DOSE:	repeated		Heroin
	repeated		Opiates

BODY WEIGHT:

220 lb

Heroin stole 4 years of my life. This is my testement, I feel it needs to be said. Maybe it will help someone on down the line that reads about smack and wants to give it a shot (pun intended). Maybe this will change their mind.

This is my story:

My first experience with a pain-killer (hydrocodone) came when I was just 13. I liked it but there were other things I was interested in at the time (Cannabis and LSD). I smoked opium various times through-out my early teen years and ate a percocet or 2 on rare occasions.

It was during the summer of my 16th year that I first tried heroin. It came in a capsule form. A friend of mine instructed me to open the cap and pour the tan-colored rocks and powder. We crushed up the rocks and he gave me a straw to snort it thru. It didn't burn. It had the slight smell of vinegar. I went downstairs and fell-back into the couch. I started feeling so good. I had never felt so wonderful in all of my life. I remember in between nods, thinking to myself that 'this is the way I want to feel for the rest of my life!' So high...so high. Only 20 minutes had passed but it seemed like 2 hours. I went back upstairs and snorted the second line (each capsule held 1/10th of a gram, only 2 lines). When I came back downstairs, I sat back into the couch feeling wonderful...ecstatic...joyful...warm...pleasure...beauty...I never felt so amazing. I nodded off and dreamed of flies buzzing around under my eye-lids and walls grew legs and escorted me to Heaven.

Then suddenly something went wrong. I started to feel exceedingly hot and sweaty. I felt nauseu and dizziness. My skin was pale and drooping. I staggered into the restroom and put my head in the sink and ran the water on full-blast. But I was still sweating profusely. My friend and I left. After the sick feeling went away, I remained high as all hell until early the next morning.

From here on, my use of heroin increased steadily over a few months to where I was eventually using it everyday...sometimes more than once. Some of my closest friends went the same way. By the time of my 17th birthday, I was a full-blown junkie. I was no longer welcome in my mother's home and so was living in flop-houses and friend's cars. A couple friends had got an apartment and I moved in there. This is where we all slipped into the abyss. No way out.

As well as heroin, we were also using everything from percocets and methadone and OxyContin all the way up to Fentanyl, Paregoric, buprenorphine, morphine, dilaudid, etc. Life was rough but we got by some how. Everyday (day in, day out) was a horrible struggle but we always managed to come up with money enough for our doses. Either thru stealing/shoplifting, burglary, even stealing from family and friends, stealing each other's dope. Lying. It just goes on and on. It's like Renton said in 'Trainspotting': 'No matter how much you steal or how much you stash, its never enough. You always have to get up and do it all over again the next day and the next day after that. Propelling ourselves with longing to the day that it would all go wrong.' Our apartment was like a shooting gallery and a flophouse for the junkie street-kids.

Occasionally I would have an overdose. I was doing quarter gram doses and sometimes more. Sometimes I woke up on my own and sometimes I needed help to wake up. I've had 9 OD's in total. Only 2 hospitalizations. The last overdose, I actually did die. No pulse, no breathing...flat-lined. I was given a shot of adrenalin straight to the heart and I snapped back to life. I spent 3 days in the hospital in the psych ward. I managed to clean up my act for a while and tried to get back to normal animal life. It was difficult to say the least. Everything reminded me of heroin use...everything was a trigger. I quit somewhere around 6 times before I finally made it last (and am still clean right now, have been for 2 years).

But before I had the chance to get hooked again, I was arrested for a felony warrant that I didn't know I had. It was for possession of Heroin (the last time I ODed the police found what was left of my stash) I served 2 weeks in county lock-up. The judge released me and I was eventually sentenced to 3 years of probation and drug-counseling with a 1 year suspended prison sentence. It was a long year of probation. I was suicidal and attempted it many times, always falling short. I wanted to die so bad. I was terrified of prison, its no place for me. But I remained clean (at least from Heroin) and started injecting large quantities of cocaine (Still one of my guilty pleasures).

Many of my friends are dead, some are serving time correctional facilities across Ohio. Some have disappeared. The mind of a junkie is very surreal and sometimes even beautiful, but the nightmare is always lurking in the shadows waiting to come out, the monkey has multiple personalities.

Heroin is the Devil incarnate. Beautiful, seductive, warm, kind, loving...and then when she has me...thats when she rips my fucking head off and takes me for a ride into true HELL. It really was Hell. Those that make it out have an obligation to tell our stories and let the truth about this life be known. You never know, maybe I might save a life one day. I have done some terrible things and said even worse things. I'm not asking for redemption or forgiveness. The needle scars will be with me till the day I die.

Let this final paragraph be of the utmost importance: I kicked heroin cold-turkey, but understand that this is MUCH easier said than done. Painful Hellish nightmare is an understatement. It is not pretty but I think it should be described to further show the element of HELL: I woke up in a roach infested slum on 3rd street in Dayton, Ohio. I did my wake up shot around 8 am. I then quite suddenly decided to quit. I had found the determination. I ventured to my grandparents home up-town on the Northside. The first spec of the sickness came at 1 pm. A tightness in my shoulders and chest and arms. My skin was starting to crawl and goosebumped. Electric chills. Cold and hot flashes. I settled in for the long haul.

The sickness lasted for 12 days: Most of the time was spent curled into a ball on the bathroom floor trying to scream but my body was so fucked and out of energy that no sound came out when I tried to scream, but I kept trying because the pain was so horrible I just wanted to kill myself. Shitting blood constantly. Heroin makes me constipated and after going weeks at a time without taking a shit it is very painful, explosive and VERY BLOODY. Sitting on the toilet squirting out blood while at the same time vomiting into a trash-can. It hurt so bad. It hurt to breathe and it hurt to not breathe. It hurt to open my eyes and it hurt to close them. Every muscle, every bone, skin crawling. MY worst nightmares rolled into one.

My back felt like I had been bent over touching my toes for days on end. Sore and aching...sweating and shivering...dying. Mentally I was near delirious...tossing and turning in bed (insomnia) feeling my legs rot off, I saw my dead father sitting beside my bed smiling and laughing. I cried and asked why he left me when I was so young...he just laughed harder. I craved heroin with a passion. I bled for it and it was never enough. I screamed for it. If I had had a gun I would've killed myself...no doubt in my mind. It just hurt so bad. Anything to make the pain go away. It eventually did go away but it seemed like years. I was a mess. But I eventually felt alive again...like a normal human-being. I've been clean ever-since. Crawling to the bathroom because I'm too weak to walk hoping that I make it there before I piss myself...sometimes I didn't...sometimes I did. No kind of life at all.

I will never go back to that life. I've lost too many friends and too much time to want to go back to it. Its horrible.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 56127
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Feb 25, 2009	Views: 46,253
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Heroin (27) : Overdose (29), Hangover / Days After (46), Addiction & Habituation (10), Not Applicable (38)