Drug Addiction Recovery Documentary (Lucas' AmazingTrue Story)

So what are your parents like?

My dad is. I kind of have more of my dad's qualities. He's very, very, very smart, very focused, very driven, and just very logical. Just thinks everything out, plans exactly how he wants to do it. He'd rather research for a week and then spend nine hours doing a plumbing job that he knows nothing about how to do. But he's gonna totally learn how to do it and invest all that time into doing it himself rather than just pay a plumber to come over and do it in, like, 30 minutes because they know how to do it. I feel like that, like, perfectly defines my father.

Is that the part of you that like him?

Yes.

Okay. You're like that, too.

I don't think I'm as much in that way, but very much about learning things. And he's a little bit quieter, more to himself, and I'm. I get that from him. It's just offset a little bit with me because my mom is very, you know, all over the place, outspoken in a room, and she's working the room, talking to everybody. She could talk. Talk to anyone about anything. Be totally comfortable. Super social work, sales, social just doesn't even have a hint of that. You know, she's just totally comfortable all the time.

Is she, like, do people like her? Is she fun?

People like her. She's fun. She's funny. You know, My mom knows how to work Snapchat better than I do. She does all the filters and funny stuff with dogs in my family. And so, yeah, she's very much that. So I feel like I got a little bit of both, but more from my dad. So I'm a little bit more social because I have that piece of my mom. But it does not come naturally or comfortably for me. I would rather avoid it and stay in a corner and look at the wall.

But you can pull it out if you need to. Like, you can do it.

I can do it.

Okay.

It's been proven now that I can do it, but I'm still just. I don't know that I'll ever be where my mom is with it, because it's just a different type of personality.

You can do it, but you're not. You're just not as comfortable. So it's, like, harder for you.

Yeah. And I'm always thinking about, like, I'm doing this wrong and I look dumb and stuff like that, where I think that part of my mom's brain is just, like, shut off. She just lives in the moment and cracks jokes and has a good time and, and whatever. And I'm always just analyzing hyper cephaly. Yes.

Which makes it hard to be in the moment.

How do I look when I'm doing this? How do I sound when I'm doing this?

Am I moving my hands too much?

Exactly.

All that stuff. Most people aren't even aware.

Yep. And even you saying move my hands so much now I'm thinking about. I know.

I thought about not saying it because I need to know what that.

That's just how it goes.

And do you have brothers and sisters?

I do. I have one brother and two sisters and they are all adopted. My sister Maddie was adopted first when I was probably about 4 or 5. And she was adopted as a newborn baby locally in Charleston, S.C. when I was 7. They adopted my sister Isabelle, who's from China. And so that's obviously a little bit weird to be seven and get a seven year old sister when your whole conception of how you get siblings is that they come as babies. It's like, well, no, this is your sister and she's seven and she's just already all grown up and she's like.

But that makes her like in your territory too.

Yeah, you know, like she's. She's no longer this kind of thing that I can write off in the corner. Maybe screaming in a cradle. Although she was screaming in Chinese and she got fixated on this Barbie in general, but a pink Barbie dress and a pink Barbie Jeep. The little Jeep, she could drive around and she would drive around the cul de sac and I remember her just yelling in Chinese and my dad chasing her around and just would not let go of that stuff. She just loved it. That was like the thing that she attached to when she came over.

What do you remember thinking about all that when it was happening?

Just craziness. Just like pandemonium. I mean, you know, it's like this is my new, my new sister and I can't even talk to her. She doesn't even speak English. And so honestly, probably the Barbie Jeep and the Barbie dress were like the most relatable things of like, I at least know what that is. And I see other girls doing that. She also came over with a buzz cut head because that was how they did at the orphanage she came from. So that's like a little bit of culture shock too. You know, she just looked like. I didn't see many Asian people by the age of seven, like, you know, and different ethnicity, people look different. So I'd never seen someone that looked.

Like her before all of a Sudden, like, everything about Jordles turned upside down. It's just like, whoa. And then probably the whole house was, like, a little bit of chaos for a while, I'm guessing.

And not necessarily, like, you know, I don't remember it being, like, in, like, a bad way, but was definitely just kind of crazy, and it was different, and it was all at once and.

Changed all the routines and, like, rhythm and everything.

Yep. Okay. I remember them playing Asian tapes in the car, too. And to this day, I know a couple words in Chinese because there were these little songs on the tapes that would go from English to. To Chinese, and it was like, apple, apple, pingua. Apple, pingua. Yay. Oh, yay. So I knew the apple was pingua is, like, one of the things that I remember from that. So we're, like, listening to that type of stuff in the car. And, yeah, it's just all totally different from what I knew.

Were y' all in the same grade at school. How did that work?

She got held back one grade behind me just because she had, like, a whole language to learn and is adjusting and all that. So I think that was good for her, to give her more time to adjust and acclimate. But it wasn't about, geez. I think one or two years later that my parents adopted my brother, who came over at least looking like a baby, although he was at age 2, and he was adopted from South Korea, but he was very small for his. For his age, so he had very baby like characteristics and was really small. And by that time, I was a pro at getting Asian siblings, so it was no big deal to make that adjustment. But now I had a brother, which was cool because at this point, I'm outnumbered with women. Evened up a little with my sisters, so now I get a brother. So that was cool. And then we all proceeded to go to Catholic school, and everything just kind of became normal to where you wouldn't even think anything about it. I remember people saying things to me like, my friends, and it's because they're young, too. I don't think there was anything. Any kind of, like, malicious intent in their heart. They're just trying to understand it as well. Like, well, like, how do you feel about it? Like, is that, like, actually your sister? It's like, well, yeah, it's my sister. And it's like, yeah. But she's like, not, though. She's, like, adopted. It's like, well, yeah, she's still my sister. And so quickly, I think I picked up on that. That, like, it didn't matter that she was adopted and that we didn't look the same or anything like that. Like, those are my sisters. That's my brother. End of conversation.

So you, you know, your. Your childhood is moving along probably better than most. And you do some experimenting with some pot. You like the idea of it, you like the effect of it, but it's really not an issue yet, right?

Yeah, not an issue.

When does it kind of move into, like, an issue?

Like, I remember the first time my parents, like, found out about it, the talks about being disappointed and why would I do this and. And things like that. And I think my mom, maybe there was a little bit of red flag of, like, this could be a problem. And my dad kind of wrote it off as boys be boys.

This is regular, like, kid stuff.

Yeah, he's gonna do. He still was very disappointed in me and made sure that I knew that. But I think behind the scenes, from what I gathered later on, is that that was more his take on it was he's gonna do this. It's not that big of a deal in the scheme of things. So, yeah, I don't think it was until my first, like, episode where, where I had bad consequences and total loss of control and all that was one of my first instances with alcohol, which was shortly after that. I was 15 and I worked at Larry's Giant Subs with my best friend. And we started meeting the people that work at Larry's Giant subs and they're all like, adults. We're 15 year olds and we're working with 21, 36, 45, all these people, people that are working at Larry's Giant Subs and the culture there is smoking pot at the least and drinking and all that. So we saw them as our resources for how we were going to get whatever we wanted. So there was a guy there that ended up buying us liquor. And the plan was we were going to go to the Halloween Boone Hall Plantation Halloween fest type deal. They had the scary houses and a haunted hayride and all that. I remember we got a fifth of Bacardi and we got dropped off by the guy right at the front gate. And I remember before we even went in, like, first move out, the car was, I chugged half, he chugged the other half. And then we like, threw the bottle away and it was like, all right, we've got the effect now. Let's go have fun in this place. And so we went through the scary house and got to the haunted hayride and was a girl that I was that I liked that. I was trying to go find back in the woods because she worked there. And I had a Razer cell phone, which was not even out in the United States then. So my parents bought it off ebay and I think had to get it unlocked. And it was like the hottest phone out there. It was the iPhone X of 2005. And I ended up coming out of those woods. I didn't find her. I lost the phone. I was covered head to toe in mud. I lost one of my shoes. When I got out of the tree line, a golf cart came up with people who worked there, possibly even the guy who like owned it. And he said, you're banned from here for life. Don't ever come back. And then my dad pulled up in the Suburban and I remember him just like, what on earth is getting in my car? Like, because all that I'm covered in mud. He knows I don't have my phone because I haven't been answering it. So I have to tell him that. Where's your shoe? Like, how do you lose a shoe? You know, just all this. All this just disappointment. And his son, you know, that. That he thought was just going to this Halloween thing. Like, I'm 15. Like, how many 15 year olds go to this Halloween thing and come out like that?

Do you remember what happened back there?

I don't really.

Do you remember how you lost the shit in the phone or anything?

I don't.

You don't?

I would imagine maybe just tripped and fell and phone slipped out of my pocket or something and just not caring. I can kind of remember calling her a bunch on the phone, trying to get in touch with her so I could go meet up with her. But she was like working back there, so it wasn't like she could just be taking phone calls and dipping off to come hang out with me. But obviously I had. I thought that would be totally normal to do that.

So you had that. Your dad picks you up. He's super disappointed. Did you get like grounded? I think you took your phone away because you lost it. So, like, did you get big trouble?

I think I got grounded. I remember in my house it was called restriction.

Well, that's the fancy term for grounded.

Exactly. Yeah. So I was. I was restricted, wasn't allowed to hang out. I was basically just allowed to go to work and school. But I feel like that never lasted long. Even if it was supposed to be for a month. I could kind of finagle my way through it and con my way out of it with my mom or Just split the two apart and play them off each other a little bit. I knew that if it was them together, they were a strong unit. But if I could get my mom alone, I could give her some sob story and how it's unfair.

Like, find the weak link and press on the button.

