A Love Affair
with  Drugs

As much as book learning and school was not my thing, drugs definitely were my thing. The moment i put that first pill in my mouth and breathed in, I fell deeply in love with the feeling of being on drugs.  All of my challenges with school, with being picked on, feeling like I couldn't live up to my brother's example, all of that faded away with I took a little pill. 

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This love would put me in more than twelve treatment centers over the next nine years and would cause my family enormous stress and helplesssness. Thankfully we had good insurance because I used every bit of the coverage we had with treatment centers. We clung onto hope believing the next one would be the one to make me stay clean. 

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Satan had his ways with me through the grip of drugs for many years. Heroin was just about the only drug I said no to. Staying on the clean side of that addiction is a boundary line I drew for myself that surely saved me in some ways and allowed me to be where I am today.

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Not only were the drugs themselves bad for me, but they drove me to do bad things. First, you are on a substance all the time, so you do idiotic things when your not thinking straight. Even worse, you become so addicted that you commit ridiculous and sometimes illegal acts, so you can get what you need. I got into some seriously sticky situations as a teenager and only by the grace of God and my good friends keeping tight lipped, I would have ended up in jail at an early age. 

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MY friend Harry and I used to break into pharmacies to steal all kinds of prescription drugs. I had two very close calls in this time. Once, Harry's girlfriend Janet and I broke into the pharmacy in the middle of the night and hid harry in a little crawl space under a refrigerator. We then went to the toy section and found two large Tinker Toy boxes. Remember those?  We dumped the toys somewhere and filled the cans with drugs - prescription pills. and codeine cough syrup, we put into bottle of laoris, which wa a brand of mouthwash. We then put the cans and bottles back on the shelf and we left Harry and snuck out again, patting ourselves on the back for coming up with such an ingenues plan. The next morning when the store opened, we went back in and helped Harry escape. He needed someone to watch out and make sure on one was around while he crawled out from under the refrigerator. Then we bought the "Tinker Toys" and mouthwash and left feeling like geniuses. We split the loot and I went home to stash mine and partake of some of it. 

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Unfortunately Harry got the ingenious idea to go to the nearby High School and sell some of the drugs. Police began in investigation after ten students overdoesed on the various coctails they bought off my now notorious durg dealing friend. Both Harry and his girlfriend were apprehended, which led the detectives to my house. Harry and Janet did not give me up. Someone probably told the police we were friends. Hearing what had happened, I flushed my stash down the toilet before they could come to search our house.  uNfortunately, some of the pills stuck to the underside of the rim of the toilet, and my mother saw them. Consequently, when the police showed up and showed her a sample of what they were lookin for, my dear mother chose to lie and say she had never seen anything like it and didn't think her boy was involved. They left satisfied and she was hysterical, crying and brokenhearted for days. Can you imagine? She must have been picturing me rotting away in jail a convicted drug dealer. 

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Another significantly close call happened when I was fifteen. One evening when my friends and i were out late,  around 10 pm we became desperate enough to break through the window of the pharmacy with a baseball or something.  Just as we were going in, a car pulled up and screeched to a halt. Terrified, we split up and took off for home through the woods in the back which happened to be covered in briars and thorns, and I, for some reason was barefoot. I ran for awhile and then tenderly and painfully walked for hours to get home. When I finally arrived home at 3am my father was waiting up, sitting on the front steps of our house. He was mad!We started screaming at teach other. He yelled and sussed at me about being out so late, and I yelled and cussed at him about my unreasonable curfew. What I didn't talk about was my attempted robbery. When he died 25 years ago I still had not told him what happened that night. 

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With the help of my friends, (otherwise know as cheating) and by the grace of God, I made it through High School. I just managed to graduate, even while taking drugs on a constant basis. Round one of my addiction lasted more than 10 years until I was 26 years old. 

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