Becoming an addict

I had my first puff on a joint when I was 13. I remember feeling like I was having the best time in the world. Probably partly running on adrenaline because me and my friend had snuck out of my house and met up with my boyfriend and his friend, and I always got a buzz off being a little rebel. My poor parents. When I was about 17, synthetic cannabis became the hottest new trend. Everyone was doing it. You’d literally see men in suits going to buy it. People of all kinds. Because people couldn’t be drug tested for it in their jobs. And it was considered “safe”. I can tell you now, there was nothing safe about that stuff. I can’t tell you how many times I heard of someone I knew being locked in the mental ward because they had gone into full drug induced psychosis. Some of those people are still struggling with long term effects to this day. When I was using, I thought I was one of the lucky ones, I just got high, I’d never experienced psychosis. Looking back now I can see how wrong I was. That stuff was nothing but toxic, and I was 100% addicted. If I didn’t have it, I’d wanna die. When I did have it, I just spent all my time sitting in my spot smoking bong after bong, I’d nod out, I passed out a couple of times, and I was not a happy person. I fucking hated life, unless I was high. You could say my world revolved around it. When I got with Abuser #2, I moved towns, he and I got a house together (which was about 200m away from the nearest synthetics supplier) which became a hang out for half the smokers in the town. Then when I found out I was pregnant to Abuser #1, it all sort of came crashing down. I was all of a sudden forced into trying to make adult and responsible choices, of which I honestly didn’t think I was capable. Tossing up between taking on the massive task that is raising a child or choosing the unimaginable, I went for a dating ultrasound to discover the baby didn’t have a heart beat. And I was absolutely devastated. It threw me into such a whirlwind of self hate and destruction, that I couldn’t have cared less if Death himself came and scooped me up in his arms and delivered me to hell. By this point I’d already gotten into the “junkie” circle, because A#2 was on a ritalin script. Everyone around me was using drugs intravenously, I’d been around it for a couple of months so in a way it had become normal. And in my desperate attempt to forget what I’d just been through, I had my first shot of morphine. And it felt fantastic. The rush was unlike anything I’d ever felt before, like a full body orgasm, and I felt great. “Comfortably numb”, if you like. And that’s when it started. My fear of needles turned into an obsession, and just like that I had another addiction. I started using more and more. Ritalin. Morphine. Methadone. Whatever we could get. I had decided I wanted to move back to my home town, so after 4 months we packed up and made the move. This is going to sound absolutely ridiculous, but the first thing we did was ban ourselves from being able to buy synthetics from any shops in my town, and we substituted them with weed instead. Sounds like we’re sorting our shit out to a point, right? Nope. That script was still coming in, we were still associating with the same crowd, and I was still sticking needles in my body at every opportunity. Life was an absolute mess, and it stayed that way for the next 6-7 months. I hid it from everyone. Not one single soul outside of my drug circle knew about my habit. It was a secret I was extremely ashamed of, one I was going to take to my grave. That was all about to change, when baby #2 made its existence known. So the drug use became a thing of the past, and becoming a decent mum became my number 1 priority. But my history of drugs wasn’t done haunting me yet. In fact it hadn’t even begun.