DOSE:

smoked

Methamphetamine

(powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT:

110 lb

Where should I start..? Now? Or then? Oh god..

1999: Party like it's 1999, make some money and Tweek.

It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school and I was fifteen. There was this girl and this boy and they were a couple, tweekers who met in rehab and sold and manufactured crystal meth, which we called 'shit' or 'dope,' but more commonly referred to as glass or ice. These two were crazy. When they weren't tweeking they became incredibly violent and would fight each other... I never knew household appliances like hammers and vcrs and microwaves could turn into weapons and make people bleed. They were gross and tweeker-dirty, never taking showers and they had so many sores on them it pained me to look at them straight on. The boy had already blown up his dad's bathroom while cooking it and asked me a number of times 'Hey can we use your garage to make it?' and I'd always say no, yet when they asked me to help sell with them I wouldn't hesitate in saying yes.

I have a mild heart condition called pulmonic stenosis, coupled with a heart murmur, and at first this boy said he was never, ever going to let me smoke ice and I'm all 'Ok' and then he got spun out and he's all 'Here' and showed me how to pack a bowl and then light it and twist it so you wouldn't burn it. I was taught by the 'best' - - I could take hits like no one had ever seen, complete with the dragon effect when I exhaled. It was extraordinary at the time, more fascinating that anything. The way the smoke formed into pure white clouds, that instant tingling sensation and euphoric rush, and the way it tasted..! Like candy, so it didn't matter if I did more, 'cause it tasted *good*. I remember one time smoking it from a meth bong which had sunkist instead of water in the chamber.

So that summer was full of going to raves and smoking free ice, selling drugs like acid and ecstasy and speed. Exciting, right? It was until this boy and girl both landed themselves in jail when they got caught on warrants for breaking into houses around our area in Los Angeles. Then my supply ran out and I really didn't want to BUY my meth - - that would make me feel like a drug addict. Ironically, a couple days after my sixteenth birthday in November, my parents put me in outpatient rehab. I didn't tell them about the selling or the meth, only that I had smoked pot and done acid. Rehab wasn't too bad, it was surmised of lots of kid and parents group meetings, but sucked because most of the addicts were potheads and I didn't share that I was into meth until February of 2000. My drug counselor was surprised, but by law he wasn't allowed to tell my parents.

2000: Sneaking around boundries

Drug tests were easy to get through. Heroin and pot stay in your system for roughly 30 days, and I got drug tested once a week at the most, so I just didn't do those two. Everything else I did, though - - shrooms, acid, speed, ecstasy, ketamine, cocaine, alcohol. [Erowid Note: Heroin detection time in standard drug tests is 1-4 days] All it did was teach me how to deal with comedowns without the aid of smoking bud. That summer I quit going to rehab because my parents requested it... something like this: I was only labeled as a substance abuser, all the kids in the program were shitdumb and weren't doing anything to help, and I started a job as a counselor at a daycamp, which I held with responsibility.


Summer ended and I started my last year of school in which I would do both my junior and senior years in one, since continuation schools offer you that option. I started smoking meth again some and mainly would use it to help me stay up while I'd finish work up. My weight fluctuated like crazy. I hit my peak of puberty in sixth grade and ever since then I had kept the same weight and height: 120lbs. and 5'3'. I knew my weight was changing and going up and down, but I never wanted to step on a scale in fear of seeing that needle creep downwards.

2001: More & More & More & More Tears

So pretty soon all this casual usage turns into regular usage, for I had hooked myself all over again but worse than it was two years ago. I just remember my friend and I smoking bowl after bowl in his room one night, and I paused right before lighting another and said.. 'Wait - - hey, do you feel.. mellow..?' and he goes 'Yeah.. weird' for our bodies had adjusted to it so we didn't feel spun. We couldn't feel wired. I almost preferred it because then it was hard for others to pinpoint if I was using or not, because I didn't look tweeked out. It became a form of relaxation without much of a comedown. It became as common as how kids smoke pot every day.

March came and I started selling drugs again, mainly acid and a little bit of ecstasy. I was promoting for productions who threw raves so it was entirely ideal. I got free into parties and had money and drugs. My parents knew that I went to raves and were cool with it, yet of course they didn't know I was smoking meth. Why would they..? I've always been a regular night owl and I'd go to sleep when I came home from them, plus I was president of my school and was about to graduate and go to a widely-respected liberal arts college in the fall. It's funny how when you're doing everything right on the outside, others don't think that anything else is going wrong on the inside.

Summer hits and I choose not to do anything but kick it with my friends and sell occasionally. By now I was smoking meth every single day.. my boyfriend and I would go through a gram quite easily, and we could do more but we had enough thinking to conserve money. On a trip we were away from our regular hookups but we were desperate for a fix, and in the end we got ahold of speedballs and dirtydirty speed, like the kind that someone makes in their bathtub. Did we care..? No. It did enough to tide us over until we got home.. until we got home to get ahold of some glass or ice, that sweet stuff that tasted like candy, tempting us to smoke more and more.

