and when she drank at parties, it was even worse. As beautiful as she was, I could not see her for very long. After just a few weeks, it was getting well, sort of creepy.

I met her at a party one Friday night. We ended up hanging out all weekend together. She was beautiful and honestly, I could have found myself falling in love with her if given the chance. But her mood swings became apparent in just a couple of weeks. Her watching me seemed almost, well, as my mom said, like a stalking situation.

One night, Marci called me. I started not to answer but something made me. Her voice was slurred and I thought she was drunk. She was but there was something more going on. I could sense it. Marci mumbled something about her brother dying. She said she had no family left now and she wanted to die, too. She had taken all of her bipolar medication, a half bottle of sleep sedative and was on her fourth drink. She wanted to die.

I raced over but her dorm was locked. I called 911 while my roommate called Campus security. The paramedics got there and tried to revive her but they were too late. Her neighbor in the dorm said Marci had been notified earlier in the afternoon that her brother had died in a car accident. Marci did not have a roommate because she was hard to live with according to the girls in her dorm.

I think about Marci from time to time. She was so beautiful and had everything to live for. She was in college and wanted to be a journalist. She was always writing in a spiral. She could have gone places.

I was studying psychology and became more and more interested in bipolar disorder after Marci’s death. I did some research and saw that people with bipolar disorder who have a drug or alcohol problem have more episodes than those who don’t. Today I am a mental health counselor. When I see a patient with bipolar disorder, my mind goes back to Marci. When I see one with a drug or alcohol problem, I make sure they are part of a dual diagnosis program. Maybe, just maybe, if someone had done that for Marci, she would still be alive.  I feel like every time I help a patient, I’m doing it for Marci, too.

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.

The old addage drugs, sex and rock and roll must have been someone’s hallucinatory dream because in my experience? It did not happen quite that way. I liked music, loved it. I grew up on the greats like Journey, Cheap Trick and Styx. So what happened? I partied hard in school and had my pick of all the pretty girls. So what happened?

Drugs. Alcohol. They led to bad choices. They led to bad grades. They led to my dreams being just that: dreams. While most of my buddies went on to get degrees and make something of themselves, me and a couple of others wasted our lives and our time.

I eventually dropped out of school and got on at a local factory. I married a girl who had crushed on me in high school that in all fairness, I had not paid much attention to back then. Maybe if I had, I would have reached my goals. There I go again, giving others the responsibility my shrink says I need to take on myself.

We had some lay offs and my wife stepped up to the plate, working two jobs while I began drinking again. I stayed clear of the drugs this time around but I was just deluding myself. My wife tried to be patient with me. Still, when I could not even vent my frustrations in a positive way, making love to her, I really freaked. My shrink and my physician both said it was the excessive drinking that was causing my problems in the bedroom.

One morning when I got up, my wife was still at the table instead of at work. She told me she was taking the day off from both of her jobs because we needed to talk. She told me that she loved me and she supported me but she could not keep enabling me. Puzzled, I look at her. She explained that enabling me was allowing me to drink and making excuses for me. She told me she knew that deep down inside of me was someone who had the courage to fight back and get through this.

We talked a lot that day. She did not yell at me or nag me. She simply looked at me with love in her eyes and told me I was the man she knew me to be, the man I did not believe I was. She restored my faith in myself when the truth was, she was the strong one in our marriage.

That was three years ago. Between my wife, my shrink and my doctor, I sobered up and started going to AA. I got back on out at factory I worked at and also took a few classes. Last year I finally got my degree in business and went to work in a large firm. Things are going well for me and my wife. We just had our first child, a boy. I think I can be a good dad now and I know he will have the greatest mom there is.  I know she was certainly my hero when I needed one.