Since we area sharing life's stories and inspirations for hope:
I grew up in Jersey with a father who was a prominent figure in a renound Outlaw MC club but my mother didn't even drink go figure and they were both young 18 and 19 years old.
I was pretty used to getting pretty shitfaced at an early age; some of my earliest memories I can still remember are being buzzed before I got sick at around age 4 or 5; it seemed we were always at some cookout, rally, camping trip etc surrounded by big burly bikers. When the wheels got greased it seemed the guys always thought it was cool to give a little kid a swig or a chug off a beer and the drunker they got the drunker I got as the swigs turned to half beers and so on until I'm puking in the bathroom or tent or whatever with my mom absolutely loosing her shit on everyone around.
My dad was a pretty prominent dealer amongst his "brothers" and there was always scales and bags of some of the most awesome smelling green shit, smaller bags of strange powders, strange white purpleish lights from my closet, scary dudes in foul moods,arguments, fights, cops, you fucking name it I've seen it before I was ten. A little side track moment here, my father and I were bullshitting on the phone a few weeks back and we were talking about random crap as usual and I brought up helping him trim the plants in my closet by picking off the yellow and brown leaves off the bottom of the plants when we lived in union county, this was before I was even in Kindergarten. He was shocked I still remembered this. This is also the same 2nd floor bedroom window I watched him jump out of being chased by two cops in which he landed on a metal shed and sent the bones in his forearm through the back of his arm. The one thing I always felt was surreal about that night was how the cops casually walked back out of my room to cuff him while his bones were sticking out before calling the ambulance, only thing I can think of after all these years was how did the cops not smell those fucking plants?!?!? Anywho, back to the original story. The semi frequent getting drunk with the adults continued until my father became more and more involved with his brothers and his love of PCP at which point he became less and less of a dependable figure in my life. As his problems progressed I spent more and more time at anyone's house that would watch me while my mother was working trying to keep everything together while my dad was with his brothers.
Fast forward a few years and as my mother continued to struggle the only person who she could afford to pay to watch me was a Great Uncle of mine who although was 40+ at the time he is mildly retarded and has roughly the mentality and thinking of a 10 to 15 year old depending on the situation. He watched me for about a year and a half. During the first few months he would say things in front of me that would make me feel uncomfortable and my mother would always question me with strange questions when she picked me up. After a while he started to do things to me and make me do things and that's as far a I'm going with that which I'm sure you can read between the lines. After a while my father had semi straightened up and came back into the picture. And one day I was heavily questioned about my uncle and any things he may have done to me. I remember my father telling my mother that if he did anything to me that he was a dead man and they will never find him again. So I kept my mouth shut, I didn't want anyone to kill my uncle because at this time I wasn't totally understanding of just what was taking place and how fucked up the whole situation was.
Years went by and my parents finally seperated at about age 12. My father used to beat my ass continuously for everything no matter how small or how big and when he was out of the picture so was the fear of punishment. One freind I had through all of this and is still my best friend till this day is a son of another prominent member of the club who is 2 years older than me and his father took off to be a full time heroin addict. Now we were two kids from the wrong side of town with an axe to grind against the world. We started getting drunk on almost a daily or bi daily basis for a while with assorted other drugs such as weed, acid etc until one day him and a couple of even older friends picked me up and we went to the back of an old industrial park and one of the older kids starts crushing up these small white rocks in a dollar bill that came from this glass vial..... and from that day on I was a 13 year old coke head. I lied, cheated, stole my way to having money quite frequently because if I didn't have money no one was picking me up to snort their coke lol. In a strange round of occurrences that will take entirely to long to detail another non drug addict friend just so happened to be able to snatch about $50k from his ol man in cash and in turn I snatched about 15k from him. Strangely enough I was somehow able to keep this money around for a while spending only $300 to $600 a day (I think I was more keeping the money as long as I could so I could be accepted). I also started copping myself by riding my bike into the hood at 13yo. After a whole the money ran out and the stealing resumed and school and home life becam unmanageable so I pulled a cop out maneuver. I went into the school guidance counselor a office an pretty much gave him the just of what I had been up to in te last year lol. Few days later I'm in a treatment center in PA and spent my 14th birthday there. 30 days later I'm out and can recite all of the twelve steps and most of the twelve traditions.
I stayed sober for a whole actually. I wasn't really accepted in AA or NA due to my age but I did stick with it for over a year and then I started fading out on it. Roun about 16 I met up with an old friend called alcohol again and it was good times for a while. Hotel parties, pussy, the shore, socially accepted and actually moving up the social ladder. Started smoking weed again in there somewhere.
One day I get a buddy to go cop me two dimes of weed from the hood (I'd go for coke but not weed lol) but another friend who was hoping to smoke with me kept warning me about this kid. He kept telling me don't trust him he's doing that diesel man an I kept reassuring him nothing would happen cause I know where he lives and he knows I will fuck him up. Bout an hour later he show back up at my moms apartment with another kid in his car. I hop into the backseat and he says "they didnt have any weed but they had this" he holds his hand out and it's two folded paper envolopes in his hand and I'm like what the fuck is that he says it's dope. Ok fuckface which dope? Everything is called dope and he says heroin, at this point I'm about to pop and start swinging from the back seat and this other dude who I nver liked is telling me to just try it and see if I like it. All this is going on while he's cutting the tape on one of the bags and takes a little bump on the corner of a credit card. So now I'm watching these two assholes get high on my dime. Naturally after a couple minutes of stewing over this I say WTF you're not doing up all my money give me a bump. It was at this point I had found my true calling!
