Owen’s Personal Story of Marijuana and Poly-Drug Addiction

Owen’s first experience with drugs was LSD that he and a friend tried soon after he got to college. He liked it and thought he should try some of the other drugs he had been missing. He made up for lost time with heavy marijuana abuse and drinking. To ensure he had enough money for drugs and alcohol, he began to sell weed.

A couple of years later, he discovered cocaine and heroin and made the switch to these stronger drugs. For a while, he could leave heroin alone when he wanted to, but after a week of continuous snorting, he found he could not stop. He began to transport heroin and marijuana to support his addiction. Gradually, his whole life began to fall apart. When he became homeless (and of course dropped out of school), he wound up crashing with friends.

When Owen asked his brother if he could stay with him, his brother insisted that Owen enter a methadone program as part of the deal. But drug tests soon showed he was still using heroin along with the methadone. The deal was off and Owen was back out on the street.

When a former girlfriend died of an overdose, Owen saw that drugs were ruining the lives of everyone addicted to them — including himself. He finally got through detox and rehab and was able to stay clean for a while.

But when life seemed flat and boring, Owen turned to marijuana and alcohol again, thinking these were just recreational and no big deal. Before long, he was binge drinking straight vodka. His mom helped him get into a year-long program that gave him some practice being sober.

He completed that program. But then after another relapse, Owen began looking for a different kind of program, one that didn’t require hundreds of meetings. He liked the sauna detoxification step that is part of the Narconon program and appreciated the fact that group meetings where you talk about what you’ve done were not part of this innovative program.

As he went through the Narconon program, Owen found that it was possible to finally take full responsibility for the bad things he had done and that had happened to him and to start making his own sober future. He said he began to feel lighter and freer. “I found that I learned how to live a drug-free life myself, not from someone else telling me how to do it,” he said. “And I think the sauna portion of the program would help anyone who had been using drugs.”

(Owen’s name was changed to protect his privacy. This story is otherwise true.)