Confessions Of A Former Child Prodigy Turned Heroin Addict [Introduction]
Introduction
I have now attempted to start this work in a handful of different ways. The truth is that I'm genuinely not sure what the best way to begin is. It serves to reason that some sort of introduction is expected, though I'm not exactly sure what to say.
What follows is not quite fiction, though I also hesitate to call it non-fiction. The simplest way to describe it would be as a memoir, though I've personally always found that term, especially when used by writers from my generation, to be incredibly pretentious. Generally speaking, I will be following a serialized fashion of storytelling, with each chapter being something like a blog entry.
Over the course of my life, I've had what I suppose most people would refer to as a series of rather unique experiences. The first of these was a short career as a child actor, starting when I was around 9 years old, and which eventually culminated in my co-starring in one feature film in the mid-1990s. I'd rather not doxx myself, but the movie I co-starred in was a "big screen" movie made by a well known director, and was distributed by Sony and Paramount Pictures. The focus of this work is not my career as a child actor - but I feel it deserves a little more than a cursory mention if for no other reason than child actors are often stereotyped as people who end up in desperate situations, often facing things like unemployment, PTSD from a childhood of abuse, and "solutions" such as self-medication with hard drugs, which usually merely exacerbates the original issue. I vividly recall one of my friends in high school laughing about the advice his mother gave him when he admitted to feeling jealous of me, as a 10 year old.
His mother told him not to stress about it, because "child actors just turn out to be heroin addicts anyway". I wish that my life hadn't been proof of that statement being the rule rather than the exception. I wish I could say that I "slipped" and "ended up in a bad situation" that I would soon find my way out of, but the truth is that I honestly don't know how my story will end.
I stated earlier that my life has consisted of a series of experiences which most people would consider rather unique. In addition to a successful career as a former child actor, I began a career as a (serial) tech entrepreneur when I was 15, at which time I started and later sold a company which was selling internet security and privacy software that I had developed after a summer school class I had signed up for, was canceled.
By the time I graduated high school, I had started and sold another company, which was a precursor to popular services of today such as PCAnywhere and the built-in Windows Remote Desktop software/protocol. While teenagers starting and eventually selling tech startups is somewhat commonplace today, it certainly was not during the first "dot-com boom" - which took place roughly around the year 2000. Primarily because of my age at the time (15), I received a ton of media attention, ranging from appearances on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, BusinessWeek, The Financial Times, and practically every single local news source.
A few years later, after finishing my master's degree in computer science, I partnered with a Wharton student I had met while we were both undergrads, and together we started a company that made mobile phone software - at a time when mobile apps were still considered an extremely new concept. My partner and I raised roughly $2 million in Venture Capital and eventually grew the company to a staff of around 10 people fulltime. While the feature is now built-into most Android and iOS devices via Google or Apple services, our company made the first commercially available service for backing up/restoring a user's phonebook, e.g. in the case of upgrading to a new phone or replacing a lost phone. Whereas my previous companies were essentially just me running the companies from my parents' basement, this was more of a "real" company - one that had an office, a fulltime staff, real investors, a board of directors, and so forth.
Besides my childhood acting career and success as a tech entrepreneur, I was also an exceptionally good student from an academic standpoint - I began taking college level classes by the time I was a sophomore in high school, and thus had nearly completed the requirements for a computer science major before I actually began college officially. I had my choice of several "top 10" universities, and eventually chose the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. Because I had come in with
a considerable amount of university credits, I was able to finish both my bachelor's degree as well as a master's degree (in computer science) in a total of only 4 years through a program called "sub-matriculation" in which certain students, with the approval of their advisors and an external committee, were allowed to begin taking graduate courses while still officially enrolled as an undergrad.
Like most master's degree programs, it was normally a two year program, meaning it would take most students two years after completing their bachelor's, for a total of six years. Students who sub-matriculated were typically able to save a year, bringing their total time of enrollment to 5 years. Completing the entire program in 4 years, however, was virtually unheard of.
Unfortunately, the economic climate for tech startups was not so great at the time, and by 2009, the market crashed, eventually resulting in a situation where we were forced to accept a buyout that my partner and I were very dissatisfied with. Sadly, we had lost majority control of our board of directors (to our investors) by that point, and thus did not have much choice in the matter.
Unlike most addicts who have a long, storied history of addiction that often involves multiple overdoses, trips to rehab, attempts to get clean, and ultimately relapses, for one reason or another, I've never had an overdose that was dangerous to the point of being potentially fatal. I've seen friends overdose on a couple of occasions - both times I had to call 911, and watched as paramedics hit my friends with narcan, bringing them back from that strange space between a heavy nod, a deep feeling of contentedness, and death. I can't say it's an experience I am envious of having.
