“When I first met him in junior high I thought he was nothing special. But, as I grew up with him through junior and senior high, I discovered that he had a miserable past—the life he wished he never had.
He moved to San Jose, California when he was around 11 or 12. Here, his parents started a liquor store and their days were filled with hectic schedules. Because of their business, his parents saw increasingly less and less of him. His mother saw him before and after school. His father became nonexistent in his life; he saw him three or four times a week.
The new environment also forced him to make new friends. Seeking a new group to “hang out with,” he started becoming friends with a racially mixed group, which was predominantly Mexican. This was a new experience for him since he was practically the only Persian.
Pretty soon, he found out that his “friends” were into a lot more than just “having fun.” Their idea of fun was doing drugs. Their drug of choice was marijuana, also known as pot. Sometimes they dropped acid.
Filled with curiosity, he decided to try drugs. It was just a few days after Christmas when he met a friend on a bridge. They smoked some pot from a pipe made from an empty coke can. “I liked it. It gave me a really good feeling. It was like a feeling that I had never felt before. It’s so hard to describe. It’s like enjoying something… a lot. I’m not saying that I had a bad time. I actually liked it and that’s why usage progressed. At first I was like I was just gonna do a little bit and I’d never do it again.”
After nearly a month of using pot, usage became constant. Some days he spent as much as $20 on pot. He also started drinking, smoking and shoplifting anything he desired.
He smoked three times a day
“I was doing it before school, during school, every single day. I did it at least three times a day or whenever I could handle it.”
Usually he would “kick back” with his friends and a brother of theirs that was a drug dealer. “Whenever I wanted some, all I had to do was go over to their house. It was cool with them. They’d say, ‘Sure, have a hit.’ Besides, they had a lot of spares. I basically never had to pay.”
Or he got pot by helping other people get some. “I did hook up people who needed it. I didn’t get any money out of it but my commission was them letting me smoke as much as I wanted.”
But sometimes he needed money to chip in for drugs at parties. He stole from his mom or broke into cars. He and his friends would vandalize cars for fun and, if they were lucky, they would find money in the glove compartment.
“Once we found $50 in the glove compartment of a car. That just made us break into cars more and more.”
Within six months, he was out of control. Drugs were running his life.
“I thought I knew what I was doing. I didn’t see having fun as a problem.”
His grades slipped to Ds and Fs. He also started getting in trouble with the law.
One day he and his friends were walking down an alley (still high on drugs) when they met a crowd that they didn’t like and got into a fight.
Neighbors called the police, who arrested him. The police never found drugs on him. He came home with four stiches on his forehead and a big cut on his elbow.
His parents suspected him of using drugs, but he denied it. When his parents asked why he had gotten into a fight, he said he got beaten up because he was Persian and his friends had tried to protect him. His mom believed him.
Then he was caught with a knife at school.
“I needed a knife for protection. It was just in case anybody tried to attack me. When you get into something like drugs, you’re always afraid somebody is watching you. You’re always afraid that you’ll get caught by your parents or someone. In order to be safe, you feel the need for protection.”
Again he was arrested, suspended for five days, and recommended for expulsion. Soon his parents found out about his drug habit. At first they grounded him, but that didn’t stop him. He sneaked out of his house to see his friends.
“I hadn’t changed. They [my parents] could see it in my eyes. Someone who does drugs looks different…blood shot eyes, bad odor, a pale face and the way you act just isn’t right. I saw the disappointment in my mother’s eyes. My dad was disappointed too because I was always the good kid in the family. I was always into helping my parents and doing good stuff.”
He continued, “But, I really don’t know my dad’s reaction. He sat with me and we just talked. He asked me, ‘why?’ I couldn’t look him in the eyes; it was too hard. He kept asking why and I couldn’t give him an answer and he let me go.”
Without asking any more questions, his parents decided to move him to his aunt’s house in Beverly Hills. There, he began eighth grade, and decided to try to make a fresh start. “I looked where I was headed and I didn’t like it.”
He talked to the vice principal and principal of his new school about his drug problem. They referred him to the Maple Center for counseling. But he stressed that the most important thing was his own decision to stay away from drugs.
You have to be there
“You can’t diagnose this; you’ve got to experience it firsthand. That’s why I didn’t feel that I ever needed any help from doctors,” he said. “Basically, there were no programs to help me cope with drugs. Even when I lived with my parents, my mother didn’t hold me like a child and ask me if I needed help. They thought if I came over here, I wouldn’t be able to buy drugs. Drugs are easier to get in L.A. than anywhere else. I could have been into drugs until this day if I didn’t want to stop.”
“I know that doctors say that there’s a physical dependency and all that, but there really isn’t. I got off of drugs because of pure will power. It was how bad I wanted it, not how bad my parents wanted it, not how bad my friends wanted it. It was what I wanted.”
When he recalls the reason for his drug abuse, he still doesn’t understand why. He does understand that if his usage had become long term, he would have had a bleak future. “I still don’t know why I did drugs. But, looking back, I know that I would have probably landed in jail if I didn’t stop.”
It has been more than two years since the last time he even thought about using drugs. He considers himself fully recovered, but emotionally confused.
“I’m still lost. In my heart I know that I’ll never be the same.”
He is, however, thankful for his experience, mainly because he has learned an important life lesson from his experience.
“I can’t say that I love my mom [with whom he now resides.] There’s nobody in the world that I do care about. When you move around a lot and live with everybody, you realize that it’s just yourself.”
Currently he is far from his “wild days.” He is now an honor student, maintains a 3.8 GPA and is on a junior varsity sports team. In the future he hopes to attend UCLA because it is close to home.
He still reminisces about his past days. “Sometimes I wonder where my old friends are just so I can see how lucky I am.”
As for now, he’s happy where he is. “I take a look around me and I see what I have now. I see how precious each thing is and I don’t ever want to lose it.””