Just Say Yes

I...used to do, well, a lot of drugs.

Daily.

I was messed up, man. I mean I couldn't get enough. I was insatiable. Constantly unsatisfied. Always looking for my next fix. Eventually it got to the point where the drugs weren't even getting me high anymore. They were just sustaining me.

I was happy.

But then I fell in with a new group of friends. They were...clean. I mean you couldn't tell it to look at them. They listened to slow, meaningless music. They wore second-hand clothes and said things that sounded really deep at first but once you had heard it for the seventeeth time you realized that they were pretty lame. So, I figured they were fucked up all the time.

Man, they sure had me fooled. Take it from me: Listening to Phish does not a stoner make.

So, I started not doing drugs just to, you know, fit in. I figured I could start anytime I wanted to. But abstaining socially became a habit before I knew it. I was not doing drugs more and more.

My other friends started to notice. At first it was the little things that just made them think I was on speed or coke or something. I had this alert expression all the time and I kept showing up when I said I would. I remembered important stuff like where I worked and how to drive on the right side of the road.

Let me give you some advice: Driving when you're straight is just like driving when you're fucked up, only you do it really well.

After a while, though, I wasn't able to hide my not doing drugs. I was in total denial but everyone else could see it. I started eating regularly and everyone noticed when I stopped "borrowing" money. And the non-drug paraphenalia around my place was a dead giveaway. You know, Billy Joel albums and baseball posters.

Finally my real friends decided enough was enough and they staged an intervention. I was totally blindsided.

Well, I would have been but only two of them showed up. And Larry was asleep the whole time.

Nonetheless, it really shook me up that my friends cared enough about me to intend to berate me into unstraightening up.

It's been a hard road, you know. I'm taking it one day at a time. The urge to lay off the heroin is strong. It's even harder to go back to the freebasing. I mean, that other crowd really messed up my thinking. I can hardly summon the self-loathing and depressed states necessary to lose an entire week to a series of hard drug use punctuated by unconsciousness and walking blackouts.

But, like I said, I'm taking it one day at a time. The first step is to deny that you have a problem.

Hi, my name is Allen...

And I'm not a drug addict.

(holds up coin)

Fucked up for 3 days so far.

I couldn't have done it without my support mechanism.

Thanks.