Of course every addict has a story, however I do intend to bring somethings of additional value to the reader. I have one great value that will be shared that I swear with all I know in this field that if anyone takes up this idea that I have it will work as a huge prevention program and make whoever can pull it off a ton of money. The challenges to making it happen will be somewhat self-evident but I’ve run this idea past many directors of programs and other professionals in the field who agree with me that if the barriers can be overcome then it should work. And I say “should” to downplay it because honestly nobody has ever said anything but that it will work and have given the idea high praise. When exploring barriers it is always simply funding and logistics, of which I have no mind for. But if you have a mind for such things and you want to dialog with me about how I have considered getting it off the ground, please feel free to let me know. I’m more interested in getting the idea out into the world and to know that it will work than profiting from it.

More on that later but for now I will also offer the following value for your consideration; Years ago when I started my private practice in order to build up a web-presence I wrote a variety of articles which can still be found on my website dakotatherapy.com. In all things related to my work I have tried to bring an uncommon approach to help those who would respond better to something of an atypical therapist. I’m pleased to say that as a strategy for helping people that it worked and it has been the most profound pleasure of my life to be in service to you all. So then, including the articles I wrote in order to get that web-presence I was always trying to bring something new to the reader so it wasn’t the same old stuff you’ve all heard before.  I wrote the following article called “What You Should Know about Addiction” which was picked up by a leading rag and run as the front page article. So, I’m hoping that if you are dealing with addiction, wonder if you are addicted, or just want to learn more about the topic that you might want to stick your nose into this article, cuz, obviously I’m not alone in thinking it has value. ttp://dakotatherapy.com/articles/?page=5

At the core of the prevention plan, the article, and my story here is the fact that the leading indicator of anyone developing an addiction is the age at first use. There are many reasons for this but the research is undeniable. So when, at the age of 10, circa 1969, living in the interior of Mexico where any kid of any age old could go get booze and smokes for their parents, let’s say, with the only question by the store employee might be asked is “do you need matches with that?” Or, “How about a corkscrew?” my friend Cory, who was clearly world-wise since he was a year older than I was and his brother Terry, a year older still, both having been regulars in their moms liquor stash clearly “knew” their alcohol. And since they knew all about it I figured they must have been well-informed as to what we should go purchase to get drunk on. Their choice was Kalua. So, there we were, pulling from the Kalua bottle in gulps and grimaces. 

The only memory that lasted from that night was that Cory ended up trying to convince me that I wasn’t actually getting sick as he grabbed me by the shirt trying to get me to the bathroom. I had barely stood up before he was wearing the contents of my stomach. I couldn’t get close to the smell of Kalua for the next 40 years without my stomach turning, as one might expect. Our next drinking endeavor was straight Crème de Menthe. We were such lame little gringos!

We finally figured out that beer was the best way to go, and so started my drinking “career”. When we moved from Mexico to Massachusetts I fell in with the neighborhood degenerates. Well, it might be more accurate to say that I was somewhat the captain of the neighborhood degenerates, always highly motivated to pool our money together and get down to the liquor store and solicit dudes to buy us beer. In retrospect how we managed to pull that off regularly seems just mind-boggling from the standpoint of those guys buying it for us. Sure, it was a different time and all, but still, I remember 100% success rate never walking away with money in pocket instead of beer in bag.

I’d guess that I was around 12 years old when the rag-weed started to come into the picture. We were so young and stupid I’m sure we purchased and smoked our share of lawn shavings; and probably got plenty “stoned-ish”, on it too, before figuring it all out. Somehow we managed binge drinking on most weekends and we would get high off of pot occasionally mostly funded by the theft of parental money and selling of the occasional rag joint here and there. Maybe allowances were involved as we lived in a affluent area of Springfield, but in any case binge drinking on the weekends was a regular practice. I was just thinking how much of a testament of being unsupervised that is. Years later a therapist pointed out to me that it was actually neglect, which took me quite some time to accept. But yeah, if you read the other stories, especially the crime story, there’s no doubt that “neglect” is the correct term. When once considers that it suggests that I was able to binge drink practically every weekend for a couple years and only got caught once. But boy, oh boy, did I take a pounding!

My father was a professional boxer back in the day and I’m guessing he pulled his punches, but it didn’t seem that way at the time as I was getting my ass-kicked. I think he was playing good-cop/bad-cop at the same time, but lost track of which he was at the time; “Who bought it for you”? “I don’t know”. Blam! “Where’d you get the money?” “I don’t know.” Blam! And so on. But dude was so sweet he came up to my room to apologize and explain himself. But still, that was the only time I got found out and we will keep in mind that I was a staggering pre-teen age drunk. I was a staggering-down weekend binge drinker, which I can say that for sure, but the reasons that I was found out only that one time can easily be found in the criminal story. Meaning, the house was a carnival shit-show of chaos and drama and a kid can get easily lost in an environment like that.

Many of the stories I’m sharing have details that overlap and I have no desire to be repetitive so I’ll be trying to bring up new and hopefully interesting details where I can and then reference where the reader can find details on other stories within the pages of this blog. Meanwhile I will try to maintain something of a linear timeline in order to attempt decent storytelling. So weekend binge drinking and getting stoned was what I did until 15 years old at which point I added smoking cigarettes. That year I also joined a carnival that passed through town during the summer and speed in the form of “white crosses” were commonplace for carnies and I was a regular user for those. Drinking became pretty much a nightly occurrence as it would for a kid who had a propensity for alcohol use, money and plenty of adult degenerates to purchase it at any time.

