Imagine That!
My days of rock and roll partying with drugs and alcohol began in the year of 1975, however the days and nights of the “party” had ended many moons ago. It hadn’t been a “party” for a very long time. That first joint in 1975 started a roller coaster love affair with drugs that would last in excess of 30 years. It almost boggles the mind to know that a majority of your life can be actually ruined in one second, deviating from your own ethics, telling yourself just this once won’t effect anything much. Such is the price one pays when one makes the decision to do drugs. It was a nightmare, a xxxxxxx nightmare.
I traced my 31 years of drug abuse and suffering back to one afternoon in 1975 when I wanted to be a part of the wrong crowd. In one instant most of my adult life was ruined. Smoking weed the first time opened up the door to almost every drug and every bad situation imaginable.
An article I once read was titled “Liars, Cheats, and Whores” after that one day I grew up knowing them all. A singer once bellowed out the words “the pay-offs and the rip-offs and the things nobody saw” in a song called the “Smugglers Blues”, I came to understand those terms too well.
I was able to take that one almost fatal moment so long ago through the stages up until the miracle life saving experience. There have been times going through the stages in Clearwater, FL that I reflected on a scary thought, “That things had been so bad for so long that doing the right thing might just be too good for me.”
I started out in low conditions then arriving in the condition of normal, which the average person lives in everyday. “Normal” is a very long haul for a recovering drug addict. Being normal again, what a miracle.
Please believe me, there is nothing exciting, romantic, or attractive about a drug addict. With the beginning of the year 2007 insight, I was sick, very sick. I had contracted a fatal case of “The Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” a sugarcoated term for the horrors of withdrawal. It was both a physical and mental affliction. The last years and there were several of the last years, I would awake in full-blown drug withdrawal from yesterday’s doses of painkillers and Xanax, I was also smoking $500 an ounce Kentucky Blue Grass between my pharmaceutical feedings. Hell, I was sick all the time and I was feeling so low I couldn’t reach up to touch bottom. Experimenting with drugs was a thing of the past, now I was into full-scale research and I was dying, I was killing myself. Killing myself slowly, one day at a time, one dose at a time, a fate you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. There wasn’t a damn thing that was funny when I was using dope. I was angry, always. Even when I wasn’t in pain, I was in pain. My vices became my behavior.
I was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana on September 13th, 1960. My mother Verda, a Cajun was one of fourteen children, my father Gilbert a veteran of WWII and a brilliant businessman. I was the youngest of three children one brother one sister.
I was raised in an upper-class neighborhood in an upper-class family. I was to receive the best education money could buy and my future was so bright I had to wear shades. The nightmare would start in 1975 at the age of fifteen. The times were changing, the Vietnam War had come to an end a few years earlier, the longhaired hippies were evolving into all different forms, athletes, bookworms, trade and industry folks. The drug culture was invading all walks of society…. and I walked right into it.
Bell-bottom jeans, lava lamps, black lights and marijuana would be the center of my universe throughout my high school years. Peace, love, sex, drugs, rock and roll became my trademarks as was getting high.
The first time I smoked weed it was the beginning of the end for me. After getting stoned for the first time, I wanted to stay stoned, and I would do a damn good job of staying high for the next three decades. For me it was a love affair with drugs with very few annulments or divorces.
I graduated high school at the age of 16 by taking extra-credit classes in the summers of my sophomore and junior years. I had already been smoking weed during breaks at school the summer school just gave me more time away from home to get stoned. In 1977 I started training in Shotokan karate under the guidance of Earnie “Radar” Smith, he was the World and International heavyweight karate champion. I became a black belt quickly under his teaching. I began fighting on the PKA tournament circuit this allowed me to associate with an elite group of drug dealers. Now to add to the street Quaaludes, Mandrax, weed, cocaine and other stuff I was already playing with, I had a free-ticket to all pharmaceuticals. I traveled across the United States and the world with my fight bag packed with uppers/downers and all-arounders. I was also balancing a college schedule at the same time. Then in 1986 I found the devil’s best invention Xanax. I used Xanax to solve all my problems and quite often the biggest problem arose when I would find my pill bottle empty. My father passed-away in September of 1989…I was drunk the night he died…”Imagine that!”