Yep, okay. Very manipulative. And so I probably got out of that trouble relatively quick. And then it was. I would say, shortly after that, that I started getting into harder drugs. Cocaine, probably a good year of that, though. Cocaine, pot, and alcohol. And I was playing in bands. I played drums. And so still like a very social, you know, like, I had a group of friends that were not all off the rails. When people's parents would go out of town, we'd have parties.

And you're still, like, in the cool kids zone.

Yeah, yeah, I'm definitely in the cool kid zone. I play in a band. I'm a drummer.

Popular.

Probably popular within that group of people, at least. So, yeah, everything is going relatively well with minor consequences, I would say. I got arrested at 15 behind a restaurant and ended up getting possession of paraphernalia, symbol possession, and Andre's possession of alcohol and littering.

Looking back, do you. Do you think even then you thought about drugs and alcohol different than other kids experimenting, or do you feel like at that point you were still kind of in that teenager rebellion category?

It's. I think in that time I thought I was totally normal.

Okay.

Looking back on it now, I can kind of see, like, what I was seeking and. And maybe for different reasons than the people around me that were kind of really more normal.

So did you use differently than your friends used?

Yes.

So what's the difference? Because sometimes I think especially for parents, it's hard to know. Is it just teen experimentation or is it something bigger than that?

Yeah, and it's, like, tough to find that line and define it and mark it out and say, like, you've now crossed the threshold.

Right. Because it's not really about what you're doing doing, but it's about how you're.

Thinking about what you're doing.

That's the thinking process.

Yeah. Because the amount, you know, my friends could do the same amount maybe one time, but they weren't seeking that every time. Whereas every time for me, it was like, I need to get as drunk as possible, basically, until I blackout. And I just saw it as a vehicle for forgetting that feeling. Like there was. I would pretend to be doing the social aspect, but I didn't like beer because it took more. I liked liquor And I hated the taste of liquor, but I would literally chug it out of the bottle. Not even pour drinks or, you know, make that attempt to make it look normal.

Kind of like the Halloween story. You just literally.

Yeah.

Drink half of it. Like, you would put on your shoes to get ready to go out.

Yeah.

Okay.

And that's like, the perfect example. And I filled liquor. I filled water bottles up with liquor and take them to school, drinking burger and just. Yeah, just go chug in the bathroom and come back out. All right, now I'm good. And I can. Let's see how fun this day can be. Okay, then. I've checked that box. If I'm thoroughly inebriate, it's like, almost.

In your, like, getting ready.

Yeah, it's like part of it is.

Shower, put your shirt on, shoes on, comb your hair.

Inebriation check.

Ready to go?

Yeah.

Okay.

Ready to go about my day.

Okay, so the. So you're kind of 15, you're 16. You're using cocaine, alcohol, marijuana. Other kids are using it, but you're using it more frequently than they are. And then kind of, where does the story go from there?

Then I switched schools again because I maintained the image enough on the outside that I had my stuff together. So they let me go back to public school with work. Most of my friend group was there, and even most of my friend group that was at Catholic school that year talked their parents into letting them go to public school as well. So that was the move that I wanted to make, and I convinced my parents that it was going to be good for me. And that was where I ended up meeting a friend in. I felt like it was gym class, and we bonded over the fact that we didn't want to do gym class, and we would, like, not bring our clothes and not dress out, and so we'd always be sitting on the side together. And it turned out that he smoked pot and he drank, and so now we have that connection and ended up going over to his mom's house because she drank and didn't care what we did. And he had an older sister who was probably 18 or 19, and she was into crack, heroin, coke. Probably didn't even do much pot or drinking because it was just not her thing. She was into the harder stuff. And she was the. The typical image you think of, like, a punk goth girl. Mohawk had the jacket with the patches all over it. So that was kind of like culture shock, too. I'd seen that on, like, tv. I'd never, like, met somebody who's actually like that.

She's sort of like punk.

Yeah. And her whole friend group was too. And. And so I always noticed them going into the bathroom and them coming out looking, you know, like something had happened. Stoney baloney. And so I remember one time I and my friend never messed with any of that stuff. He just sit on the couch and it was almost like he didn't even notice it. But I knocked on the door and I went in there and asked them what they were doing. They said, well, we're smoking crack.

That's pretty bold.

Yeah.

Because you're younger, right?

Yeah.

You're just like, hey, what's up?

Going on in here? Yeah.

Okay.

I knew it was something you did, something fun. I figured it was something more than smoking pot because that normally went on out here.

You have to go hide that.

Yeah. And I think I've been trained to that point that, you know, generally if cocaine or something like that's going on, it's done behind a closed door where you're not gonna have a bunch of people coming in wanting to get some because it's not social as smoking marijuana or drinking. And so they were doing it out of a can and they ended up passing it to me. And I remember I took a hit of it and I like, collapsed to the back of the wall in a corner and sank down to my butt and leaned over and threw up. It was just like, wow, that was just a shock. It was like. That was a feeling like I've never experienced before before in my life. And we got out of the bathroom and then they, weirdly enough, went over to the kitchen table in front of everyone and started cutting out lines of heroin and said, we'll do this now. It'll help bring you down. And so within like 30 minutes, I'd done crack, heroin, loved both of them, and was off to the races for the next couple years.

That's a fast track to the big ladies.

Yeah, okay. Definitely. And just a whole different lifestyle that went with it, you know, quickly. I'm going to 30 day detox units all the time. My parents are putting me in. I'm having these episodes of.

I mean, that's definitely moved out of the genre of, like, I'm the cool kid in high school to, like, I'm a draggy. Like, that's. There's a click.

Like, even the drug kids, right.

They were like, what?

You're too much for us. And the behavior just doesn't line up. So I remember constantly having friction with the band. I was in that These are all my best friends and slowly I'd stolen enough from them here and there to where they didn't want anything really to do with me. And I pretty much just had one friend and we were just kind of ride or die together. Would always figure out a way to do it. If I didn't have a way, he did. And we kind of just relied on each other for that. And I would say that little period of using culminated over like a year and ended up hitting a head with. I stole 500 out of of my parents atm at like 2:00 clock in the morning. Stole one of their cars, took it to the ATM because I knew that would be the time that I could do it. And got the money out, held it with me for the whole day. Was showing it off to people just because I was desperate for attention. Like a high roller, high roller. Like this is normal money to me. I could have this at any day. Probably selling stories about that I was selling drugs. And that's how I got it, you know, just desperate to be cool and wanted people to like me. And got off that day, bought $500 worth of crack and went to a really sketchy house where there were much older. I mean we're talking in their 30s, maybe 40s, crack cocaine years there in somewhat an abandoned house. They were like squatting.

So you're still 16?

16.

You're still 16?

Yep.

And are you with your friend?

I'm with a couple of my friends that were, they were into that. Okay. And they're just along for the ride. I mean their friend just got 500 worth of crack and is inviting them to, to come on. So they're, they're fine with it. But I remember that was like the first time that I ever got the feeling. I remember walking in that house and seeing the people that were there and looking around that it's like a house that's being squatted in. Like nobody lives here.

And just like a stereotypical like yeah, like what you people think about when they think about a drug addict.

Yeah. Okay. Like what you think watching Breaking Bad, like I have that Jesse Pink would be in or something. Which is that type of looking crack addict, missing teeth. And I remember there was a baby crying in another room and just like rough and just thinking finally for the first time having that thought of like what am I into? What has become like, like I don't belong here. I don't belong here. Like I come from a good family that loves me. Like I have. Why, why am I doing this?

Were you scared?

I think at that point I was starting to get more and more scared because my parents were calling me and they knew the money was gone. They're leaving voicemails and I mean, just calling back to back to back to back to back to back to where it was like just that all that anxiety is just building up of like, I'm gonna get nothing. Trouble at some point for what I've done. And that finally came to a head as well of like, you know, the whole day I was like, I'm gonna do this. But, you know, there's no immediate pressure on me of my parents calling me. It was just knowing that somewhere down the day, you know, I'm gonna be getting in some trouble, but everything's getting.

Real at this point.

Yeah.

Okay.

And so I lined up probably 10 to 15 crack pipes and loaded them all up and just started them hitting them back to back to back, until the next thing I remember, I'm waking up and one of the people there is beating on my chest while a woman was sticking an Adderall pillow in my mouth, trying to, like, force feed it to me. And they said that, like, I went out, my heart stopped beating. And of course, nobody called the ambulance or EMS or anything like that. And to this day, I don't. I don't know what happened, how serious it was if I just lost consciousness, if my heart really stopped. I mean, these aren't like medical overdose. I had overdosed and something bad happened. Yeah, I decided that would be okay with it. And so then that just led to worse and worse behavior. Making counterfeit money, robbing drug dealers, stealing cars, stealing money, just stealing anything that I could steal to keep the habit going. Because crack, it's a very short window. And I feel like the behavior gets worse quickly because you're just chasing it and you can't rest until you get more. Whereas at least with heroin doing it, you know, you do some and then you're high for six hours, eight hours. Yeah. It's not just this constant, you know, and all your thoughts just being like, how am I gonna get money? And I'm looking at my best friend thinking, what does he have on him? Could I rob him? Wow. You know, I mean, just really twisted thoughts that you would never think. This is my. My best friend at that time, point time. And yeah, just. Just. It could be my family, friends, anything. I was just looking at them as, how could I get something out of them?

So during all this time, your parents are trying to help you. They've done all the, like regular parent stuff. They've punished you. That's not working. They're sending you to treatments.

They're sending me to like 28 day behavioral health detoxes. 14 day stay, 28 day stay, 30 day stay. I like, in school during all this type of stuff as well. So I don't think that it really made sense for me to go to like a way for treatment. To them it was like, how do we make this work? Keep him in school without totally interrupting his life.

