How Drugs and Alcohol Impacted My Life

Growing up, I was always considered the innocent one out of the group. By innocent, I don’t mean literally staying out of trouble as I do have to admit that I’ve always been the one to mess around and make decisions before thinking about the consequences. What I mean by being “innocent” is my abstinence to drug and alcohol usage. I believe that drugs and alcohol in today’s society have a negative connotation and I know they are bad. However, I cannot speak for those who want to experiment with these crazy stimulants, hallucinogens, opiates, empathogens, or whatever they’re trying to get their hands on. Many may interpret what I’ll be saying for the next 5 minutes as a shameful attempt to glorify drug usage, but I am NOT in any way, shape, or form condoning the use of drugs and alcohol as it was a miserable, punishing phase in my life that I unfortunately had to experience. If anything, I hope this essay will demote the use of recreational substances and prevent those who consider trying them to reconsider. I want to speak to those who have no experience with drugs and I want to explain the truth behind the minds of those who are so carried away with getting drunk and high that they cause society to label anyone who uses drugs as “dangerous and irresponsible”. I speak for most of the people who are viewed as dangerous, people who bring nothing to the table besides failure and bad influences, people who could care less about their criminal record because of their involvement with dealing and selling drugs, and people who peer pressure others into following what they do. Being currently viewed as one of these people, I would like to share my story of how drugs and alcohol have affected my life and how I went from the kid who would walk away from a guy sparking up a cigarette to becoming one of them.

Before getting into the events that led me to the unfortunate person I am today, I do have to admit that during these times being under the influence, I would feel great pride in doing so. I’ve always been the boy with low self-esteem due to my lack of athleticism and appearance. I had always wanted attention and acceptance from those around me. I’m lazy, unproductive, and can never be able to achieve the desired grades that everybody else strives for. I maintain the belief that I can never do anything right. What I wanted was to simply fit in. When I am under the influence, I feel special, smart, important and social. I felt socially-accepted by everyone around me and now I had something to show off. I was proud to have bragging rights because I was getting high on things like cocaine or Molly. In correspondence to how drugs and alcohol use is portrayed in the media, people seem to think that drug users have the mindset: “all of the popular kids do it so doing the same will put me into the same category”. I was not peer pressured; I did it because I believed that’s what it took to become accepted in today’s society. Simply, I would feel cool.

This started a few weeks into my junior year of high school. Prior to that, I had already lost many friends that I made over the many years before. My lack of self-confidence along with my awkward personality and shyness made it difficult for me to make new friends at school. All of this suddenly changed when I was invited to my first party. This was not just any party. It was a college party. Proud to be one of the few high schoolers to have been invited, I knew it was going to be a night to remember. Before this party, I had never consumed alcohol before (excluding the holy wine), so I knew this was going to be an experience… and an experience it was. Because alcohol is legal (age-restricted of course), I was more open to the idea of putting it in my body and that was exactly what I did… uncontrollably… For those who have never taken a shot before, downing seven shots within the first 30 minutes on your first time is not the brightest idea. Before I knew it, I started to lose control of myself and ended up onto the floor. A friend helped me up and carried me into a room with a bed so I could sleep because according to him, “that was enough” and I was “done for the night”. Done for the night? How can I be “done for the night” when all of a sudden, life around me was starting to feel slow and warm. All of my problems seemed to have faded away as if I took off into a “delayed” universe where everything that happens has a time delay, giving me a false belief that every problem that I was going through at that time was all in the past. I felt as if I was 5 seconds ahead of everyone else. Being drunk helped me gain the great social skills that I dreamt of having, and I befriended many upperclassmen. No, no, no, I am not “done for the night”. I felt social, important, special, funny, and accepted. Every flaw I had that prevented me from befriending new people seemed to have disappeared and I could easily talk to whoever I wanted to while comfortably using the “oh he’s just drunk” excuse in case I happened to say something dumb; the fear of being judged suddenly vanished. With all the college kids befriending me and the night of endless socializing, I felt mature because I was hanging out with them. I felt… cool.

The next morning, I woke up on a couch that I couldn’t recall falling asleep on. I sat up and immediately felt agonizing pain all over my body and head followed by a bloody nose. No doubt, they were signs of a hangover. I should have used this hangover as a lesson to not do that again or at least try to control the amount of alcohol I drink the next time I attend a party, right?? Wrong. I did not have a single regret, but instead perceived it as a trophy for what I had accomplished the night before… I had finally become one of them. I just felt… cool.

