Posted: March 16, 2015, 5:17 AM
When i was young i was always a troubled youth. I was diagnosed as hyperactive at 2yrs old and given Ritalin. From that point onward I was drugged by my family and the Doctors and shrinks as I made my way through my unstable life. I was forced to take at least 1 psych med 3 times a day, usually 2 or 3, 3 times a day plus the other drugs that were supposed to help with the side effects of the psych meds for an ever changing myriad of diagnoses. At the age of 16 after 14 years of forced drug use and struggling to understand what was wrong with me. I had had enough, enough of the drooling and being zombie that the meds were making me. That summer i started smoking pot and self medicating. I told my mother i was no longer taking prescription drugs or going counseling....And i never looked back. The pot sorted me right out, the tense over reactionary youth with a chip on his shoulder disappeared when i was high. The often made fun of mental case who was drooling in his textbook by 4th period english class as he struggled to stay concise was now the dopey eyed cool kid who was accepted by my peers. Unfortunately continued troubles at home kept me from graduating high school. Fast forward.... I was 21 still self medicating with pot and had recently started messing with meth that summer when i had ran across an old jr high school friend who had taken me under his wing, Gary. Gary was a semi straight edge skinhead from orange county california. His step father was dope cook, his mother a dealer and his older brother a meth addict. Gary's brother had just died from a meth overdose. Gary wasnt going to let that happen to me. So he talked his mom into letting me move into their house and he told me straight up with love "If i ever catch you doing meth again i will stomp you". He showed me that there was a better way to be using the old straight edge have some pride in yourself ideology. "We are better than those tweekers". He saved my life, because i was headed down the road that so many of my peers were going down. Jail or dead. Problem was i was still a drug addict. Using pot daily to calm down and drown the guilt of what a waste of a person i was. I couldnt hold down a job for any length of time. I couldnt maintain a meaningful relationship because of the co- dependency my pot addiction was creating. I was selfish and immature and always stoned. 20 years later here i am. 40 yrs old and still in the same rut, no job, no wife.....no life. But i am now drug free. 6 years ago i left my co- dependent and abusive (only when i didnt have pot) relationship in cali. Left my 8 year old daughter with her mother and moved to to Tennessee. I wasnt the supportive father she needed me to be, i was to busy being stoned or using resources that should have gone to her to get stoned. So i took an offer from my family to move out here. At first i tried to continue to self medicate. But the scene here is very different from the home scene i was used to. Here i was an outsider and nobody wanted to sell to me and if they did they marked up the price so high it was insulting. I couldnt just call up the homie and have a $50 OZ dropped off by noon. So i tried to grow my own for a few seasons and even though ive got the green thumb i had ran out of seed. Last fall i got my last and final harvest. I was used to "cleaning up" through the winter and putting myself and my family through the pot detox roller coaster. Like many of you I was loud, rude, emotional and dealt with the crazy dreams and nightmares that long term pot use suppresses. I had been smoking pot for so long that I had forgot what it was like to dream and had to deal with the pent up nightmares that my sub concise needed to release. Of course you still dream and have nightmares when you smoke pot, you just generally dont remember them in the morning. Anyways I stopped self medicating 4 months ago. I didnt quit so much as i just ran out and its not worth the effort to continue doing so. Ive found that many of the issues i was self medicating for related to my medicating in the first place. Theres nothing wrong with me and there never has been. My future is bright, job prospects are good and even though my resume looks like a** i can still pass a piss test in a local job market where most are hooked on pills and cant. I just needed to grow up and grow out of it. I look back on what Gary taught me and realize he was right. To have some pride in myself and hold myself to a higher standard. To not cheat, cheat myself and my child out of our lives together, cheat my ex's out of the man they deserved and cheat myself out being a functional member of society. If you are struggling with getting off of pot, go read some of the other posts made in the forums for the other drugs and count yourself lucky. Pot is easy to kick! it isnt heroin or pills or even cigarettes and caffeine. Thats what i wanted to share with you, the choice is yours to make. Im glad i made mine, if only i had made it sooner. you dont need a 12 step or a therapist or a crutch drug. You just gotta make up your mind to do it.