Right. That's something that parents do a lot. They're like, we've got a big problem here. But it's hard for them to sort of understand. Like, it's so big. We need to focus on this and not school.

Yeah.

Because we see that a lot here.

Yeah. And that's like an unfortunate thing. And there's no rule book for it, which is the worst thing. I wish that there was just very clear black and white solution to like, if you see this, do that. And it's done, it's fixed. But it's like all just this world of gray.

Best you can.

The best you can do it. I mean. And the pattern that I feel like I've noticed in my life and then definitely where I see in a lot of other my friends and people that struggle with addiction is they start at the most low level of care. You know, it's detox. Then it's maybe 28 day treatment or even Iop before that.

Don't go straight to.

They never go straight to like 90 days, 90 day wilderness treatment. Like real deal. Let's take care of this.

Right.

Because that costs a lot of money and a lot of resources and time and pulling out of school.

And with young people, it really is hard to tell how severe the problem is. Is it just teenagers making a bad choice and they just need some counseling, or is it something else?

Yeah. And I feel like there's always that classic disagreement. And that's another pattern that I've seen is the dad saying, kind of boys will be boys, and the mom saying, this is a real problem. And they can't get on the same page to even agree about what's gonna be the solution or even if there is a problem, let alone get into a solution.

They can't get to a solution because they can't.

Can't even agree on what the problem.

Is or what the problem is. Because even when they think there's a problem, one parent is usually blaming the other parent saying, you know, he's just using because you're always yelling at him and you're always on this case and no, he's just using because you won't back up my parents or you're baby.

Yeah, you just give him everything that he wants. And. And so I think there's. There's so much complexity to it on all those levels, and it's like, it makes sense. It's the same way that I feel like most of us go about problems. Like when I'm going to diagnose a plumbing problem at someone's house, I would start with the most easy solution and cross it's process of elimination, make sure that's not bad and then go check the next thing, make sure that's not bad. Until we get to the point where it's like, all right, I need to dig up your entire yard to get to a pipe that's six feet down and, and like, you know, do something that's gonna cost a lot of money.

Right.

But you don't want to start with that. If it just then ended up being that one little 15 minute thing that cost no money, that would have fixed it.

Do you think that would have even made a difference? Like at 16 years old, after you had the overdose in the crackhouse, if they would have yanked you up and sent you away to a year of treatment, do you think it would have made a difference?

I don't think so. Okay. I think that I was so gung ho about that. That was my thing. That was my solution.

It was like part of like after the crack house thing, you want to stick it on just your identity?

Yes.

So now it's not something I'm doing. It's part of who I am.

Yes. Okay. For sure. I am Lucas the drug addict. And there are certain type of behaviors that I have to be able to live with to maintain this lifestyle. And a certain amount of consequences I'm gonna have to always kind of have in my rear view of that they could happen. And, you know, slowly but surely all of it happened, whether it was felony possession and things with legal consequences and the overdoses, as far as like personal health consequences and the stuff with my parents and my friend group and school. And one by one, all the things teetered down.

When did it finally reach the breaking point in your family?

The breaking point in my family was when I finally graduated. I didn't graduate high school. I failed English with a 69 at one point, and I didn't walk. And that was honestly, that was my English teacher being fair with me. I probably deserved to have a 40 or something. But she gave me some chances for extra credit. I carried that for a lot of years. That. That teacher basically ruined my high school diploma.

Probably easier to live with, I think graduate because I had a 40 than a 69. It's 70 passing.

Yeah. Seven these passing. So it was like one point off and I would have gr. Graduated. Yeah.

That is kind of like torture. I just have to say.

Yeah. So I don't know what was behind that. I think I gave that woman plenty of ammunition to feel the way that she did. If it was like even on purpose. But she gave me extra projects I could do. I think I turned most of them down. I've never been a good paper writer, so that was my weak suit. But. So I. I didn't finish high school, but the school year in, I guess is what to say for that. And I started doing English, an online English class to make that up. And I just totally bombed it. I didn't do any of the work. It probably required an hour's worth of work a day. But it was just, it was very monotonous and I didn't want to do it.

So what I think is interesting about that is you've got. You're 17 now.

18.

17. 18 year old kids doing all these hard drugs, literally in and out of treatments, having overdoses, using Cracker Gain, using all this stuff, but still your family and you are worried about whether you're passing English.

Yeah.

It's just when you, when you step back and look at it, it's like. Doesn't make sense. But that happens all the time.

Yeah. And I think between episodes it would just go back to, you know, it was that for me it was like, let's not let anything bad happen. But obviously I didn't have much control over that. It was either just gonna happen or it wasn't. And for my parents it was like, maybe that's it. Maybe if we. Maybe that was the last episode and it's gonna go uphill from here. I feel like there was always just that blind hope of us thinking that that would be the last thing. So I think at that point in time, me feeling English just. Yeah. Became the big deal. But it was, you're gonna do an online class, figure it out. So I got the online class, I failed it. And then that was like the, the final straw. That was the guard. Yeah. It was like, well, now you're 18, we don't like have to keep you here. And they went ahead and figured out an option for treatment for me and they gave me the. Presented it to me as you can go to treatment or you need to leave our house. But I ended up in North Charleston, homeless, real deal homeless. I had a book bag that had all my belongings in it, maybe a couple changes of clothes, phone charger. It was the adventure of homelessness in North Charleston, South Carolina. And I was panhandling for money. And I'm like making it work. I mean, it's a super poor existence. Like I'm living on five to ten dollars a day pickled sausages, the ones that come in the individual packages and a bag of Fritos or something and that'd be my food for the day so that I could spend the rest of the money on like a nickel bag of pot or, you know, a 40. Like, I mean, I'm not even being a good drug addict alcoholic at this point.

Yeah, you're homeless for marijuana. Yeah.

And I can't even keep that up while being homeless. You know, I really just don't have enough money to sustain. At some point I met somebody that had a motel room and I started living with that guy and that made things a little bit easier. And then I looked at walking to the mall, maybe getting a job because he said that I needed to do that to stay at the motel. So I would go there and pretend to look for a job. I really didn't. And finally my parents came and found me probably about three months later. And one of my friends had told them the motel room I was at and they gave me the option again of go to treatment or you can stay here, but we really want you to go to treatment.

Were you in contact with your parents during any of this or like they hadn't. You left and they hadn't talked to.

You and they hadn't talked to me.

And how long had it been?

About three months.

I can't imagine what was going through there. I mean, I can't imagine how scary that was.

Really good boundary holding.

But they must have been scared of dad.

I think so. I think the only thing that was going at that time that would keep give anyone hope, it's that I wasn't into as hard of drugs at that point in time. It really was. I feel like I got these big ultimatums and consequences always in periods of my life where it wasn't the worst, which was always weird to me. It's like, why am I getting this now rather than six months ago when I was actually doing a bunch of stuff?

Yeah, now I'm smoking pot. People come here like But I'm doing better.

Yeah, because smoking pot and drinking is doing better than shooting heroin and smoking crack.

But your parents didn't know in this three months you were just literally gone. They didn't know if you were alive.

Yeah, it could have gotten.

They didn't know that you were just smoking a little weed because you didn't have any money. Like they imagine.

It could have been anything. So it was, you know, it could be as bad as their imagination would let it. But they. They found me and they gave me that option. At that point, I'd had enough of that life. And treatment sounded pretty good.

Wasn't as much of an adventure anymore.

Wasn't an adventure. I played it all out. Realized that life is really hard on your own with nothing. But I ran that to its end and went to treatment for the first time for. It was like a three month treatment. I remember I went there for 30 days. They told me it was going to be 30 days and it was cool. You could smoke cigarettes. They had volleyball. There was a waterfall. It was co ed. It was just like, almost like a.

Makes it like a resort, like an.

Adult summer camp or a resort. And they had candy and bowls everywhere. They made you food. There were snacks all the time. Was like, I'm taken care of.

Especially coming off the street, coming off homelessness.

This is like, this is the life. Yeah. My parents are sending me cigarettes in the mail. I'm selling those cigarettes to people.

They're probably proud of you, doing the.

Right thing, thinking that everything's going well. So, yeah, everything got instantly a lot better. I'm not liking that I'm not able to do drugs and drink and conspired with some people there that had friends and family that were closer that could maybe send stuff in the mail. And I'm still constantly scheming.

Right. You're still like hustling, willing and dealing.

My parents are sending me cigarettes that I'm selling to other people because up in Connecticut they cost more. So I'm splitting the difference and making a profit on that, buying stuff out the vending machines and then selling it for a higher price. So I ended up leaving treatment after 90 days with something like 200 bucks. That's kind of impressive that I've made in treatment.

It's like you're like a businessman.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I was trying to. To come out of there not empty handed.

Okay.

Just in case it went wrong. At any given point, I'd have some kind of cushion to back up on.

Well, you lived on the street so now you got, like, survival skills.

Yeah.

You know, like self preservations.

Knew that I would need something. But they end up saying, we want you to go to sober living. So I say, okay. I don't. You know, it was quickly turned into the choice of sober living. Or you can figure it out. And it's like, all right, I know pretty fresh what that is. So let me go to sober living. So I went to that. And that was my first sober living I went to. And it was big bulk. Probably more than 100 guys, maybe even 200. Old motel that was converted into sober living. Each room had one bedroom, but there were three beds, and we're talking about a pretty small bedroom. So that was like. Was just super cramped. It was not the. The best idea of sober living.

Right.

From what I know now.

Right.

This was like. And we're talking south Florida, so there's probably other shady things going on. That's just.

Sounds like a bad scenario.