I continued fighting on the tournament trail until 1993 and at the age of 33, I retired from fighting and went into drug-abusing full time. I was seeded in the families real estate business, which allowed me to pop pills from behind my desk and I had the biggest nightclub in the south under my control. Now I had added an unlimited supply of liquor and whores to go along with my weed/cocaine/pharmaceutical friends.
I would soon find out that playing my fight doctors and the family dentist for painkillers was easier and cheaper than buying my needs on the street, and would only buy pills from the dealers when my months supply of Xanax and opiates were exhausted… usually after the first week.
The doctors in the small town of Lake Charles became wise to my wicked ways and I had to escalate to the pain management doctors of Houston, Texas. As usual the doctors were very sympathetic and opportunistic to my plight of old fight injuries. I would make the 2 and ¼ hour drive and procure the world’s most addictive controlled dangerous substances. It was a game. I would walk into the office that was packed with other abusers and be seen right away regardless of the appointment time. At the doctor’s office I had the girl who answered the phone, the girl who made the appointments, the girl who took the blood pressure on my fast envelope of cash payroll and they were waiting eagerly on me each month. The doctor was always awaiting my arrival with open arms…. and hands for my money. The price of poker had just gone up to the tune of $1,300 a month for the doctors and the scripts; Doc also owned the pharmacy across the hall from his office. A fairly high price tag on the visit but I added Oxycotin and narcotic cough syrup to my arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. My Texas haul consisted of; Xanax, Oxycotin, Flexeril, Soma, cough syrup and a list of other dope I just can’t recall the names of…”Imagine that!”
I would fly down to Mexico when the months over-abundance over of quick fix cures were gone in about 14 days, there I would nail down 3-month supplies of Opiates, Valium and Soma. My cocaine and weed connections were kept entirely secret between the Dixieland Mafia and myself. During my fighting years the Dixieland Mafia had been very good to me. In 2004 my mother died I was stoned…”Imagine that!”
Thinking back over the early years the pharmaceutical-devil’s tools were names like Quaalude, Tunial, secobarbital, or prelude in the next three decades Lucifer would add other names to his list of deadly poisons like Xanax, Percocet, Oxycotin, and a long list of others. The dope was killing me and I knew it. “Imagine that!”
When my drug problem was first made known to my family, my father had sent for the world’s best doctors…my mother sent for the “voodoo” woman from Ville Platte, Louisiana in attempts to arrest my drug addiction. Their attempts didn’t work…”Imagine that!”
In search for relief from my drug addiction I was in and out of a countless number of what were billed as the “Best” drug/alcohol rehabs and I had spent 100’s of thousands of dollars on drug recovery and I was never any better...I never once felt recovered. Those 30-day stays didn’t work for me…nothing worked for me. Most of the best so-called rehabs always started off the same, “We are going to wean you off for the first 4-7 days.” Hell, I loved being “weaned off”. The only thing they were actually doing was poisoning me a little bit more than I already was. Those places were actually giving me the “Dope I was on” while I was paying them to get me off of “the dope I was on.” I was dope-sick when I got there and I was still dope-sick when I left. “Imagine that!”
There was a time I entered a 30-day inpatient drug rehab program and I was in hardcore drug withdrawal when I walked in and I was in hardcore drug withdrawal when I walked out, a month later. However, the folks who took my money told me how good I looked and how good I felt before they discharged me…”yeah right!” Two days later, I suffered a withdrawal seizure that left me with blood spewing and it took 29 stitches to sew up my forehead. “Imagine that.”
In the final days of my addiction nightmare I was keeping a stash of pills and pot in the freezer with the hopes that the cold temperature would keep the dope fresher so when it was time to dose or smoke (and it was always time) I would catch a faster and better buzz. In the final days, I would awake from sleep in full-blown withdrawal and jump out of bed on a run for the freezer, which held that magical cure that would shake the monkey off of my back…for the next few hours. My pet monkey had grown to the size of King Kong and the big ape was holding the Empire State Building in one hand. I woke up every morning sick and I would sweat butterbeans in 20-degree freezing weather without the “shit”.