The months that followed along consisted of me hanging out with the big boys, drinking, kicking back every week, skipping classes to take a sip of booze with whoever I could find at school that was down, and posting photos and videos of it all over social media. I can remember talking about it to all of my friends from school and how cool I was for hanging out with college kids outside of school every other night. My friends from school, no doubt, started getting irritated of my annoying bragging and eventually started viewing me as one of “those people”. The kid who used to distance himself from bad influences was suddenly being viewed as one of those people by his own friends. What do I mean by “those people” again? People who would brag about the illegal things that they do as if they have nothing else better to talk about (like how badly these impact their academics and future) and the people who strive to peer pressure all the kids that stand in their way to drinking and smoking. Just to throw it out there, I never attempted to pressure anybody to do things against their will, as it is against my personal morals to force people into doing things they otherwise wouldn’t have done- not to mention it’s not even fun to hang out with a drunk or a person high out of their minds who aren’t even going to enjoy it. And then there’s the situation with me taking full responsibility if something happens to them. With that being said, I still had the qualities and morals of the person that I once was, but I cluelessly took the wrong path in order to blend in with the crowd. I did it because I believed it was the thing that separated the cool kids from the others. I thought of myself as one of the cool kids that any other high schooler would want to trade places with. I felt like I was one of them. I felt accepted. Important. Special. I felt… cool.

Months progressed and I end up on the next chapter of my experimentation with drugs. Raves are associated with their use of dangerous and illegal drugs, most notably MDMA (commonly known in its tablet form “ecstasy”, although this term may also include the presence of adulterants). The rave scene becomes more prevalent during college years, but with me being the only high school junior in a group full of college kids, I felt a great urge to experience what they were experiencing. As anybody with common sense would have guessed it, I wanted to give ecstasy a try… and that was exactly what I did.

About an hour before one of the last scheduled performances for my lion dance group, I had a conversation with a friend who claimed that I was “lightweight” due to the amount of Carolina Reapers (the world’s hottest pepper) that I have ingested. I guess eating five of the world’s hottest chili peppers over a course of three days wasn’t enough to impress him (he was also considered a cool kid). Wanting to prove him wrong, I told him that I could pop an entire ecstasy pill before the performance, since I had an extra pill that one of my friends had brought from a previous rave. This was a stupid, last-minute idea and I knew nothing about ecstasy and its effects at the time. I made the horrible mistake of going along with my idiotic plan, took the pill from my friend, and popped the whole entire thing not knowing what to expect (ravers typically take only a quarter or a half to get a nice euphoric high unless they already have a high tolerance for MDMA). A couple friends in my lion dance group were regular “ravers”, who have already experienced their fair share of ecstasy rolls, were shocked at my stupid decision. Reflecting back on this, why did I do this? Was I really peer pressured into doing these things or did I just make the choice myself in order to look cool? Whatever I was thinking, it had already been too late and all of my friends started surrounding me and advised me to drink plenty of water so I wouldn’t pass out from dehydration or cardiac arrest during the intense dancing that I was about to do under my lion. Instead of worrying about possibly dying in front of hundreds of people and having my friends who were involved with my stupid decision-making to possibly face criminal charges for negligent homicide, I felt hardcore. Accepted. Cool. I bragged about popping a Molly to all of my friends through texts and asked some of the others, who were there in the audience to check my pupils to see if whether or not they have dilated. I’m lucky enough to be alive to say that I must have been blessed by God because the pill did not kick in until after my lion dance performance was finished, for I most likely would have passed out and ended up in the emergency room. While in the restroom to wash my face after finishing the lion dance performance, I suddenly felt a huge rush of energy and euphoria. I ran out of the restroom smiling and bragging to all of my friends that I have finally reached heaven (little did I know I was actually getting high from methamphetamine that was adulterated into the pill, for the MDMA still haven’t yet kicked in). I suddenly felt special. Important. Powerful. On-top-of-the-world. I now have new bragging rights to something that I, at the moment, perceived to be considered cool. I now have the prideful sense of finally being able to say “oh you’ve never been on ecstasy before? I already have and you’re missing out!”. Talking at five words per second and speed-walking around the parking lot at like 10mph, I wanted the world to know that I was on ecstasy (it was actually meth). I wanted everyone to know that I was hardcore enough to take it and that I had total self-control to control the ecstasy high (once again, I was on meth so it wasn’t so much of a challenge to control myself as opposed to when the actual MDMA kicked in). About fifteen minutes later, the MDMA kicked in. This feeling shot out of the blue. For those who do not know what MDMA does, it induces intense euphoria and empathy. You literally fall in love with everything in the world. Being the low self-esteemed and socially awkward guy I was, I knew this high was finally my chance to tell everybody in the world how much I loved them. By this point, a no-brainer would know that that was exactly what I did. I called every single person that I could get a hold of on my contacts and told them how much I loved them and how much they meant to me. With the help of the meth high that was keeping my mouth running on and on at 10 words per second, I wanted to make sure that whoever I was calling could notice the unusual speed of my speech. I wanted them to know that I was high on one of the most notorious drug in the world (little did I know, I was actually on the most notorious drug in the world as I was crazily tweaking on methamphetamine). I wanted them to think of me as important, bad, hardcore, crazy, and down. I wanted the world to know that I, once again, have caught up with my college friends in the “drug game”. To put it short, I felt… cool.

