What it was like, what happened, and what it's like now: A year of sobriety.

Well, the title is a bit of a misnomer - it won't actually be a year until April 8th. Still, I thought it might be interesting to tell the story of my addiction to drugs - heroin especially. What follows is part one of a series that I hope to update once or twice a week.

I remember the first time I used an opiate recreationally. I was 22 and a senior in college. Migraines run in my family and my mother, who didn’t know better at the time, gave me a bottle of about 15 OC 20’s in case I got a bad one. They had been prescribed for my deceased uncle who had fractured his arm badly a few years before his death. Preferring alcohol, they sat in a medicine bag with other miscellaneous over the counter remedies for months before I decided to give one a try. I popped one before heading to my math class – one of the couple I had left to finish my mathematics degree.

I remember feeling light, a little giggly, but I don’t remember being overly impressed. I certainly enjoyed the experience but I didn’t notice the euphoria that I would chase like a mad man later. The pill bottle sat unused for a number of months longer.

In the meantime, I focused on my drinking and the shrooms I grew in my closet. There’s a whole other back story to that, but the gist is that I got curious, ordered some spores, and away I went. I grew just enough for personal use and friends and enjoyed taking a vacation from myself, as I described it, about once a month.

Life continued and I lived a normal, though somewhat isolated life. I had a number of friends but I’d never had a girlfriend and I always felt rather socially awkward and different. I got a crappy job at a grocery store after graduating – the Piggly Wiggly – and I kept to psychedelics and binge drinking with the occasional bowl.

After about 8 months of being bored beyond belief at my job, I decided to go back for a master’s degree. For no particularly well thought out reason, I applied and was accepted to a graduate program for geography, which had been my minor at college.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I didn’t belong in the program. I went back for the wrong reasons and being raised in a rather conservative religious household, I felt uneasy around the more liberal attitudes of my peers. I turned to isolated nightly drinking until I started enduring too many of the ill physical effects of alcohol. Desperate for an alternative, I managed to order a few ounces of pot through the mail that I found through an online service. This was well before TOR and the darknet and as such, delivery was slow and unreliable and I ran out rather quickly. Lacking the social contacts to buy anymore locally, I started to look for an alternative.

Eventually, I started to think back to opiates. By this time, I had finished the OC’s – mostly mixing a half a pill here or there with alcohol. After some research, I found that a legal loophole existed whereby you could by dried poppy pods for flower arrangements. You could then grind them and steep them like a tea. The resulting taste is disgustingly bitter- but I finally understood the appeal of getting high on opiates.

The progression was slow. At the time, you could still order them on eBay and it was easy enough to stock up. Depending on the pod size, I only needed 4 or 5 of them per dose and ordered in boxes of 50-100. I loved the feeling; I loved the itch; I loved the rested feeling but inability to sleep. I loved lying in my bed and binge watching the entire Firefly series while high. The tea gave me a feeling of love; a feeling of hope; a feeling that no matter how bad things might seem to be, that they would turn out okay.

I think this is a pretty good stopping point. I'll pick up next time with my first experience with morphine sulfate. I hope you found it an interesting read.