I became street-wise, college educated, and computer literate while abusing drugs. In the drug world there are few things I haven’t done and there is nothing I haven’t seen. I had been stoned for 31 years and my entire adult life had been spent high, the majority of my adult life had been wasted. I had been wasted. “Imagine that!”
Doing and getting drugs had taken priority over my girlfriend, family, religion, work, money, or freedom. I no longer had friends I only had associates. I was out of control and I had been out of control for a good number of years. I used drugs to live and lived to use drugs. In 31 years my drug addiction never took a day off, a vacation, or a holiday and it worked overtime 24/7/365. “Imagine that!”
By the start of winter in 2006 I was begging for relief from my drug addiction. The drugs for the day had begun only to last me until the early afternoon and then I had to take or hunt down more or be knocking on deaths door once again from the withdrawal. I was in a constant panic to score the drugs for today and the drugs for tomorrow. I had to have the drugs…that was on the top of my “must do” list everyday. “Imagine that!”
On November 13th of 2006 I boarded a commercial flight in Lake Charles, Louisiana for my destination of Clearwater, Florida. I was about to enter a drug rehabilitation program that I knew absolutely nothing about. I was told in a phone conversation “It’s something like you’ve never heard of or seen before.” That it was.
I then entered the drug detoxification program a few days after I arrived in Clearwater. I was sicker than most. I knew and everyone around me knew there was not one drug addict on the face of God’s green Earth that was as bad an addict as I was. Not one.
Before starting the program I prayed that I might die so I could feel better. After beginning the program I felt better after the first week. I felt good after the second. During the detox program I began to see that the good qualities in others and was amazed to find there were still good qualities left in me. The drugs for so very long had masked those good qualities. On the 45th day I felt my body and mind were clear of all drug toxins. Neither had been clear or clean since I smoked that first joint in 1975 and this was 31 years later. I have no cravings for drugs or any desire to ever use drugs again. God has looked down and smiled on me. This was a true miracle.
In a sense the drugs and drug life had caused me to become “socially retarded”. The drugs had my mind in a state of suspended animation and I had become a social recluse. “Reality” and “Responsibility” were things I had dodged and avoided with drugs for over three decades. I was born on September 13th, 1960 but didn’t start taking responsibility for myself or my actions until November 13th, 2006. I found reality. God smiled again. This was another true miracle.
I went from being ”the hopeless drug addict” to “the hope for drug addicts” everywhere.
“IMAGINE THAT!!!!”
(My Momma and Daddy got down on their knees every night and prayed I would get over the drug thing. The program is what every Momma and Daddy prays for when the dope-man cometh. I suffered for over a quarter of a century until the day I found the program…I feel I suffered needlessly. 99% of us are from good families, are of above average intelligence, have some college education or a better than average education. We are from different walks of life, different geographical backgrounds, and different make-ups of families, different ethnical backgrounds, different religious backgrounds but there is one thing we share in common it is when it comes to drinking alcohol or using drugs we are all Mr. And Ms. Excess. In the early days of my recovery an old friend from back home asked me, “You mean you aren’t even going to smoke weed anymore?” I laughed and replied, “Hell, that’s the very thing that started my living nightmare.” “Imagine that!”)
(Note to younger folks: In my drug life I always had plans for how I was going to score drugs and of what I was going to do once I had the drugs in hand. Both of those moves I had down pat in my playbook. However, the plan for when or how I was going to QUIT using the drugs never even entered my game plan. The thought of ever quitting the drugs was irrelevant and totally unconceivable to me. When others confronted my father about my drug use they usually got, “Hell, my son is in college and he is on the dean’s list…he will grow out of the drug thing.” I didn’t grow out of in my parent’s lifetime and I feel very lucky to have gotten over it in mine.” “Throughout my entire lifetime the only times that I had any kind of trouble the drugs were in there somewhere.” “Imagine that!”
In one of the most published books on addiction ever written I can remember a very important part of the book concerning hitting “rock bottom”. The book didn’t say one has to lose their sanity, health, integrity, ethics, family, friends, freedom, homes or money or all of the above before they get help and stop using drugs or alcohol and you don’t. “Imagine that!”) T.W. 2008