Teens who have struggled with drug addictions
shared their experiences: Real Stories:
Anabolic Steroids; Behind the Bulk: Craig’s Story
Craig took steroids because he wanted to look like an action figure. Craig did get bigger, but so did his problems.
Adapted from Heads Up: Real News About Drugs and Your Body, Scholastic, Inc., 2003.
Every time he passed a mirror, Craig flexed his muscles. He wanted to look “insanely big-like an action figure.”
“When I walked into a room, I wanted heads to turn,” he says. People did notice Craig’s 225-pound, 5-foot 9-inch frame. But what they didn’t see was the physical damage and psychological turmoil going on inside. The story behind the bulk was five years of steroid abuse and a struggle with muscle dysmorphia, a condition in which a person has a distorted image of his or her body. Men with this condition think that they look small and weak, even if they are large and muscular.
Illegal and Grim
It all started when Craig was 18.
Before a trip to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, he was feeling overweight. He wanted to look good with his shirt off, so he resolved to get fit. A student at Bristol Community College, in Fall River, Massachusetts, he started going to a nearby gym.
Running on the treadmill, he slimmed down fast, losing 20 pounds in a month.
But lean wasn’t Craig’s ideal. “My whole priority was, I wanted people to say, That guy’s huge.”
He lifted weights and experimented with steroidal supplements, also called dietary supplements. These drugs promise to build muscles. Despite potential risks and unclear effectiveness, they can be bought legally over the counter at many stores.
But what Craig was looking for couldn’t be bought in a store.
So he turned to anabolic steroids, drugs derived from the male sex hormone testosterone.
Under a doctor’s supervision, anabolic steroids have some legitimate medical uses, as do corticosteroids, a different type of steroid used to reduce swelling. But to use steroids as Craig did, for muscle-building in a healthy body, is illegal. This didn’t stop him. Nizagara buy on line Neither did the many grim potential side effects.
Craig thought he knew exactly what he was getting into. And like 4 percent of high school seniors (according to a 2002 NIDA-funded study) and an estimated hundreds of thousands of adults, he took steroids anyway.
Heart Problems
Craig’s appearance was that important to him. “The scale was my enemy. Every pound meant so much to me,” he says.
Craig constantly compared himself to others. He drove his friends and family crazy asking, “Is that guy bigger than me . ? What about that guy?”
He never had complete satisfaction.
“Some days, I’d be arrogant, wearing shorts to show off my quads. Other days, I’d be a disaster. On a non-lifting day, I’d have to wear big, baggy clothes.”
Craig’s steroid use escalated over time. He had begun by taking oral steroids (pills) exclusively. But when he heard that injectable steroids were more effective, he overcame a fear of needles. At his worst, he was injecting three to four times a day and taking 10 pills on top of that.
The drugs took their toll. Craig’s hair fell out; acne popped up all over his back; his face swelled.
Then, something even more serious happened: He started having chest pains.
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Craig was having heart problems of the emotional sort, too. “I don’t even remember how much of a jerk I was,” he says.
New Priorities
There was a lot of screaming and yelling at home, and ultimately, the end of his marriage and a custody battle over his 1-year-old son, Jake. Bactrim Without Prescription Craig’s wife said
that Craig, then 25, couldn’t see their child until he passed a drug test. That was the moment when everything changed for Craig. He knew he had to quit.
On Father’s Day, 2001, Craig went cold turkey. He knew he needed help, so his parents found him a psychiatrist, who treated him through the better part of a year.
Today, Craig’s priorities have changed. He still wants to be a head-turner, but for a different reason. “Now I’d rather be walking into a room with my son [who is now 2] and have people thinking, Wow, he’s the greatest dad in the world.”
Daniel used and sold X at raves to feel popular— but he wound up completely alone.
Daniel, 17, of San Clarita Valley, California, wanted prom night to be special. So, he reached into his tuxedo pocket and took out pills stamped with images of Tweety Bird and Buddha. Ecstasy (also called E, X, XTC, Adam, hug, love drug, and beans) looked harmless enough. But Daniel found out the hard way how dangerous it can be.
