I started using drugs in 1963 as a freshman in high school. I had a girlfriend whose mother was taking Valium and seconal on a regular basis and she regularly helped herself to them and then helped me to get them. The downer effect helped me to deal with the stress of family life, which at the time was unbearable to me. My father was the Dean of freshmen students at the high school I was attending and his expectations of me at school, and at home, was set at an extremely high level. Too high, in fact, unless I got high indeed! In my sophomore year I was introduced to marijuana, hashish, LSD and methamphetamine. I lived in the wealthy area along the North Shore of Lake Michigan and the druggies I associated with were from affluent families. During this time, obtaining drugs was not a problem. Quite the contrary...they allowed me to co-exist with my situation. I should also mention that alcohol was a great influence during this period. The alcohol did, on occasion, cause some conflict with the law (accidents and arrests) and my family (coming home intoxicated, getting bailed out of jail, etc.). All through high school I was able to maintain a low A and high B average while taking four years of math (up to advanced trigonometry), four years of Latin (straight A's), two years of Spanish, two years of biology and chemistry and one year of physics along with four years of English (including a Great Books course).
Upon graduation, I was determined to prove my worth to my family (particularly my Dad) and continue with my education into college (at my father's Alma mater,North Dakota State U.). It was also a good way to stay out of Vietnam in 1967. My freshmen year was nothing more than a review of my senior year of high school so I had plenty of time to work on refining my social skills in drinking and drug abuse. My sophomore year I moved off of campus and really felt that I was on my own for the first time in my life. I worked assembling quarter-mile sections of rail all through the North Dakota winter in open-ended boxcars on a siding out by the airport. I drove a 1949 Plymouth 2-door coupe, which had a big hole in the floorboard on the driver side. Soon, the drugs and alcohol became more frequent, work became a hassle and school was something I showed up for on exam days and hoped for the best.
In about February of 1969, I quit college and moved to California to join some friends (actually they were ex-hookers from the Fargo/Moorhead area) and get involved in the anti-war movement that was so popular among the liberated children of the 60's. I lived four doors off the Sunset Strip in Hollywood if you can imagine! I was in heaven!! No rent to pay, since my hooker friends had a great income. A swimming pool in the center of the apartment complex. Free food. No work. And all the drugs I could possibly imagine at my fingertips. I started to use LSD on a daily basis along with meth crystal (Ice) and downers to go to sleep when I finally wanted to. After three months of partying I was so burnt that I had to leave or risk total annihilation.
Around the end of May, I found myself on the road again. I loaded myself with THC capsules hidden in a thermos and headed for Cedar Rapids, Iowa where my sister was going to college. After partying with her for a week, I went back to Chicago to find some of my friends who had been to Vietnam. I knew the draft board would soon be on me since I quit school!
When I found my friends, I moved into the 7-bedroom farmhouse they were living in and asked for their advice on what I should do to stay out of the war. One of my good friends who had stepped on a landmine injuring his leg severely advised me to start using heroin immediately. So I did. This resulted in a full-blown habit by the time my number came up for the draft. As anyone who knows anything about the drug culture would know, I supported my habit by dealing. The day of my physical, in downtown Chicago, I shot up what I thought would be a sufficient amount of heroin to last through the ordeal. It took much longer than I had anticipated. I went through all the physical testing and since I had checked the box next to the question, "ARE YOU ADDICTED TO ANY DRUGS" with a yes, I was sent to sit on the ' Group W ' bench (which some of you undoubtedly remember from the song "Alice's Restaurant" by "Arlo Guthrie" with the mother-rapers and father-rapers. I was eventually moved into a waiting room with twenty or thirty other guys who were attempting to dodge the draft and the cold sweats started. Soon, I was drifting in and out of consciousness.
Eventually, my name was called to go in to see the shrink. He asked me if I had any tracks to prove that I was indeed a heroin addict. I rolled up both sleeves and said, "On this arm I have the Chicago Transit and on this arm I have the Northwestern." I had wanted to use the railroads on the Monopoly board but I was too wasted to come up with the names. I knew one of them was the B&O but I didn't want to draw any attention to my smell from all the sweating. He then asked me if I would be interested in going into the armie's rehabilitation program and from there into the service. I gratefully declined his offer and he said he would get me out of there as soon as he could knowing I was in bad need of a fix.
The next three years were spent getting off (then on, then off, then on, then finally off) heroin. In 1972 I moved to Lead, South Dakota and started working at the Homestake Gold Mine, Inc.. I met a young woman at a party one night after work and we started to do drugs together on a regular basis. On my birthday in 1973 we were married. We had two children, a boy first then a girl, bought a home and raised Afghans on the side. For the next ten years all went smoothly. Then my wife started to drink excessively. Soon, she was an alcoholic who was hiding bottles around the house. I could have lived with that (after all, I was no saint and I was using cocaine and smoking pot) if it weren't for the verbal abuse that started along with it. I could have even lived with the verbal abuse (maybe) if it weren't for the children. In any case, our relationship survived for another nine years. You see, we were both raised by the traditional standards of a family set up by our ancestors and instilled in us by our parents. The husband is the 'breadwinner', the wife is the 'breadmaker' and the family stays together forever through thick and thin. However, when my children were 14 and 12 years old (in 1991) I decided that it was no longer worth being chased around the house with knives by a deluded alcoholic in blackouts.
