The sad reality of being a drug addict is that eventually you find yourself trying to escape from your escape. After a decade of addiction, all I wanted to do was escape to a better life outside of using.

As an avid heroin user for almost 10 years, I believed that detox wouldn’t work. I had my mind made up. I was too stubborn to even attempt it. I think for the most part I believed continuing to use would be much easier than trying to stop. Withdrawal? I didn’t have time for that. I have an all-or-nothing mentality, and I had my mind made up that if I wanted to stop, I just would. I knew my strength—or so I thought.

My road to addiction began as innocently as taking some painkillers to manage a severely broken ankle. I loved the feeling that Oxy gave me as I fell asleep. It was a sudden rush of calm all over my body, I felt no pain and not a single care in the world. It’s scary how fast my body became used to it. At first I didn’t even want to take any pain pills, but sleeping in a cast was really uncomfortable. I soon figured out taking an Oxy would help me sleep. Some nights I would mix Oxy and Vicodin just to make sure I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night.

Since I was prescribed painkillers in the ER, I was never really told how to taper off of them. The thought of becoming addicted honestly never crossed my mind.

After a few months, my ankle had pretty much healed but I still found myself taking pain pills. If I tried to go a day without them, the withdrawal hit me like a ton of bricks; I was nauseous, broke out in cold sweats and craved relief. So I continued taking them, and promised myself that I would stop tomorrow, and then that turned into the next day and so on. I found myself making excuses to take them everyday. For me, it was easier to take more pills than to face the fact, or even the possibility, that I couldn’t continue on without drugs.

At first it wasn’t hard to get pills. I would just keep complaining about the pain and my doctor wrote me a new script. I was honestly surprised how easy it was. It seemed nothing would get in my way and I was able to keep my secret a little longer every month. That alone gave me a high. No one knew I was doing anything. I kept things private and could put on a great act. To everyone else I was normal. I think this was one more factor that led to my denial that I had a drug problem. However, about six months in, my doctor starting questioning my drug use and would not renew my prescription. Instead, he wrote me out a plan to taper off. I still remember tossing the paper into the trash as I left.

That night I began frantically looking for an alternative because I still wasn’t ready to stop. There are hundreds of drug forums online, and pretty much any question you have you can google an answer for. I wasn’t necessarily searching for it but one thing continually popped up right in front of my eyes: heroin. I found so much information on heroin; it seemed to be a much cheaper alternative to Oxy and easier to get. The only problem was I didn’t know any drug dealers. It’s not something people exactly advertise as their career choice either. Through the forums I had learned that sometimes drug dealers linger around methadone clinics. It sounds terrible, but most people leave these places and instantly score more. It’s like preying on the weak. I had success finding a drug dealer and from then on my new addiction was heroin.

I think many drug users, and addicts in general, continually try to justify using. Read more “the fix”…