Yeah. That it's notorious for down there.

Yeah.

And this is right when all that's starting up around that time period, 2008, 2009. So I get a job down there. I go down with a little money in my pocket, and I pick up weightlifting and just anything I can to make my outside appearance not look like how I feel like on the inside and start to try and clean up my life while also trying to figure out what's cool. What do I think is cool. So I'm still into. While I'm not doing drugs and drinking, I'm still very much into the culture of drugs and drinking. I'm into the movies, the rap music, the.

Well, you're trying to find your identity.

Yeah.

Because you didn't do that. You didn't get that developmental stage. You sort of skipped that.

Yeah.

Which most kids go through, you know.

Or always just attached onto, you know, it was the band guy that I played in a band, and then it was that I was the bad drug addict. And then, you know, now it's like, bad drug addict is not cool. So, you know, figuring out what that was gonna be after that. So I got. Got. Ended up getting a job there selling steel buildings. As soon as they took me off salary and onto commission, I just floundered. I'm not a great salesperson. It's just not in me. And it was a very disingenuous job. My job was to lie and act as if I was in a. Like a steel warehouse. And I had this whole script of a story I was supposed to sell to the person While yelling, you know, bob, get that steel beam over here. OSHA's gonna be on her ass. You know, like. And so that felt disingenuous. I just wasn't good at it. And there was a guy named Hillbilly at that sober living, and he was an electrician. He did work for the sober living, doing maintenance for them. And he fell off a roof. I remember him falling off the roof. I remember hearing the noise of him falling off the roof. He broke his leg. So then he needed a helper to help him do the stuff he couldn't do. And he ended up asking me. I think there were a couple people ahead of me on the list of who he asked. And they must have said no. So I'm glad that they did. Yeah, I don't think I was the first person to go to, but he ended up going to me. And so I started learning electrical work. I was getting paid directly by the sober living, so I was in good standing there. I got moved to, like, the three quarter house way ahead of the time that I should have been okay. That was for people who'd been there for, like, more than a year could then move there if they wanted to stay there. So I got all these perks and privileges. I got to go in the women's building where the men were not allowed. That felt like a privilege.

I'm sure it was.

Not that, like, anything, like, happened or anything like that, but just getting to walk in and even have, like, a staff person be like, you can't be here. And it's like, no, I can't. I'm doing practical work, you know, to kind of, like, shove it in people's faces that I could. I could go wherever I wanted and do whatever I wanted to do. And then GHB was getting passed around. That's sober living. And, you know, again, it's even me compared to the drug addicts. Like, while they could kind of keep a damper on things, I just could not. And so I ended up taking, you know, one water bottle cap was like, a dose of it, and everybody was taking one or two. And I ended up taking four or five and had a seizure and ended up in my. With my face in my food at a public restaurant, got carted off by ems. They couldn't figure it out. I ended up telling them I got out of the hospital, went and tried to plead with the sober living and make up some kind of story as far as what that I could stay there. So I did a drug screen. Nothing showed up because they didn't test for that. And I gave him my paperwork. I took out the one sheet that had to do with. With ghb. I left all the sheets that I had to do with a seizure. And I told them that I was prone to seizures and I had a medical history of that. And they bought it. Or at least I thought they did until a couple days later, the director of that place, he noticed the page was missing. So he made me go back to the hospital with him. Some weird mix up had happened where they couldn't get my paperwork. So I ended up getting off like scot free.

Yeah.

Which is like terrible. Terrible. Like validation for a drug addict alcoholic. You know, like, it's like, where was God then when I. When I needed to be like caught and kind of have my nose put in it. But it ended up coming around anyways. So the owner of the sober living accused me of padding my hours and I actually wasn't. So I still don't know where that came from. If it was just like a way to kick me out. Because they kind of knew that I must have done something, but they didn't catch it. They didn't have grounds to do it. Yeah. So like, let's starve them out with a job.

Okay.

And maybe that gets them out. That's just a theory. I don't know if that's actually true.

I kind of like it. I could see it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I. I knew that there was just nothing else I could do there. I lived on this strip that was, you know, it was fast food, grocery stores, stuff like that. And for some reason in my life, at that point in my life, I have no skills, but I think that that's all like beneath me, you know, I'm not gonna go get a job at the Piggly Wiggly or anything.

Well, not after you've been electrician and allowed into the women's house.

Oh, yeah.

You can't go back from that. You can't get demoted.

That was a big boost to my confidence.

Right. So that probably because that's like a real job though.

Yeah. Really?

It's like an adult job.

Yeah. Before that it all started grown up. Gum, food and beverage. And now I had this like, skill and I'm. I'm feeling the confidence from it. And I think my mom could. I remember my mom telling me that she could tell that, that I felt more confident to her, but so I end up calling my parents and I. I say, you know, I can't make it work down here. You got to Let me come back. At this point, I've been sober living for almost six months, so they say. Okay. And so I came back and just kind of went right, right back to it. Ended up finding a job at Little Caesars for a little bit. That was kind of when I hit a point in my life where I got an offer for an electrical job and I got an offer to be the manager of Little Caesars. And I had a choice to make. Was I going to keep doing food and beverage or was I going to take my chance with something else? So I got into electrical work and met a woman. We started dating, started living together, like right off the bat. Not, not the healthiest of relationships at all. At least in the start of it or really the whole, the whole thing. We both had history of doing heroin but weren't doing it actively at that time. And we started to do it again. Ended up scaring the one roommate off. So he moved out like in the middle of the night one night and didn't leave a note or anything. Just disappeared. I think I heard from like someone else that, that he told him that he just couldn't be in the house anymore with us doing all that doing heroin. And we ended up getting a dog. And I'm fighting to keep all my external appearances up as far as like, I have this good job, I have like a career now.

You're like, basically you're playing house.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I am a real adult and kind of wanting to stick it to my parents a little bit of like, look at me, I don't need you.

How old are you?

20.

20. You're still like a kid.

I'm still just, I'm still just a child. An emotional maturity of a 12 year old.

Okay.

You know, and. But I feel good about myself that I'm making things work. I don't have a license at this point in time. So my mother is literally picking me up every morning and dropping me off every afternoon to work to almost. So when you really start to look at the truth of it, like you could pick apart anything that I was selling of me having my stuff together. There was someone propping me up.

But more together than you have been.

More together than I'd ever been. Right.

Yeah.

I have an apartment, paying rent. My mom's feeling in the difference most of the time because I couldn't manage money and I'm a drug addict, but ended up having two bad overdoses there back to back within the span of one week. The second time I woke up handcuffed to A hospital bed and had a letter that said that I'd been deemed a danger to society and myself and that I was being committed by the state of South Carolina to a mental health institution. I don't know if that was that they thought I was trying to commit suicide because it happened that quickly or. Or what exactly was behind it, but I was forced by the state to go to treatment without a criminal charge or anything like that. And that was new for me, too. Right. This is like being committed to an institution.

Just so you know, it's not easy to get committed.

Yeah.

Like, it's gotta be pretty bad.

Yeah.

Especially to get committed on drain alcohol burns.

Yep.

It's really hard.

Well, so somebody pulled the strings and got it to happen. And I'm somewhat grateful for it because I'm extremely grateful for it because I don't know what would have happened. That was just within one week, the two overdoses. And luckily, someone was there. Luckily, someone decided to call ems. Luckily, people. I don't even think then they were carrying Narcan on the ambulances.

Yeah, probably not.

So I didn't get it until then. I remember my mom. They had to, like, strap me down my whole body. And the doctor ended up saying, you know, this is gonna be really unpleasant. And he gave me the Narcan. And my mom said that I just went into, like, a rage and turned into the Hulk and was about to bust out the straps and everything. And I know that was really scary for her, especially from, like, is he overdosed and dead? To what is happening to my son. So each one of these times, there's, like. It's just flirting with death. I don't know how many minutes of difference would have made a difference, but we moved to a different apartment. We get another dog. And then that. That episode culminates with we said, we're gonna stop doing heroin. And I have. It's my turn to pay rent for the month, and I get a big check from work that I worked a bunch of overtime, and I got my tax return check back. So I had a little bit more money than what I needed to pay rent. I dip into to where then I have less money than what I need to pay rent to buy some pot. That. My idea is I'm gonna sell it all in this one night, make my money back, and then still be able to pay rent the next day. Well, of course, that's the time that you call around and nobody wants it. Right. So now I'm kind of screwed. And she's upset with Me. And it turns out the only person that'll give me any money for it is my heroin dealer, who says he'll give me half heroin, half money for it. So we do that. Now we have the money for the rent and we do some of the heroin and we go to sleep on the couch. I don't. Like, it's not like I remember, like, because we had like a bedroom with a bed. So we must have just passed out on the couch. And I woke up that night in the middle of the night, maybe 2am and immediately my first thought was, I need to find more heroin. Like where I knew that there was more and find where it is. And I'm looking for it and I can't find it. And I'm calling out her name and she's not answering me, which is. Which is strange. So I go over there and she's like half on, half off the couch. And that's really weird. So I flip her over and she's just pale as a ghost. So now I'm like deathly afraid of what is going on. I've dealt with it on that end of being the person overdosed. But I've never seen one of my friends or someone I love that happen to. So I call my mom. My mom says, call you mess. So I call you mess. They come. She ends up getting taken out in a stretcher. I end up getting taken out in handcuffs. I go to the police department and they end up squeezing it out of me, pointing to names on my phone. As far as, where did you get it from? We're not going to let you go until you tell us. So I end up telling them. I go to the hospital. Her father is there. He lived in California. I never met him. This is my first time meeting him.

Is that in this situation?

