Marijuana
Real Stories: Marijuana
The Lows of Getting High: Alby's Story
By Cate Baily
Adapted from Heads Up: Real News About Drugs and Your Body, Scholastic, Inc., 2003.
(While the following story is real, to ensure anonymity, the photo is of a model and is not of the article’s subject).
At 18, Alby was living a nightmare behind bars. He felt he was in constant physical danger. “I saw people get stabbed,” he told Scholastic. And he experienced daily indignities. “I couldn’t eat the food they served. The potatoes were like blocks and the meat didn’t taste like meat,” he says.
Believe it or not, getting arrested was probably the best thing that could have happened to Alby. It got him into treatment for his drug problem.
When we spoke to Alby, he was 1 month into his recovery at a drug rehabilitation center in Westchester, New York.
Grudge Against the World
It all started one summer day on a street corner in Yonkers, New York, when Alby was 13. “You need to get your mind right. Hit this blunt,” a friend said.
Alby didn’t have the strength to say no. He felt he had to smoke the blunt (a cigar hollowed out and refilled with marijuana or a mix of cocaine and marijuana) to fit in. He desperately wanted to belong.
His parents had never been there for him. They were drug addicts themselves and couldn’t handle the demands of parenting. So, Alby bounced from a foster home to his grandmother’s to a group home. When he was about 14, his mother died.
“I wasn’t supposed to go through this,” Alby says. “I had a grudge against the world.”
After trying marijuana (also called weed, grass, pot, herb, boom, Mary Jane, and chronic) to fit in, Alby kept abusing the drug because he enjoyed the intoxicated feeling marijuana creates. “It had me in another state of mind,” he says. “I was relaxed. All my problems seemed like they were disappearing.”
The Price
Alby’s problems weren't disappearing. They were getting worse. The good feelings he sought from marijuana came at a price.
Over the next 5 years, Alby smoked marijuana every day, several times a day. He went to school high and eventually dropped out. “I was losing focus. My attention went from 100 to 0. I was depressed,” he says.
Despite the consequences, Alby kept smoking marijuana. In fact, he was willing to do anything to get high.
Eventually, he started dealing drugs to support his habit. That’s what landed him in a maximum-security jail.
New Friends, Lingering Effects
Now, at Daytop, Alby has been able to address the real problems in his life by talking them out with counselors and making new friends he describes as “positive.”
But he still feels some of the effects of his drug use. “Sometimes I want to say things, and I can’t get them out. I can’t find the words,” Alby says. “I never had that problem before I started smoking.”
Alby’s memory problems may improve with time. But for now, they are enormously frustrating. “I used to know things,” says Alby, “but now, it’s rusty. I forgot how to do division.”
Frustrations aside, he is looking ahead and hoping to create a future for himself. Alby wants to pursue a career as a mechanic.
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