After the night of enjoying that one-hell-of-a-drug, I grew extremely depressed as the level of serotonin and dopamine in my brain became non-existent. I looked back at my text messages from the previous night where I was telling everybody what I was on and asked myself what has gotten into me. Only half a year ago, I was the innocent boy who would say no and walk away if I was offered a cigarette. Now, I’m proudly doing all of these crazy things just so I could fit in with the cool kids that didn’t even pressure, let alone suggest me into doing any of these things. They never forced me into popping that ecstasy pill nor have they ever forced me into taking more shots of Hennessy than my little body could bear. I made all of those decisions myself because I wanted that acceptance and attention that I never had. The whole view that the “cool kids” go around trying to peer pressure other people into doing all of this illegal drinking and drugs doesn’t seem to be true. Well of course you have those who do, but those guys shouldn’t be speaking out for all of the drug users. Maybe everyone else wanted the same feeling that I strived for: acceptance, importance, and the honorable title to be considered as “cool”. Had I maintained that view when my comedown ended, I probably wouldn’t be so much of the “druggie” that I am considered to be today. Just a month later, I disregarded all of my smart, mature thoughts and continued right where I left off with my drug experimenting. What a horrible pathway I decided to take because all of my college friends decided that I was making too many poor decisions. This led them to eventually drop me out of their group, only causing an increase in my desperation to fit in.

Towards the end of my junior year of high school, my doctor decided that my grades were nowhere near average. Because I was too busy hanging out with the cool kids and focused the majority of my time “kicking back and being cool”, I neglected most of my schoolwork. With the relatively low grades that my doctor saw, he made a risky decision prescribed me Adderall, a medication used to treat ADHD and narcolepsy which is basically made up of amphetamine salts. Usually doctors start off by prescribing weaker ADHD medications such as Ritalin in order to see how the patient would react to the medication. Instead, he wanted to help me catch up on my schoolwork and pass my finals and hopefully raise my grades before the school year came to an end. As the last resort, I was prescribed the strongest ADHD medication available which was Adderall (I’m excluding Desoxyn which is medical methamphetamine but doctors rarely prescribe Desoxyn anyways). Adderall provides chemical balances in the brain for people with ADHD who happen to have fewer dopamine levels than others, making them calm and helping them stay on one task. For those without ADHD (like me), it does the complete opposite. It gives confidence, an energy boost, fast reflexes, suppressed appetite, cognitive enhancement (doesn’t actually make you smarter, but it makes you THINK that you are smarter), and an intense ability to focus like a laser. Sounds like everything a low self-esteemed, underachieving person could ask for, huh?

I hoped that I could finally take this opportunity to take a break from drugs and focus on pulling my grades up at the last minute, but it ended up being the complete opposite. The morning after my first bottle of Adderall came in, I asked my parents if I could take one in order to work on my finals project that I hadn’t started. I took one and felt upset that I didn’t feel anything, leading me to believe that I actually had ADHD. It took about an hour for it to hit me for the first time… and it hit me like no other drug. I felt productive, social, important, and “super”. I felt as if the whole world was missing out on something that I was lucky enough to get the chance to experience. I felt like everything that I was never good at somehow became so much easier than before. I had a strong belief that I could do anything. Everything that I was good at? Now I’m probably 10x better than before! Talking to strangers and making new friends? No biggie. Playing a sport that I would otherwise be too shy to try in fear of failure and embarrassment? I didn’t even think of that problem. At that point, I felt like I was more than cool… I felt like I was finally the person I’ve always wanted to be. I ran to my laptop to start on my finals project that I ended up finishing in less than half an hour (I received an A). After finishing my project I cleaned the whole entire house, from sweeping and mopping the floor to doing the dishes and organizing all of the shelves in the house. I did all of this with great vigor… twice. My dad came home from the flea market to see me tweaking out of my mind and went straight to the bottle of Adderall to read the medical description and to think: “What the hell did I just give my son?”. Despite how much of a crackhead I looked like, I didn’t give the slightest concern about whatever biochemistry was happening up in my brain as I was too busy feeling happy. Finally the feeling of never being able to do anything right and the pressure of maintaining good grades that I had always fail to achieve completely demolished. I didn’t need to try to fit in and be cool anymore because I believed I was the individual that everyone wanted to be. Every time I completed something that was almost impossible to achieve (because of the short amount of time or because the task was overly mundane), I would tell the whole world. I would text and call all of my friends and inform them of what I have just done, such as pointlessly organizing a whole entire cart of iPhone cases at Best Buy (true story). Everything that I had ever dreamt of seemed to be delivered from this pill. Going to school had never been so much fun. I would come into class tweaking out of my mind and I made sure that all of my classmates knew that I was LEGALLY on drugs. I felt better, smarter, and cooler than all of them. I felt proud of being on drugs. Of course this also led to non-stop bragging and endless conversations about Adderall and how I can do everything so much better if I were high on it. By this point, I fully developed into one of those type of people.

