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IMPACT PROFILE
The face of ADDICTION
Even separation from life of privilege, loved ones is not enough to make him stop
Michael’s piercing blue eyes narrow slightly as he reclines in his chair and remembers the cooler he and his friends stumbled upon during the summer after the seventh grade.
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JEFF LOUGHLIN/The Patriot Ledger His all-consuming need to drink and get high led Michael to jail, made him a thief and ended his relationship with his father. |
A rare smile spreads across his face as the memories unfurl: There was a pool of warm water inside, along with four cans of beer and a half-empty bottle of Boone’s Farm wine.
The day had started innocently enough, riding bikes and shooting B.B. guns in the woods behind Michael’s house in Weymouth.
It ended with Michael unconscious, but victorious after downing more beer and wine than any of his pals.
“I remember being on the floor of our tree fort, passed out and puking on myself,” now-40-year-old Michael recalled during an interview at the Norfolk County Correctional Center. “The fort was spinning. My mother woke me up and I got grounded.”
That day remains vivid in Michael’s mind decades later, played back in full color along with a handful of other childhood memories, - like the birthday when Michael’s mother took him to a pet store and told him to pick out anything he wanted, and, years later, the brand new red truck he was given to drive to school.
| “I remember being
on the floor of our tree fort, passed out and puking on myself. The fort
was spinning. My mother woke me up and I got grounded.” – Michael, remembering a time in his youth |
But unlike those other memories, the drinking episode foreshadowed a lifelong problem that would separate Michael from a life of privilege, his loved ones and the ability to be a productive citizen.
Michael’s story of addiction and destruction is filled with details that make it uniquely his, but his life is also a vivid example of how, despite a decades old war on drugs and public education campaigns, the problem of drug abuse continues to permeate every race, class and community.
Suburbia is no shelter. And it isn’t always broken homes or broken people that are prone to drug abuse. Michael says he had a wealthy, loving family, and believed that despite his drug use, he could conquer the world.
Instead, his all-consuming need to drink and get high led Michael to jail, made him a thief and ended his relationship with his father, the man who had proudly showed Michael around the family’s thriving business and promised it could all be his.
But that was not to be.
And today, despite moments of regret over having lost so much, Michael is still not willing to quit.
He says this while sitting in a bare cubicle hardly bigger than a broom closet, where attorneys visit one-on-one with inmates. He is mostly softspoken, his behavior polite and inquisitive.
Michael, who asked that his family name not be printed, arrived at the Norfolk County Correctional Center in Dedham on Aug. 16, 1999.
But his journey to jail began years earlier.
Michael’s drug habit began in earnest in the eighth grade, during which, he says, he was drinking and smoking marijuana every weekend.
In the ninth grade, Michael began selling marijuana. He says he bought a quarter pound and sold joints for $1 to $2 each.
While most kids his age were living on allowances and struggling to settle into high school, Michael walked around with a cocky swagger and a wad of cash, sometimes $200 thick.
| In the ninth grade, Michael began selling marijuana. He says he bought a quarter pound and sold joints for $1 to $2 each. |
“I grew up around a business. I watched my dad selling cars, so I knew how to operate a business. I got a lot of people (into) marijuana. There’s no doubt about it.”
At the same time, Michael’s own habit escalated from two to three joints on the weekend to five a day - every day. For him, it was about feeling good and pushing things to the limit to get that feeling.
“I always thought I had control. ... By Monday, I had my homework done, so I didn’t think I had a problem. I was like: ‘Bring it on. I can handle it.’
“Looking back, I was addicted then, and I didn’t know it,” he continued. “I was psychologically addicted. I’d be telling myself I have to stop, and then I’d want to smoke a joint.”
His school years were punctuated by being arrested for driving a car while drunk and hitting another vehicle head on, a suspension for getting high on school grounds and a weeklong binge in Las Vegas with his girlfriend during his senior year.
By February 1980, his final semester at what was then Weymouth North High School, Michael’s father was worn out by his son’s drug abuse and disobedience and issued an ultimatum: constant parental supervision or move out.
Standing there, his hands crammed into pockets stuffed with money from drug dealing, Michael watched the words roll off his father’s lips.
The choice seemed easy.
“I left,” Michael said.
The next several years were a haze of on-again, off-again drug dealing and use. He tried cocaine briefly, attempted to stay straight for awhile and attend college, then dropped out when his drug habit picked up again.
The world Michael knows now in Dedham is dominated by bare walls and thick metal doors that roll thunderously closed. For inmates, it’s a place where the sky is a small patch of blue visible through a screen atop a tiny concrete courtyard.
It’s a place where boredom never goes away, Michael says. Instead, it is battled by playing basketball, weightlifting, reading and attending self-help classes.
At the time he was interviewed, Michael was serving a three-year sentence for assault and battery and resisting arrest after a night of drinking and a fight with his wife.
Writing Michael off as a loser is the easy way out.
By his own account, his beginnings were as good as they get. Michael's family owned two thriving businesses. There were summer vacations on Martha’s Vinyard and winters in Miami. There was always new clothes, new sneakers and new bikes.
His parents cared about his grades, too - every night from 8 to 10 was study time. Receiving a B minus or a C on a report card was cause for a family discussion.
Michael’s face, normally a slate of unreadable reserve, lights up when talking about loving, extended family gatherings and special moments of his childhood.
Still, none of it was enough to lure him away from drugs. “I don’t know if it was a self-destructive thing. I just felt so good. I always thought ‘What’s a little weed,’” Michael says now.
Michael says his father moved from the area and no longer communicates with him. “I burnt that bridge,” he says. His mother, with whom he maintains a close relationship, still lives on the South Shore. Michael is married and has no children.
To this day, Michael can’t explain why he allowed drugs and alcohol to dominate his life.
At times he wonders aloud: Maybe it was never having a good work ethic. Maybe there was some deep-seeded anger - he’s not sure. The only cause Michael points to with any certainty is an addictive personality.
It’s an addiction he’ll forever struggle with.
“I don’t think I’m going to quit. I like the freedom of being able to do what I want to do,” Michael says. “To smoke a joint now and then, I don’t think is bad. I enjoy the feeling. But there’s a thin line between feeling good with weed and smoking too much of it.”
