Meth Recovery Quotes

Because all little girls deserve to be protected. Even the daughters of douche bags.

Nic ha fatto uso di droghe, a fasi alterne, per oltre un decennio, e in quegli anni credo di avere sentito, pensato e fatto quasi tutto quello che un genitore può sentire, pensare e fare.

I was so empty inside that I took all my cues about who I was from other people.

I can feel the tears and they make me angry. Why do I cry all the time? Why am I so damn emotional?

Every addict I know says the same thing, in one way or another: their drug of choice filled that empty space in their soul nothing else could touch.

Annie is clean today because of what she’s done, and what God has done in her. We merely supported her recovery and stood by her while she saved herself.

Trust me—the best revenge is you finding your own happiness. That makes you a clear victor. Don’t give your abuser anymore of your energy or time, even if it’s meant to hurt them. Focus on building your new, better life.

She began removing visible tattoos—from the face, neck, and hands—of those leaving Kenton County jail, at no charge. From one youth’s forehead she removed “13.5”—“Twelve jurors, one defendant, and a half-assed chance of winning,” he told her. This is coming off, she told him, and all this will be behind you; he broke into tears. “I’m like the den mother,” she said. Along the way, she removed a branding: a pimp’s name—Charley—from a woman’s thigh. One man had a Hannibal Lecter mask tattooed across his lower face. She saw “Life’s a Bitch,” “God’s Child,” and “I’m a pornstar. I f— teenage sluts” etched on necks and foreheads. And when I met her, she was removing the spiderweb from the back of Will Pfefferman’s left hand. “We also take off a lot of swastikas,” she said, “and teardrops.” Jo Martin’s Tattoo Removal Ink is important to the story of Kenton County because by the time it opened, it fit naturally into an ecosystem of recovery support outside the jail, yet rooted in the Unit 104 experiment. For

Kenton County began shuttling inmates from 104 directly to the LLC to avoid the perilous bus trip. The day before I met Webb-Edgington, eleven people from the jail arrived. LLC staff fed them, then got busy finding them beds in sober-living houses. They fitted a couple for eyeglasses. One man was wearing only shorts; outside, the temperature was 21 degrees. LLC staff dug him up a pair of pants. Kenton County jailer Terry Carl hired a social worker to sign inmates up for Medicaid. They often asked her for dental care, too. Ravaged teeth were as public a sign of street addiction as visible tattoos. Improved smiles, on the other hand, helped their confidence; then they dressed better and they got their hair cut, too. Some of them got tattoos removed by Jo Martin, who in the winter of 2019, three years after being turned away, moved her lasers into an office at the LLC. Jason Merrick imagined now what he called “recovery-ready communities”—towns geared to helping addicts recover. “This is what rehabilitation looks like,” Merrick told me. “It’s a full continuum of care, not just punishment.

Many people think that if we have a multitude of [treatment] resources, everything’s going to be better,” Barrett said. “It’s simply not true. A multitude of resources does not encourage people to want recovery. It just doesn’t work that way. If they’re not kind of pushed into it, or forced—if they don’t know something worse can happen to them—many people would not have any interest, and it would have no staying power.

As COVID-19 hit, instead of continuing the Mission as a flophouse, Ortenzio opened a Resurrection Room, where addicts could spend ninety days quarantined in sobriety. Two users well-known to the Clarksburg street world—Melissa Carter and Jesse Clevenger, who stopped using when they were forced into drug court—found sobriety at the Mission and have become his recovery recruiters. Clevenger had been a major heroin dealer in town, selling to dozens of people a day while feeling, he said, “like you were a house-call doctor. Everybody you talked to all day were at their worst—sick, had no money, crying.” Then Clevenger was forced into a drug court and treatment. It was either that or prison. “I wouldn’t have got clean,” he said, “if I didn’t have that ultimatum.” Now he was out among meth addicts and preaching recovery at the Mission.

In 2014, as the flows of the new meth were just beginning, Californians passed Proposition 47. Rather than expanding the ways felony drug-possession arrests could be used as leverage by judges to push people into treatment and recovery, Prop. 47 made those charges misdemeanors. Cops stopped making those arrests. Those who were arrested tended to refuse treatment and judges had no leverage to force them into it. So they remained on the street and fewer addicts went to treatment, just as the street drugs they used became more prevalent, addictive, and brain-damaging than ever.

When asked how many of the people he met in those encampments had lost housing due to high rents or health insurance, Eric could not remember one. Meth was the reason they were there and couldn’t leave. Of the hundred or so vets he had brought out of the encampments and into housing, all but three returned. Eric grew weary of wanting recovery for the people he met more than they wanted it for themselves. Such was the pull. Some were addicted to other things: crack or heroin, alcohol or gambling. Most of them used any drug available. But what Eric and Mundo most encountered by far was crystal methamphetamine.

Happily, drug courts around America are doing this work—using the threat of prison terms to push addicts into treatment, where they can put some space between their brain and dope and slowly embrace sobriety. Life repair can then begin. It’s happening across the country—as in Scott Barrett’s Recovery Court in Kenton, Ohio. It’s slow, hard work, with slip-ups and success. But this rethinking of courts and judging is harm reduction of the most elemental form. County drug courts are not a luxury. Synthetic drugs have made them a necessity. After all, people can’t recover when they’re dead, which is what decriminalizing today’s fearsome synthetic drug stream risks.

As if they are a mountaineer climbing across the great slopes of Mount Everest, meth monkeys take quite the health risk. Their minds become mush due to sleep deprivation. Like pillows with way too many hours of sleep invested into them, these minds exhaust themselves and become overworked. Like that of old television shows, their minds become reruns on repeat.

I sometimes think the recovery community is a picture of what the church should look like. I’ve experienced the Spirit of God hovering in those recovery rooms as a palpable presence, bringing healing to those who struggle and who submit to their higher power. It’s my belief that Jesus, my Higher Power, hears those prayers, whether or not they know his name. His favorite people were, after all, the most broken among us — the outcasts, the misfits, the sick, and, yes, the addicts.

If moments of clarity and realization happened when they should be happening, maybe there would be no addiction.

The dirty little secret of the drug-treatment industry is that for the majority of people recovery programs don’t work, at least if the goal of treatment is long-term and complete abstinence.

Cravings can be successfully managed by remembering that the cue is like a wave washing over one’s entire body. It has a forward motion and will, ultimately, crest and pass. At its height the urge to use seems unbearable, but by practicing cognitive techniques and applying relapse prevention tools one can survive the craving.

Methamphetamine is, in many ways, the perfect drug for gay men. In addition to initially heightening sexual experiences, it artificially neutralizes many concerns gay men have about themselves and their place in the community. Where there is little confidence, meth creates feelings of strength and power. Where there is fear, it creates assertiveness and even aggression. Where there is a feeling of unworthiness, it creates a sense of narcissism that is, in itself, mood-altering. Where there is a feeling of not belonging, it creates connection without concern for age, physique, or wealth. Where there is an internalized belief, based on a lifetime of messages that gay sex is wrong and shameful, it creates an exhilarating thrill at flaunting taboos and celebrating gay sexuality.

The truth is, the path to skid row isn't always laced in crystal meth - there is no concrete path that leads to insanity. Crazy is really just you or me and one bad day that leads to several more bad days. It's those of us who were forgotten about. Those of us who couldn't get help in time. Those of us with a disease that was misdiagnosed.