I Snorted Meth For Seven Years And This Is My Story

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Producer’s note: Someone on Quora asked: What is it like to be addicted to crystal meth? Here is one of the best answers that’s been pulled from the thread.

I used meth daily for seven years. It started out awesome. It made me feel warm, loving, happy, and confident. I lost all of my shyness and became someone who didn’t have any problem striking up a conversation with anyone. I felt smarter, driven, and extraordinarily confident. I didn’t want to sleep or eat, which was also nice (at first).

My addiction to crank began the moment I did the first line up my nose. I didn’t want the euphoria to end, and immediately made plans to score more.

In less than a month I lost an excessive amount of weight. I loved it. I bought new clothes and looked good in everything I tried on. But the weight loss continued, until I looked like hell. I wore long sleeved shirts in the middle of summer to hide my skeletal arms. At 5’7″, I weighed 90 pounds. I got stared at, and no longer in a good way. People assumed I was anorexic.  Customers who I helped at work went to my boss with concern for my health. I was skeletal. My eyes were sunken in. After burning away all the fat on my body, I began to burn through the muscle as well. The skin on my butt literally hung loose from my body because there was no muscle underneath to support it.

Everyone knows water is vital to their health. When you’re on crank, though, you probably won’t drink any. The meth will dehydrate you severely. As a result, you will stop defecating. You will experience the most severe constipation you have ever known.

In an effort to hide my addiction, I forced myself to eat. Eating was not pleasant anymore, and nothing tasted good. I also learned how to force myself to sleep at night like normal people do. When I would begin to fall asleep, my body would twitch and jerk violently.

People on meth talk so fast they can be hard to understand. They also change the topic of conversation before concluding the initial one. I learned to focus, and to slow my speech to a normal rate.

I practiced all of this until I seemed as normal as anyone else. The only one who knew I was an addict was my dealer.

I never smoked meth because it seemed “so much more unhealthy.” In an effort to be more “healthful,” I chose to snort lines up my nose. This ate through a lot of the cartilage inside my nose, caused nose  bleeds, and, I’m convinced, led to the massive loss of vision I have now.

As time dragged by, I was no longer getting high when I used. I felt so sick that I had to use meth just to feel “normal”. The drug had lost all of its fun aspects. My body now required meth in order to function like other people do every day.

All the things that made me like meth so much at the start had changed to the opposite. Instead of feeling warm and outgoing, I became cold and withdrawn. My productivity ceased as I became obsessed by small details, and would concentrate on them for so long that nothing ever got done. (In other words, I was “tweaking.”)

My personality changed into someone I didn’t know. Someone evil. I said the most cruel, vile, awful things to people who loved me. I was hideous in the way I treated others, something that still hurts me to remember.

People around me were also addicts. One by one, I watched them fade out. One developed cancer and died. One moved on to heroin and died of an overdose. Another lost their business and all of their life savings.

Relationships were destroyed. Another person I knew sits behind bars today because he shot and killed someone in a meth-induced rage. Many of them committed robberies, prostituted themselves, and did all kinds of illegal things to ensure they had meth.

In the end, meth consumes your entire life. It robs you of your joy, the people you love, your talent, your health, and your mind. I’ve yet to meet a tweaker who successfully retired and was able to live out their golden years in good health, happiness, and prosperity. Meth gives you only two options:  death or incarceration.

I’m fortunate. I’m one of the rare few who pulled my head out of my ass and by miracle, managed to quit using without going to rehab. I wasted seven years of my life enslaved to that drug. Imagine the things I could have accomplished in that time had I kept myself on the straight and narrow. I will never get those seven years back. I cheated myself horribly.

This answer originally appeared at Quora: The best answer to any question. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and get insider knowledge.