I ended up being addicted to
heroin, coke, meth.
I've done it all.
And it all started with pot.
Marijuana is the dry parts
of the Indian hemp plant.
Hash is the sticky crystalline
that comes off when they pick it.
A lot of it it's like from Mexico,
shipped over the borders.
A lot of people manufacture
their own and sell it.
Hydroponics is a system of growing weed.
There's a lot of science,
there's a lot of chemistry
that go into wanting to make it stronger.
And comparing it to what was available
in the 60s and 70s,
there is a huge difference in potency.
It's so much more stronger.
It's so much more intense,
and so much more damaging to the body.
The main mind-altering drug ingredient in
marijuana is THC.
The THC is what gets you high.
This drug is a hallucinogen,
distorts your reality.
It can be green, brown or gray.
It's compressed most of the time
into brick forms that are real compressed.
And they bag it into pounds,
ounces, quarter ounces.
So weed is either smoked or baked.
You can smoke it from a bong, a pipe, you
can roll it up as a joint.
Some people, they'll dissolve
the marijuana in butter
and they'll make pot brownies, pot cookies,
whatever food they want to ingest it with.
I was wrestling, I was in football,
went to school, got A's.
You know, I was a good kid.
I had this dream, I was going to
make sure that I had an education.
I was a B student.
And then I went from that to C, D.
I pushed aside my studies,
I pushed aside any sports to do the drug.
I didn't want to go to school. I missed school
all the time. I didn't graduate because of it.
Everything kind of slipped away.
I lost the glimpse of hope I had.
I was probably 13, 14,
something like that.
I started smoking weed
when I was 14, I think.
17 -- can't forget that day.
I saw pot everywhere when I first
started doing it. It made it okay for me.
I was with a friend. She was like,
"It is, it's an herb, it's grown,"
"it's safe, it's natural
and there's no problem with it."
I knew other people did it.
It seemed harmless at the time to me.
Take a puff and pass it
to your buddy sitting next to you.
No one ever passed it up,
everyone always took a hit.
It started off as something
very casual and fun.
And then within a few weeks, it was something
that became an everyday habit.
And then it just turned into a sort of like
escapism, just to get away from everything.
I smoked weed
so I didn't have to deal with life.
It was kind of taking place of life.
There's a common misconception that
weed is not like -- addictive.
I never thought
I was addicted to marijuana.
I thought it was just something that was part
of my life style. I thought it helped me relax.
I'd become so accustomed to
being stoned every night.
When I wasn't doing it,
it was out of the norm.
Once you smoke it, you really don't feel like
you can do anything without it.
You just feel so high. You just want to
be high for everything you do.
And there was nothing that I wanted to do
with my day other than smoke weed.
It was so weird.
That was my driven purpose.
See, I always had this idea
in my mind that
I can live life and smoke weed
at the same time. But I never could.
I'd want to get high every day. I'd want to get
high when I woke up in the mornings.
My mind was so set on having it,
that it preoccupied so much of my thinking,
that that became all that I did.
That was all I thought about.
If I ran out of weed,
I'd be pretty -- pretty mad.
Irritable and annoyed with everything.
I was tired.
I was nervous. I was anxious.
'Cause I couldn't sleep without it.
I'd be up for days when I tried to stop.
It's an emotional roller coaster.
It's very hard on you.
I'd feel depressed by not having done anything
better with my life,
but I'd still use the drug
to hide from the problem.
I was actually Prom King. The drug dogs came
to school. And I had some joint roaches
in the ashtray of my truck -- and they
found them. I got kicked out of school for it.
I dropped out of school.
I had no job, I had no money to pay rent.
It unconsciously separated me
from my family,
and I was always concerned with like,
when I was going to go out and party.
And it just... the priority list of like friends
or family just slipped underneath.
I stopped trying.
And when that started,
that was -- it just led to
a different life style.
If I needed to get a job interview that
included a drug test,
I wouldn't take that job, because I
couldn't stop using it.
I had a BMW.
And I loved that car, I loved it.
I was so high and I just floored it,
just went all out in it.
And I took a curve and I lost it --
flipped the car over.
And my first reaction -- I had a quarter
pound of weed in there
-- and my first reaction was:
grab the bag full of my weed.
One of my friends was smoking pot,
him and a buddy.
He was going like 80, went off the road
and hit a tree. Killed my other buddy.
I wound up in prison.
I served 3 years, 11 months and 19 days.
I've been locked up -- since I
started smoking, about 12 or 14 times.
I went to jail -- been facing charges
ever since. I got a felony on my record.
It ruins your chance to get a good job,
it ruins your chances to get anywhere.
Once you have a record, that's it.
So it's...
it's not fun -- at all.
People say marijuana is a gateway drug. I
mean, you can argue that all you want,
if it is or it isn't. The fact of the matter is, when
you smoke pot, the people that you hang out with
are going to have other drugs around you.
Eventually you're going to run into it.
As much as I hate the word
"gateway drug," I'm the prime example of it.
And I know lots of other people
who followed the same path.
I basically realized that
my gateway to those drugs
was the fact that I couldn't stop
smoking weed on a daily basis.
'Cause eventually you build a tolerance
and then you stop getting high.
So you still crave a high.
So you go out and look for other drugs.
Which of course
were even harder drugs.
So that's how I tried coke.
I'd go over to another friend's house and
people would show up with mushrooms,
"Hey, you want to buy mushrooms?"
After that I started doing
cocaine and Oxycodone.
-- Do some heroin...  -- Introduced to coke,
Xanax, Ecstasy, all that stuff.
I wouldn't have touched any of that stuff because
I wouldn't even know what being high was.
So once you get high,
it just changes everything.
Maybe nothing horrible is going to happen
to you those first 10 times you do it.
But before you know it, it's going to be
a huge component of your life.
Personally, I wish I would have just avoided it.
I know people who have grown up
and never smoked weed
and are perfectly fine,
they're socially accepted,
they have great lives.
It's all a big hype, you know what I mean.
They just tell you that,
"Oh yeah, you just get high, whatever.
Everything will go away." That's BS.
The problems that you had before you got high are
still going to be there when you're done being high.
You're going to ruin relationships, you're going
to get yourself in trouble with the law,
you're going to screw your finances up,
you're going to screw your future up.
It took away my chances of wrestling
in college or playing football in college,
going to college for academics --
because I was capable.
And that is all gone.
So now I can't vote,
I can't do anything as a normal citizen.
I would have been in college right now,
about to graduate,
probably going for something decent,
a good degree, get a job,
get my life together -- not going through
what I'm going through right now.
It wasn't something that was harmless.
Smoking pot ended up taking my life away and
leading me onto another life that I never wanted.
