My Addiction, Part 1

When I was in drug treatment, the counselors used to tell us about the statistics. They said that women that do not get clean by age 30, have almost no chance of beating their addiction. I made it by the skin of my teeth.

I was a textbook drug addict. I started smoking pot at age 14. By the time I graduated high school, I was smoking it everyday. During that time, I took LSD/mushrooms many, many times. By age 18, I moved on to bigger (& not better) things. I started snorting cocaine. I dropped the marijuana & stayed loyal to coke for another year or so. The part I didn't know was the reason I was doing this. I was clinically depressed & I was using drugs to self-medicate.

When I was a kid, I was very afraid of needles. That fear was long gone by age 19 when I started shooting coke on a semi-regular basis. But, with coke, there was one major problem - having to come down. When the money ran out & the drugs were gone for the night, the feeling of depression would be 1000 fold.

All of this was leading up to the big one. The drug that would become my whole life. The drug that took me from a contributing member of society to a thieving, sometimes homeless, suicidal, family-estranged, diseased junkie.

More to come...