What need is there for alarm clocks when we never slept anyway? My day would usually begin around 72 hours before the morning light became noticed, and I was routinely surprised by the site of it: “My God, is it morning?” The revelation would then create cause to “burn one,” yet again, as did almost any event occurring in my environment, perceived environment or actual environment, I should say. Hell, if the phone rings, burn one; tie my shoes, burn one; returning from the store, burn one; receive bad news, burn one; receive good news, burn one! Any event of just an average day in Methamphetamine addiction became a reason, an excuse, to continue using.
I believe I have heard it said before, though I am drawing a mental blank about who may have coined the adage, “You are the last thing that I thought of, and the first thing on my mind.” Simply put, Methamphetamine was my god, and I was unknowingly dancing with the devil himself. Methamphetamine addiction stripped me of my very person, changed my personality to an unrecognizable degree, and created scars throughout my family and deep into my friends . . . scars that may never fully heal.
All that I am and all that I have left to give after Methamphetamine addiction is a story of completely grave disappointment, exhaustive pain, mental collapse, and a scream in my heart that will not be stifled. Hopefully, what is left of me can be used to better aid others’ decisions regarding which dance requests to decline in life.
So, there I was, sitting on a women’s maximum-security block in Jefferson County Jail, wondering what forces had brought me there. At that point, I could not decipher between the reality of my situation and the completely foggy, surreal environment before me. I remembered something on television telling me to just go with the policemen when they entered our apartment, and I remembered the same strange voices telling me to just go back home when I twice walked out the large, opening slider of the general population block a few days earlier. The female deputies in the cube had said they were going to make a difference for me the second time I went too far. What had they meant? I knew they had made me gather my sleeping pad, bath towel and cup, and piece of paper explaining my charges, then had rolled the slider of the maximum security block while angrily directing me to it, but the only difference they could have made for me at that point would have been showing me where my husband had been “taken.” I read the piece of paper sitting beside me on the steel bunk. It read: “Trafficking Methamphetamine, $140,000.00 bond.” What did it mean? About three times a day, other inmates would come to my cell with small amounts of food that I would devour. Withdrawing from Methamphetamine brings huge cravings for nourishment of any kind, and since I had lost down from an ideal weight of about 145 pounds to nearly 100, my appetite was overwhelming. The problem was, I was on the maximum-security block, and the portions were substantially less than the average portions on other blocks. As well, I was also withdrawing from the immensely strong opiate, Oxycontin.
Delusional and afraid, I did not answer the call to see a nurse, afraid that whatever forces had taken me there would poison me for having wanted a pill for relief from the withdrawals I was going through due to Methamphetamine addiction. I was thrown head-over-heels into a constant realization that I had to make the right choices, and feared that the entire world was watching. I wondered if I had secretly been watched my entire life, as paranoia gripped every seam in my being. I wondered who my mother really had been, and remember chanting repeatedly “I know there is a God.” Complete mental collapse had come to my bunk. I read every engraving, every scribble from inmates who had been in the cell before me, and wondered what they could have meant for me to understand when they wrote on the walls. Every second was a hungry eternity. Every night was filled with a battle against falling asleep because the nightmares I endured from Methamphetamine addiction were terrifying. Did I really have children? Did I have only two, or had the misperceived forces lied? Was I an experiment? What could I believe in the Bible if some cruel dictatorship had only shown me what controlled “facts” they had wanted to show me? I clung to the knowledge that I knew there was a God, because I had known Him in my life other than “fact” in print. I had felt His arms around me too many times before to doubt Him, many times before and during Methamphetamine addiction.
Every evening I was allowed out of my cell and into the block alone for about thirty-five to forty-five minutes, as the other maximum-security block inmates were held in their cells, waiting their evening turn to shower and use the phone. For a while, my mind drew a blank over phone numbers that I had known all my life, another side-effect, for me, of coming out of Methamphetamine addiction. I would try all day to remember just one phone number, and then doubt myself when it finally came time to make that call. When I actually remembered numbers through the foggy withdrawals of Methamphetamine addiction, the users of that number’s service had not been set up to accept the Department of Corrections’ billing methods. And why would they? I had come from a very straight, Christian family, previously untouched by Methamphetamine addiction. Our relatives did not go to jail. I finally reached my mother-in-law. She had spoken with my husband. He was on the sixth floor of the same jail, and I on the fourth. Furthermore, his block was above the maximum-security block, and he had been trying to yell to me through the vents, to instruct me on how to speak with him. I thought I had heard his voice a couple of times, but there had been so many others in the ventilation shaft as well…. So, the female deputies had made a difference for me, after all.
