Marijuana to Methamphetamines-An Interview with Bill

Bill** was 12 years old when he first tried marijuana. He recalls, "One day at school, one of the cool kids asked me to go over to his house and smoke pot. Everyone wants to be in the cool crowd, so I was definitely up for it." Unfortunately, that one invitation to experiment led Bill on a slow descent into habitual marijuana use. Smoking at his friend's house after school turned into smoking at a friend's house before and after school. In no time, he was smoking every chance he could. Bill remembers, "We went to Steve's** house every morning, afternoon and night to smoke-pretty much any spare moment we had."

When asked whether he was stoned during school, Bill replied, "Yeah, all the time." Yet none of his teachers ever noticed. "If teachers think there's no hope for you, they don't really care what you do in class," he says. "The teachers stop noticing you."

Bill felt, however, that school was good for one thing-getting drugs. He would score bags of marijuana for just $5 a piece-about the same price as a cafeteria lunch. "The sixth graders bought [drugs] from the seventh graders. The eighth graders went to the high school and got it from ninth graders. Some of the kids, I later found out, had parents who smoked pot so it could have been from them, also," he recalls.

Never did the idea that marijuana was harmful stop Bill from using. He remarks, "You always kind of know it's bad for you, but that's never enough to really stop you."

In the tenth grade, Bill moved on to harder drugs. He says, "I went straight from pot to Ecstasy. Once I started doing club drugs, I did anything I could get my hands on. I did acid, mushrooms, nitrous oxide, special K, cocaine and methamphetamines. I experimented with a lot of stuff."

At first, Bill and his friends would attend raves at least once a week. Soon, however, one night of partying turned into an entire weekend of debauchery. Every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night they'd drive anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours to find a rave and do drugs, making rides home a perilous journey. "The drive home was always pretty scary because everyone was so messed up. We'd [play] ro-sham-bo to decide who had to drive and since most of the time the parties were two hours away, it was a long drive home," he remembers. "The most common occurrence was the driver falling asleep and waking up just in the brink of time to avoid crashing into the car in front."

For a long time, Bill was successfully able to hide his drug use from his mom. He remembers, "[Whenever I would go out] I told her that I was staying at a friend's house or I was going on a camping trip or something. My mom has always been really trusting so she gave me quite a bit of leeway. And at that age you're changing quite a bit, anyway, so it's kind of hard to notice changes in behavior [caused by drug use]."

But when Bill became hooked on methamphetamines, his life started unraveling quickly. He started to shoplift merchandise in hardware stores and return the stolen items for cash in order to support his habit. He also began doing drugs at home, something he had vowed not to do. At 17, his mother finally caught him in the act. He recalls, "It was early in the morning, I was getting up to go to work and I did a line of speed. I decided that wasn't enough, so I was going to do another line. Just as I was about to do it, my mom walked in. It was the worst experience of my whole life, the worst feeling I ever felt. My stomach just hit the floor."

The confrontation was brief as Bill tried to leave the house quickly and go to work. But when he returned, he found his mom and estranged dad waiting for him. He says, "Somehow she tracked down my dad in Las Vegas and got him here by the time I got home from work. He took me to the doctor the next day and got a referral to an outpatient drug treatment center. I went to Twin Town that afternoon."

After three weeks of treatment, Bill got out and quickly slipped back into his usual pattern of drug use, but it wasn't as easy the second time around. His mom tapped the phone, so that she'd know what he was up to at all times. Bill says, "All the calls I made to get drugs, all the calls I made about stealing [or] however I got my money, she got it all on tape." It wasn't until he was arrested one night that he realized he needed to get clean.

Bill recalls, "I was walking home from my girlfriend's house one night and I had a knife up my sleeve. [I also had] a glass pipe in my sock and some speed in the watch pocket of my jeans. A cop saw me, said I looked suspicious and pulled me over. He immediately he found the knife and then my pipe. He started going through my backpack and found mirrors, credit cards, straws, and baggies." The policeman also found Bill's 17-year-old girlfriend's diary detailing their intimate relationship and threatened to charge him for statutory rape since he was 18 at the time. "It got pretty ugly, but the guy ended up saving my life by throwing me in the back of the car. That was something I never wanted to experience, so that's when I made the choice to go back into treatment and get clean. That's when it worked for me."

Ultimately, Bill underwent six months of outpatient treatment and was faithful to the program. "It got me clean and my relationship back on track with my mom, my sister, my dad. It got me expressing my feelings. It improved my life 100%."

In thinking about the consequences of his drug use, Bill remarks, "I don't even want to think about how many brain cells I've lost. Every one is valuable and I lost a lot." He continues to say, "I [also] lost out on a lot of education. I lost out on a lot of friends.People that I could have been friends with for life who would have been really good friends, I ended up losing because I wanted to get high and they didn't want to be around that."

Bill believes that using marijuana was what led him on a path toward years of drug use and the subsequent troubles that resulted from his addiction. "Marijuana opened me up to everything else which got me in trouble," he states. "Everything started with pot. It started the chain of events."

**Name has been changed

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