“My heart was racing so fast. I thought I was having a heart attack,” Daniel said. A friend helped him into the prom because his legs wouldn’t stop trembling. The dance floor was located on a Hollywood movie set. Daniel tingled from head to toe. “Then I hit a peak,” he said. “I felt like a movie star.
Later at a friend’s house, Daniel crashed into gloom and confusion. He swallowed two more “E” pills. Taking multiple doses within a relatively short time multiplies the toxic risks of any drug.
With ecstasy, “stacking,” or doubling the dose, carries especially high risk. The level of ecstasy builds and the user’s body can’t keep up with the amount of drug in his or her blood. That’s what happened to Daniel.
“I lay down and couldn’t lift my head,” he said. “My legs were rocking back and forth.”
The following weekend, Daniel dropped “E” at a rave where some 200 kids danced on a dirt clearing. . Before long Daniel was selling ecstasy. “I’d walk into raves and yell E and people would crowd around. I felt a sense of power.” With the profits, he bought more ecstasy which he took often, always with other kids. “I did drugs so I didn’t have to feel alone,” he said.
When Daniel’s father worked nights, friends flocked to his house. Adorned with glow-in-the-dark shirts and beads, they danced to trance music and chewed pacifiers to keep their teeth from grinding.
Lives Destroyed
Soon Daniel was dropping up to five “E” pills a day. Desperate to feed his habit, he started selling cocaine and Methamphetamine as well as ecstasy. “I was skinny. My skin was the color of paper. My teeth were rotting out,” Daniel said. “I would steal anything I could get my hands on. I stole valuables from my dad. I didn’t see anything wrong with the way I was acting.”
Once, a friend’s mother wanted to buy drugs from Daniel.
When he delivered the bag of speed to the house, Daniel watched his friend’s face crumple in sadness. “I felt really bad. I saw lives being destroyed because of what I was doing,” he said.
On New Year’s Eve, Daniel’s girlfriend called him a “drug addict” and a “lowlife.” He jumped out of her car.
“Staring at the city hotels and gas stations, I thought I’m going to be living alone in the streets and that scared the daylights out of me,” Daniel recalled.
The next morning, he went to his father and said, “Dad, I need help.”
New Year/New Beginning
A resident of Phoenix House, a drug-treatment center in Lake View Terrace, California, Daniel has been clean for six months. He’s gained weight, and he cares about himself again.
But he worries about ecstasy’s effects. “I feel like I’ve suffered brain damage,” he said. “Sometimes I get stuck in conversations, because I can’t find a word.” Other times he walks the unit and stops in horror, forgetting where he’s going.
Daniel is trying to understand his past and piece his life back together. “I got into drugs because I felt like no one liked me. Then nobody wanted to be around me because of the drugs, and I ended up completely alone,” he said. “I feel like a new person now.”
“E” is for Empty: Daniel’s Story
On how he felt when he was on ecstasy:
“I didn’ t care abou
t anyone or anything. I just cared about doing my own thing, selling and partying. I’d take out anyone who got in my way.”
“Ecstasy is a roller coaster. It brings you up so high that you feel like you’re on top of the world. When you come down you feel like a complete outsider, like you don’t belong anywhere.”
On how he saw ecstasy affect others:
“I’d see people get real bad with E. They’d sell the shirt off their backs. This guy once offered me his dirt bike for 40 pills. People tried to give me watches and stuff that I knew they stole from their families. Purchase Cialis online Another guy wanted to give me a bunch of women’s jewelry and a 40-speed bike for a couple pills of E.”
On what he’d tell other kids:
“I’d like to join an N.A. (Narcotics Anonymous) panel and talk to kids who are using. I’d tell them, Get out while you can. It starts out as all fun, games and parties but it leads to real nasty things. You become your own worst enemy.”
From Scholastic, Inc and the Scientists of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Marijuana; The Lows of Getting High: Alby’s
Alby smoked pot to get away from his problems and fit in but soon discovered there’s a high price to pay.
The Lows of Getting High: Alby’s Story
By Cate Baily
Adapted from Heads Up: Real News About Drugs and Your Body, Scholastic, Inc., 2003.
