the sun rise in crack city
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The Sun Rise in Crack City: A Journey into a SAIT Student Crack AddictionThe Weal / 14 April 2012 by Daniel Leon Rodriguez
“I went to hell and I came back,” he said with a sad smile. You would not
notice him among others inside SAIT halls.
He wished to be identified as Johnny. He is 23 years old, a SAIT freshman, and
a crack addict.
In a lonely classroom Johnny told me how crack, like a lighting crash, ruined
his life. His voice is relaxed, but the shaking of his body reveals that he is
anxious.
“I just wanted to be a cool kid.” Johnny was a 16 years old boy in his eleventh
grade during 2006. A friend offered him crack during lunch break in school. “It
was like the best feeling of my life, like sex, but better and more euphoric,”
After that first hit, it started the craving that still haunts him. He bought the
“rocks” with his lunch money. At the beginning he consumed around $40 a
week
Now Johnny was under control of crack craving and it “sketchy, paranoid and
depressive crashes.”
He first experience with drugs was with marihuana in seventh grade. “Crack
was a whole new level.”
He attended a high school in Forest Lawn. “Everybody did drugs there, that
school was my gateway to drugs.”
Johnny was among the 45 per cent of students in Calgary that Alberta Health
Services reported using drugs in 2008. None of his teachers were impressed.
Johnny was a shy child. His father abandoned him when he was a kid. “I was
afraid of talking with people and making new friends”
Johnny tried other drugs like crystal meth, opiates, coke, pot and all sort of
pills, but “crack was the most addictive of all.”
The relationship with his mother deteriorated quickly. “She kicked me out of
home after the first three months after my first hit” Johnny wouldn’t know
anything about her until three years later.
He moved to his aunt’s house because she was never at home. “School became
just a social meeting place to get high with my friends.”
Johnny’s mind became rewired. His brain became less and less sensitive to
dopamine because of crack.
Eventually his mind would need crack to be able to feel pleasure. When lunch
money was not enough, Johnny started to steal. After, he met his first crack
dealer outside school at “Crack Mac’s.
He barely graduated from high school. In 2007 after graduating, Johnny went
to his first crack house in Marda Loop. “It was so scary… I remember it so
clearly.
“From outside, it was so beautiful, but inside it was just destroyed.” He found a
house with the paint peeling and floors full of needles and crack pipes.
There were 23 people inside buying, smoking and living for the sake of crack.
He bought a rock, and locked himself alone stoned in the bathrooms for 12
hours.
When Johnny woke up with nothing depression hit him. He tried to use
anything remaining inside the broken needles and pipes. Places like this
became his “home” for the next three years.
Johnny became part of the 43per cent of the street-youths that consume crack
according to Aids Calgary.
2009 was his worst year; Johnny now 20 was smoking up to $1000, over 50
rocks, on crack each day.
He started to do anything to sustain his addiction from robbing prostitutes,
breaking in cars, selling drugs and stealing cars.
During that year, there were more registered crack crimes, 1118, than
marijuana, 893 cases. “Some people live for the next meal; I lived for the next
hit,”
For him there was no such thing as days, but continuous 96 hours of craving
without sleeping. He would do at least ten crimes each day, and get between
some dollars to $10,000 in a week.
“I didn’t care. All that mattered to me was my next high” Johnny couldn’t stand
any relationship.
He had a crush for three years on a prostitute and crack addict 20 years older
than him named Maria.
Maria would sleep with whomever to sustain her addiction. “I was so in love
with her, but she didn’t have any interest in me.” They had nothing more than
sex and crack.
“Sometimes it would be a whole day without stopping.” Johnny heard that
Maria died from a crack overdose the last Christmas break.
Johnny tells me that “crack heads” are very self-absorb people. “Anybody that
could help me to get high was my best friend at the moment.”
He would wake up many days knowing nothing. “One day I woke up in a ditch
two miles south of Crossfield, Alta. “I didn’t have any idea about what I was
doing there.”
The only thing he tought after waking up was crack. “It was a long walk back to
Calgary.” He tried to go to narcotic anonymous unsuccessfully.
I asked him what he used to think about death. He rolled up his sweater and
showed me his arms. “My arms are horrible,” said Johnny.
The deep scars of cuts all around his arms are silent witness of three suicide
attempts.
The last one, probably the worst, happened around 3 am during a summer
night of 2009. “That night I started to realize what was happening in my life,
and that I hit rock bottom.”
He took a broken pipe and started to cut his arm in the bathroom of a crack
house in a downtown apartment.
The last thing he saw was the floor painted with blood.
The next day he waked up in the psychiatric wing of the Peter Lougheed
hospital. “I was lucky. It’s rare that someone call 9-1-1 in a crack house.”
After that summer he moved with his mom. Everything started when he met his
mom unexpectedly at Chinook Mall. After that, he decided to visit her, and he
never left.
He lost the contact with the street life. “It was like nothing ever really
happened.” Johnny’s mother still doesn’t know of his addiction according to
him.
He didn’t quit, but he dropped his consumption to $40 a week. Johnny was
lucky because he had support. His crack friends had bad problems; they had a
broken home or were abused.
“The only thing they knew as families were crack heads and the only home they
had were the crack houses.
“There is no turning back if you don’t have the proper support.”
Johnny is among the 10% of Albertans that Canada Health reported consumed
crack last year, but that is probably just the top of the iceberg.
He decided to come to SAIT to get a better future. “I was tired of dead-end-
jobs.” Today, he craves the flavour of crack, but he fulfills it with alcohol.
There aren’t words that could tell Johnny’s entire story, and many like him that
are unnoticed by us in this city that has become a hell for them.
Johnny’s life turned 180 degrees. Crack may only left him a requiem for his
teen age dreams.
Johnny doesn’t want to do crack anymore, but it is everywhere.
“Is like going to a 7/11 for coffee… You can’t get out, there is no way out.
It is like digging a grave for you and throwing yourself in… I’m hooked”
Hopefully for him the sun is rising at “crack city.”
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