This past year I have gone to work drunk, blacked out in clubs and bars and can’t remember getting home. Ashamedly I slept with someone and could not even remember the person coming home with me until we bumped into each other the next day.
Luckily, I am alive, but I’m left with the days, months and years after the trauma. I have to deal with what it’s done to me for my whole life—I’ve been experiencing everything, you name it.
David K.
Heroin cut me off from the rest of the world. My parents kicked me out. My friends and my brothers didn’t want to see me anymore. I was all alone.From the day I started using, I never stopped. Within one week I had gone from snorting heroin to shooting it. Within one month I was addicted and going through all my money. I sold everything of value that I owned and eventually everything that my mother owned. Within one year, I had lost everything.I sold my car, lost my job, was kicked out of my mother’s house, debt, and living on the streets. I lied, I stole, I cheated.
Jua's story
My goal in life wasn't living...it was getting high. I was falling in a downward spiral towards a point of no return. Over the years, I turned to cocaine, marijuana and alcohol under a false belief it would allow me to escape my problems. It just made things worse. I had everything, a good job, money, a loving family, yet I felt so empty inside. As if I had nothing. Over twenty years of using, I kept saying to myself, I’m going to stop permanently after using this last time. It never happened.
Jared M.
My older brother is 19 and has been using since he was in high school. I always knew about it, but was too afraid to say anything to my parents about it (i was in middle school at the time).
In the past year it has gotten a lot worse. He has switched from marijuana to other drugs like Oxycontin. My parents eventually found out and tried to get him to go to rehab, which lasted about 3 days.
The only friends that he has are drug addicts too, and this past month his friend died from an overdose. A week after that, he was high on some sort of pain killer that I have never heard of before and crashed his car into a street lamp.
It did a lot of damage and he would have been dead if he had not been wearing his seat belt. Whenever I saw him at the hospital, he finally broke down and promised that he would stop.
My brother's addiction