The Addict's Choices: From Depths of Isolation to Heights of True Deliverance
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The Addict's Choices - John Wesley Childress
choices
Chapter 1
Addiction Was My Choice
Perhaps this was also your experience—especially if in 2013 you are, or were, about 59 years of age. I grew up in the cocktail generation, well towards the end of it to be more precise. It was like the Dick Van Dyke Show: folks got off of work, went home, and mixed a carafe of very dry martinis. The choice to drink was not only accepted, but from my perspective as a kid it was encouraged, perhaps even required. Not only was there the nightly cocktail hour, but also the occasional cocktail party, where on a couple of occasions I was even drafted to play bartender and waiter. I watched the adults around me choose drinking as part of enjoying social interaction and, being a perpetually overweight and introverted teenager, this choice appealed to me, too.
About the time when my parents’ cocktail parties reached their peak, I discovered marijuana, or specifically, hashish. Though it was not a martini, it was a mood-altering substance and using it helped promote similar social interactions for me. I loved my parents and their actions always were important to me. Consciously and uncon-sciously I tried to emulate them in my own way.
I must have looked like a fool sucking on a carrot, but there I was standing off the back porch, outside my parent’s home in North Hollywood, California with a carrot pressed to my lips, trying to figure out how to inhale and get this hashish, or hash, to burn so I could smoke it. I had gotten the hash with my friend, Paul, from down the street. Neither one of us had ever smoked anything, let alone smoked marijuana. We had gotten a couple of grams of hash, a hash pipe, and some extra pipe fittings from a friend of Paul’s. I got some of the hash and some of the pipe fittings, and necessity being the mother of invention, I got a carrot out of the fridge and a drill bit from my Dad’s tool chest. I drilled out the carrot from the small end almost all of the way to the other end and then drilled it down from the top. I had a bowl from the pipe parts we had gotten; it was about ¾ inch in diameter at the top. It necked down to about a third of an inch and was threaded so it would screw in place. I tested it out. It seemed to be airtight and I thought it would function as a pipe. I got a little piece of hash, about ¼ inch in diameter, and put it into the bowl. Then I got one of my Mom’s butane lighters and attempted to figure out how to hold the pipe, light the hash, and inhale all at the same time.
It was really hard at first. It seemed for a while that I just could not get it to work. I looked at the pipe I had made and wondered what the heck was going on! So, I ran through the procedure again in my mind on the proper way to hold the pipe, inhale, and light the hash, and gave it another try, and bam! The next thing I knew I blew out a big cloud of smoke. Success! I waited a few minutes... and nothing happened! So, I tried it again; this time it was a little easier, it only took me two or three tries to get it to work, and then I blew out another big cloud of smoke. Again I waited a few minutes, but still nothing. I could not feel any affects at all. Maybe there was something wrong with this hash, I was not feeling anything, although, honestly, I had no idea what I was suppose to feel.
At this point in my life I don’t believe I had ever drunk enough alcohol to feel its effect much; I’d consumed just enough to taste it and discover that what my parents drank tasted nasty. So I had no point of reference as to what I was supposed to feel like with hash, but I was willing to experiment and find out.
I tried it again and after a couple of attempts got another good hit, and exhaled another cloud of smoke along with a fit of coughing. Still nothing. Maybe I needed to hold the smoke in my lungs longer? I took a look at the chunk of hash that was in the pipe, and broke it up a little, only to find that it was all gone, I had smoked it all, and felt nothing?! Well, this was totally unexpected, and Mom was arriving home from a visit to the doctor at any moment, so I took the pipe apart and ate the carrot so there would be no evidence. I ran into the house and brushed my teeth and washed my hands thoroughly. I had smoked my first bowl of hash and I didn’t get high, what the heck! I was totally disappointed, but for some reason, I was hungry, and made myself a baloney sandwich, ‘cause maybe I did feel it a little... Then I went back to my bedroom and read one of my favorite Doc Savage books, The Man of Bronze.
It wasn’t until my next attempt at smoking hash that I really noticed the effects. This time I was down at Paul’s house, in the back yard, using the real hash pipe, not one that I had fabricated out of a carrot. By now I was starting to figure out what I needed to do in order to actually get a hit, and Paul confirmed to me that I was supposed to hold the smoke in my lungs as long as possible. Having asthma did make this a little harder, but I managed to follow his example, and after several hits was now feeling the effect, and I liked it! Besides the ethereal feeling and the mood uplift, it was the laughing that hooked me, and also the munchies, fulfilling my desires to eat—I loved it.
This was my first choice down the road of experiencing the drug culture. Little did I know at the tender age of fifteen how the result of this choice would impact the rest of my life. Things like addiction usually start small, but they never stay small.
The Lasting Lesson
Addictions start out small, sometimes just as experiments, but tend not to stay that way. What has your experience been with addictions and based on that experience, do you agree, or disagree? Then please relate highlights of your own story—because in the final analysis, this book is about your story and your desires to change it for the