FCYU-Feature Story

A Fine Line
When does experimentation become addiction?

By Natasha S.

As I was rushing out of the train station on my way to night school (a prison I attend twice a week because I’m one of those academic screw-ups that I never thought I’d be), I heard someone say “Ta–sha!!”

I turned around and saw my friend, Caleb. He’s from Slovakia and has the most desirable Slavic accent. He’s about 17, tall with blonde hair and blue eyes. He’s smart and nice, reckless and just a little troubled.

I admired that recklessness. Being around him made me feel alive. I wanted to be reckless and carefree and above all the consequences.

“You have to go get a drink,” he told me as he rifled through his book bag.

“OK… Why?” I asked, a bit flustered.

“Because you have to take de pillzz,” he said, producing a packet of cough medicine that you can buy at any drug store. Take enough of them, he said, and they send you on psychedelic trip lasting hours.

“Um, OK, I guess.”

Feeling Adventurous

He had offered the pills to me before, but I’d only pretended to take them.

Tonight, though, I was feeling adventurous.

Taking the little pills out of the packets, my hands were shaking.

“When will they start working? What will happen?”

“You will feel like robot. Everything will be slow.”

I dropped one. Purposely, I think. But he just picked it up.

“Eww! No way am I eating that. It has germs!” I said.

He placed it back into my hand alongside the others. “See, now you cannot tell which one it is.”

I took a swig of water, put the pills in my mouth and waited for them to take effect.

Time Slows Down

We walked around for a bit, skipping first period.

“I’m starting to feel it,” he said. “Do you feel anything?”

“Not yet. I hope it doesn’t work,” I said.

“It will work, it takes about an hour. You will feel it, you will like it.”

On our way back he threw up.

“It is good. I like throwing up, because afterwards I feel it,” he said. “I want a cigarette.”

Thirty minutes later I felt tired, mellow. Everything was super slow. Turning my head made kaleidoscopes of colors that I couldn’t decipher for minutes—or what felt like minutes. Every time I checked the clock only a minute or even just a few seconds had passed.

I spent the night at my friend’s house. I didn’t want my adoptive mother to see my dizzy face and ask questions. I was ashamed. I knew better. I had seen first-hand how drugs and addiction could destroy lives.

My biological mom had been addicted, and my dad had been a dealer. I had seen my mother go from being the somewhat normal, loving person that I had known through most of my formative years into a crazy, depressed, beaten, apathetic woman who refused to see the disorder, chaos and abuse that her kids were suffering.

The end results were my mother’s death, my dad’s incarcerations and my entry into foster care. Yes, I knew better. But the prospect of going into the deeper regions of my mind and seeing all the colors, and smelling all the smells, and thinking all the things I wouldn’t allow myself to think in a normal state of mind felt too enticing to pass up.

Reprieve, or Habit?

The next week, I wanted to do it again. My school day had been all confusion. Thanksgiving was coming up and I couldn’t convince my adoptive mom to cook, so I would be spending an uncomfortable Thanksgiving at someone else’s house.

I felt alone and annoyed with everything, for no reason, or for reasons that I couldn’t explain. I wanted a reprieve.

But Caleb wasn’t around. I didn’t know what kind of over-the-counter cough medicine to take. So I called him from the nurse’s office.

“Listen, I have a cold and want to take the medicine you gave me before. What’s it called?”

He told me the brand and then added, “Only buy that one, and don’t take more than 10.”

I marched right out of school and went to the closest drug store and nervously bought the drug. I quickly left before my common sense could kick in and remind me of all the dangers of drug use, even technically legal drugs, which I knew could be just as addictive and destructive.

A Meeting With God

As soon as I got home I took eight. Then I waited. Nothing happened, so I figured it wasn’t going to work. I called my friend, and she said that I should come over, that we were going out. So I went to my friend’s house, feeling a tad disappointed that I wouldn’t have the trip that I wanted, and that I had paid $6.09 for the damned things!

“Where are we going tonight?” I asked, laying back on my friend’s bed.

“To church.”

“What!” If there was one thing that I didn’t need, it was a meeting with God.

“No, it’s not like that. Me, you, Jylisha, and some other people are going to go to the Youth Service. It’s going to be fun.”

“Yeah, right,” I thought.

I checked the clock. Six o’clock maybe? I couldn’t read it; it was spinning. Man, I was feeling woozy.

Could They Tell?

We left to gather the rest of our church-bound group. Lights seemed to be tiny suns orbiting street poles. Voices melded together and grew distant. My steps took an eternity and the air made me feel sick.

