perrinelson

Bad decisions can come back to haunt you at the strangest times.

We all make mistakes in our lives. Oftentimes those mistakes have consequences that affect us immediately, but they can also affect us later in life. I've just witnessed that in my own life.

When I was a teenager I "experimented" with recreational pharmaceuticals. It began with tobacco.

A friend of mine named Bob and I decided we wanted to smoke tobacco when I was around 13. I remember hanging out with him at the entrance to the PX and the Commissary on base and picking up the cigarette butts that people discarded in the ash cans. When we had collected quite a few we peeled them and gathered up the loose tobacco into a plastic bag. Later we took paper towels and rolled our own cigarettes with them. They were horrible.

Not long after that I started stealing cigarettes from my dad. I remember he smoked Pall Mall golds. I'd take them to camp with me and me and my buddies would smoke them there. We really didn't know what we were doing, and we tried swallowing the smoke instead of just inhaling it. It made us dizzy, but we thought we were getting high. Later we got sick.

One time I decided to try to make brandy from scratch with Bob. We'd stolen some of his dad's brandy and thought it was cool. So we tried to figure out how we were going to make some of our own.

We knew we needed a still. At first we thought about using a gas can. I remember taking one and trying to "burn off" the gasoline in it to make it clean enough to use as the main boiler for the still. I can attest to the fact that it really, really hurts to burn yourself when the gasoline fumes flare up.

We decided that wasn't a great plan, so instead we got a five-gallon glass jug of water and emptied a good amount of the water. We filled it with grape juice and added a few packets of yeast to ferment it.

A few weeks later we took the fermented grape juice it to camp and set up our still in a tent. The glass jug couldn't take the heat and shattered, filling the floor of the tent with our sour grape juice. Another failed experiment.

A couple of years later I decided I wanted to try marijuana. Another friend of mine named Clay told me he could get some for me. He showed up at my house late one night and I went out front to see what he had. It looked like ordinary pipe tobacco instead of marijuana, so I didn't waste my money on it.

I actually knew where I could get some. Another couple of friends, Jay and John introduced me to marijuana on another campout. Then they showed me where they were growing it. Less than ten years later, that property had been sold and a mobile home park was built on the spot.

When I was in high school, all the "cool" kids hung out across the street from the school in the mornings before school, smoking cigarettes. If you stepped into the woods behind the crowd, there were a few trails you could follow. There was almost always a crowd of kids smoking marijuana there. Big circles of kids passing joints around. There would be ten or fifteen kids passing around three or four of them at a time. I was there quite often, before my American History class.

Somehow, despite all of this, I managed to do fairly well in school. There were a few classes I didn't do so well in, but I did well enough that I ended up with several college scholarships, including an appointment to West Point and one to Annapolis. I ended up going to Michigan State University.

It was there that my experimentation really started getting serious. Amphetamines. Cocaine. Finally LSD.

I've had a few really "good" trips on LSD. I've also had a couple of really really bad ones. The first bad one nearly scared me to death, but it didn't stop me.

Ultimately, and actually very shortly, my abuse of drugs and alcohol caught up with me. I spent more time partying than I did studying and within two semesters I was through with Michigan State. I had lost my scholarships due to very poor grades and had to return home in shame and disgrace.

You would think that that would have been enough for me to learn my lesson, but the fact is, I really enjoyed getting stoned. I had to be straight for a while, long enough to actually get through college and get a real job. For a while things were working out. Then my boss decided to party with me.

I was back at it again. I was smoking marijuana and popping pills again. I was also getting drunk a lot more than I should have been. Eventually, it had to come to an end. I think that the beginning of the end came when my boss died of a heart attack at the age of 26.

He was supposed to go out with a woman from work named Nancy one night and never showed up. Two days later he didn't show up at work. A couple of people from work decided to go check on him and found him dead in his home. It was devastating.

I don't know to this day whether he had a heart condition that I didn't know about or if drugs, specifically cocaine, might have had something to do with it. I do know that he was a friend of mine and now he was dead. He and I had traveled to the Florida Keys for a vacation once and he had talked about how he wanted to own and live on a boat and sail in the Caribbean. Now it wasn't going to happen.

I still miss him.

For a while, thanks to the help of some Christian friends I cleaned up. I ended up going through the motions at work though and kept chafing under the "straight" life. Eventually I started going to a strip club just about every night and blowing hundreds of dollars a night there.

Then I came to Washington for a visit. "Inspired" I quit my job in Florida and moved to Washington. Sadly, part of the reason I did that was to have an opportunity to get away from everything in Florida, except for the drugs. Marijuana was once again a major part of my life.

I've taken up smoking, drinking and drugs several times in my life. I've quit them all several times too. Once I quit smoking cigarettes for nearly a year, then I lost control of my girlfriends car one morning and nearly got us both killed. My immediate reaction was to start smoking again. It took a few more years before I finally managed to quit them for good, a few years after I had married my girlfriend.

It took a few more years after that for me to finally be able to quit smoking marijuana. It also took quite a few attempts. I had gotten to the point where I was going through an ounce of marijuana a week and didn't have money for anything else. I knew I had to quit, but I couldn't do it.

When I did manage to finally quit it was really difficult. I had become dependent on the stuff to the point that when I didn't have it, my personality changed drastically. I fell into a clinical depression and had to take prozac for six months. I nearly lost my wife during that time, but eventually she and I managed to work through it. I've been clean now for more than seven years.

Still, consequences can strike at the weirdest times. Tonight I watched as a young person I had told some of this tale to went to his home stoned out of his mind. He had gotten drunk and eaten some psychedelic mushrooms and was totally wasted. He had thrown up all over himself and his friends car. He seemed proud of himself. He also said that I was probably the only person he knew that could understand it.

Because of my bad example, someone that really has enough problems is following in my footsteps.

I pray to God that he doesn't take as long as I did to realize the consequences of this foolish behavior. I pray that he learns from this bad experience and stops abusing drugs and alcohol now, before it ruins another life.

And, I wish I had stopped long before I did. Before I ruined his.

My cat Voodoo, is gone.

My wife just got back home from taking him to the humane society. He was suffering from feline dementia, and seizures. He also had horrible problems with draining abscesses and had picked up some really bad habits like peeing all over the house and leaving his loads in the sink instead of the litter box.

These problems only began to manifest in the last couple of years. Up until then, he was the coolest cat.

I miss him already.