Welcome to Highschool
Freshman year starts and all my friends split up. Everyone went to a different high school than me and I was not excited about it. Freshman year was pretty normal. I received good grades in school, I kept my partying to the weekends and I made some friends. Sophomore year I was transferred to the high school my friends were at and life was good again. This time partying was not contained to weekends but every single day afterschool.
This is where all the trouble began. My best friend at the time was a girl whom shall be called Kate. Kate was my right hand man. We would smoke marijuana together everyday after school and we would get caught all the time by her super sober parents regularly. They would sit us down and yell at us and say that if we were not careful we would end up as drug addicts. I wish I were kidding. Both of her parents had been sober longer than we had been alive and warned us of the dangers of drug use.
Most of the time they would just take our weed and flush it, break our marijuana-smoking contraption and give us a lecture.
One year on New Year’s Eve; Kate, John and I got drunk off some little bottles of hard liquor I got my sister to buy for me. Kate threw up everywhere in the house and this time her parent’s were fuming. They packed us in the car and took us to my house where my two unsuspecting parents were watching TV. When we got to my house they sat us three knuckleheads on the couch in the living room and Kate’s mom let it all out. Told my parents about all the drinking and pot smoking we had been doing.
My parent’s were caught off guard but I believe they knew I had been up to something the last few months but could never prove it. Once everyone left my mom looked at me and said, “stay away from that girl she is a bad influence on you… oh and you are grounded for a month.”
Looking back I know my parents did the best they could at the time, but my mother blaming my friend for being a bad influence was just to help her own denial. The “not my daughter” idea really helped me get away with a lot of harsher consequences during my high school life. Well I was grounded for a month but that did not stop me from smoking weed after school everyday. Remember my parents worked till 6 so I had plenty of time to do what I wanted to afters school.
And so We Start with the Harder Drugs
By the end of Sophomore year, I had started to get into harder drugs trying ecstasy for the first time. A few friends had started taking it regularly and Xanax. At this time in my life my sister was on a ton of Xanax and all I knew was I hated seeing her on it and what the effects were so I really never touched the stuff.
The funny thing about drugs is that they are progressive. Cigarettes led to marijuana, which led to alcohol, which led to some random ecstasy, which led me to cocaine. It just happened. You meet people out there in the using world you normally would not even know where to find.
Cocaine was a game changer. Oh my god. It was great. What a fun and sociable drug at first. You take a bump. I take a bump. It was like the Oprah show just a lot dirtier of a couch. I would do cocaine every single day. I remember driving my old beat up 1992 rusty blue Toyota into the high school parking lot and taking a bump before going to first period. Bring it on day! I would go to work after school at my phone sales job and take lines in the bathroom. It was like my own Wolf of Wall Street but alone and a lot less money.
Then my nose started to hurt. It would bleed all the time and it became so hard to snort anything. I was losing interest in my new relationship. Then as all good things lead to another, Kate and I soon discovered crack cocaine.
Give me More More More
Okay so I am in 10th grade going into 11th grade. I discover crack cocaine and my love for smoking drugs. This changed everything. Crack just does one thing to you. Make you want more. I would be in math class thinking about smoking crack afterschool. Actually, one day Kate and I brought my friend Preston home from math class… we all sat on her porch and smoked crack together. We joke about it because we never saw Preston again a few weeks later. He fell in love with crack. That is what it does to you. You fall in love.
(Preston sorry buddy!)
The good thing about smoking crack is all you need is a soda can; cigarette ash and a lighter. It was super easy. I could get crack easier than buying a pack of Newport’s from the gas station. Kate and I would get into huge fights all the time, we pretty much hated each other but we did not have anyone else to use drugs with regularly so we stuck it out, and would settle our feuds with… yup you guessed it: crack! This went on for a while. I remember being up all night at her house before taking a midterm. I would try to sleep and she would be going in and out of her bedroom window all night smoking crack or looking for pieces of it on the ground outside. You never drop crack rock on the ground but for some reason you always think you did and have to try smoking some foreign materials to prove it to yourself a few times.
I don’t remember anything special about this time of my life. I cannot tell you if it was months or a full year of this, it honestly is just a blur.
A Trip to the Dentist
I was living the life of what I thought a normal teenager in high school did. I did not see anything wrong with my behavior or the choices I was making nor did I have any real desire to stop. One day the dentist gave me some bad news. He told me I had to have all four of my wisdom teeth taken out.
What a horrible person he was. So I had an appointment and out they went. To make up for the irritating procedure he sent me home with a 30-day prescription of Percocet 5mg pain pills to help off set the pain. I went home and slept for a few days uncomfortable from the pain and not using any substances that I had become accustomed to.
I started to take the 5 MG little pain pill to help ease the pain. I remember not obsessing about it. I did not even finish the rest of the bottle I just left it in my closet on the top shelf behind Scruffy my stuffed dog. I resumed life back at high school. I think I was still in 10th grade but it could have been 11th.
Somehow a few weeks later I magically ended up in a situation where I was given a Roxicodone. That is a little tiny blue pill A215 imprinted on it that is 6 times stronger than that little 5 MG I had taken for my toothache. So I popped one. What was the big deal?
Well I had already gone down so far on the scale of acceptable things that I really did not have to think about it for more than 2 seconds. Several minutes later I was throwing up.
That little blue pill was no joke. I did not like it and was cool with just smoking weed and drinking beer. However, as the days rolled on I was confronted with it again. This time I snorted it.
I liked it that time and decided this wasn’t ALL bad. For the next few weeks I started doing those pills every few days: snorting and eating them.
One night, Kate and I were sitting on a curb in her neighborhood smoking cigarettes and waiting for our dealer to show up to sell us some blues. He came to the curb and we did the usual exchange, but before he left he leaned over to the passenger side door opened it and said, “Hey have you guys ever tried to smoke these?”
“No,” we replied. “It will change your life; want to get in?”
Growing up they said drugs were bad but no one never said they could also be so good. No one never said that it could take away never bit of anxiety, pain or regret that you had. No one said that drugs could be a solution.