“I’m in deep sh-t,” I thought as the other members of our group joined us and I heard their names through the 10-foot tubes that my ears had become.

I was afraid to cross the street. I wished I hadn’t taken the pills.

At the church, I was afraid that everyone could tell that I was on drugs, and afraid the Big Brother in the Sky would see me and strike me with lightning.

I was as quiet and distant as possible. I spoke only when asked directly, and only a few curt words. Everyone must have thought I was rude and weird.

“Are you feeling OK?” my best friend asked me with concern in her eyes.

Straight Off Crazy Street

All night I was spaced out. At one point, I went up and knelt down on the floor to be “saved by God.” When I came back to where my friends were sitting, I asked how long I had been gone.

“Five minutes. Are you OK? You look a little funny,” my friend said.

“I’m fine. I just had a religious experience. How would you look?” We smiled at my logic.

When we got home, I started spewing stuff straight off of crazy street: “No one can ever love me. My mother died because of me. I will never graduate. I’m a liar.”

The next day, I felt guilty and told my friend what I’d done. “I’m gonna call a drug hotline for you,” she said seriously. I felt so embarrassed.

That whole episode wasn’t what I’d wanted or expected it to be. I had wanted a break from my crazy, worried, anxious, tired, bored state of mind. What I got was a restless and depressing night.

I was disappointed and discouraged. I started thinking of how much could’ve happened. I could have gotten physically hurt, or I could have hurt someone else or done something illegal. I realized that I am too afraid, and too scarred by my past, to ever feel that I’m above the consequences the way Caleb seemed to be.

The next time I saw Caleb it was all smiles and jokes. We were both sober—rare for him—and happy. He sat behind me in second period and we laughed with the rest of the class about the teacher we all hate. After class he told funny stories about Slovakia. “You’re more fun when you’re sober,” I said.

Behind the Happy Face

On the bus I couldn’t stop thinking about him. He seemed OK in life. He had a presumably happy family with both parents, and a girlfriend that he was in love with. When I asked, he said he was happy, that he just did drugs for fun.

It scared me to think that someone so apparently happy would do drugs so much. I felt sure there was something he wasn’t telling me—something he wasn’t telling himself.

Suddenly Caleb felt dangerous to me. He seemed like someone who rushed headfirst into danger with total disregard for the risks. I felt the consequences might yet come to him, and to me.

I thought, “Why am I drawn to Caleb? Is something wrong with me? What if I don’t turn out to be worthy or smart? What if I’m just a drug addict?” Later I convinced myself I was overreacting.

Paying the Price

A few weeks later, though, Caleb became concerned that he was having a psychotic break (losing touch with reality). He hadn’t eaten much in days and was having hallucinations.

He looked up the symptoms associated with prolonged use of cold pills and found that he had some of them. He told me that he’d had a psychotic break before and it had lasted a couple of days, then went away.

So he wasn’t above the consequences. No one is.

I felt disappointed. I had hoped that Caleb would prove that not everyone ends up like the people in my family. And he hasn’t: He wasn’t behind bars, or running from the police. But his mind was paying a price.

A Contract with Addiction

Something changed for me after that. Caleb no longer seemed to have a happy, energetic light. I no longer believed that he used drugs just to have fun. I believed now that he was so far gone, so caught up in experiencing and experimenting, that he wouldn’t stop taking drugs even when the stakes had become too high. Like any addict, he crossed the line from enjoying himself to damaging himself and he still didn’t stop.

I haven’t taken the pills since then. Sometimes I still want to turn into Not-Tasha, but my interest in drugs has faded a bit. I don’t have the ache to try them like I did before. I’ve smoked weed a couple times, but that didn’t feel like a great idea to me either.

I’ve come to realize that once you decide to deal with foreign substances, you sign a contract between you and the police, you and your body, and you and the universe to be out of control and to accept all consequences, including addiction.

A Different Way

If there’s a time in my life when I feel curious again, or when I want to escape and get out of control, I’m going to be careful. I think it’s best to try drugs—to try losing control—when you’re feeling comfortable and good about yourself and what you’re doing in life, not when you’re feeling low and depressed. That seems like a recipe for addiction.

I still sometimes want to take some magic pill to disconnect from my life and my problems, at least briefly, or to inhale some mysterious plant that will allow me to feel uninhibited.

But I’m not going to do that now. I’ll just have to come back down and deal with my problems, and my little vacations could actually make my problems a lot worse. If I just deal with my life now, I might find a different way to let go.