Habit was Broken in Three Months
Ex-cocaine User Now is High on Narconon
During the three years Doug used cocaine, be sometimes spent as much as $500 a weekend on the drug.
Finally, be decided be had “bottomed out” and went to Narconon, determined to break free of his habit. After three months in the program, be no longer uses cocaine, although he said many of his friends still are heavy users.
Doug is a real estate salesman in his late 20s, with sharp good looks and short curly hair. He is animated but nervous as he talks about bow be became addicted to cocaine—a drug that physicians insist is not physically addictive.
“I was a success at 25. I had my own Porsche, a condo downtown and many rich and prominent friends. But despite all this I was very unhappy and was looking for something to fill the emptiness.”
Over the next few years, Doug began taking cocaine until be often used almost a gram—more than $100 worth—in one night.
When Doug took cocaine he felt energetic and had a feeling of wellbeing. But when he wasn’t taking the drug, “I felt depressed and didn’t feel I could communicate with anyone. I had a low energy level and had a lot of respiratory infection—which is common to cocaine users.”
Describing the point at which he admitted to himself that his cocaine habit had become a real problem, he said, “It was one of those nights where I had just snorted my last line, it was 3 o’clock in the morning and I just thought, ‘Oh, Christ.’
“I just had this overwhelming feeling of despair, because I realized that I was ruining my life.”
Soon, be said, he could barely function on his job. At times he couldn’t recall when he had made a phone call, which he actually had placed only the day before.
“All I knew was that it was in the past sometime, back there in my mind,” he said, waving his arms to indicate the state of his memory.
Doug wanted to stop using cocaine, but he didn’t want to go to a hospital drug program and expose myself.” He settled on Narconon.
Within a few days he quit taking the drug and soon he was regaining his strength and jogging again, sometimes running up to eight miles a day. His moods evened out and his memory returned, he said.
Even his marriage improved. “My wife has been supportive of coming here (to Narconon). But she was never really aware of how bad my problem had become—dopers are real liars.”
Doug believes he won’t return to cocaine use. He said the Narconon program has “killed the desire to take drugs.”
“Life is meant to be a beautiful, happy experience, and I realized I couldn’t do that on drugs they are a complete waste of time.”
Doug described cocaine as a “heavy-duty drug,” and said people should be more aware of its dangers. But because many respectable people use it, cocaine “has the veneer of social acceptability,” he said.
Doug doesn’t agree with the physicians’ view that cocaine isn’t addicting.
“It may not be physically addicting,” he said, “but you have an incredibly strong psychological desire to take it.”
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