Throughout my posts, I have mentioned what I have sold and what I have used, but I think a more detailed account might give you a better understanding of why I used these drugs.
Some it was because they were presented to me at that age, some were pressured onto me, and others were used to counteract the effects of another.
My preferred method of consuming drugs was to smoke or snort because the effects would be instant, and I found the high to be the most enjoyable. Like I said before, I never ended up using needles, partly because I was scared of them, and I wasn’t looking for that next level high.
I had a fairly low tolerance even deep into my drug use, and I didn’t know why people wanted to get any higher than when you smoke or snort a substance. Most people eventually turn to the needle because it’s more efficient, and at the beginning of using a needle, it’s cheaper. Eventually, your body builds the same tolerance, and the amounts go up, and so does the cost. I was around plenty of people who used the needle, primarily for the use of painkillers and heroin, but they would also inject cocaine and meth with the needle as well. One common misconception is all heroin users use a needle to take the drug, but this is very much not true. You can smoke and snort pretty much any form of heroin, and the needle is just another method of taking the drug. I might be messed up but I am not as screwed up as them, I would think. But I was very much wrong and now realize that thinking was very faulty. I do not doubt that I would have eventually got there in the end.
A drug user is a drug user, it doesn’t matter how you take the drug. The end result is usually the same as most become only a shell of the person who started using the drug in the first place.
Here is my drug progression over the years.
Age 10 is the first year that I took a puff off a cigarette, but I never actually learned how to inhale until 13, so I was really just pulling in the smoke, holding it into my mouth, and then blowing it out. Then one day, my friend must have noticed, and he asked if I was inhaling, and I responded that I was. He told me to take a drag, so I did. And then he said now breathe in like this, and I did, and my head floated a few feet above my body, and I quickly realized I hadn’t inhaled before this moment. I felt embarrassed because this was a 12 year old teaching me, but I guess you have to learn somehow, and now I knew.
Alcohol had come the year before at fishing camp at the age of 12, my dad had to go back early because of issues at the restaurant, so my friend and I decided to sneak some beers behind my dad’s friends’ backs, and we got drunk. I remember trying to ride my bike and falling every two seconds and cutting my legs all to hell, then when it was time to go to bed the camper started spinning like I was on the tilt-a-whirl at the fair and closing my eyes made it worse. Finally I rolled to my side and puked all over the floor of the camper. I didn’t drink again after that until I was 14.
I started smoking weed at 13. We would make homemade pop can bongs, and smoke some ditch weed off it trying to get high. I never really succeeded at that either until 14, and when that hit me, I thought it was laced with something because I didn’t know how anyone could smoke that stuff and still be functional. My head was plastered to the door of the truck, and I could only beg for my friend to stop and get some munchies. Fortunately the driver wasn’t partaking in the festivities because we would have probably died that day.
Weed and alcohol were both used under curiosity, to find out what all the fuss was about, and after the first use I determined I wasn’t ready, there was still something there I liked, but I waited a couple more years for each before I used them regularly.
At 15 is really when I started to use them both consistently, probably more so because they were both more easily accessible. The use stayed pretty constant throughout high school until I went to college. My use in freshmen year was probably pretty standard, binge drinking to any standard, except when everyone is doing it, it seems pretty normal.
I remember something changed around my freshman year of college, and my self-talk quit saying, I will never do hard drugs in my life to…I might try some cocaine if the opportunity presented itself.
Well, it wasn’t long, and those opportunities started to arise because instead of going home for the summer after freshmen year, a couple of friends and myself sublet an apartment at the Dinkytown apartments across from Burger King on Washington Ave. We were right in the heart of stadium village, and to me, it felt like I was on the Las Vegas strip. I was 19, and I tried a large number of drugs that summer for the first time and didn’t find one I didn’t enjoy. The list contains acid, mushrooms, cocaine, ecstasy, synthetic powders, and those are just the ones I can think of, and I am sure there are at least a few I am leaving out.
That summer, we got into fights, threw parties in our apartment, and started to build quite the reputation, and once the paid officer on the weekends started calling us the 411 boys, we started to use the window to enter and exit the premises.
In the moment, I didn’t think for a second that my life was starting to take a turn for the worst. I thought I was just a normal college kid who was trying new things and seeing what life had to offer.
The drugs I just listed stayed consistent in my life, but mostly I stuck to alcohol, weed, cocaine, and ecstasy because psychedelics were not my thing. I preferred the party drugs because I could be more social on them.
When college was winding down, I started hanging out with a much rowdier crowd, and other drugs started to find their way around me. Some of my close friends were pushing the limits further, but I managed to keep them at arm’s length for a little while.
Then around 22 or 23 years old, I started using Adderal and fell in love with it and wish I had known its effects while I was in college. I had been told my whole life that I should get checked out for ADD, and when I took Adderal, I felt like I had all the focus in the world.
I tried a few other drugs, one of them being DMT, which is a psychedelic that lasted a much shorter period of time than acid and mushrooms, and I found it to be much more enjoyable. The one drug that made it’s way into my life that year was probably the worst one of all, crack.
I don’t blame the person who peer pressured me into my first use of crack because I probably would have eventually tried it anyway. But there is nothing like that first crack hit; many people spend the rest of their lives chasing that same first high but are never able to replicate it again. Crack didn’t become a steady part of my life until a couple of years later, but once that eventually happened it pretty much marked the beginning of the end for my drug run, because once crack has a hold of you, there isn’t much you can accomplish in life after the fact.
At 24, however, I started to use painkillers to come down off uppers when I needed to sleep. I would also use benzos if I felt anxious or stressed out.
At 25, crack became a regular part of my life, and that is also the year I started to use meth, heroin, and fentanyl. As soon as I hit meth, I realized it was very similar to Adderal but on steroids, and I knew I was in trouble because I loved it.
What I found myself doing around this time was using a lot more and going out a lot less. I started to push away most of my family and friends; if you didn’t use the same drugs I was using or were involved in the same illegal activity I was involved in, I didn’t want you in my life.
Any money I made early on in my drug selling career and any possessions that I acquired started to disappear much faster then they came. I became very unreliable. I would use the same skills I could have used to be successful in sales to convince people to lend me money. Instead of using it for what I said I was using it for, it was going to my addiction or bailing myself out of messes I created because of my addiction.
My life was spiraling out of control, and I didn’t have any idea how to stop the bleeding, and at no point did I think I should stop using.
It’s crazy how addiction works, how the drugs poison your brain to think you can’t go on without them, it just gets to a point where nothing else matters but getting high.
Thanks for listening!
Noah
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