At 18, Alby was living a nightmare behind bars. He felt he was in constant physical danger. “I saw people get stabbed,” he told Scholastic. And he experienced daily indignities. “I couldn’t eat the food they served. The potatoes were like blocks and the meat didn’t taste like meat,” he says.
Believe it or not, getting arrested was probably the best thing that could have happened to Alby. It got him into treatment for his drug problem.
When we spoke to Alby, he was 1 month into his recovery at a drug rehabilitation center in Westchester, New York.
Grudge Against the World
It all started one summer day on a street corner in Yonkers, New York, when Alby was 13. “You need to get your mind right. Hit this blunt,” a friend said.
Alby didn’t have the strength to say no. He felt he had to smoke the blunt (a cigar hollowed out and refilled with marijuana or a mix of cocaine and marijuana) to fit in. He desperately wanted to belong.
His parents had never been there for him. They were drug addicts themselves and couldn’t handle the demands of parenting.
So, Alby bounced from a foster home to his grandmother’s to a group home. When he was about 14, his mother died.
“I wasn’t supposed to go through this,” Alby says. “I had a grudge against the world.”
After trying marijuana (also called weed, grass, pot, herb, boom, Mary Jane, and chronic) to fit in, Alby kept abusing t he drug because
he enjoyed the intoxicated feeling marijuana creates. “It had me in another state of mind,” he says. “I was relaxed. All my problems seemed like they were disappearing.”
The Price
Alby’s problems weren’t disappearing. They were getting worse. The good feelings he sought from marijuana came at a price.
Over the next 5 years, Alby smoked marijuana every day, several times a day. He went to school high and eventually dropped out. “ I was losing focus. MoneyGram location in FRANCE My attention went from 100 to 0. I was depressed,” he says.
Despite the consequences, Alby kept smoking marijuana. In fact, he was willing to do anything to get high.
Eventually, he started dealing drugs to support his habit. That’s what landed him in a maximum-security jail.
New Friends, Lingering Effects
Now, at Daytop, Alby has been able to address the real problems in his life by talking them out with counselors and making new friends he describes as “positive.”
But he still feels some of the effects of his drug use. “Sometimes I want to say things, and I can’t get them out. I can’t find the words,” Alby says. “I never had that problem before I started smoking.”
Alby’s memory problems may improve with time. But for now, they are enormously frustrating. . “I used to know things,” says Alby, “but now, it’s rusty. I forgot how to do division.”
Frustrations aside, he is looking ahead and hoping to create a future for himself. Alby wants to pursue a career as a mechanic.
The Lows of Getting High: Alby’s Thoughts
On his mother:
“My mother was into drugs. After a point, my mother, she couldn’t take care of us—me, my sister, and my brother—no more… She died of AIDS… I wish she was here.
Viagra I used to blame her for the problems she put me through… I don’t blame her now because I know when you use drugs you’re not the same person… I just miss her now.”
On why he started smoking marijuana with friends:
“How it seemed was, if you weren’t down with it, they’ll look at you funny.
At that point, I was like, ‘I want to be down.’ Truthfully, I did any means necessary to be down with the program… I needed more guidance.
How to turn the whole peer pressure thing off—I didn’t know how to deal with that… I was more vulnerable to the negative influence.
I didn’t know what that was doing to me. I just fell into the negativity…”
On how he felt when he was smoking marijuana:
“I was lazy a lot. I didn’t want to do things… I was depressed. I felt like I was always in a rut. I was always feeling bad about myself, where I was standing in life.”
On being in treatment:
“I love it … because it’s giving me the tools I need for my foundation in life. School is going great. . I’m taking courses for my GED.”
On getting off drugs:
“I was smoking for a long time, and it was like an everyday thing to me. It was a part of me, and now that part of me isn’t there. How can I cope with that? I need something there. It was hard, but I take it one day at a time. If I get tempted to relapse, I tend to go somewhere positive or find someone positive, so that thought doesn’t come back… I feel a lot better about myself. I feel a lot sharper. I don’t feel lazy anymore.”
From Scholastic, Inc and the Scientists of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
These stories are part of a joint project between NIDA and Scholastic, Inc. |
