1. I’m 23 and have been using iv heroin since my 17th birthday. I’ve gone to multiple rehabs, halfway houses and different states to get clean. I’ve done some extremely bad things I’m not proud of but its my truth, my reality that I have to remind myself of on a daily basis. Ive pawned every piece of gold or jewelry in my parents house, the majority of it during my mom’s open heart surgery which had devastated her when she was well enough to see what was missing. A lot of it was her mother’s who died almost 20 years ago and really all she had left of her. I live near a lot ofy family and used to unlock windows and later break in and steal anything of importance. I had written many fraudulent checks that belonged to my parents which the bank had caught up with. I didn’t even try hard to match the signature, it was so sloppy and desperate now looking back. Now I’ve done every type of prostitution that could ever be imagined.
From being homeless and literally tricking on the street to seeing sugar daddies to ‘highclass hooking’ as an escort on backpage ads and was a stripper off and on for years. I’ve been paid from $20 to $3000, pretty obvious which paid which. I actually had no problem with the sugar daddies because they were always kind and respectable or were paying me enough to do whatever insane fetish they were into. I’ve gotten paid thousands for three somes with other hot chicks and a grand to have olive oil rubbed all over me. The hardest blow to the diminished ego that was somewhat left was when I started tricking. I was living in abandoned houses or with different johns or drug dealers that I would hope and pray weren’t going to rape me that night. Sometimes I wasn’t so lucky.
I’ve done lots of other terrible things that I could list for hours, literally. I’ve been raped, stabbed, jumped, abused by so many people before and during active addiction, overdosed, committed and been in many programs. By some miracle I have never, ever had an std or any type of infection, last time around I swore I had to have gotten HIV because of how low I had gone and the disgusting men I was sleeping with. I have no kids as well.
I don’t blame anyone but myself for my actions and today take full responsibility for everything I’ve done and have slowly been trying to financially reimburse those I hurt so very deeply, back. I was a complete monster back then and used to accept my fate dying a junkie on the street and used to almost be comfortable with that. I am not the person I was a year and a half ago. It took me getting raped, a gun to my head, getting stabbed and a trip to jail. All of these events occurring in a few hours and were done to me by a dopeboy I was staying with. I had been arrested many times but never actually did time until that. My parents reluctantly bailed me out and sent me back to Florida for rehab.
2. When my boyfriend was out of the country for two weeks, I pawned literally everything of worth in his house, including the vacuum cleaner. My thought was that two weeks was more than enough time to make enough money blowing guys from Craigslist to get all the stuff out of pawn by the time he got back. I spent it all on heroin and coke. It was the night before he was arriving and I, of course, was unable to get any of his stuff out of pawn. So I staged a robbery by breaking one of his windows and leaving the door ajar. I picked him up at the airport, arrived at the house and acted as surprised as him when we discovered all his stuff was gone. Made a false police report and even gave a fake interview to the local paper. I blamed it on a nonexistent gardener who I said I saw snooping around the place. The worst part is that this was right before Christmas, so I told my boyfriend “they” had also stolen $200 in Christmas gifts I had bought. He gave me $200 cash because he felt bad. I was a total piece of shit. Bright side? Rehab finally worked and I just celebrated 3 years of sobriety yesterday! I’m not with the guy anymore. Also, I’m a guy.
3. It’s like having the worst girlfriend ever, who you are madly in love with but who treats you like shit, makes you sell your car and house and furniture and even your high school yearbook that your crush from 10th grade signed and told you that you were cute. She’s told you to stop talking to anyone you’ve ever cared about, they don’t want to talk to you while you’re still dating her anyways.
You sell your clothes so she can go out and buy new ones. You eat ramen every meal so she ca eat at the best restaurant in town. In the morning you think about her and in the evening you think about her and when you go to take a crap but you can’t because you’re constipated you’re reminded of her. You wake up and if she’s not in bed with you you get the chills, your eyes water, you have diarrhea, you sneeze, your muscles ache, you have anxiety, you have depression, you don’t want to eat because food isn’t appealing even though your stomach is rumbling, you don’t particularly want to drink but you’re dehydrated so you force yourself to drink some water, and during all this your skin is crawling as if it was dirty covered in goose-bumps from who knows where and you wish you were still asleep so you could at least pretend she was still in the bed with you.