Managed to keep this new found love under wraps for a while but it eventually lost my jobs and couldn't stay employed so it turned for the worse. Started dealing coke and weed for a while until that collapsed due to a growing habit. Then came the flat out robbing, armed robberies of gas stations, B&E, shoplifting etc. Then came homelessness, panhandling, petty arrests and living in the back of an old conversion van behind a auto body shop after they closed down for the night, let me tell you that there I no amount of blankets and old comforters you can musterf up to stay warm in a rough jersey winter living on the streets. Then came a 5 year odyssey of methadone after I got the money up to walk into the clinic. Oh that good green nectar and that asshole Indian Dr that would keep increasing the dosages me: "I'm still in pain it hurts" it's been two week mind you lol I finagled my way up to 110mgs after a few months.
I managed to actually build myself up again on the clinic. Got a roof over my head, cars, respectable job as a plumbing foreman at age 24 making pretty good knot etc. Methadone is liquid motivation my friends, nothing comes close to making you work this hard and aspire for more than methadone. It also turns out I can drink and party on methadone and the hangovers don't hit to bad either lol. Well guess what turned out if you bang a considerable amount of dope you can get pretty fucked up while taking methadone too. Next thing I know I'm shooting 10 to as much as 18 bags a day of some good ass newark dope on top of 110mgs of done and that's no bullshit. And again I start dealing to the fringe dope heads in my town that won't travel to the hood to cop and as is always the case turns out someone decided to save his ass from a misdemeanor possession charge by giving the drug squad my name. Many many months later and one fucking hell of a cold turkey kick. I'm out and shipped off to a treatment center called Delaney hall in Newark. As was said earlier in this thread methadone stays with you for a long long long time it was over a year before I finally slept a whole night through, tooks a normal shit, the little nagging aches and pains went away, and feeling human again. I read on here that "you wouldn't even know I was on methadone" um yes I would I'm a fucking junky my brain is programmed to find you now and you stick out a lot further than you think you do my friend especially to a brother of the opiates. Another person mentioned about methadone and bones some say it ain't true others say it is but I believe it to be true, I mean where else can you go and see so many half crippled adults under the age of 65 with canes and other issues than a methadone clinic other than a hospital or like establishment? Those are the OGs that have been on for 10+ years!
I've said some things in here that I've never even mentioned when I speak at meetings but I felt the need to throw it out there. And there is so much other shit I could add to all I this as well for example my mothers bad taste in men in which she chosen a disgraced ex member/crackhead of a rival MC club for her next husband an she doesn't get high or drunk lol
Alcohol for me was always the catalyst ie my gateway drug, it lowers my defenses and makes me vulnerable. After I quit the heroin I started lifting and I drank and drank and drank some more. I hit the gym got drunk and slept that was life aside from the weekends when I went an found some bar whore to stick my dick in. Then I got hurt at work at which time I tore a bicep tendon in which immediate surgery was required and got introduced to painkillers. Turns out alcohol and painkillers is a pretty enjoyable bliss. After about 2 years of eating no less than 10 perc 10's a day along with a twelve pack I was beginning to fade as a person and was getting sicker and sicker. And for good measure I even started to smoke crack with a guy from work on Saturday nights for a couple months on top of my pills and booze.
After one particularly bad binge I woke up one morning, January 6th 2012 to be exact, I woke up and said to The Lord "I don't want to do this anymore" so I stayed sober for couple months but I kept feeling weaker, sicker and more lathargic with each passing day until it was so bad I was sleeping on the bathroom floor for about a week cause I just didn't have the energy to keep getting up in the middle of the night to go puke for 30 minutes at a time. My roommate (remember that bet friend I spoke of earlier) who is sober woke up one night an seen me laying on the bathroom floor and literally dragged me to the hospital. One of the things I remember from that night was him telling me that I was like his brother and he loved me an he wasn't going to sit back and watch me die and at that moment I realized that there were people out there who cared about me which was something I never cared to consider in the past. Later the next day the doctor walked into my room in the ICU wing and have me the news that I had hepatitis and my liver enzymes were 1400+.
In the end alcohol was the gateway drug and stopping it made abstinence from other chemicals a non issue. And I asked God for help and I believe it was him who pointed out to me at the absolute correct time that I had royally damaged my liver and was also Hep-C positive for quite some time and any further alcohol abuse would mean death. I asked him to help me and that's what I got which pissed me off for a while an made me resentful towards everything and everyone. But as I reflect on it further down the road now would it have taken anything less to keep me sober than an absolute truth of a quick and painful death? Instead of the old death, jails, institution warnings from the rooms of AA and NA? I mean you hear it but ya think it doesn't apply to you right?
And to "MOST" of the fence sitters who posted in this thread: if you posted in here talking about, in lesser terms "I have a problem but it's not really a problem and I can handle it whenever I want" um the fact that you felt moved enough to comment in here is a pretty hefty sign that maybe the problem you speak of ain't so fucking little! I said "MOST" not all because there are exceptions to the rules of addiction an dependence and then there are the unfortunates who will never get it and let it destroy themselves. Choice is yours, get busy living or dying