Addiction

Growing up I have vivid memories of all of my father's crazy friends. They would always be over our house at all hours of the day or night but mostly come over when my mother was not home. I also remember a few really bad fights between my parents when I was a kid but never being sure what they were about. Both parents worked full time jobs, my mother worked at day and my father worked at night but would stay out halfway through the next day as well. My father also had a side job he worked to at his auto repair shop he owned on a lonely plot of land about 20 minutes from our house.

Last summer my father opened up to me about his addiction and involvement in the drug business. He used to deal coke, meth and weed all the way up until I was a sophomore in high school. He was mostly on Meth which made sense as to why he always felt the need to work because meth gives you that energetic surge of energy and he used it to his advantage to maintain productivity in both of his actual jobs and even his illegal job. After telling me some of his crazy stories where he nearly had a bad run-in with the cops on multiple occasions, I was able to piece together a lot of backstories to the memories from my childhood and even in high school. His involvement in drugs nearly made him lose everything when my mother attempted to file for divorce while I was still in high school. Even then I never had a clue though. Nowadays he doesn't sleep. After being addicted for about twenty years, it took a physical toll on him and he is lucky if he can get a good night of sleep.

I'll never understand addiction to hard drugs or how people can trade a wonderful life for a terrible life-threatening habit. It's a shame that people can lose so much motivation or drive too do anything with their lives after trying an addictive substance just once.