In this situation. And he very, very politely tells me that he's doing everything he can not to basically kill me, right? And for me to leave. But he would have been certainly warranted of worse behavior or saying it in a meaner way or a louder way or anything. But he was very cordial for what had just happened and him processing how this all happened because to him, he didn't know that his daughter was doing heroin or anything like that. So, I mean, I would get that from a parent's perspective. It would seem as though my daughter's been corrupted by this guy, he's influenced her to do this. So I'm kind of instantly the bad guy in that situation. But her mother was an alcoholic that was in A recovery program. So she understood it. So she would sneak me in when the father would go to lunch to where I could see her. And for four days, they cooled her body down to try and mitigate brain damage, and then slowly brought it back up. And when they did, she just. She didn't have any. She couldn't breathe on her own. She couldn't do anything on her own. So then came the time to just what they were gonna do, and they decided to pull the plug. And her mom snuck me in before they did it. So I got to say goodbye and see her one last time. And that just tore me up. I mean, I'd just never been through something like that in my life or could even imagine it of the person that I loved. And while it was obviously a super unhealthy relationship between two drug addicts, addicts.

You still loved her.

She was my everything. You know, the apartment was gone, the dogs got taken. The only thing I got left with was my job. And I was lucky because I was the one who got left with his life. But from that point on, I was just kind of like a robot. I just got off work, drank till I passed out every night to go to sleep, and woke up and did it again the next day. I wasn't doing drugs. I wasn't even really smoking pot. It was just alcohol, basically, as a. Just sedate me and get it to where I could sleep. But about nine or 10 months later, I'm like, in this funk. I'm not hanging out with anybody. And I run into this woman that grew up in my neighborhood and had always had a crush on me. I think we'd even dated before in high school for a very short period of time. And she kind of, like pulled me out of my funk and was like, well, let's go downtown and we're gonna go to this party and hang out and do whatever. And she kind of knew all of what I was doing. That kind of kicked up pretty quickly once I started getting back into hanging out with people and all that. I'm doing opiate pain pills, I'm doing benzos, I'm smoking pot, I'm drinking. And as I dated her, she slowly started to put these ultimatums on me to quit these things one by one. And so I quit the pain pills. But I remember plenty of fights where one night I'd just splurge and do it secretly manipulatively, and she would catch me and it'd be this big blow up. But finally I kind of put that to the Side.

Every different kind of thing, something bad would happen. And she'd say, okay, this is the problem, whatever the drug was. And she'd say, no more, no more.

Pain, no more benzos, whatever.

One at a time. Kind of like going down the list.

Yeah.

And she, she, like most people, thinks it's. It's this drug that's causing the problem.

Yeah.

So trying to eliminate the one thing.

Yeah. Okay. And so she whittled my addiction down. Okay.

She tapered you.

Yeah. Okay. And she, she took me down from the most extreme to the least. You know, it was pain pills to start, then it was benzos. Then I was just down to smoking pot and drinking. I remember it was drinking first because it was kind of. I never really broke that habit of just drinking every night until I passed out. And. And then it was just smoking pot. And I remember she finally said, I feel like you need to. To like. And we both do. She was doing it as well, but she was like, we need to quit smoking pot. And I thought about that for a couple days and told her. I kind of told her that I'd have to think about it. I didn't know if I'd even be able to do that. And I thought about it, and my drug addict, 22, 23 year old self, the best idea that I came up with was that I was going to start shooting heroin again just on Fridays when I got off of work. And I would quit smoking pot and she wouldn't know about the heroin, and it would seem as though I'd quit everything. And so that's what I did.

Because you thought you could kind of hide that from her. You wouldn't do it very much.

Yeah, you just.

On Friday.

It's just gonna be on Friday right after work. Right. I have my paycheck. I'm gonna go buy it, do it, apply her for six, eight hours, maybe just that whole night. And then the rest of the week I'll be fine. I'll be able to hold it together. And obviously anybody who knows anything about addiction knows where that goes. So it's Friday, then it's Friday, Saturday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and it starts getting into by Monday. I don't. I'm not making enough money to even keep supporting this. So now I'm stealing and doing different things. And, you know, it's getting to where I'm sick all the time and I'm having to call out of work. So now my paychecks are increasingly becoming less and less because I'm calling out all these days of Work. And I ended up. I'm still not driving at this point. And I stole the company work van on my lunch break to go cash my check and meet the heroin dealer. And so I ended up getting fired for that. So now my job's gone. And then I was doing a side job on the weekend and the guy had showed up to pick me up, who's someone I worked with. But we did side work on the weekends together because he had a truck. And I remember I was like, alright, I'm gonna, you know, check the inebriation box. And so I did more heroin than I was used to doing. God knows why. I think it's just the impulse of me that more is better. And I'm walking out of my house, I'm feeling great, like on top of the world. Everything's good. I remember looking over and seeing my mom and she could, you know, she's a pro at this point, so she could just look at me and know what's. What's going on with me. So I remember her kind of looking a little bit disgusted. But I'm walking out of their house, heading down the sidewalk, and out of nowhere, my hands slapped to my side and I jump like a dolphin out into the street. I don't know what, what compelled that physical reaction?

Is it like a reflex or it's like a. A choice?

I want to say that it wasn't a choice, but it was. It was. My body was overdosing off the heroin and it just gave me this weird physical reaction where I just propelled myself out into the street right in front of the guy who's picking me up. His truck is like this. And I'm just doing that right in front of him into the street. And I land on the whole side of my body. I busted my tooth out, I'm covered in scabs. And the next thing I remember is waking up in the back of the ambulance and I'm looking out and a doctor who lives across the street is covered in my blood and just looks horrified. He's like pale white, but he's covered in blood. And then behind him.

You scared the doctor to death.

I scared the doctor, which is bad.

Can't be easy.

He's like this, just this doctor, like awesome guy who lives in. Lives across the street from my parents, just raising his young family. And he has to walk out one day and have my mom screaming for him to come over because she knows he's a doctor to resuscitate me. And he called 911. And so he ends up doing that. It must have been successfully. But behind him I see a semicircle of kids and parents in my parents neighborhood that obviously my parents care about what they think and they're their friends and these are like kids and like they're exposed to this like my drug addict behavior culminating in me looking dead.

On the street in an overdose. In the street in your parents neighborhood. Everybody's standing there.

Yep. And this is not like, like that's not normal in my parents neighborhood at all.

That doesn't go down.

That does not go down. You know, it's like super scandalous news in my, in my parents neighborhood of somebody doesn't take their garbage can out or something. You know, it's like this is way beyond that. And I went to the hospital and the woman there told me I needed to go to treatment. And I told her she was crazy. Ended up leaving in the hospital gown with my rear side exposed to the world and started walking back to my parents house, back across the bridge and my mom's driving next to me just begging me to get in the car. But there was some kind of, I'm sure I was trying to prove some kind of point with that because she was trying to get me to go to treatment as well. And that was like the last big episode from there. It was methadone episode with heroin, Suboxone episode with heroin, methadone, you know, just.

Kind of off and on bargaining. You would try the meth, Were you trying the methadone to try to come off or you just would run out and use methadone?

What was, I was, I think I was getting to a point where I just couldn't sustain it. And it was like I don't want to be sick and go into withdrawals.

So you're just out running sickness.

Yeah. And so it was like. But I did like commit to it as far as I'm not doing heroin anymore. I'm on methadone now. Right. But it's like I'm a drug addict so I'm gonna find a way around it. So I methadone had a long enough half life to where I could not take it for a day, sometimes even two days and save up my doses.

And then have a bunch at once.

And then take like three doses at once. Methadone clinics are real easy to go up in dosage and you gotta do a lot more to go down.

They're easier to raise your dosage.

Raising my dosage I remember was a little sheet about this big, just had a Couple questions. Why do you want to, you know, whatever. You go up 10 milligrams to come down. It was like, a full sheet of questions, and you could only come down 5 milligrams. And it got to a point where I couldn't pay for it anymore. My mom said she was done paying for it, and I ended up having to come off it all at once. And I was supposed to taper down over, like, that's not good. This was not good at all. Yeah. So I was supposed to taper down over a couple weeks, but they kept not dropping my dose. But, like, I'm not complaining because I don't want to be going through withdrawal. And I know this is about to be painful, so I'm not saying anything. And finally it gets down to, like, the last, like, second to last day. And I was like, hey, nobody's been taking my dose down. Like, well, we're sorry, but this is what you have paid for. So, like, I think I was at, like, maybe 150 milligrams a day. The next day it was like, 75 or 50. And the next day it was zero. Wow. And I went into the worst withdrawals of my life for 30 days. My mom is a angel and a saint that she got me through that. I didn't end up using it all through it, but she was paying for me to get massages and acupuncture, and I'm pretty much living in the bathtub, and she's just, like, waiting on me hand and foot.

Why are you staying sober?

At this point, I think I was on super lockdown. Like, my mom basically took it upon herself that she was my 247 companion.

Yeah, okay.

And that she was just gonna be. And I had no money. She's super wise to all my behaviors of how to get money. So I had, like, no option because, trust me, every fiber of my being was like, if I can just get some opiates, I won't feel this bad. But I ended up getting through the whole thing, had another heroin episode, and then got on Suboxone. And that was when I ended up going to treatment was I was smoking pot, drinking a little bit, and I was on Suboxone, like, not the worst of the worst of my addiction. And I got that same choice, which is ironic, where there were 14 pairs of boxers in a bag at the door. And I remember I woke up, and I woke up on the couch, and my mom and dad are both sitting there. And that was weird because normally my dad would already be at work and my mom would be like, on her computer working at me, sleeping, like, waiting for me to wake up, you know, it's like, this might be trouble.