But you’re awake now. So you get out of bed, and you go find her. Maybe today you won’t have to do something that compromises your morals to find out where she’s gone, but really you don’t even care, as long as there is a way. You walk an hour and forty five minutes to get on the bus. You travel for another 45 minutes on public transportation. You get off at the train station in the bad part of town. All the while you have to shit so bad but you know once you find her that will be solved. You’re hungry but dont want to eat, once you find her you can eat. You feel dirty and sad and anxious but once you find her she’ll bathe you and make you happy and calm.
But right now your walking through the ghetto. You walk another 20 minutes. Maybe it’s cold and raining, if so you are so so so cold. Maybe it’s hotter than hell and that just makes you feel dirtier. You find a guy that knows where she is. He says he’ll go get her and bring her to you. And the cops pass you as you’re talking to him and they have to know what’s up. What’s someone like you doing in this part of town? So the 10 minute wait for her to come back to you accompanied by the guy who could give two shits about you as long as you bring him money seems like an eternity.
Maybe he’ll run off with her and your money. Maybe she wont be looking so hot today, maybe she won’t be herself. Maybe he’ll come back with a woman you don’t know and don’t want to meet but now your money is gone and you’re broke and sick and a good few hours away before you can get some more money and the world might as well be over in your opinion. But your girlfriend comes back, he brings her, and she gives you a kiss on the cheek.
Then you go home, to your mattress and your overdue rent and the lack of food and the piled up bills and the same clothes you’ve been wearing for three days and your parents that have called but you never answer and your friends that invite you out but you never go, but you’re home and she’s there with you. Eventually you go to bed. But she’s never there the next morning, and you know she won’t be, and you wish someone invented a way to pause time, or go back in time, to that first time you met her, the first couple months when you guys hung out, before she made you sell everything to be with her, but you can’t and you’re fucked. And you know it.
4. I am 32 years old, have a well paid job as a professional, live in a huge house with my fiancée and am very comfortable financially. I am also a drug addict.
I work in the healthcare sector in the U.K. as a professional and it took me 5 years to get my degree. My addiction started about 2 months into my first job. I had a really bad headache and as I had access to all sorts of medications, I decided to take some co-codamol (para 500mg and codeine 30mg) for this. This was the worst decision of my life. I instantly felt like I was on top of the world. My body felt light, I was overcome with happiness and everything just seemed so easy and problem free. I told myself this was a one-off but as you have already probably guessed it wasn’t.
Over the next year I gradually had to take more and more of the co-codamol to recreate that “first feeling”. The problem was, I never really achieved this. I went from codeine (which wasn’t monitored very well where I worked) to tramadol to the occasional sip of morphine liquid. I told myself I wasn’t addicted and I could stop whenever I wanted. Nobody at work ever suspected I was stealing drugs or that I was constantly high.
After about a year of this I decided I had to stop doing what I was doing as I was going to lose my job if I got caught. I went cold turkey for 1 week and it was honestly the worst week of my life. On drugs, the whole world seemed so rounded and smooth, without them I constantly felt like everything was sharp and too rough. At the end of the week I decided my life felt better with the drugs and I started using again. That first dose after going cold turkey was just sheer bliss.
I haven’t tried quitting again in 9 years now but I have almost been caught on a few occasions. As I started to need more opiates to feed my addiction, I had to start stealing larger quantities from work. Of course they finally twigged drugs were going missing but I was pretty crafty and the investigation went nowhere near me. I have moved jobs since and I am very careful about what I take and when. I know when suspicion is aroused and I just back off stealing for a few weeks.
There have been some low moments. Going on holiday is a nightmare for me as I don’t want to risk taking prescription drugs through customs to any country. Usually my holidays are me withdrawing badly whilst feigning a “local bug”. 5 years ago I got desperate and smuggled 50 tramadol capsules through Mexican customs. I didn’t get caught but I thought I was going to have a heart attack trying to get past security. Nowadays I just suffer on holiday for a week rather than risk being caught. I have also collapsed twice at work after taking extra strength codeine and dropping my resp rate ridiculously low. Again, I have passed that off as exhaustion and I’m 100% confident nobody suspects I’m a drug addict. I’m excellent at my job as well which helps me keep up the ruse.
