A Life of Lies, a Dance with Death: A Recovering Addict Talks About the Cost of Crack

A Life of Lies, a Dance with Death—a Recovering Addict Talks About the Cost of Crack

My roommate is a crack addict and this is their story.

“From the first time I cooked it, I couldn’t stop until I had used it all,” says Bill about crack, the addictive rocklike form of cocaine that is smoked. Despite a 17-year history of drug use and abuse that finally ended with a $450-a-day crack habit, Bill (who wouldn’t permit use of his last name) does not fit the image of the poor teenager prowling the streets in search of drugs. A burly, attractive 30-year-old, he has an $180,000-a-year job as a vice-president in a third-generation family owned machined-metal-parts business and lives in New York’s affluent Westchester County with his wife two grown children and two small children. While no hard statistics exist on how many of the five million American cocaine users also smoke crack, 800-COCAINE, a national hotline, estimated in a survey last May that 50 percent of the 1,200 calls received each day were crack related, up from 33 percent earlier in the year. Bill reached out to 800-COCAINE last year, the first step on a torturous road to recovery. Recently he spoke to reporter Andrew Abrahams about his days as a heavy drug user and his new life as a recovering addict.

I guess I’m a very compulsive person, because my addiction is a disease of compulsion. I was interested in gambling from the age of 8, and growing up, I gambled all the time. When my parents were away, my friends and I would have all-night poker games, and I would play anything for money. The higher the stakes, the better,  the more I liked it.

In high school I was always drawn to the people who were dealing drugs. I was into the glamour of it, looking for excitement, and the act of doing drugs, mostly marijuana then, was exciting. When I went to Fairleigh Dickinson University, my education there basically consisted of eating hallucinogenic mushrooms, peyote and selling marijuana.

I look for reasons now why I started drugging on a daily basis. When I was high I had an ego that couldn’t fit through a doorway, and I didn’t have to deal with my low self-esteem. I just wouldn’t deal with things. If I didn’t like something or it was aggravating me, I’d just put it out of my mind, aided by the fact that I had a pipe in my hand.

When I met my wife in 1978, my drugs of choice were Quaaludes Vallums and coke. She was really innocent and told me she was afraid of me because of my reputation. I was a wild kid, drove a Corvette, and she thought I was a woman chaser and womanizer. She tried to resist me, but I did my normal thing—I tried to get her high. That was the way I got to most women.

Within a year after our marriage, my wife was growing addicted with me. Drugs seemed to enhance the fact that we were infatuated with each other. Everything was better, but also the bad times seemed even worse. Every fight in our marriage was because we didn’t have enough drugs. During her first pregnancy, in 1983, she really wanted to get high, but she knew it would be bad for the baby. When she first told me she was pregnant, my eyes lit up and I thought, “Now there will be more drugs for me!” I was very sick by this time. I wound up in the hospital after snorting 33 grams of coke in three days. There was some kind of shock they said I went through. I remember waking up with a straitjacket lying next to me. This was when my family found out I was heavily into drugs.

I started doing crack in November 1984. I was dealing powdered cocaine before that to keep my own habit going. All my profits went up my nose. One of the other dealers I sold to said he had this new thing, coke that was already cooked up into free-base.

I used to send my workers around the corner to get some crack until my regular dealer came through with powdered cocaine. Or I would send someone down to the Bronx to buy from a dealer who sold the crack in sealed containers that had his logo. Crack took me to places I never thought I’d be in, and I associated with people I never imagined being with. I went to places no man had gone to before ..Where No Man Has Gone Before!"

Your body reacts to a crack high like any stimulant. Your heart rate picks up and you start to sweat. The sensation is something like the feeling you get after you’ve held your breath for a long time and you exhale. Then you start to sweat, and you get a rushing feeling followed by euphoria. This all lasts about five minutes. Its the most addictive thing I’ve ever tried, and I’ve talked to people who have used intravenous drugs. You’ve heard Richard Pryor talk about the love of a pipe, and it’s so true. When you put that pipe up to your mouth, it’s like kissing the most beautiful woman. I could have replaced everyone in my life with that pipe.