Yeah.

And they, they told me, they were like, listen, we're ready to go. We got a place figured out. We like really want you to go, but if you don't go, we can't have you keep staying here. I mean, at this point, I'm 25, I'm limited in my parents garage, and.

We gotta be almost like, exhausted.

Yeah.

There's like, at this point, you're almost just like too tired of.

I hardly even. I don't even have friends. Like, they're all like, moving on with their lives. The super unhealthy people that I could cling to that have lives that resembled mine. They're like in and out of jail or going to treatment themselves, so they're never really around.

Yeah, they can't manage their own lives.

I don't have a girlfriend. Like, I'm fighting for myself at this point. And it reminded me the same thing of the homelessness where like, I'm barely eking out in existence. I'm not happy. And at that point in time, to be told like, or you can go be homeless, it's like, well, I know what that's like. And I'm probably in the same position as I was before, so like, all right, well, let's do it. And so they told me there was a wilderness treatment center, and they told me that I was gonna go there. And so the whole car ride, I'm looking up bad reviews on this wilderness treatment center to discredit it as much as I can of like to do. See this? They said that they beat them, they didn't feed them, and that they're like, they're tyrants and that it's this awful place. And these are.

These are all trying to make your case.

Yeah. And they just stuck with it. And both my parents ended up driving me. And. And so I went there and they told me it was going to be like summer camp. And I'm on Suboxone at this time. And I made sure that that was something that I could stay on. And then I get there and I.

Was going to say, I don't think they let you stay on that there.

That's not, that's not how that shapes out.

That's not how that. That's what I thought. Yeah.

So I get bounced back and forth between the doc, this, their doctor and the treatment center. They send me to the doctor to get her to sign off on me going off the Suboxone. And after hearing my history, she's like, I don't know, you're. You kind of probably need to be on Suboxone, like with the amount of overdoses and like, potential for death death that you have, like. She's like, I don't normally want people to be on that, but you're like that 2% that needs to be on it. So she tells the treatment center that the treatment center sends me back to her this time. They're like, listen, he's got to come off. Write him a plan for what he can do. And so I'm on 16 milligrams a day, and they taper me down a milligram a day.

16 is about max, right? It's a pretty high dose.

32 is supposed to be the ceiling.

Wow.

But 16, yeah, that's pretty uncommon, but 16 is pretty high. And. And they started taking me down a milligram a day. And Suboxone, you is like, you know, let's go down a quarter milligram every three months. You know, it's normally how that looks like over the course of like two years, you come off it. So I come off in 16 days and. And all the while I'm hiking in the woods and eight miles a day, and I'm just miserable because I'm full blown. Detoxing and Suboxone and methadone are both much worse than detoxing off just heroin or oxycontin or something like that, and lasts for much longer. So pretty much the whole time I'm in treatment, I'm like detoxing in one way or another. Whether it's the super intense part or even a month later, it's like I'm still just feeling like I got the flu and just down and. And just all these terrible health symptoms, but I end up sticking it out. I was an awful client there.

You were a terrible client.

I was a terrible client.

In what way?

I ended up writing, like, basically like a constitution for my group of, like, all of our complaints.

You tried to like, they made the.

Mistake of doing a rebellion. Yeah.

You were leading the rebellion.

Yeah. They gave us these feedback sheets and you got like four lines on it and it was like, well, that's not going to cut it. So I ended up filling all the sides and then the entire back. And then we all, we all signed it as a group. I mean, it's the most petty stuff, that I'm not getting enough tuna, that my socks are irritating me, that we shouldn't have to be hiking like we are, that they should give us more food. Just anything that I could complain about. I was lasering in and being as critical as I could. And that ended up getting me a meeting with the. One of the director positions. He was like, dude, what do you want? You want different socks? I'll get you different socks. You want. You know, I was complaining because you could only have one outfit of your regular clothes and of the. The rest was all the clothes they gave you. And I was like, well, I want my other sweatpants and my other sweatshirt and nobody will let me have it. And so he let me get that and he kind of just quelled all my stuff and. And got me about my way. But I still ended up.

Why do you think he did that?

I think just to kind of placate me. I mean, at that point, they're looking at like a. Like, we were like all talking about, like, walking.

Yeah. Like, we're like, we're gonna leave.

And I was clearly like the. The instigator ringleader of it all. So it was like, maybe if I can get this guy to chill out, he'll. He'll go back to the group and say, all right, this place is alright. They took care of some of my stuff, so. But it ended up that the rest of my group walked and I ended up staying.

Really?

Yeah. It was just me and one other guy in my group. We had like maybe six of us before that, and four ended up up walking. And so then it was just two of us. And that was kind of tough in that situation out there, because to only have one other person that I didn't really care for that much. And when there's six people and you're carrying everything you have to carry to camp and stuff, it's not too bad. And there's two of you, it's kind of heavy.

At least you had your second pair of jogging pants.

I have my second pair of jogging pants, which didn't even do me any good out in the world. Woods. That was just when I was back on base.

But you won that power struggle.

I won the power struggle. And I think that was always what it was more for me was like me winning.

Right.

And it was like, well, let's just give him like, in hindsight now that was probably more of. It's like, let's give him the win on like the jogging pants. If it's gonna let. Make him stay here and get treatment and hopefully get better, I think we can be fine with the sweatpants. But it got to a point for sober living to be a talk. And, you know, I just. I'd given up at that point. So it was like, my parents were like, we want you to do, so we're living. It was like, all right, tell me where my options are. Like, you can go to this place in Nashville, or you can go to this place in Asheville, which was run by the same treatment center. And it was like, well, I guess I'll just stay in Asheville. Like, I know people here. I've been to some meetings. My friends are staying here. So I ended up doing that and went to that sober living. And that was a good sober living that was run by good guys that were young. There were the recovery coaches there and the house manager.

What made it good? So it was because the recovery coaches were, like, young guys who were in recovery themselves.

Yep.

What else made it good?

Everything was taken care of. Like, we shopped as a house. They had groceries there. It just wasn't as much of this, like, fend for yourself aspect that I had in Florida.

There's a lot of. There's different philosophies on this, Right. So a lot of these recovery houses are like, no, you gotta figure this out on your own. But then there's this, like, no going to, like, contain this situation. Right.

And we're going to work with you. Like, I know that you are, like, a severely emotionally challenged. Have no life experience. No, I have no idea. I don't even know how to, like, pretty much apply for a job.

Right.

You know, like, all these jobs have just kind of fell into from, like, a family friend just being like, yeah, it's a shoe, and just call this guy tomorrow, and you realize you're gonna call him and you got the job. So I've never had to, like, look for work. I've never really had to, like, live with people. Some people that maybe I didn't like, Some that I did never really had to, like, grocery shop. You know, I just didn't know anything about life. And they kind of held my hand and walked me through all that stuff of this is how you get a job. And I was real obstinate on that.

Yeah, Somebody told me you were real resistant on the job situation. Yeah, I heard that.

Yeah. I did not want to get a job at all.

Why?

I think it was. It was mostly all just fear of, like, I didn't want someone to turn me down. And I knew that at this point. I've done plumbing for multiple years. I've Done electrical for multiple years, gas work. I'm pretty confident with that stuff. But I'd had about a year where I hadn't done it. I just have the lack of confidence in general in myself.

So it's kind of like you had a confidence in yourself that you had the skill but you weren't sure you could get higher.

Yeah.

It's kind of what I hear.

Yeah. Or that they would tell me no and God forbid anybody tell me no ever.

Right.

And like reject me.

Right.

Especially in a way that's like, well, you're not good enough. You're not qualified enough. Like, that was my most. That was my biggest fear, was for someone to tell me I wasn't enough in some kind of way. And I would rather just sit on the sidelines and not do anything than ever put myself out there to be told that.

Right.

And I got tricked. I got conned.

Nice. You definitely had it coming.

Yeah. And I think it was more God strict than my recovery coach's trick. But he looked at some places. He helped me make my recovery coach, helped me make a resume. I never made one of those before. I mean, I didn't even know where to start. He helped me make a really good resume. And I got a button up shirt, I got a tie. And he picked out some places. And he purposely picked a place. My other fear was the house is about to start. This rule where you got dropped off at the bus stop and you had to get a bus ride to wherever you're going to work and they weren't going to drop you off at work. And I was just terrified of that. I did not want to ride the bus. And so he purposely picked places that were outside of the bus route to where I would be an exemption that, that I wouldn't have to go to the bus route.

So they really paid attention to what you specifically needed.

Yeah.

And that's another reason why I was like.

And that was like against the, you know, as far as like the top. Like, that was not allowed.

Right.

That was my recovery coach, like going out on a limb to kind of just be like, we really want this guy to get a job. He got a job. Are we really going to turn him down just because it's off the bus route? But I knew that that would sell it for me.

Right.

And this place was called Zen Tubing. And I thought it was a plumbing tubing manufacturing plant or something. I was like, well, I can't get a job plumbing. But at least I would halfway know how to work in some Kind of manufacturer plant where I just got to pull a lever or watch something on a conveyor belt or something like that. And I pull up and I'm in a button up shirt, a tie. I got my nice resume and it's like a guy in cargo shorts with a bunch of bands around. And he looked at my resume for like two seconds. He was like, can you start tomorrow at 7am like sure man. Cool. And I still don't fully get like, it doesn't look like a tubing place manufacturing plant. But it just hadn't clicked for me yet. So I show up the next morning and it's like, no, we're like a, like a river tubing place. And your position is going to be tube wrangler. And you're going to get paid 7:50 or 7:75 an hour to do it with these high school kids and these college kids and these older kind of burnout people. And it's like, oh my God, what have I got myself into? This is like not what I was going for. And so I, that was my job. I blew up tubes and I handed them off to people. I had to give this little speech about what to look out for on the river. And then I deflated all the tubes at the end of the day and I went home. And that started to practice. The idea for me of just having a job, being accountable, like routine, structure, going to work, responsibility, making my own money.

