M's Story

   When I was 14 I started to smoke weed.  I was sitting downstairs in my friend’s basement and they kept asking me if I wanted to smoke.  So, eventually I said, “Sure, why not?”  I loved it.  So, for about the next four months that was all that I did.  At this time I did not have any problems in school, with my family, or with the police.  Then I tried ice.  One day I was hanging out at my friend’s house (the one whom I stated smoking weed with) and I saw a little bag with little crystals in it.  I asked him what it was.  He said that it was some tina.  So I begged him to let me try it.  He kept saying, “No, you’ll get addicted too easily.”  But, finally he let me try it.  After the first time I tried it I knew that I was going to have to have it all of the time.  So I started working to get money.  Right when I got paid I would go and spend all of my money on ice.  I quickly began to get skinnier and skinnier.  My whole body looked like a skeleton.  Then I stopped for about a week and gained my weight back instantly.  After I noticed the extreme weight change I would always smoke one or two blunts every morning so that I could eat.  That worked pretty well.  My weight stayed pretty normal so that no one could tell (sic, that I was using meth).  After a while my parents began to get suspicious.  So, they quit giving me money.  The only thing that I could do to support my habit was to sell drugs.  I did that for a while, but I quit because I was too paranoid.  I began to steal my parent’s ATM card and steal their cars at night and go take two or three hundred dollars out about twice a week.  I got caught doing that, so I had to find a new way to get money.  I was talking to a guy one day and he said that he knew how to make ice in a fish tank.  I found out how to do that and I started to make it.  It cost about $75 to make.  I could make $3,000 off what it made.  So I did that a couple of times and thought that I had the life.  As much money as I wanted and all the ice that I could dream of.  By this time I had gone crazy.  I would think that bugs were crawling on me, I would think that everybody was the police, and that someone was always watching me.  But, still, I thought that I was living the good life.  Besides being extremely paranoid, I was constantly fighting and getting in trouble with my parents, and I quit going to school.  Well, one day I got in a fight with my parents and I decided to run away.  Well, after the second or third night I got arrested because the cops found me.  When I got arrested I had an ice pipe, a gram of  ice, and a $5 dollar bill with cocaine on it.   I dropped the gram of ice and stood on it so that they wouldn’t see it.  But, they still got the pipe and the  bill.  They asked if I had been doing drugs and I said “yes,” so I didn’t get in trouble for the drugs.  So the cops told my parents and my parents signed me up for rehab about two weeks later.  After I got out I was doing pretty good for awhile.  Then I ended up hanging out with my old friends and began to use again.  I started stealing again.  Now I’m in a treatment facility and working on my recovery.  I will be leaving in a couple of weeks.  I’ve been working on my N.A. twelve steps and will continue to work on them when I transition home.

September 1, 2004