It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life...Walking out the door with my two children crying and saying, "Dad, please don't leave us here with mom! We want to go with you. Please don't leave us!!" My wife had threatened to turn me in for kidnapping if I attempted to take the children with me. We were divorced the same year. I moved into a friend's basement and soon met my present wife. She worked at Homestake and we got along very well. She had two young girls of her own and one boy who was 13 from two separate marriages. On August 7,1992 we were married. We managed to buy a house together and I petitioned the court for custody of my children and won. It was a joyous reunion.
On September 1, 1992 (less than a month later), I was buried in the mine by a ton of rock that fell off a wall right next to me. My back was broken in 3 places, my right ankle was broken so severely that it required replacing with a Titanium, total ankle replacement joint. My chest was separated, my ribs were all broke on both sides and my left ear was cut off. My survival was due to Divine Intervention and nothing else. A month after this all happened (in November) my father died of cancer. And in March of the next year Homestake put my wife on layoff and took away the only income that we had besides Social Security. The results of all this changed our lives dramatically.
Where do I begin? The role reversal with all it's feelings of inadequacy; the fighting between kids which caused fighting between my wife and myself; the fact that my wife, who up until this point had thought of early retirement, was now thrown into a situation where she might have to work the rest of her life to support an invalid (I am now totally disabled); or the ensuing drug frenzy that consumed our lives, our families, our income, our friends and took them all away in a cocaine rush????
The momentum which drove us to cocaine is perhaps already evident and I will not go into much more detail other than to say we were consumed with self pity, stress, marital and sexual inadequacies and no avenues of escape that were as easy and medicating as was the cocaine. It was so easy to shoot up cocaine and watch your troubles disappear. The only problem was that everything else we had disappeared along with the troubles. First to go were the bank accounts, then the life insurance cash values, then the 401k, then we started to sell vehicles, then we hocked things we wanted to keep, then we borrowed from friends and when we couldn't pay them back, we lost their friendship. Then we mortgaged the house which had been paid off from my settlement and used the money to cover our credit cards and other debts and get our stuff out of hock at the pawn shops around town. Then we got cash off our cleared credit cards and started all over.
When we finally ran out of resources (which wasn't until we had a second mortgage on the house), we started to borrow from our parents under all kinds of pretences. We finally hit bottom one day and decided to seek help. We entered into an outpatient program. In order to stay in the program after the initial week we had to be tested for tuberculosis. I tested positive. It turned out that I had TB when I was young and my body had fought it off without anyone knowing it (including my folks). Or, it could have happened sometime in my drug life. Lord knows I had everything else; hepatitis, kidney infections, liver infections, stomach infections, herpes. In any case, I was removed from treatment until they could find out why my test showed up positive. This took a team of inept doctors about a month. During this time I relapsed and so did my wife.
While we were in relapse I was busted for felony possession of methamphetamine. I re-entered treatment immediately and on February 6, 1997 I was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary. The sentence was withheld except for 15 days in the county jail with the remainder of the two years on probation. Once again there had been Divine Intervention.
In the summer of 1997 I decided to put the knowledge I had acquired over the years, in drugs, alcohol and family abuse, to use. I enrolled in the summer courses offered from the University of South Dakota in ADAS. During the summer I took Individual Counseling, Group Counseling and Introduction to Alcohol Abuse and received A's in all three for my efforts. This was no easy matter! After not going to school for almost 30 years, I was quite hesitant about my abilities as a student. It took a great amount of perseverance and determination but you know something? For the first time in those thirty years I felt Self-worth. I was so pleased with myself, and my family was so pleased with me, I decided to go on to school in the fall atUniversity of South Dakota. I came into the school with a 1.23 average in transfers from NDSU. My average since I have been here is 3.80 and I am now a senior.
Well, this has been my life in a nutshell. At the least, I hope it will enable you to see that problems can be overcome and addiction can be controlled at any age, by anyone (I've been clean now for two and a half years). The most important thing to remember is...You can't do it for anyone else, but you can do it for yourself!
UPDATE: In my senior year, I developed a rare disease called 'Sarcoidosis' and was forced to quit college before graduation. I am now living in Gillette, Wyoming for health purposes and I volunteer my time to churches, schools and other non-profit organizations. I am still sober and drug free!
Here's something to think about:
According to an old fable, the devil once placed his tools on display. Among them were some labeled malice, hatred, envy, jealousy, vanity, deceit, and lying. A special place was given, however, to one called Discouragement. The devil explained, "This is the most useful tool I have. It is worth more than all the others put together." Satan still owns and uses this tool.
Thought: The answer to discouragement is to receive the Master's encouragement. It can also be found in friends (if you have none, I'll be yours), family and even deep within yourself.
