My whole family are alcoholics and/or drug addicts. I grew up around alcohol and drugs. I started drinking regularly around the age of 10. By the time I was 12 years old i was smoking weed and taking pills. I used to steal my grandparents’ prescriptions from their medicine cabinet. I’d get bag fulls of muscle relaxants and weak opiates like codeine and Vicodin.

Then one day, my abuse turned into addiction. I met a girl and she was a few years older than me. I was 12 and she was 16. One day she asked me, “have you ever tried methadone?”. And i replied, “what’s methadone?”. She said, “It’s like Vicodin, except WAY stronger.” This immediately caught my attention. So the next day she brought me some methadone pills and I took one and I loved it from then on. I became addicted to it. I was stealing tip jars from coffee shops and local businesses to supply my habit.

When my supply got cut off, I was in the worst pain imaginable, physically and emotionally. I was puking for almost a week. I slept all day everyday and my parents had to change my bed sheets for me because they were soaked in sweat, I couldn’t do it because it hurt too bad to move. I lost about 10 pounds from sweating, but I was always cold. I had the shakes and shivers and my head felt like a boulder was sitting on it. The withdrawals lasted about a week.

Once it all started clearing up, I got addicted once again, except with something different. I had a friend who I used drugs with, and I went to their house once and they had some coke. I’d never done cocaine before and I always wanted to try it. I was never afraid of anything, I wanted to try anything new. So she pulled out a gram rock and crumbled it up on a mirror and chopped it up. I did a line and I felt like superman. I started talking to her as if I’d known her all my life.

But I couldn’t stay on one subject, I just kept talking and talking and talking. I ended up doing a few more lines. Then I had to go home and so I started walking down the road and walking wasn’t satisfying so I started running all the way home and I just felt so good. I felt so fresh and clean and wonderful. I loved the stuff. So I was doing coke everyday for a couple months until I was taken into a foster home because my dad was using meth. When I went into the foster home, I lost all connections and had withdrawal from the drugs again. So I ended up going to treatment and I got clean.