I remember my mouth and throat got torn to bits. I didn't eat much, slept occasionally, but it wasn't real sleep. When I did sleep for good amounts of time it could be for days and days. The sunlight became the enemy even more than it had before. We were certified tweekers and I had risen myself to the status of drug addict, and neither of us were too happy about it. We tried to stop cold turkey but we both became so sick due to withdrawal and beat up immune systems that we had to devise a new plan: To slowly detox ourselves, smoking less and less everyday until we could completely be off of it with only tolerable sicknesses.


I remember getting all four of my wisdom teeth taken out and then not even thinking twice before smoking more meth the day after. No physical repurcussions made me stop - - except for one time when I took my clothes off to take a shower, I looked in the mirror and was shocked by how I looked. I stood on the scale completely naked and I weighed a whole 103 pounds. It was a shock given that just less than a week ago I had weighed about 117 pounds. I was always against that whole evil-sterotypical tweeker persona - - Rail skinny, depressive, loud, speedbumped all over, never taking showers, all of that. I wasn't the evil tweeker like that first boy and girl I talked about. My boyfriend and I never got into fights, yet I do have to admit that I was scared it *could* happen, because it was always a possibility. Me and him shared all of these things together and it just made us want to stop more.

We didn't want to be dependent upon this. We wanted our combined $2,000 which we had used over a span of two months for our addiction. We would sit in each other's arms and cry while the pipe and the lighters and the gram baggies full of ice would be on the table in front of us. We weren't going to let it rip us apart, yet we knew our physical bodies couldn't cope without it, so while our minds wretched in agony.. we would take the bare minimum of hits. We couldn't get high anymore. We could sleep while on it. We could eat while on it. Our physical self couldn't function like normal humans unless we were on it.

Gadually it got better. We had been smoking it out of a crack pipe, and my boyfriend took Black Cat firecrackers and wrapped it around the piece and then shattered it to hell. We flushed all the free donations we got from people. We worked at gaining weight back, but it's extremely hard. We'd sit in the smoke-filled garage of his house while people smoked bowl after bowl after bowl of ice until we couldn't stand it anymore, in which we'd leave and go upstairs to be by ourselves. We found out that when we were in each other's arms, the cravings went away and for the first time in a long time we could sit still and be perfectly content. There was the simple realization that meth would not work because you could love it, but all it would do was not love you back and abuse you with trickery - - the thing which worked was my boyfriend and I, for I love him and he loves me back. There is no better drug than Me and Him.

Monday, September 24th, 2001: Right At The Moment.

I'm sitting in my dorm room in college on the east coast, loving it and doing well. My boyfriend and I have both been completely sober since Thursday, August 30th, the day before I left. I re-found the love for food, and I know I've gained weight but not as much as I should. Had my metabolism not been screwed up by smoking so much, I know I'd be able to gain weight. This whole time I know I've been in withdrawal mode due to on-and-off bouts of sickness. For the first week I was always itchy. I can't really sit still for too long without fidgeting some, and on occasional nights I can't sleep well. I don't sleep much, for that matter. I go to bed at around 4 or 5 in the morning (a combination between forcing myself asleep because my boyfriend is on the phone pleading with me to do so) and wake up at around 10:30.

I can feel my body returning to normal and it really makes me happy. It feels good to be completely sober for once, and even though I'm around drugs (especially alcohol) all the time, I'm determined to keep my promise to my boyfriend and to myself. It's good to know that everything that I'm feeling, whether it be mental or physical, is coming straight from myself and not sidetracked by some sort of chemically enhanced substance. I don't really have cravings, but when I do think about meth, I can easily envision myself hitting that pipe and turning it to get the best hit, blowing it out while I feel that momentary flash of highness - - that illusion that one day I'll get that same tingly feeling as I did the first time if *only* I smoked enough. But, it's chasing a false dream, and I might as well stop before I kill myself.

I remember at the end of the summer my boyfriend said that he noticed I got this extremely sad look on my face whenever I watched him take a hit of tweek and that he couldn't bear to look at me, he couldn't bear the thought that he was causing me pain. That was a big deal of how he stopped himself.. he forced himself to smoke a bowl while I sat there and watched him with this sad look on my face until he started crying and put the lighter down. I heard the pipe fall from his fingers and tinkle as it hit the cement garage floor, unfortunately not breaking from the slight impact... but the whole time my eyes were on him as he cried. I started crying also, and he crept over to me on the couch and we held each other and cried, and all I could do was stroke his hair and kiss him on the temple, repeat that I loved him and that It would be alright because it's over, This shit is over. That was the night that he blew up the pipe with the Black Cat firecrackers.

I didn't tell half the stories which happened.. this is only an overview. I cry when I think of most of them - - I cried when I wrote that last paragraph as I remembered the reality of the whole ordeal, the craziness and the pain, just everything.

When I went to the required Narcotics Anonymous meetings while I was in rehab, I listened to all the stories like this one but I didn't *hear* them. I didn't bother to try and understand or take their advice because I was under the mirage impression that nothing like that would ever happen to me. Well, it did. And it can happen to anyone, whether you choose to believe it or not. It's not like you wake up and say 'Hey, I think I'm going to start smoking speed every single day and deal drugs.' It's just something that happens, that you slip into, and when you do.. you'll be one lucky bastard if you can pull yourself out of it.

Keep Safe.
-J

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 9617
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 2, 2004	Views: 67,495
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