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heroin, cape town
“at this
particular time in my life, i was addicted to heroine for
approximately 3 years. it was november 27th 2001, a wednesday
evening. i had just bought 3 quarters of “thai white” from my dealer
at bayside shopping centre in cape town. i immediately went to
mcdonalds and used 1½ quarters, and at that stage i was in my
element. nothing pleased me. i went into bayside and spoke to some
people and at about 10pm decided i would walk home.
as i got to the end of the parking lot at bayside, i decided that it
was still fairly early and that i would phone my dad to come fetch
me. as i turned towards the phone booth a white bakkie with four
coloured guys stopped and asked me something. as i did not think
anything of it, i stepped closer to the vehicle to ask if they were
lost. one of the guys jumped from the back and grabbed me, while the
other quickly opened the door and pulled me onto his lap. i was too
shocked to scream. they drove off in the direction of parklands and
asked me if i had any smokes and if i had been drinking! i said no
to both questions and demanded they let me out. they assured me that
they would take me home and asked me where i stayed. as i stayed in
parklands, part of my heart held on to the hope that they might take
me home, while my heart was numb with fear.
as they drove past the turn-off to my house, i started crying and
panicking more and repeatedly asked them to stop and let me out, i
could walk home. once again, the driver told me he would turn
around. he drove towards a part of parklands that only had
developments, and no houses. i attempted to escape by throwing my
legs out of the window, and got as far as my thighs, when the guy
who’s lap i was sitting on pulled me back in by my hair and slapped
my head against the dashboard, angry that i had broken the window!
the driver (who did most of the talking) told me to keep quiet and
that they were only going to have sex with me because i judged them.
while he spoke, the other two were searching my pockets and putting
their hands down my top feeling my breasts. when the one found that
i had a smoke in my bag he was angry as i had lied to them before!
they lit the cigarette and gave me a drag, then stopped the bakkie.
i started crying uncontrollably and begged them not to kill me. the
guy who seemed to be the youngest jumped off the back and scratched
around in a bush, retrieving a gun. he gave the gun to the driver
and got back on the back. they drove down a dirt road which led to
the dump which is next to a shooting range, then stopped. i don’t
remember walking, just that two of the guys where very angry that i
was crying and screaming.
the driver held the gun to my head and told me that if i was good,
he would not kill me, and i must stop crying for nothing. he pushed
me onto my knees and kicked me onto the ground where there was a
hard plank with what seemed to have a hole in it. he pulled my pants
off and my bodysuit i had on. i thought of screaming but did not
know who to call to! i was screaming in the deepest parts of my
mind, as he forced himself into me. a poem of “our father” came to
my mind. as a child i could never remember to recite the whole poem,
but with every thrust he gave i remember more and more of the poem.
once he was finished he grabbed a discarded old rag and wiped
himself off of me for his friend. i said “our father” over and over
again and after the 4th guy i could remember the end “forever and
ever”. i fixated my eyes on the top of the trees were i could see a
full moon shining through.
my tears were dry and empty my spirit shattered into a million
pieces, while a small dog barked from far away. they told me to stay
there; i was numb and moved almost lifeless. the men started arguing
and three of them left, leaving the driver behind. he took the gun,
put it to my head and demanded a blowjob, then told me to kiss him,
i felt nauseous. he got angry and told me to lie down on my stomach
and proceeded to sodomise me. i cried out at the pain, the more i
moaned the harder he thrust. after a long time he stopped and told
me to get dressed. for the first time in years i wanted to live
again and asked him not to kill me, that i had been good. while i
was pleading him the other three guys came back and started talking
in afrikaans, about how to kill me and cover up my body!
they tied me up with plastic towrope and picked up a disguarded
broken bottle, pushed it into my neck and slid it across my throat.
by the grace of god, the glass was stump. they pushed me against a
barbwire fence that separates the shooting range from the dump and
told me to say my prayers. i kept quiet, closed my eyes and heard
them click and cook the gun. he screamed at one of the other men and
told them to untie me! they then took me back into the bakkie and
drove through the dump onto a dirt road! they dropped me off at
killarney and told me not to turn around; otherwise they would come
back and kill me. all i did was glance back at the license plate
number, which i cannot remember and sat down on the ground.
in this time a police van drove past which i heard later at the
police station. there is a lot i have not mentioned as it is
currently too painful, so i will skip to the ironic turn of events.
i was instantly a racist and had this unexplainable desire to
understand why they chose to do that, why any man or woman can hate
someone so much to feel it their right to take another persons
sanity and life!!
for the next 9 months i spent time with myself and heroine. i went
to a rehabilitation program and relapsed shortly after my leaving.
my parents heard of a place in eersterivier, called teen challenge,
and gave me an ultimatum to go there or into a medical institution.
i choose to go to teen challenge. the day i got there i hated it, i
was the only white person amongst 50 other mostly male!
as time went by, i reconnected with god and found that my spirit
just needed his healing. i developed strong friendships with a few
of the guys at the centre and knew that they protected me from the
guys who did not want change in their lives at the time! one day
while talking to my brothers of t. c. we exchanged and talked about
stories of our pasts. to my horror 3 of them had been in prison for
rape and murder. i had come to love the enemy. this was a
realisation to all my unanswered questions.
i cannot give any logic or understandable answers; all i can say is
that god is bigger than any enemy, circumstance or battles of the
mind. god and teen challenge with its staff helped me to become an
overcomer! and i am forever changed. after leaving t. c, 3 friends
and i went back to the dusty road and prayed, nothing extraordinary
happened, but i was able to release all my fears, and close off one
chapter of my life.”
