Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve no doubt heard marijuana referred to as a gateway drug, but what exactly does this title mean? The answer may depend largely on the person you ask. Present it to a gateway advocate and you might hear something along the lines of: “The gateway effect is a theory that states users of less harmful drugs (marijuana, alcohol, tobacco, etc) may run a higher future risk of becoming involved with harder drugs (crack, heroin, ecstasy, etc, etc, etc) and/or crime.” Present the same question to a reformed hard drug user and you just might walk away with a somewhat different view.
The following story is an account of one man’s journey into, and back out of, the hard drug scene, and how his experiences have enlightened him on what it really means to walk through this gateway.
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“I guess you could say my troubles with drugs started just after the turn of the millennium when I got the news my best friend was killed in a workplace accident—although that isn’t necessarily when I started using.” says Chris Masters, a thirty-nine year old reformed substance abuser from Canada. “I was unemployed at the time and had no reason to be out of bed at six in the morning, so I was asleep when the call came that he’d been struck on the back right side of the head and had been airlifted to a hospital in a nearby city. A week later he was dead, and I began to fall into a depression that would change my life.
Three years later found me still unemployed. The problem wasn’t that there was no work out there—there’s always work if you’re willing to get your hands dirty—the problem was that I was afraid, plain and simple. I didn’t want to end up … well, you know: dead like Dwayne.
I most likely would have gotten over my fear and eventually rejoined the working world, but that wasn’t quite what fate had in store because it was at this point that the future Mrs. Masters decided she would rather be the future Mrs. Somebody Else. Within twenty-four hours after her departure, my body turned on me as well, and I was shot full of morphine passing a kidney stone in the local hospital. Within twenty-four hours after that, my nephew was holding a make-shift crack pipe under my nose offering me to ‘give it a try.’
It’d be easy for me to drop the blame-bomb on him all this time later, but like me, he had a story that put him behind that pipe, and like me, this was only the start of his journey into hard drug use. He was simply offering because he figured if it could make his dilemmas fade away, it’d probably do the same for me.
I accepted the haul of the modified beer-can/crack pipe and in an instant my troubles melted into the background. They were still there (no girl; dead best friend, stones movin’ around my guts like a landslide), but they just didn’t seem to mater so much anymore. It was like a vacation from all things negative.
Eventually crack drove an unspoken wedge between my nephew and me. It wasn’t that anything had gone wrong between us, or anything like that; it’s more that he receded away from … from life, I guess. His house became his den, and his den was the only place he wanted to be. I, on the other hand, walked away from crack all together. It just wasn’t my thing being pent up in seclusion all the time. Besides, I was single and on the prowl; I needed to be someplace chicks hung out. I needed to be at the bars.
Not long after putting the chemical aroma of my nephew’s living room behind me and heading off to the bar, I ran into a little pill called ecstasy and fell in love with the feeling it offered instantly. It ruled supreme over my life for the next three years, and although I could go on for hours about the good times I was having on the inside, on the outside I was a train wreck. I dropped a good half of my bodyweight, I was weak and tired when ever I wasn’t high, my teeth began to rot out of my head at an alarming rate, my major food source became samples from the grocery store, and so on, and so on, and so on. I was dying. My family pleaded with me to quit whatever I was doing so many times the words became like a unwanted familiar song reverberating in my head, but in the end it was my old friend Dwayne reaching out from the grave who convinced me.
Already fucked on pills and walking the two miles it was through the woods to town for more with a friend of mine, I decided I needed to take a piss at the bottom of a steep embankment. Why at the bottom I can’t say, but in my bewildered state that’s where I needed to go. I got down there with no problem, took my piss, and made my attempt for the top again. I didn’t make it. About halfway up I lost my footing and fell backwards smacking the back right side of my head against a tree as I went. I can’t say for sure how long I was knocked out, but when I opened my eyes again my friend, who was equally as wrecked on pills, had time to assess the situation, decide I wasn’t just yanking his chain, climb down to the bottom, and shake the shit out of me.
Quitting wasn’t instantaneous after that. It took me a few weeks, in fact, to remember the outcome of Dwayne’s blow to the head and connect it to what had happened to me that day in the woods. Eventually I did, though, and I knew it’d either be, quit on my own terms, or quit because I was dead. So I braced myself for a life without ecstasy. A couple months and a mountain of pills later I knew it wasn’t going to be just so easy as deciding.
Although I smoked pot off and on for most of my adult life, and I smoked it more during my hard drug phase, it never got its grasp into me like it seems to for others. Mostly I’d accept the pass of a joint because it was easier than warding of the nagging to do so when I didn’t. Truth is: it actually made me feel kind of ill back then. With the thought of loosing my ecstasy vacation looming, though, I decided, ill or no, I needed the stepping stone to get me back to the right side of sanity.
Initially I was high from weed every bit as much as I’d ever been from ecstasy. I guess you could say I wasn’t ready to entertain the thought of turkey yet—cold or otherwise. This period of time was a transition phase for me: one high traded for another, and I realize now, looking back, that I was standing the preverbal gateway I’d heard so much buzz about. Only difference: I was headed in the opposite direction. Hard drug use in the rearview; salvation dead ahead.
Eventually loosing the ill feeling, I smoked pot habitually for the next two or more years. I still wanted the ecstasy, but I could, at least, manage without it as long as I had weed as my crutch. Time progressed, though, and as the desire to experience the ecstasy high became less and less, the feeling that I needed to be high on pot all the time subsided with it. It would be lie for me to say pot was my cure-all, and that my desire for ecstasy disappeared completely—even to this day—but that’s a haunt that I think inflicts all reformed dedicated abusers. It would also be a lie for me to say I didn’t become addicted to pot during the course this. I did, but I did with the understanding that there are bigger demons out there.”