Eventually the pleasure of feeling accepted and successful turned me into an Adderall addict, leading me to crave and attempt to chase the high every single day. When the school year ended, my doctor ended my Adderall prescription (this drug did not make a single positive impact on my grades since I spent most of the time being occupied on the randomest tasks while on this drug). This led me into the scene of drug-dealing, as I needed more money in order to satisfy my cravings. If I had the ability to travel back in time to tell myself that the following was going to happen, I would not believe a single letter that came out of the mouth of the future me.

Everything got worse when I transferred to Foothill High, a continuation school where drug use is so prevalent that entering the bathroom to take a minute piss would result in walking out high due to the amount of guys hot-boxing Mary Jane in the bathroom. During this time, I was trying to lay off the drug use due to a previous Adderall overdose that I had over the summer which caused me to fall into psychosis- not fun, by the way. But due to the amount of drug use that was occurring on campus, I went back to my old habits. Every morning, my friends and I would try a completely new drug. So much so, that I even had a period of time where I was not sober for a single class period for an entire two weeks. I made friends left and right due to how often I got high, but what I was mostly known for was my intense use of Adderall. Since conversations about drugs were on-going at every corner I turned, I now could talk to anyone at school and share stories of my previous drug experiences. I didn’t need those college kids who dropped me anymore, for I finally found people that were more open and understanding when it came to getting high on different sorts of drugs. Surrounded by this drug-driven environment, I quickly viewed smoking, drinking, snorting, and injecting as something “normal”. This reduced my fear of slanging drugs, as I looked at all the illegal drug activities as nothing more than a walk in the park. I didn’t mind taking the risk of buying and selling drugs for it just became a lifestyle. Scared to try certain drugs? I’ve already tried it. I’m still alive, so it is okay for me to do it again. Oh, you’re about to snort some cocaine? Count me in. I’ve already done meth and meth is worse than cocaine so therefore it’s okay for me to do cocaine! You’re selling Vyvanse? I’ve been addicted to the much harder ADHD medication, Adderall, for almost a year. Doing quick mental math, I’ve probably done over 100 pills by now, so it should be okay for me to buy and try some of those Vyvanse pills you got! You’re offering me a shot of tequila? Alcohol is legal and every college parties drinks so I think it will be okay for me to try it since everybody does it! Can you see a chain forming here?

Looking back at it all, society makes drugs and alcohol seem like something that only the badasses do. With today’s social media, many teens are expected to live up to the hype. I have so many questions on whether or not any of my choices were smart and worth the risk to endanger my wellbeing. With all of the decisions that I have made, did getting peer pressured by the other kids who have done the same lead me to become like them? Was it really peer pressure or was it all just an immoral decision that made me stupid? It wasn’t those people who were being bad influences to my life. The influence was my strive to fit in into today’s society. Was I actually feeling like I belonged in an environment where drugs and alcohol were a daily routine? Because a year ago, I wasn’t smoking or drinking. Did I really think that I actually belonged in that environment or did I just want to belong in that crowd just so I could be “cool”? What did I really achieve from taking that meth-laced ecstasy pill? None of my friends told me to that they were proud of what I did nor asked me to do it so were they really the bad influences? Everything that I did was because I believed those highs and drunks were the true pathways to becoming accepted and important. The college kids didn’t even think that I was cool so they ended up dropping me, a clear sign of misinterpretation on what it takes to become cool. It was me who was the one to think that I was the one being “cool”.

Currently, I am in the process of trying to become fully sober. Earlier, I stated that I felt mature for hanging out with the upperclassmen. Looking back, I can confidently say that I feel way more mature to learn that doing all of these things to considered cool was not true at ALL. The media that portrays drinking and smoking as cool. Those people that are being viewed as a menace to society, peer pressuring others to get high and drunk, doing nothing useful with their lives, failing school, and spending all of their free time talking and bragging about the illegal drug activities that they have engaged in are not bad people. I believe they just, sadly, have lost themselves to the belief that doing all of those things will make them cool. Like me, they all just want to feel special, important, accepted, and cool. They just mistakenly believe that lighting up a joint to become someone who they aren’t is what it takes to reach that.