Fast forward to today. I’ve been using for 10 years now and I still live in dread of being caught. I just can’t imagine a world without the drugs to keep everything smooth. My fiancée has no idea I’m an addict and I keep my stolen supplies well hidden in our house. I’m actually far too good at lying and being deceitful.
I really don’t know what to do. I know I have a problem and need to stop but at this stage, I’m ashamed to admit I don’t really want to. Taking drugs is normal to me and stopping and withdrawing again makes me feel sick. I’m looking for advice from anyone who is/was in the same boat. Believe me, I know I have a problem and the best thing to do would be to come clean but I’m petrified.
5. I would usually wake up around 6 am to the sound of my dad getting ready for work, and I’d go throw up in my bathroom. If I threw up or pissed the bed I would usually have a garbage bag in the room to throw my sheet in so I could take care of it later. This only happened a few times but it got more and more frequent. Usually the vomit was dark black, goopy, and extremely acidic. I found out later it was blood.
I had a constant supply of tums that I would eat from. I would then drink a bottle of water, a hit from the bong to reduce nausea, and some valium to stop myself from shaking. I would then wake up at around noon and take more valium to stop shaking. I would usually sleep until about 2 or 3pm, sometimes up until 6pm. Once I woke I would take a few shots of captain morgan to keep the constant body high going, and depending on how much weed or valium I had I would try and make some calls to get some more. Around 7pm before my mother left for work I would go through her meds to find Klonopin and Ambien that I could take later in the evening. I was ALWAYS thinking ahead – because I liked to be completely fucked up by around 11pm. She took a quarter of a 10mg of ambien to sleep, and I would usually take about half of her bottle over the month (Between 20 to 60 depending on the script). Denial.
If I wasn’t hanging out with friends that night I would be on the computer all night or with my girlfriend getting wasted and popping valium. Each valium was 10mg and I’d usually take around 20 per day. Eventually I would get really nauseous because I forget to eat, or just took too much, and I’d have to smoke weed and eat more tums. If I didn’t want to stop drinking at this point I would purposefully push the contents of my stomach up and I would vomit violently, and then continue drinking. By the time it was all winding down I would take up to 40mg of ambien. At the time I liked to tell myself this was to sleep, but I always stayed up and drank with it in order to gain more of a body high/psychedelic experience. Usually by this point my girlfriend would be passed out, and I would just be on the computer. Many of these nights I spent crying from 2 am to 5am, either when my dad would wake up and he could console me, or my girlfriend woke up. Needless to say those two and my substances were my only coping mechanisms. Many times my father would come check on me to make sure I was okay every morning.
This was my routine for 3 years until right around age 22. The only thing I have left that reminds me of it is a bald spot of cement on my floor where my black vomit destroyed the carpet, so we had to cut it out. When we got new carpet (they did this when I was in rehab) they left that cut out. Every morning my feet touch the cold reality of the world, and I am ever so grateful that I am alive. Sorry this was long winded. I had a hiccup last night after two years of sobriety and this was really perfect timing for me to write.
6. When I was badly strung out (Opiate addict, polydrug abuser), it was wake up early because I was sick, either get high or scheme to get money. If I got high, I would flop back down and waste away time. If I needed to get high, I would frantically call my girl or my mother to get money. At best, someone had money for me (or someone needed drugs and I’d middleman), at worst I suffered for a bit until I pulled myself up and went to kick in some poor family’s door and take their jewelery, change jar, photo/video shit, laptops and assorted small things that rinsed well. Lots of time was spent driving a 100 mile round trip to an open air drug market. The rest was spent getting high or selling the drugs at huge profit so I could get the next batch (which was always smaller, since the money never got made back entirely). Occasionally an arrest, OD, or change of supplier would shift things a bit. Eventually prison.
Nowadays I’m going to the suboxone clinic 40 miles away once a week. Unfortunately, it’s in the closest open air drug zone. So I take someone’s clean urine, pass my screen and get my script. Then I go and spend every cent a few blocks away, drive home and furiously stick a needle in my arm until the typical $100-150 purchase is gone. Then I wait for the next appointment. I have no motivation to do much of anything. I have virtually no job experience at 25 years old, and a felony record. I live in isolation, having alienated 98% of the people I know. I constantly dream of getting high, and only go through the motions of living. I am a dead man at 25. This course of action will eventually kill me literally, but unless my heart pops from a fat blast of coke, it’ll likely be a long and slow fade away while juggling opiates.
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