About the third week, fairly use to the routine, clarity began to shine through the chaotic withdrawals of Methamphetamine addiction. A woman in the cell next to mine had summoned me to the small, tunneled airway between her cell and mine, at the long, 6″ vertical window. Sitting on top of the steel bunk, I listened to her instructions on how to “go to Tokyo.” At first, I believed she was either mocking my desires to leave that place, or had also been withdrawing from illicit drugs. As I listened to her, I realized she was talking about holding a conversation through the toilette. I was sure she belonged on the medical block, insane as she was. Then it dawned on me. The toilettes share the same pipe from floor to floor. Would it be possible? Could this strange voice be correct? The next day, my mother in law told me that my husband had given a male deputy $40 worth of candy bars he had obtained from the general population commissary to be, in turn, moved into Cell 3 on his block, directly above my Cell 3. I immediately went back to my cell, forgetting the shower (this was a huge sacrifice when being met with absolutely nothing to do all day except to look forward to that shower), and dipped the water out of my toilette with my cup. I towel dried the remaining water in the bottom, climbed onto the sink to yell his name through the vent, and heard his voice return to me. I began to cry. The girl in the cell next to mine had told me the night before to request extra toilette paper rolls so that I could unroll it from the tube and then use the three of them together to make a sort of “microphone” that I then inserted into the hole in the toilette. So when my husband screamed from the ventilation shaft “Do you know how to go to Tokyo?” I was ready, with a tear-filled “Yes!”
For four months, we spoke to each other in this manner, losing each other when being moved block to block, bribing guards to be moved to different cells, trying to keep from being thrown back onto the maximum security block for having hit one of the loud, institutionalized inmates who had to uphold image and whose status in the Department of Corrections’ community felt threatened by “big-time drug traffickers.” A horribly emotional “good-bye” was endured “in Tokyo” the entire night before my husband was pulled away and shipped to prison. I had made it to the work block, and had touched my children through the thick glass at the visitation area by then. My case had also been mostly decided without me, as well. My husband pleaded for the powers-that-be to do something different than prison with me, and in turn, he would plead guilty and accept the ten-split-three prison term they offered, meaning he would serve three years straight, and seven on probation. Being that this had been both he and my own first offense, they had agreed, my heart breaking again. There had been people in different outreach ministries battling over me being given a different type of rehabilitation other than prison, as well. The utter joy of leaving that place was mixed with a screaming from my heart because my husband was not free; little did I know that the grips of Methamphetamine addiction would continue to grab and scrape at us for the rest of our lives.
And we had deserved exactly what we were given since we had been guilty of dealing drugs all along. Had we not been addicted to drugs, we would never have sold them. Methamphetamine addiction causes one to make choices they would never have made, had they been clean, even choices one is vehemently opposed to making. But for whatever reason one decides to break the law, they must accept the outcome. Even after having been stripped of my freedom and family, kept from my husband of, at that time, fifteen years, and facing ten years in prison if even thinking about breaking the law again, I missed Crystal Meth and Oxycontin. I knew how completely evil the two were, even when used without the combination of the two, and I repeatedly told myself I did not even think of drugs or crave them any longer, and did not have a Methamphetamine addiction any longer. I was lying to myself. There is such a thing as “too good,” or “too enjoyable.” For me, trying hard drugs changed me forever. Life was, is, and ever shall be different, in the sense that it is difficult to find natural joy; it is very difficult to sit still or to just be. I must constantly fill my mind with something, anything, to do, in order to keep from returning to the horribly cruel world of Methamphetamine addiction. If I could have that one moment back . . . That one deciding moment when my life changed forever because I decided to abuse drugs, in particular Methamphetamine, I would walk away from it. Even now, as I say that, something in my mind says “Yeah, but that first hit ever is the one you keep looking for again.” How horrible for a society to be given something so lethal, so detrimental, and simply be told to “just say no.” To me, this “choice” is not too far from different than the one Eve made in Eden. She had been told she would be a god if she would only sample the apple. When taking that first hit of Methamphetamine, I thought I felt like one too….
*To be continued*
Reference:
- For more information on Methamphetamine Addiction, visit the Justice Department’s site: www.usdoj.gov/methawareness/
