Drug Addiction Stories & Info

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.

Paula was the oldest of the five of us had always been a little different from the rest of us. She got into drugs while still in high school. We watched our parents get her out of situation after situation, everything from going to jail to accidental overdoses to relationships with guys. Each time she fell apart they would pick up the pieces.

I found myself getting aggravated with Paula’s antics as we got older. I had goals for my life and they did not include bailing her out and rushing to her aid in the middle of the night. One evening we had a particularly harsh conversation, much like the one I was witnessing between my neighbor and her brother. I called Paula a nut-case and told her the family did not exist solely to take care of her and her mess-ups. She was my older sister and I was embarrassed that she had no common sense.

Just three days later, Paula either accidentally or purposely  overdosed on drugs. She called our parents and told them what she had done only it was too late when help arrived. She told them on the phone that she could never see herself getting her life straightened out. She just wanted to end it but that if she could get help one last time she would stop.  My parents drove quickly over there while callling 911 from a cell phone.  To this day I feel bad about chewing her out but my time in therapy after her suicide helped me to understand I was having a normal reaction that day long ago.

My neighbor and her brother looked at each at each other.  She was crying and he looked like someone had just awaken him from a bad dream.  He walked over to her and kneeled down and said he would get help.  He told her that he never wanted her to get a call after an argument between them due to drugs.

I helped them get in touch with a drug treatment center.  Just the other day, I got a card from her brother telling me thanks because he had been clean for six months.  I smiled and in my heart thanked Paula for helping me to help another brother/sister relationship.  I know she was there in spirit, too, and that it was Paula’s gift to me as well as to them.

For years my family tried to tell me that marijuana was a gateway drug. I did not believe them. I was doing good. I was a good student, my friends were cool, none of us were losers or into hard drugs. We just had marijuana sometimes to relax when we were all hanging out. We went on to college. It was no big deal. Still, my mom kept telling me it was a gateway drug and I always had an argument against it.

So off to college I went. My friends and I were having a blast, getting to call the shots, be our own bosses. We made it through our freshman year and decided as sophomores that we were grown and wanted an apartment off campus. That is when I met Shelley.

Shelley lived next door and I fell for her the first moment I laid eyes on her. She came to one of our parties and when we brought out the marijuana, she laughed. She said it was for babies, that she she smoked it until she “graduated” to better stuff. She brought out some crystal meth. Not wanting to look like a baby to the gorgeous neighbor I was smitten with, I tried it. You can guess the rest, right?

My grades plummeted. Shelley dumped me for her meth dealer. I went home. My mother told me “See? I was right. Marijuana is the gateway to other drugs.” My mom helped me get clean and I ended up graduating a year and a half later than I should have from college.

That argument still exists to this day. Is marijuana a gateway to other drugs? Yes and no. Yes, if you are on marijuana, you could be more inclined to take something stronger. Some people do it because marijuana no longer “does it” for them as those in my N.A. Group stated. In my case, though? I have to call a spade a spade. If there was a definitive reason? It was closer to peer pressure without the pressure. I wanted to impress Shelley. So in my case, I have to say marijuana was not a gateway. However, my mother and a couple of people in my support group gave me a sound argument to think about: was it the fact that I was already high from the marijuana that night? Was marijuana the gateway or just impressing Shelley?  I do not know. Maybe, it was a combination of both. Either way, I got clean and I do not take either one now. That is the most important fact of all in my own story.