David Sheff - High: Everything You Want to Know About Drugs, Alcohol, and Addiction

When youre an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelingsto sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK

When I was growing up in San Francisco, it felt like everyone smoked pot. They smoked it walking down the street. They smoked it at school. Some of my parents friends even smoked. So when I was twelve and one of my friends offered to smoke me out, it felt like no big deal.

We walked down to the park behind the soccer field. My friend passed the pipe to me, and I hit it without really thinking. Almost instantlypretty much as soon as the drug hit meI felt a sense of relief.

I think that relief came because pot helped blunt a feeling Id had my whole life that something was wrong with me. On the outside, everything looked good. I was popular and did well in school. But inside, I was scared and insecure and totally uncomfortable in my own skin. I walked through life like I wore my nerves on the outside of my body. Everything was too much to handle, and the world seemed overwhelming and abrasive. Id look in the mirror, and the image looking back struck me as ugly, weak, and pathetic.

Smoking pot changed that. When I smoked, I felt confident and strong. I could slip out of my bubble of insecurity and go to parties, talk to girls. Pot helped me see a different person in the mirror. It helped me turn off the negative voices in my head, stop worrying, and just have fun.

Pot made me feel freeat first. But soon it began to have the opposite effect. It stopped giving me that confidence. Stopped making me feel light and fun and strong. The more pot I smoked, the harder it became to catch hold of those positive sensations, and the more depressed I got when I was straight.

Id heard all those warnings about pot affecting brain development and all that, but I thought it was a scare tactic. But looking back, I realized I spent so much of high school and college high, that I missed a lot of what normally happens during those years. Its when I should have learned how to adapt to change, how to handle difficult emotions, how to fail, be rejected, deal with all the normal pressures of adolescent life.

Because I was always smoking pot, I never faced any of those things. I never learned how to be a real, functioning person, how to just cope. When things got too intense, I got high to escape. And when I wasnt high, I was so deeply depressed I couldnt even get out of bed.

Eventually, no matter how much pot I smoked, it basically stopped affecting me at all. It didnt take away the pain and fear like it once had. It just made me dull and paranoid.

At that point, I decided to seek out harder drugs. And it was definitely a conscious choice. I was desperate to find something that gave me the same sense of relief pot had once given me. I felt like I couldnt exist without drugs.

I tried everythinghallucinogens, prescription drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin, ecstasy, cocaine. I kept chasing that more confident and strong version of myself who felt less alone. Sometimes the drugs would work for a while, but then the feeling would slip away again. It wasnt until I tried crystal meth that I thought Id finally found the one.

Now, thanks mostly to Breaking Bada TV show about a high school chemistry teacher who became a meth cookeverybodys heard of crystal meth and knows how dangerous it is. But back in the late nineties, when I first did it, I had never heard of it. So, when my friend offered me some speed (also known as meth), I took it without thinking.

As soon as that drug hit me, I felt a rush of elationnot just from the drug, but from feeling like this was what Id been looking for my whole life. It was better than those first hits of pot, better than everything. I felt super confident, super strong. I felt like a real-life superhero. Just like that, I was addicted.

Once I started doing crystal meth, my life spiraled out of control in a flash. Meth made me arrogant, crazy, and fixated on more, more, more. I was like an animal, reduced to one need: to get high. Nothing else mattered. I broke in to houses, stole money. I even stole from my little brothers piggy bank.

My parents kicked me out of the house. I ended up homeless, living in a park in San Francisco. I ate out of garbage cans, got food from soup kitchens. I did things Id never imagined doing to get money. And I kept using. I couldnt stop.

Until I had a really bad scare. I woke up in the hospital with a tube down my throat, having been on life support after an overdose. Terrified, I went into rehab and managed to stay sober for a year and a half.