I hope this ends up being a story of redemption. I hope that after nearly a decade and a half of on/off use, I will finally be able to put my fascination with opiates behind me, and permanently move on. That said... it's not like I haven't tried this before, and I've failed each time. My current schedule of use, as monitored by a doctor who prescribes me suboxone and clonidine, feels much different than it has
in the past. So what makes things different this time around? I'm not sure I can accurately answer that question. Perhaps it has less to do with any external circumstances, but rather a difference in my own state of mind.
As I said earlier, I genuinely don't know how this story is going to turn out. I hope, more than anything, that it becomes an inspiring story of redemption in which the protagonist slowly but surely manages to overcome his addiction to opiates. This story will focus primarily on the events of my life, starting in the mid-2000s, shortly after I completed my master's degree, when I first developed an addiction to opiates.
Like most people, I didn't intentionally start making decisions that would lead me down the path of addiction... but I guess hindsight is always 20/20.
It started with my roommates and I selling large amounts of marijuana on campus. We maintained very strict rules about who we would sell to (only other dealers, with a strict $1500 minimum purchase), the prices they'd receive, and if/when we were willing to give people product on consignment. By our senior year of college, our "business" had expanded to the point that we had easily cornered the market on campus. I'm quite sure that from around 2004-2006, there wasn't a single bag of weed sold on Penn's campus that couldn't be traced back to us within a handful of steps. This was primarily possible to begin with because I had access to a large amount of liquid capital, thanks to my success as a tech entrepreneur. By the time senior year rolled around, however, we were making so much profit that it hadn't been necessary to dip into my savings for years.
Within a short amount of time, we soon realized that the profit margins on other drugs like xanax, cocaine, and other pharmaceuticals was significantly higher than weed, and expansion seemed like the next logical step for us. We did not want to get into cocaine due to a bad personal experience that one of my roommates had, but everything else was fair game as far as we were concerned. By far the most popular pharmaceutical drugs were benzos (e.g. xanax) and opiates (e.g. oxycodone).
While the other dealers selling xanax on campus had margins of 50-80%, we found a way to sell xanax for what amounted to nearly pure profit. In today's era of "Darknet Markets" and near-anonymous cryptocurrency, it's not terribly difficult to find a source for pure alprazolam, the chemical in xanax. In 2006, however, that connection was analogous to gold. For less than $300, I found a source willing to sell us 1 gram of pure alprazolam powder. A single dose of xanax is 0.5 mg - 2 mg, with most people preferring the 2 mg "large bars" as they resemble serrated bars with 4 demarcations on them, making them easy to break into 0.5 mg pieces. At 2 mg per dose, 1 gram of pure alprazolam would produce 500 doses of 2 mg each. Xanax was typically selling for $4-6 per 2 mg bar at the time, but because we didn't have a pill press, we instead made small liquid vials out of our alprazolam powder, and sold the
500 2 mg doses we made for $3 each or 10 for $25, thus significantly undercutting the competition. This was largely made possible by an enterprising roommate of mine who had access to very precise scales via his job at a chemistry lab. We easily turned that $300 bag of pure alprazolam into nearly $3000 - a 1000% profit. Needless to say, we continued with this process several times over, eventually even receiving a "wholesale" price for buying several grams at a time.
After graduating, however, I stayed in Philly to run my burgeoning tech startup, while the rest of my roommates fanned out to elsewhere in the country, either for jobs or grad school of some kind. As a result, I moved in with another friend of mine, who I was aware was heavily selling cocaine and oxycontin. Between the 2 of us, we had the campus market cornered on weed, coke, and oxy. It quickly became apparent, however, that moving in with him and combining our businesses was quite possibly the worst decision I could have made.
At the time, I didn't realize how heavily addicted Andy was to oxycontin. To be perfectly honest, I didn't even know that opiate addiction worked the way it does. I was under the impression that addiction was always a purely mental issue - something that could be overcome using "mind over matter". I couldn't have been more wrong. I didn't realize that addiction, and in particular opiate addiction, has a physical component to it - regardless of how much you might "want" to quit, there is still always a period of time during which your body will crave the substance you are addicted to. This makes it especially hard to quit an opiate habit. No matter how much you might want to quit, once your body becomes used to that euphoric rush, the urge to continue using is almost like the urge to eat. Regardless of how much you tell yourself that you want to quit, when you feel a craving analogous to hunger pangs and you know that a single phone call will make you feel better in less than 30 minutes, finding the willpower for sobriety is damn near impossible.
Opioid “replacement therapy” drugs like methadone or suboxone help a great deal, and for most addicts, are frankly necessary. They are certainly not miracle cures, but quitting with the aid of methadone/suboxone, benzos, and clonidine, makes the process much more bearable.