The basics.

Yeah, because at this point my parents are still basically funding my like cigarette habit, my candy habit, my energy drink, you know, all that kind of stuff. They're, they're still fully supporting. So I got to transition out of that. And eventually it got to the point where it's time to leave that. So we're living and my parents said, we want you to go to another one.

Good call, parents.

Yeah. And it was like again, at that point I was just done. It was like, that's what you want me to do, I'll do it. So I went to another sober living that was more kind of like my first one where it was pee in a cup, you know, don't do drugs and drink.

Don't do drugs. So you're in halfway house number two.

The less structured type, less structure. So I moved there and tubing season ends. And within a couple days before tubing season ending, my new roommate tells me that his construction job just lost a guy and that they're hiring. So it worked out perfect. So I just seamlessly transitioned back into the construction world, which is where I Wanted to be anyway.

But back to a big boy job.

Back to a big boy job.

Okay.

That felt more purpose from and more confidence. And it was just like this real deal job.

I was thinking when you said, were you talking about being the one in Florida? And you said, where was God? Then when you, like, the hospital didn't have the favors, I was thinking, no, he wanted you there because you really got something out of there. And that was. You knew you had a skill.

Yeah.

And you didn't have that before.

Definitely.

And you only got it from being there from that one guy. And that gave you something that you wouldn't have had. So that's the thought I had. Oh, no. He was with you there because he needed this training so that he knew he could do something.

Could do something.

That he's confident that he could be good at something.

Yeah. Because I really didn't know that till that point.

Right. And that was a seed you really needed.

Yeah, I think so. So, yeah, I'm back in construction. I'm at this sober living that's way less structured, so I can pretty much do whatever I want. There's no rules around. I mean, just so many of the things that there were rules around at the last place. So I'm enjoying the freedom. By this point, I'd gotten my driver's license back that I hadn't had in seven years.

Wow.

I spent more time from when I got my license without one than I did with it.

Okay.

Because it was from like 15 to 25 that you have a license. So even to this day, still, I've spent more time without a license than I have with one.

Wow.

Which is wild. And that was another confidence thing where it's like my whole life had been getting rides and figuring that stuff out, and now it was like, no, you're going to be a big boy driver and get your license back and we're gonna set you up with a car. And so my parents found an old little Ford Focus that was manual. Everything. Windshield, the door lock, stick shift, everything was manual. I mean, it was the most bare bones car, which was good. Like, I needed that humility, you know, because in my mind it was like, oh, I deserve a Mercedes or BMW or something. I've been doing so good, Someone should reward me. I was like, well, why don't you just take this for now? Figure that out. So. But at least now I'm like, independent. I'm driving myself. So, like, life is starting to look up. And I'm like, at this point, I'm finally buying into recovery.

Yeah. Like, you're staying clean on your own now.

Yeah.

Cause you could be doing whatever now.

I definitely could.

This is the first time.

Yep. And I even probably could have in my. In my previous sober living. It just would have been more difficult and obviously the threat of, like, homelessness if I got kicked out and stuff like that. But I would say that first sober living is where, like, the turn happened where it was like, I could actually see myself being sober and being happy and enjoying it.

Right.

And, like, that's now, like, a possibility. It's pretty small, but it's a possibility. Whereas before, I was just totally closed off to that.

How many months do you think from the time you went to the wilderness till you started to even think that way at all?

Probably three, maybe four months before I even just got just a little bit.

Because you felt physically terrible for a month and a half. Two. Two months.

Like three months.

And then. Okay, so you. You just, like, really are good in detox?

Yeah. Okay. Pretty much. And yeah, just not, like, miserably sick all the time.

Is starting to work again.

Starting to work again. But it's still crazy. I was on a ton of medications and I didn't tell anybody, and I just stopped taking them all.

Okay.

And that was to a really bad month.

I bet it did.

Because you're supposed to do that under doctor supervision gradually. And I just said, I don't want to be on any medication anymore. I've been on one medication or another my whole life, and there's nothing wrong with that. But for me, at that point, it was. I just wanted to be done with that. If I was going to be off drugs and alcohol, I wanted to be totally off of everything. And that was probably something, some kind of, like, little power win of, like, I'm gonna do this my way. And my way is without any of the meds to make me feel better about it.

At least your power struggles are getting more in the right direction. Yeah, that's all right.

My power struggles are like meds or no meds, rather than, you know, leaving treatment or not.

Or jogging pants.

Or jogging pants. Really insignificant things. So I. So I started to buy into it because I had this idea before I went to school, sober living, that as a young male adult that, like, getting sober meant the picket fence, the boring house. I need to meet a woman as quickly as possible and marry her whether I love her or not. Get a minivan, go. Maybe go back to school. You know, it was just this whole idea of, like, being an Adult.

But was it like, the way you're saying it sounds like almost like. Was it like the exciting or was it more like I resided myself to now.

Terribly negative.

Same way you sort of resided yourself to I'm a drug addict. It's like, now I'm just gonna be like a straight.

Yeah, it was like, I'm gonna be a schmuck.

Boring.

Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna be a stiff guy who just works in a cubicle and hates his life and. But just struggles through it one day at a time and, you know, eventually I'll die. That was my idea of sobriety in my head. It's like. Like that's what it's gonna look like.

It's hard to imagine feeling happy being sober because when you're an active addiction, every time you're sober you feel miserable.

Yeah.

And you think that's what feeling sober feels like.

Sure. Like, you never think that it's gonna balance out. Right. Because being sober and active addiction. Yeah, it's. I mean, it's so. It's so up and down. There's so much contrast. Right.

You're really not even sober. You're just like, in withdrawal or not in withdrawal. So the concept, like, helping people think that they could, like, be happier to make sure you can't even convince them of it, like.

Yeah, it was just. It was a totally foreign thing to me. So of course my imagination ran wild with it and came up with the worst case scenario to me, which is obviously not the worst case scenario to me now. Like, cubicle job. At least. At least it's a job. Family, white picket fence. Like, that's most people's idea of, like, the American dream. Rest. For me, it was. It was just a death sentence. But so I'm seeing these younger guys and they're like, not only are they enjoying life being sober, but they're going to waterfalls and jumping off and they're goofing off still and going to see movies and hanging out. They're having fun. They're like, enjoying life. And that was like the big thing that I needed to see. And for. For me that time I was in that sober living with Joey. And Joey was that person for me. Just that he was doing it and he was happy and he was great. And it was like, I want to be like, this guy. This guy's got it going on because he's really happy. Because he's really happy and he's just enjoying it. And like, you know, he worked at like, Sunglass Hut, but he'd Come back and tell you how awesome it was to work at Sunglass Hut. And he, you know, just had these like little things that I thought were so insignificant about life that he got so excited about and thought was like so cool and so. Yeah, that was just like in front of Infectious for an example, for me, that was also when I met David for the first time. David was my house manager and he was a, he was even a further along example of this is like a cool younger guy that's like my age that's in recovery and like he had even more, you know, he's like really living the dream. And that was, that was, that was the biggest thing that sold me, at least for the short term, was like that this was cool, right? There was something cool about being sober.

There might be something good on the other side.

Yeah, right. That I wasn't just going to be like the biggest loser. Because I'm thinking about talking to my friends that are back in Charleston and telling them like, oh, I'm sober now. And then saying like, what?

Right.

Why on earth would you ever do that? Like, who would want to live and not drink? You know, I'm thinking that kind of feedback, not even realizing that there's people out there that are on the other side of it. They're like, no, it's really cool to not drink and it's fun and fine, I love my life and I don't have terrible consequences.

You're actually much happier.

Much happier.

It's hard to convince people of that.

And slowly that happened. Like I got happier and things kept getting better and you know, I got my license back and then I got a good construction job and I'm. I'm making the best friendships that I've ever had in my life that are like very deep and meaningful. And I ended up becoming better friends with my recovery coaches and David, my house manager than I really did long term. The guys in the house and they just became deep friendships that I'd never had before. You know, these guys knew me better than anybody ever did in my life. And I felt like I knew them equally as well.

So you trusted them?

I trusted them.

They looked like life was better for them.

Yeah. And they look like me. They're like young. We like the same things. You know, they weren't. It wasn't this. I remember I went to my first 12 step meeting when I was 15 and it was all 45 to probably 60 year old guys sitting in a room talking about alcohol.

Right. And I'm thinking nothing about that looks Appealing.

I'm in the wrong room.

Right.

Like these aren't my people. There's no way now I can see where I even at that point in time would have had a lot of similarities with them. More similarities than differences. Looking at my addiction. But then. And I get it for or a new person coming in that it's like I feel like they have to have something to bond over that's similar to where they buy it. So then even at that house, I ended up moving on to their version of the three quarter house, which had me basically with almost no structure at all. Just drug tests. And that's pretty much it. Making sure that you did your chore every once in a while. But no staff that lived in the house or anything like that. And I stayed there for a while until I made a decision to move in with a woman that I've been dating in early sobriety, which everybody warned me against. And I got the same advice that everyone gets. Stay out of relationships for a year. And I thought I knew better. And this woman was the one one for me. And so not only do I move in with her, but we sign a lease together. So now we're locked in. She was in recovery. She was in the female sober living house of the same company.

Gotcha.

So that's how I met her and just kind of hit it off. And so we moved in together and you know, started back playing house where it was like I was looking for that. That and got another dog. Cuz that's always got to be part of it. Secretly.

