- Drugs
I was born on August 13, 1975 in Northern California. I was raised by a single mother and my sister who was two years younger than me. I was already making the wrong decisions at five years old. When I was five and my sister was three, we broke into my dad’s pot stash. I was scared to use the matches to light the joint. When my sister lit the match, it scared her. She dropped the match, and it lit her on fire. It was in the middle of the night, so my stepbrother woke my dad, and he jumped on her and put out the flames. It almost killed her! She was in the hospital for months. If you don’t think pot can be devastating one way or another, you are dead wrong.
My sister and I were physically and sexually abused by our stepfather for several years. When I was about 11, I finally told on him, and he went on the run. We were stuck in a foster home for three months. Our stepfather was finally captured, and my sister and I had to testify against him in court at a very young age. He got 14 years and only did 7. Things were different back then.
I started using hard drugs at 12. On my 12th birthday I started using LSD, and on my 13th birthday I started using meth. My hometown is very small, so we had no middle school. When you left the 6th grade, you were in high school, and drugs were everywhere. My uncle was only three years older than me, so I hung around the older crowd, and that didn’t help matters. I started getting in trouble with the law at age 13. My pastor talked to the judge and got me placed in a group home in Alaska for troubled youth. I grew up in church, and the place in Alaska was a hard labor youth Christian program. I was there for seven months, until they closed down. When I got back home, probation called me and told me not to get comfortable. They were placing me in another home, because while in Alaska I was caught shoplifting. I got mad and came up with the bright idea that, if I kept getting kicked out of group homes, eventually they’d have to let me go home.
I went through 24 group homes in almost three years, and they finally let me go home, when I was 17. I kept using drugs and getting in trouble. My PO made me move in with my Dad. I started getting into trouble immediately. I have over 100 misdemeanors and 8 felonies, and all are drug and alcohol related. I’ve been through a lot of treatment, and I can’t seem to kick this addiction.
In 2002 I met my beautiful wife and fell in love. She introduced me to pain pills. Taking those drugs was the biggest mistake I ever made, and my life has been all about making the wrong choices. I was addicted in no time. If we didn’t have these drugs, we would become very sick. We started getting them illegally.
My wife and I have a son named Mason, and he is eight years old. My wife has overdosed two or three times and lived through it. People kept telling us that, if we didn’t slow down, one of us was going to die. We never listened. On August 22, 2011 my wife and I got high on benzos and blacked out for three days. I woke up on August 24, 2011 at 9:18 am. My wife was four feet away from me sitting upright on the couch with foam stuck to her parted lips. She had died sometime in the early morning hours. I will never understand why God decided to take her life and not mine. I had told everybody that it wouldn’t be me that died and that drugs couldn’t kill me. Back then I truly believed that. God got sick and tired of me boasting, but he didn’t take my life. He took the life of my wife who I loved more than life itself. God punished me. I couldn’t go to my wife’s funeral, because the day she died I was being taken to jail. Before the ambulance got there to take her, I brushed the foam away, and I kissed her on her parted lips. I told her goodbye, and I’d see her soon, then I called 911. I pondered taking my own life for a long time. I didn’t have the guts to do it, but I subconsciously tried to kill myself when I got out of jail by taking massive amounts of pills.
While I as blacked out, my wife took methadone, and the mixture of that and the benzos killed her. A month after I had been in jail her son also died of a drug overdose. He had been 18 years old for 9 days, and he and my wife are buried beside each other. This was a little over two years ago. Was getting high really worth it?
My mom and sister freaked after her death and spent four days with me, because they honestly believed they would never see me alive again. They should have been right, but four days after they left I was arrested on five felony warrants for forgery charges. There is no doubt in my mind that the arrest saved my life. I was incarcerated for five months and then went to court-mandated treatment. I seemed to be doing well, but after five months I was kicked out for relapsing on alcohol. I was on the run for a month and using pain pills again. I went back to jail for two months. My treatment facility went to court on my behalf and got me back into the program instead of going to prison.
I am still upset by the death of my wife from this deadly disease. I’ve been in treatment for eight months. I chair meetings, and I’ve told my story to others while praying that nothing like this will happen to anyone else. I am holding down a job for the first time in six years. I share in meetings, and I almost have a year clean for the first time in my entire life. I am working to stay clean harder than I ever have before. I am just now starting to get into our son’s life again. I’m trying to stop my drug use for my son, because he needs me more than ever, because he has no mom. I miss her every day, but now I’m trying to start my life fresh with my son. I pray that I find a woman one day that loves me and my son as much as she did. Please don’t let this happen to you. Pray for me.