After a few months on the road with the carnival I returned to Santa Barbara. Shortly after that we moved to a town called Carpentaria just up the coast, but at the same time isolated to some degree where I took up daily smoking of pot. Now to truly appreciate this episode that lasted probably a bit over a year you have to think about it in terms of what it means to “wake and bake”, which is to say wake up and hit the pipe, joint, roach, hash-oil pipe, or whatever it was next to the bed from last night. The objective on any given day, accomplished more often than not was to then stay high all day, until the next day, which lasted basically for a year.  

The next few years was a blur of movement around the country and eventually back to Santa Barbara and into the foster care system. Alcohol was consumed when I could, white crosses went the way of the carnival, meaning I stopped doing them once I was out of the carnival, and I’d get stoned when the opportunity presented itself, but these were lean times for a teenager with no income other than the occasional rip-off of some sort.

The huge jump in use came when I joined the Army at 17. Even though I was technically underage as a soldier I was able to drink and drink I did do. From the time I got out of basic training until I was released from the Army a couple years later I’d say that I could be found at the enlisted men’s club at least 90% of any given evening and that would be just cover the nightly maybe 10, or so beers, never mind the assorted other substances I indulged in over time. I was stationed in Germany and so even if I wasn’t in a club on any given night there was beer in the barracks. There are some German beers that are quite tasty at room temperature and there was usually some in my room.  I dealt copious amounts of drugs, the main one being a European version of a Quaalude called “Mandrax”. I dealt hash in what where sometimes 100 gram “plates” and smoked plenty of the product. I got somewhat involved in heroin, but after a couple of months of using it I noticed that my “friends” and “associates” were now all heroin users and it didn’t take a genius to see where that was heading so I made a decision to stop using it. Still if I were to guess that 90% of any given time was under the influence of some type of mind, or mood altering substance that estimate is probably low. The amount of craziness that followed me around was not a little bit and one can imagine that to try to share two years of that kind of chaos will require the writing of a book and I hope to make that happen someday.

Meanwhile some of the “highlights” would include overdosing on Mandrax and alcohol to the point where, as I was told, my breathing stopped on the way to the hospital. Fortunately I was at the annual airshow that our post had each year so there were plenty of ambulances around. In the hospital I came to as the nurse was using my own limp hand/arm to slap me to consciousness after having had my stomach pumped. I was told that I had stopped breathing during my trip to the hospital and that I had been kept breathing by the EMT’s. While recovering from that episode over the course of the next several days I slept through the next 3 days except for getting up occasionally to use the bathroom and (I imagine, but don’t remember) eating.

While in the Army I got busted no less than 10 times for all kinds of things but it could have been more like 20 without exaggeration. Because of the drug dealing and other enterprises I could afford whatever costs incurred as a result of any arrests. As concerns drug and alcohol use there was the occasional cocaine that came my way but mostly it was about daily use of “What do you have? Let’s do it until it’s gone and go get some more.” I dabbled in psychedelics but they were hard to come by.

So since this is a narrative of drug use only I won’t detail more of the craziness that came from all of this. I have written a criminal history that covers some of this but only really as a gloss-over and if I ever get around to the Army story that will be a doozy. For the two years it covers I would say it surpasses the criminal story, if for no other reason than the time-condensed craziness. I was approaching 20 years old when I got out of the Army and entered into the world of other craziness, that being the world of bikers.

The big addition to drug use during the biker days was the use of “crank”, or, as it became known, crystal meth. “Go fast” is what I called it and it was love at first try. Alone it was plenty wonderful but to use it while drinking made for a much longer lasting drunk, which was a big plus for years. In those days I found myself drifting towards working the swing shift with kids in residential treatment and so I would get off at 11, close down the bars at 2, then if I could find something after hours if available and a blast of meth the next day did the trick every time to get the whole thing back to where I wanted it to be.

I had a distain for society along with cops and laws in general and I was only too happy to drive on down the road in whatever altered state I was in. The fact that I had only 6 DUI convictions, 9 motorcycle accidents and too many car accidents to count is actually an amazing amount of luck. To be clear the accidents mostly didn’t involve cops, so, for example, running off the road in the mountains, or some such thing, otherwise it would have been otherwise. But I’m saying that I would get on my motorcycle as loaded as a man could be, always sans helmet, and I did that plenty of times. So, in that respect I’m fortunate to be sitting here writing this 44 years later. During those years there was still the occasional psychedelic but they were always treated as a party drug and not used respectfully as I would later on in life.

In 1996 I decided that it would be a good idea to quit my job and hit the road to play professional poker. The overview of that story is in the blog as well. To say I became addicted to poker is a massive understatement. To say I played all day every day is not much of an exaggeration. I got so sucked into that life and I just could not find a way out. I didn’t drink as much as I could have but I could find the meth users in any given town fairly easily and meth was a good drug for poker for a variety of reasons.

In late 1999 I managed to find my way down to South Texas where one of my sisters lived and through what I can consider nothing less than a series of true miracles I managed to quit using everything. This part of the story is worth parsing out to some degree so I will do that in the next section of this narrative.