Editor’s note: Following is a factual account of one Wayne County man’s story of addiction. The Tribune is not publishing his name, due to the on-going, sensitive nature of his struggle.
He is your son. Or your brother. He is your friend or neighbor or the guy standing in line behind you at the post office.
He is 23 years old. People in their 50s and 60s and 70s might call it the “tender age” of 23. But thanks to meth and heroin and coke — and a plethora of other drugs — he has robbed himself of the tenderness of youth.
He has been abusing drugs for years. He’s gotten clean a couple of times — kicked drugs on his own, he says, stating emphatically that treatment doesn’t work for him.
He recently relapsed — again — and now he can’t see his way forward. He can’t see giving up meth. He says he has no fight left in him.
What leads someone to this place in life? Every path to addiction is different.
This young man describes his path, admitting that some parts are “a blur” and that “a lot of my memories aren’t very ‘there’ anymore.” With that in mind, this is his story — as he sees it, as he tells it, as he remembers it.
As a kid, he recalls being “loud.” An “oddball.”
Several years of his childhood were spent moving back and forth between the West Coast and Mount Olive, as his parents’ marriage disintegrated. He describes this time as being fraught with traumatic events — an attempted kidnapping, being followed by suspected drug dealers — yet he seems reluctant to label his childhood as “troubled.” It seems he doesn’t want to blame a troubled childhood for choices he eventually made. “It was more so my fault that it was so bad,” he says.
For the most part, he has been living in the Mount Olive area since about the age of 10. He got drunk for the first time at age 12, and although he takes responsibility for his eventual abuse of alcohol and drugs, this is one instance in which he is clear the blame lies elsewhere. He recalls being at a family reunion where “the older boys were drinking, and for some…reason, they thought it was funny to let the young, young ones drink.” Looking back, he sees the horror of the situation and still struggles with the fact that it even happened. At this point, drinking was a one-time thing.
He recalls his childhood mind being racked with disturbing thoughts — he believed his family members were witches and that “there were people living behind my house in the woods, who were at war with me” — and by age 13 he’d been prescribed a medication that, he says, is a “very strong mood stabilizer…an anti-psychotic.” At first, he took the medication as prescribed. Then he started increasing the dose. And, finally, “I’d find other pills around the house, and that’s when I’d start mixing pills.”
By mixing pills, he says, “I think it started by just trying to die…I mean, I’ve really been debating it since I was, like, 10.”
At 14, he got drunk for the second time, this time by choice. It’s also the year he started smoking marijuana. But, he asserts, it wasn’t until he turned 16, and got his license, that his abuse escalated. He and a friend “were smoking weed every day…We’d always find some way to hustle and get some weed. And we started selling it…”
He was 17 the first time he did meth. “My first time I did it, I loved it. But I didn’t want to get addicted. So I did it, and then I didn’t do it again for like a month or two. And then, I did it, and this time, I drank a couple beers with it, and that just boosted the high.”
Mixing and using different drugs together is the crux of his addiction. Most addicts, he says, have a drug of choice and “will chase that one drug.”
For him, though, temptation is everywhere. “I like any kind of high…I want to mix everything together…
“I’ve done most of the drugs that you can think of and probably some you’d never think of.”
Meth, he notes, is particularly easy to get in this area. So, it’s mostly meth he’s battling now, though he is still drinking and smoking weed, too.
“Whenever I relapsed a couple months ago…I saw me headed down a spiral…I knew I was gonna be too weak this time to pull out. Normally, I can pull out, no problem.”
But, he adds, “Here’s the messed up part: Any other time I have relapsed, it’s ‘cause I wanted to die. This time I don’t want to die. I’m not seeking death, is what I mean by that. So, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I want to live, I just don’t…I haven’t exactly given up the fight, I just don’t have any fight to give.”
He describes a never-ending loop of thoughts playing in his mind: Go home and get high. Don’t go home; go out, run around and get high. Call someone because I don’t need to be by myself; don’t call because they’re not gonna help and I’m just gonna feel bad for wasting their time and mine. Go to the hospital and get committed; that’s not gonna help either and it’s just gonna leave me with a pile of bills. Move away, but what’s the point — I’m just gonna mess up there the way I did here. “Every one of those [thoughts] popping in my head, that fast. Constantly.”
Still, he has dreams. “I want to start up small businesses. ‘Course, I’d start with one, then go to two, then three. I’m gonna start those three with a group of people, all of us work on ‘em and then eventually expand countrywide.” He doesn’t have a particular type of business in mind; he says he just wants to create businesses that will provide opportunities for other people who need help achieving their dreams. “I want to make that possible for them.”
Of course, the inevitable questions are asked of him.
Why not try a treatment program? “I don’t need treatment. It’s not about the drugs…It’s about my mind. My mind is broken.”
How about talking to a psychiatrist? “I don’t have no problem talking to people. But I don’t want to be put on medication, because I’m poor. I cannot afford the medications that I need.”
Can you achieve your dream of helping others while still doing meth? “No. Because it’s gonna kill me.”
He states this matter of factly. As though it’s a foregone conclusion. Yet he also says he doesn’t want to die. This is the dichotomy he lives with every day.
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, contact Hunter Hijma, with the Wayne County Health Department, at 919-580-4079 or Celebrate Recovery at 919-658-5122. Celebrate Recovery meets every Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Mt. Olive First Pentecostal Holiness Church.
