LOUIS: Reclaiming Himself from Drugs
Louis started using drugs to escape himself. He
began mainlining heroin at age 19 and eventually became addicted to cocaine as
well. Like many other addicts, Louis, now 40, says his drug dependence snuck up
on him. "I didn't choose to become an addict. I chose to experiment, to
escape." Drug abuse, he adds, helped him cope with anger, anomie, and
feelings of powerlessness. (Even before trying heroin, he had a troubled life:
Running away from his Camden, New Jersey, home at 16, he ended up on the
streets of New York and joined a gang before being sent to prison for 18
months.)
"I can clearly
remember my using [drugs] because of [emotional] pain, and because I didn't
know where to go with the pain or what to do with it. . . . I think sticking
that spike in my arm was a violent act, maybe it was an act of just basically
anesthetizing myself," he says.
It didn't take long
for Louis to figure out that he was addicted. "Emotionally and
psychologically, I just knew that this was it," he says. "This was
going to be my way, you know, to cope."
Louis did try to stop
using drugs many times. He tried methadone. But his early efforts didn't last
very long, even though drug use eventually became mundane and not even
pleasurable. Louis says he knew there had to be more to life than getting
high, but by some point he felt powerless to give up drugs even when their
use became what he calls "an empty routine." Louis says he did
whatever he could to support his habit.
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Hitting a Turning
Point
Although many addicts
must "hit bottom" before they seek help, Louis was always able to
find "a trap door," he says. In 1986, however, at age 29, he hit a
turning point. He found out he had the AIDS virus. "At the time I was on
heroin, so I didn't really feel the [news]. It took some time before it sunk
in that I have this result, this diagnosis." Louis says the diagnosis
was a wake-up call, but it wasn't until 1989 that he would be able to give up
drugs for good.
That year, he was
released from the last of many detoxification programs. Upon release, he
began to reflect on his life. He realized he had spent most of his teenage
and early adult years in an institutionalized setting. At 33, Louis was an
HIV-positive drug addict, out of work, and living in an abandoned building in
Harlem. Tired of what he describes as "a cycle of institutional
incarceration," he decided to find the means to change his life while
waiting in a soup line in an East Harlem shelter. He found it at that
shelter. There, Louis entered a community with which he could connect.
Although there were rules and regulations to follow, Louis says "there
was a wholeness" in the shelter that he hadn't felt in a long time:
"It was a place that wasn't like anyplace I'd been before."
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Finding a Haven
Louis also decided
that he had seen one too many friends die from drugs or AIDS. "There were others who had the same dreams that
never came true . . . never had the promise of their recovery really
fulfilled, because they were cut short," he says. Watching friends die
from AIDS, Louis says, he began to reflect on his own mortality. "I
wanted to be conscious as opposed to being on chemicals." There was no
blinding moment of truth that led him to recovery, he says. It was more of a
gradual process.
Seeing other addicts
recover and enter upon a "trans formative process" showed him how it
could change his life. When addicted people realize that there is a choice
and an alternative to addiction, "to me that speaks [about] freedom, and
that is what recovery is all about," says Louis. "Recovery is about
change, and change is about freedom."
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