“Addicted”

How I even got addicted to heroin is quite the story. I spent so much time hating drugs when I was younger. What happened really is crazy. I am not here to glorify any of it, a lot of it is very intense and exciting; but some of it was also very heartbreaking. I want to inspire as well as educate. It’s not the most tragic or comedic story I will have to tell. But hopefully it’ll give u a little view into who I am. As well as giving people an idea of how it all shook down. There were so many factors that led to me becoming addicted to heroin. It was never my dream to be hooked on drugs. I definitely didn’t chose that life but now I chose to get out of it. 

My mom and I were separated when I was 4 years old, I ended up with my dad. When I was younger, I attributed my mothers absence to not wanting me, but that wasn’t true and there is way more to it. I thought it had to do with drugs and alcohol so I always swore from a young age that I would never do drugs, and wouldn’t let them ruin my life. I remember when my best friend started smoking pot the first semester of my Senior year and I was mad at him cause I thought he was ruining his life.

As a Senior in High School, I didn’t go to many parties with my friends, who sometimes would go on the weekends. I just did not want to get in trouble with my dad. My brother was in college so when I would visit him I did drink here and there and at 17 I smoked weed for the first time. That was the end of senior year, 2005, on 4/20. Kind of funny for sure, it was just me and three friends driving around in my car. They say you don’t get high your first time smoking. Well, like Chappelle said, “not me, oh not us, we were really really high.” I got so completely stoned that I put deodorant on my pants because I thought my dad would smell it and get pissed. Well I smoked the rest of the school year and into that first summer. Noone had talked to me about my ACT or going to college; no advisor nor my dad said anything so right before the end of the year I took the test and got a 24. I tested into UW-Milwaukee with just the ACT score so that was cool. The craziest part about that is, I guess on the reading part and got an 18. Wonder what my score could have been. I read more books in jail, than I did in college, true story. And wouldn’t you believe, after staying out of trouble all through high school and into freshman year of college. Four days after I turned 18 I got arrested for a pipe in Downer Woods.

Go figure, I had a semi normal freshman year of college and was really just smoking and working a little at a grocery store by my dad’s house. I had a car and some money from graduating but college was expensive and I was commuting about 20 minutes from Brookfield to the East Side of Milwaukee, it kind of sucked going to college like that at first. Then summer of 2006, about to go into my Sophomore year of college my life changed. 

I wanted to sell a little bit of marijuana and just get some free to smoke instead of spending the money I worked for to buy it. So I went and bought an ounce from the guy. After that he fronted me whatever I wanted and my business and world changed. Within a year I had quit my job and moved out of my dad’s house and to the East Side of Milwukee. Right around that time is when the craziest part of the story happened. I was driving home from a girlfriends house around midnight in Mequon,WI. I T-BONED a car in the middle of the intersection with no other cars on the road; the kid thought he could make it and smash, totalled. The next day he wanted to meet up to give me $3,000 for a Nissan Altima and I had been selling weed and I asked him if he “wanted to buy some pot.” What happened next changed everything. He asked me for 100 worth which I thought was rare. I had never been one to rob someone but I will charge someone what they think it is worth. He proceeded to pay me 300 dollars an 8th, which is about 40 dollars today, every other day for the next 2.5 years. I did the math on that one customer and it came to well over 6 figures during that time. Needless to say he never felt like I was screwing him over and he never felt like I was ripping him off. He actually brought liquor and beer to a few of my parties and we ended up being friends over that time. He just was a foreign exchange student from Taiwan and he didn’t know anyone else that had weed. I figured he would find someone right away, but when he kept coming to me and not beating my ass. I just went with it.

The problem with that was having that much money. Going into the summer of 2007 I had been starting to get pretty wild with the partying. I was already doing cocaine all day everyday, but added to that was binges of ecstasy, LSD, mushrooms, whippets, ketamine, which really had me in a wild state. No matter what I did or spent though the money was coming in. By 2008 I had a really nice place with my buddy and a girlfriend I really loved and a puppy we just got. I didn’t realize how out of control I was even with all the drugs because of the nice house we were living in and the fact that we had just gone to California on vacation and would cook out and kick it everyday. I was vulnerable and paranoid and really looking for a new high. 

I hung out with different groups of people from all over the place and a lot of people were doing oxys at that time. I had never done one but I saw people doing them and never really thought it looked fun. Honestly. But I tried half of an 80 my first time, that’s way too much. I was puking my ass off and telling everyone how good I felt every time they would ask.

A week later the same buddy had a little line of heroin and I wanted to try it, he even said, no, but let me cause I begged him to try it, after everything I had done, I just wanted to try it, just to say I tried it. Well my girlfriend found out and she was mad I did it without her. I had no idea how to get more and just kind of forgot about it, until a week later, the company that was making Oxys was going to make the OCs uncrushable. This was going to make it so hard to get pills now. That same weekend my buddy’s friend came over to trade a bunch of heroin for a bunch of cocaine that was always left in my freezer. Heroin literally walked through my front door and I had thousands of dollars to spend on “something new.” 

At first we would buy about 500 dollars worth at a time and sell it to all the people that I knew that couldn’t find pills anymore. Nothing I sold anyone killed anyone ever, but pretty much everyone I knew from around that area is either dead or clean. There were very few of us left that made it through this heroin pandemic. It is really sad because I had two good friends die early on in college, one did overdosed on a cocktail of drugs but mostly Suboxone killed him and the other buddy fell in the river when he was drunk over the fourth of July. I thought it was too young to lose friends to anything, little did I know, that was only the beginning. 

Having the money flow and new habits was a perfect storm to get very addicted very quickly. I would do such large amounts and my tolerance was very high. At first I didn’t know much about getting sick, didn’t know about how addicted I was becoming and I never really ran out for the first year so I never knew what I was really getting myself into. I had never wanted to become an addict and I was so damn smart. The fact that it was even an option makes me wonder, and the fact that I chose that, makes me sad. Eventually the life that I thought was so great was no longer and I struggled so much over the next 10 years.

I have so many stories about going through my additiction. I just hope to inspire someone to keep trying to get clean. Just never give up on yourself. Ever. So many people wrote me off as dead. I never gave up trying to get clean.

Top left: Eastside of Milwaukee, 19 years old Top right and Bottom: Brookfield 18 years old Middle left: South Beach, Miami, 19 years old Middle right: 17 years old, right before college