I think you always wanted the white picket fence and the dog. Clearly you keep going back to that.

Trying to maybe. So the, the dog and the picket fence in the house and the wife and the kids and two and a half kids or two and a half. Got to be 0.5.

Yeah.

But within a couple months she relapsed. And she told me that she did. And you know, my first thought is like, get out, run away, find a way out of this. But then I ended up thinking I was like, well, we can make this work. So it's like, let's just double down in your recovery program and get you back on the right foot. And then I think the next time it's like one month after that that it's much worse. And then she went to detox. And then she got out of detox and was like, all right, this is the last time. Like we gotta, we gotta make this work. And within maybe just a couple days, like took my. All my keys. Then Like, I had, like, all kind of job site keys for all the equipment on the job site, all the gates, like, stuff that I really needed to have. That if I didn't get those back in the couple days that I did, I would have been in, like, a lot of trouble at work.

Right.

For toolboxes that had, I mean, literally tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and tools in them. So I ended up getting that back. But plates got broken, all my stuff got strewn out. Demands for money. I'm finding needles and burnt spoons and all kind of stuff. And it's like, you're really getting, like.

A front row seat to, like, the ugliness.

I'm getting a front row seat to, like, my show.

Right.

You know, but from the other end.

Right.

Which was totally eye opening and that. And I instantly realized that, like, this is what. What I put my parents through. And just the craziness of looking at someone that's visibly high while they're telling me I'm not high high.

Right. You can't reason with.

I'm just tired.

Yeah.

And. And yeah, they. It's like talking to a brick wall. And just. I got a very heavy dose of that turned back on me. And that was, like, tough. Right around this time, I'm about to pick up a year sober. And it was. It was tough to get through it, but luckily I'd built up a network with those friends that kind of got me through it until we figured it out and she ended up leaving the house, and then I had it for myself, but now my rent just doubled. Now I got this dog. Now I'm just taking care of all by myself, and then just learning how to work through that stuff. And I'd say that first year, maybe even two years, my parents took a really hard line with me on, like, me calling them for money and stuff like that. It was like, figure it out. And they definitely still showed up on bigger things. Like, I think the clutch went out of my Ford Focus and it was really their car. And they ended up helping me out with that. But on a lot of things that they would have normally given me money for. They. They held really good boundaries and said, like, part of being an adult, you got to figure it out.

Right?

And lo and behold, I figured it out. I just never thought that I could because someone always did it for me. But I had to be pushed out there to, like, just do whatever you got to do. Right.

But having done that gives you the confidence to know that you can definitely. You can't have that confidence until you can prove it to yourself.

Exactly. Which is tough because nobody wants to just be pushed out there. You know, it's like swimming lessons. No one wants to get pushed into the deep end. But sometimes that's the best way to learn. If you're so terrified of water, you're just never going to jump in. So my parents pushed me into the deep end. No swimmies, no nothing. But watched me and made sure that everything was alright and just learned how to start figuring all that out.

What do you think? You, what's your best advice for a parent going through this?

My best advice for a parent is to talk to people who know about this, to talk to therapists, to talk to other moms, to plug in with networks, to just to talk to as many people as possible and be open to suggestions. I think the biggest thing at first is like, not my son, not my house, not my neighborhood, not my family. That kind of stuff of like, it just can't be right. The denial and the denial. And then once it's finally accepted, it's still kind of denial, like, well, it's a problem, but it's not so bad.

Right.

And it's just. That's the thing that I would plead with parents is just to be honest with yourself that like your son being a drug addict does not make him a bad person.

Person, doesn't make you a bad parent.

Doesn'T make you a bad parent. And it's only going to get worse if you can't be honest with yourself about what it really is.

It's really a parallel process. There's the denial, the anger, the bargaining, the trying to control it, and then the following, the acceptance. It's a parallel.

The parents are going through the same thing, right. Except with their son, while their son or daughter is going through it with the drugs or alcohol.

But the faster the parents can go through it, the faster the kid will go through it.

Yeah.

So if you can move through those stages, what's your best piece of advice for a young person trying to make the decision, like, do I go to that recovery residence or do I just walk like on the fence? What would you say?

Gosh, you know, from, from being on both sides of it. Walking and leaving only got worse. Not going only got worse and going only improved my life, like way more than I ever thought it could. I mean, I never would have guessed that my life would be what it is today at all. Not, not even in my wildest dreams. And it's just for it to be like, okay, like you're not aloof because you are 18 and it's gotten out of control and you need to stop everything. Like that doesn't make you a square, it doesn't make you a stiff, it doesn't make you uncool, it doesn't mean.

You'Ll never have fun again.

Doesn't mean you'll never have fun again. I've met some of the coolest 18, 19 year old people in sobriety that they're also sober and like love their life and they're living their best life out there and going to college while doing it and figuring stuff out. And one of my best friends got sober when he was. He's never had illegal drinks. We got sober before he was 21. I think he was just 20 though. And he's got seven or eight years now and loves it and got sober at that young of an age. So I've just seen so many examples of it being great. And then I've seen so many examples on the other side of, you know, everybody dying. Especially in today's climate with fentanyl and all that, where it's not the same as it used to be. You could go and try it literally one time and die. Where I felt like that was, that felt to me more of like a scare tactic when heroin, true heroin was around. Whereas now that's like, that's like the real truth, right? Because you could go out and do it one time and to. Because you're seeing it everywhere, just everywhere, all the time. It's going on like crazy. And so. And the same thing as the parent with not, not my son, not my house, not my family, with the addict, it's like not, not me, not my friends that are gonna overdose and die, not me that's gonna overdose and die. I'm different.

Yeah, that happens to other people, but.

Yeah, never to me. I'm smart about this. I know what I'm doing. I'm safe, I'm cautious. I do this. And from seeing it very firsthand to also with myself, like, please, do you think that when I was like doing that stuff that I was like, oh, it's just willy nilly, I'm doing whatever. Like I told myself all that stuff that I'm safe, I'm cautious, I'm smart, I'm smart about this. I really know what I'm doing. I have this planned out. I thought I was a scientist or a pharmacist or something. And the truth about it is that we're not. We're just drug addicts who don't know how to turn the off switch. And it just gets worse.

So what is going on in your life now? Like, what's your life like now?

My life now, you know, all my. The first thing I always think about it is my family. You know, most of my family took me back pretty quick, but my sister, that same. That one sister, wild Chinese sister running around, you know, she'd seen it so many times where I would, like, put the image forward that I'm getting sober and better and her buy into it. And then we let her down that, you know, it wasn't until maybe three years sober that she even acknowledge that I was around. Wow. She would tell people that she didn't have a brother, and I deserved that. You know, I definitely earned that. And she just wanted to see that, that I was really gonna do something different.

She just didn't trust it.

Didn't trust it. And now I have, like, the best relationship with my sister that I've ever had. I have the best relationship with my other sister and my brother, brother and my parents. And I can, like, be relied upon by them to help them out with stuff and answer the phone and be a son and be a brother and be a nephew to my aunt and my cousins. And I have, you know, I have all this family that's terrific and so wonderful that I just worried and drove crazy and stole from. And now I get to do the opposite of that and be something good.

In their life, bring something to the family.

Yeah. And that's. That's been. That's just been a huge. A huge blessing in my life is to have my family back.

And then you and David, another person.

Yeah.

And then have a recovery resident.

Yeah. And then my. My best friend David and I are up in Asheville and decide to start a sober living and look at Charleston for a while, and that didn't work and ended up pivoting to Greenville and moved here and start the sober living with Chris as well, who was from here. And that's been like, you know, by far one of the most awesome experiences in my life. Right up there with. With the family stuff. And now, you know, for half my life, because of the way the shifts work out, I get to. I get to be with those people that I see myself in, that I saw myself in, you know, the Joey and the David and all that. I see myself in these guys because they're just younger versions of me that are saying all the stuff that I said. They're doing all the things I did and I get to just, like, work them, work with them through that, try.

To show other young guys that life.

Can be better, that life can be better, and that it's fine to struggle and it's fine to be, like, angry and stuff like that, but that there is a solution to be better. And that, you know, getting rid of alcohol isn't the only problem. And drugs and there's like, a lot of that just left me with my problem that was me. And getting to work through that has been awesome for me. And then also getting to help these guys understand that there's more to this than just stop drinking and drugging.

Is there anything. I didn't ask you that I should have asked you.

I can't think of anything. Thing. Okay.

I'm so excited for you because in this video, you're going to get to meet Lucas. Now, Lucas, along with David and another friend of theirs, Chris, started this local young men's recovery house right here in Greenville. It's called Greenville Transitions, and it's awesome. But that's not what this video is about. This video is about Lucas and how he got to where he is now. I can tell you it's a long story because there's a lot of ups and downs. Let me just tell you. Lucas didn't get it on the first or second or third or even fourth try. And so many people probably would have given up on him, but Lucas's parents didn't. They kept trying, and in the end, it paid off because his parents never gave up on him. Lucas not only has his own recovery and his family is so much better for it, but he's out there helping so many other young men and their families get recovery. There's a lot of lessons to be learned in Lucas's story, so make sure you watch the whole thing. Okay, so now that you've seen Lucas's story and you've heard what he has to say is an amazing story, isn't it? I mean, there were so many bottoms and so many times when you thought, oh, my gosh, this has got to be it. And it just kept going on. Okay, so now that you've got to hear all of Lucas's story, with all those ups and downs, I know you're going to want to hear the rest of the story. Okay, so now that you've heard Lucas's story story, which is full of lots of ups and downs, I know you're going to want to hear next week's story. So make sure that you subscribe to this channel so you don't miss out.

Sa.