I’ve had a lot of crisis points in my life because of drugs. I’ve had car accidents because I was too high, and in one of them my right arm was almost severed. Beginning two years ago I tried to get straight every day, but I was hopelessly addicted. When my wife told me she was pregnant again in 1985 and quitting drugs, I was off to the races. I was smoking four or five days in a row, then I would sleep for a day and start all over again. At night I would be downstairs free-basing while my wife was sleeping. I couldn’t do even the simplest tasks at work, like adding or understanding something I had just read. If I hadn’t been part owner of my business, I’d have been out, fired. My family started to come down on me, but I fought them the whole way. I finally started running out of money and stealing from the company, liquidating the inventory the Pention Funds and whatever else I can get my hands on. My thought process wasn’t good enough to cover up the things I was doing, but I didn’t care.

My family at last managed to persuade me to look into an outpatient recovery program. I called up 800-COCAINE, and they told me about fellowship groups (like Cocaine Anonymous) and also about Stony Lodge Hospital in Westchester County. I went to the hospital in November 1985 and didn’t do any crack for a couple of days. I went away to Florida, stayed clean, but the night I got back I saw my dealer on the street, and I guess that triggered something in my mind. As soon as I got home and my wife went to sleep, I pulled out the pipe. I then went on a four-week running drug fueled binge and did about $8,000+ worth of coke.

One night I was doing a deal at a neighbor’s house, and the house was full of smoke. There was a knock at the door, and it was my father. It seemed like the whole world came crashing down when he came in. I put in about three or four days at Stony Lodge, but then I went on another run. See am a runner with a drug problem or is it I'm a drug addict with a running problem. Anyway...

I was such a manipulator, promising my family I wasn’t doing anything and then getting caught at the lies. I decided to check into another program at Regent’s Hospital in Manhattan. I told my wife, took out $1,000 worth of traveler’s checks, then bought a quarter ounce of coke instead.

I tried to get into Regent’s again on Christmas Eve in 1985. They were full, so I called Stony Lodge and wound up staying there for 39 days. There was a lot of structure there, which I had avoided all my life. They had different programs—psychodramas, group therapies and discussions about people to avoid when you got out.

I felt very alone. I was fearful of getting out because I didn’t think I could stop. They told me I had to surrender to my disease, and I would never surrender to anything. I finally said, “I give up. This crack kicked my ass.” All the other times I tried to stop, I’d do it for my parents or my family, but this time I decided to do it for me. In the fellowships, they try to impress upon you that your craving, your desire, will pass. When I was alone, I’d say, “I’m not going to get high for the next hour.” The hour then became a couple of hours, which then became the daylight hours, and today it’s a 24-hour period. I’m only clean for today. Yesterday is history, today is the present and tomorrow hasn’t come yet ...it's a mystery.

All my life I thought if I went out and bought a new car or a suit or got a haircut, I’d be a happier person. I now realize that happiness is an internal thing and those external things just don’t make it. Now my life has turned around. When my first child was born, I was completely stoned; I don’t remember a thing. My 8-month-old daughter was delivered by cesarean, and when they gave her to me when she was three minutes old, I just held her in my arms. It was the greatest loving experience I've ever had.

What’s to be done about the drug problem? Education in the schools is important. We also have to start attacking the street dealers and make the stuff less accessible. And you really have to educate the family members the codependents, because they’re the ones who often help the addict along with his addiction. If you have an addict living in your house, don’t give him any money. Lay down a strict set of rules. For example, my family enabled me to continue with my addiction; had I lost my job, it would have brought me to my knees.

I now go to about six fellowship meetings a week. I love my life today. I do things now like pull up to a toll-booth and pay for the guy behind me. It’s the practice of giving things without getting something in return. I’m doing better at work, and my life at home has improved. I was walking into a house full of fear, terror and anger, but now it’s a loving house. My sons, daughters and my dog jump on me when I walk in the door. My son used to cry in the middle of the night, and I used to hide downstairs because I didn’t want my wife finding out I was getting high. Now when he cries, I go into his room, and he tells me about his bad dream. I realize I’m not perfect, and I don’t want to be. I just want to keep getting better.

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