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life is not life with drugs
author monument (lyttelton)
this is a true story of my life as a drug addict
south africa is a great country with a lot of problems. one of the
problems is substance abuse and it is getting worse as dealers are
targeting soft targets, especially schools. i feel people are not
doing enough in our schools or as parents to educate our children of
the dangers of drugs and alcohol. we live in a conservative society
where people do not want to talk openly about drugs. to put this
problem aside is wrong and parents must themselves take charge by
educating themselves about drugs so that they in turn can educate
their children. just like we teach our children about sex because of
hiv we should also tell them about the dangers of drug abuse.
it is still believed that if you teach your child at an early age,
about the danger of drug abuse it will make a difference. parents
sometimes tell children not to do something because it is bad
without explaining why. rather talk openly to them about the dangers
and living a drug free life. we can no longer say "this cannot
happen to my child" or "it is the schools duty or the sap". it is in
our best interest as parents to do something by being open about the
abuse drugs.
nobody is an expert on parenthood therefore i want to share my life
as a drug addict with you and hopefully parents and children will
benefit from reading my confession. i am not proud of what i did
with my life or all the people i hurt in the process. it would make
me happy if a child can refrain from ever start using drugs or
alcohol or quit by sharing what i have experienced down this road.
being the eldest of four boys with good parents who worked hard to
give us all we needed. we are a very close family with a lot of love
for each other. in 1974 we moved from cape town to johannesburg,
which meant a new school and new friends. at the age of thirteen in
a new school wanting to be one of the boys, sport played a big roll
as a scholar. i always wanted to be "one of the boys" so i joined a
very powerful gang who hard earned the worst reputation because of
the bad things they did. we were out with the gang one day drinking
alcohol and partying when an older guy we knew offered me a "joint".
i did not say no, because as a teenager knew nothing about marijuana
except that it was illegal. it gave me a weird feeling so i did not
hesitate using it again. little did i know that this was the start
of a long and slow road towards drug addiction by smoking and
drinking alcohol before, during and after school. my schoolwork and
sport started deteriorating but as a teenager i always had an excuse
for my behaviour. for two years until the age of fifteen, drinking,
smoking joints and hanging out with gangsters hurting people,
fighting and stealing their money for dope, alcohol and girls was my
lifestyle. at the age of sixteen i as a result of a rugby accident
became an epileptic. i than started experimenting with other drugs
such as lsd, which was a different "high". because of my epilepsy
coping with school was difficult so i quit school and started
feeling sorry for myself. that was a big mistake which just made me
do more drugs because it made me feel better about myself even
though knowing you are not allowed to do this because it is against
the law and being epileptic doctors warned me not to drink alcohol
or do drugs.
my family moved again from johannesburg to pretoria where i started
to attend classes at college to complete matric. starting again by
meeting up with different people and made new acquaintances at
college. then it was fun hanging in a bar the whole day instead of
being in college. it was in this period that smoking mandrax was the
in thing and then i was called to do army training. smoking mandrax
was a bad experience as this had worsened my health and my life
started deteriorating in front of me but i did not care. life had
just changed towards being a full on drug addict and my life existed
only of getting "stoned". on coming out of the army i had to do the
jobs on offer but the salary earned was not enough for my lifestyle
of addiction which meant starting illegal activities like selling
stolen goods, stealing, and basically anything to get money, and al
for a "high". while being on medication for epilepsy my immune
system seemed as though it could tolerate more drugs than compared
to a normal addict. between the age of nineteen and twenty six i was
always in trouble for fighting in and outside of clubs, the law also
played their roll and i was caught four times for possession of
marijuana and was also suspected of other activities but there was
no proof. in this period my addiction to lsd and mandrax had got
worse and was costing between three to six hundred rand every day.
for me this was a game and i did not realise or did not care about
the pain that it was causing to my family.
life was just one big party of drug cocktails like a roller-coaster
up en then down and speeding along and haven’t i also seen people
have a bad experience on lsd. they see things that are not even
there which gave me a fright and having people you know overdose in
front of your eyes. it is not a nice site at all to see a person die
or come close in front of your eyes because of to much drugs.
