Brad developed a serious drug addiction problem in high school and entered a professional treatment center for help.
I first used nicotine when I was 11 or 12 and then marijuana and that was a month before my 13th birthday. I got into alcohol later on that same year.
When I first started using it was really sporadic. My grandfather’s death later that same year, when I was thirteen, kind of triggered up more emotions that I kind of wanted to run from. I tried to use on the regular basis as much as possible. If I had to steal alcohol from my parents, I would do that. I would try to cop as much marijuana as I could from friends. It was just more difficult in middle school than it was in high school to get drugs, but, I mean, it was on a regular basis, as much as possible.
Once you start using drugs, or at least once I started using them, I met the kind of people who had the drugs that I wanted, and it made it much easier to obtain them because usually one of my friends would be able to either give me some or sell me some. What I learned is that users thrive themselves on other kind of users.
I moved from different people to different people. I was kind of a social chameleon, trying to please everybody and make sure I was cool to everybody, every group. So sometimes I’d be with the more stereotypical-like prep kids but they were using, too, or sometimes I would be with the more kids that were called freaks and they’d be using different kinds of drugs ... but I never purposely gave up a group of friends because of what they were doing or what they weren’t doing.
Those who I did move away from the most would be my clean friends, the kids that weren’t using because they didn’t have the same interest obviously as I did. So I would move away from my clean friends in order to have more time to get high because when I did hang out with my clean friends, I found that I was bored because I didn’t have what I wanted and I still had to deal with emotions and my problems.
My drug use really did progress rapidly. I started out with more marijuana and alcohol in middle school, but when I got to high school I was introduced to a world of all different kinds of drugs and the progression of it was just that anytime I saw something new at a party or that somebody had, I would say, “Well, I want to try that out,” and I’d buy it or I’d use it with somebody else who was using it and it was basically whatever I could get my hands on ... anything that took me away from reality. It was like searching for some kind of magic combination that would be the ultimate solution to my ultimate problem which at that point was myself. I didn’t have the proper coping skills so my best friend was my addiction.
I think automatically it starts out as an experiment thing but for some of us it makes more sense to keep doing it than it does for others, and those of us who become addicted or are already are addicts, we find that it is so powerful – why would we want to quit? The big part of addiction is denial, and. I mean, I remember myself thinking, “Well, I have so many problems and feeling really hopeless,” but I figured it couldn’t be the drugs; they don’t have anything to do with this.
When I got to my last six months or so, maybe six or nine months of using, I would get high, and I would still feel the effects of the high except that the feelings beneath it, all the anger and sadness and hopelessness and all that stuff wouldn’t disappear anymore. It would still be there while I was high so then I would be, you know, messed up, you know, high, stoned, except I still would be feeling sad about something, anger, and it would only enhance that emotion rather than take it away.
I actually said to myself that I wasn’t going to use a lot of drugs, and I said that to my parents and stuff, but, I mean, that kind of just slipped away as I started getting more independent from my family, which usually happens around the time of middle school, late elementary school, early middle school. And I just started overall anti-authority, so I figured any messages that came from authority was either lies or just trying to manipulate my behavior, coerce me to do something that I don’t want to do, so drugs seemed to be, you know, something that made sense actually, because it was like, “Well, they didn’t want me to do it, so I’m going to see what’s so bad about it.”
During my using people did talk to me about it occasionally. My mom she said that she figured it out when I was about 14 that something was going on with drugs, but she didn’t know what do to about it and she did know how severe the problem was. Later on when they would start finding things – ‘cause the longer I used the more careless I would get – they would start finding more and more things in my room, around the house, in my car that kind of thing. They would confront me with it and by that point, once I knew that they knew, I was like, “Well, fine, OK, you know. Now do whatever you want to me, but I am going to keep using, basically.” As any drug addict would tell you, it’s hard to hear somebody say that, well, “We think that you have a problem.” It’s really hard to hear that. I just basically fought with it or ignored it and closed up any feeling I had about it with more drugs.
I can’t pinpoint the exact age I realized I had a problem with drugs, but I know that ever since, ever since, I’d say 14 or 15, I felt something was wrong. I just didn’t tie it to the drugs ... my denial was so thick that drugs didn’t seem to have anything to do with it. When drugs stopped covering up my emotions, that’s when I started to think something was wrong here.
My peers helped me see the reality of it – that drugs were affecting me in a negative way. And what I didn’t understand then was that I’m a drug addict who would use anything and everything, so if marijuana’s not there, I’d use alcohol. What I failed to realize was that any drug was what I was addicted to ... anything that gets me away from reality.
My goal is on going to stay clean today rather than avoiding drugs, because I’ve learned that after a while sometimes there certain triggers and certain things that you just can’t eliminate. When I do something that I know is wrong, I can feel it and I feel that guilt and that’s something I didn’t have when I was using drugs. I didn’t have that conscience there – I numbed it, and now that I’m clean, you know, now I have to face that. and I say, “Wait a minute; that was wrong.” So I had two choices: I could either go numb with drugs or I could choose to do something about it. And if I get high, if I don’t die, it would almost be worst than death because I know what kind of misery I was in when I was getting high everyday.
I believe that my peers did have much more of an influence in my life ... I listened to my peers more than I listened to my parents, definitely, or my brother, and they had much stronger impact on anything that I would do. I mean, I think that is normal not just for drugs addicts but just for adolescents in general.