Drug Addiction Stories & Info

Even today I hear the whispers as I entered the classroom that morning.  It was 8^th grade and I had spent the summer with my cousins.  I had “blossomed” as we said back then.  By lunchtime, the whispers and giggles were no longer hidden as the girls glared at me and one of the more obnoxious boys came up to me and flat out said “So Dianne, where did you get the falsies?”  Without hesitation, I lifted my t-shirt and asked “Do these look fake to you?” 

That began three years of hell that I have not forgotten to this day.  I dreaded going to school but with both my parents working 12 hour shifts at the local factory, I did not want to burden them with my problems at school.  They let us know enough that we were burdens as it was, me and my two younger brothers. 

It was just a few weeks after school started that another girl, another “outcast” stopped by my locker and asked if I wanted to hang out some time.  That was how I got introduced to pot.  I loved how it made me feel able to drift away from the teasing at school.  During high school, we got into cocaine. I did my best to try to hide my figure and getting hooked on drugs helped me stay skinny but it didn’t hide certain attributes. 

I got clean when my aunt came to stay with us after her husband died.  She was alone as they had never had children and it did not take long for her to figure out what was going on, even though her brother (my dad) and sister-in-law were clueless to what had been going on. 

My aunt saved me in two ways.  She helped me clean up my act and get off drugs, but she also showed me what going to bat for someone means.  She had come to school to pick me up for a “girl’s day out” when classes were over and that same, obnoxious boy from the falsies statement three years earlier was making remarks about me again, only he had gotten louder and meaner over the years. 

Without batting an eye, my aunt looked at him and smiled.  “Are you Jerry B’s son?”  He nodded yes.  “I thought so.  He used to tease me all the time, too.  In fact, I remember the note he gave me asking me to go to the drive-in with him.  I turned him down flat.  You are definitely your father’s son, teasing the girl you are crushing on.  Just like your father, you are going about it all wrong.  She doesn’t date jerks, either.” 

The other kids laughed and he turned red.  Sure enough, he did end up asking me to prom a year later.  I said no without hesitation.  They say boys tease girls they like?  All I got out of remembering those years is how he acted that day in 8^th grade and a drug addiction that could have ended everything for me if not for the love and caring of my aunt.  Today, I am happily married with two daughters about to start junior high.  I am very actively involved in their lives.  I’m not going to let them be bullied by some boy who doesn’t know how to express himself in a positive way.  I heard the boy from my own adolescent years just had his third wife file for divorce.  Seems the girl I was back then got the better end of the deal after all.

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.