we went out to friends in johannesburg where we just sat as normal
smoking mandrax. we had a plan for a housebreak, we new was
foolproof. the time was right 1:30 am my friend saw we were to out
of it to go along so 2 guys went and 2 stayed. at 6:30 am the phone
rang and we were told that both men were shot dead with multiple
bullet wounds as a result of trying to escape from a robbery. we
never got to thank our friend who told us that we should wait for
him to get back. it was like my life flashed right passed me in
knowing that it could have been one of the two of us. i did not
enjoy needles or pills but did pop a few pills now and then as two
friends of mine overdosed in front of me injecting walconol, they
died so quickly that there was nothing we could do, which shock me
and i got a fear of needles. coming close to overdosing is not a
good experience. one day a guy we knew came up to me and gave me a
handful of pills which i immediately put in my mouth an started
swallowing while he was trying to tell me two was enough, but it was
to late. he told me this was the most vesparex he had ever seen
someone take. this happened on a friday night and for four days
after that i had to be fed, taken to bathroom and could not walk or
talk. fully recovered one week later and decided not to pop pills
again as that week was a blur but done some weird thing which pup me
off taking pills again.
there has been to much misery and death around me because of drugs
although never forgetting a close school friend of mine that dies
when we were only sixteen in a fatal stabbing outside a night-club
in a fight over a girl.
taking drugs is no life at all and by the age of twenty five i had
already been engaged to be married twice which never worked out at
all because of my substance abuse. my life was a mess but like any
addict i believed that the problem could be fixed by myself by not
admitting that there was a problem. that was another big mistake by
keeping my problem a secret and then decided to stop smoking mandrax
and dope. only then i started sniffing cocaine mainly because it is
a smaller parcel, compared to carrying mandrax an marijuana. life
became very unmanageable as cocaine is a very expensive habit and
highly addictive. the feeling is so good that you don’t worry about
your actions and don’t care about the consequences of what you do,
life becomes a nightmare. money starts to have no meaning in life
and life has no meaning of life anymore. this turns out to be a life
that surrounds being in dangerous places with dealers, money and
other addicts. i made good money and was able to get cocaine on the
book from dealers because they trusted me which meant using more was
easy for me.
on the age of thirty i got married and was divorced 3 years later,
even though my ex wife tried to help me but listening to people was
not my strongpoint. the worst was still to come, when at the age of
twenty eight crack cocaine came in my life which is just as
addictive as heroin. crack was the worst drug of my experience as it
really takes away everything you have got, love, friends, family,
money and most importantly your life. from the age of twenty eight
till the age of thirty six crack was my life. spending all my money
on the next "fix" and always having my parents pay my drug debts
which was by no means cheap at all. to give you an example of the
things a person is capable of while on crack, the company i worked
for closed down and being a long time employer of the company i
received a seventy five thousand rand cheque which i spent within
two and a half weeks and for those two and a half weeks i never even
slept, it was like that crack fix would never end.
crack grabs you in a place you do not want to be grabbed and does
not want to let go at all and you become somebody you don’t want to
be. when you see a millionaire or two lose everything because of
crack it is also not nice to see because you could also have had all
this money but chose crack which could cost up to three thousand
rand a day as was in my case. a crack addict becomes withdrawn from
society and does not care for other people or life and a person
should remember that drugs is a habit to treated in the right manner
and there would be a better chance of treating someone as early as
possible at a young age before the addiction gets worse. the best
cure is if the individual realises and admits to having a problem
and really wants to give up any substance abuse which in not that
difficult because it is all in the mind. crack was the most
devastating drug ever experienced by myself as it becomes your god
and you actually worship it but it is a living hell and you don’t
care about anything around you, only when the next "fix" is going to
come from.
after being in a rehabilitation centre for three months a lot was
learnt by me and a lot started to make sense but is difficult to
start a new life at the age of thirty six after twenty three years
on some kind of a drug. seeing things that was always there all your
life is a new experience and weird but it is a challenge and a
challenge is a fight for me and fighting is in my blood. things have
started looking much better now that the hard drugs are something of
the past but i always must remember that i will be a drug addict for
the rest of my life. it will take me many years to get back what was
lost especially gaining peoples trust in me and showing my love for
my family and the few friends that have helped me with my recovery
and prove to myself that it is possible to live a normal life with
its ups an downs and have done well thanks to the people that always
showed me love. people are not aware of the dangers of hard drugs
which is why this true story was written by me, not to tell you
about the bad things i did but to make you realise that substance
abuse could happens to anybody. we as people should make an issue of
this and demand more anti drug campaigns for example anti drug
banners, anti drug radio and television commercial’s and more talk
shows on this habit. i cannot say this is the answer but only a
suggestion. substance abuse plays a big part in crime so it is op to
us to be more open about the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse and
to come together as one and stamp out this problem that effects our
children’s and country’s future.
my message to you is that you should not abuse any substance as this
could just be the start of a long lonely road to addiction and worst
kind of life you can imagine. you cannot imagine how difficult it
has been for me to get my story on paper as my addiction is unlike
anything you can imagine, almost like a horror story, just worse
submit a testimony to
info@narconon.org.za
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