Lloyd was a very creative person. He wrote poetry and short stories that got even got published sometimes. Well he used to anyway.

It had been a long time since Lloyd wrote anything. These days all his creativity was going into getting drunk and staying that way. He was creative in how he found the money to buy more liquor. He was creative in the ways he hid bottles around the house so his wife, Katie, wouldn’t find them.

To drink as much as Lloyd did you had to be very creative indeed. You had to be prepared to beg, borrow, and steal to find that next drink. And that’s what Lloyd did.

For the first few years of his marriage, he more or less hid his problem from his wife. She knew he liked to have a few drinks, but she didn’t know that he HAD to drink. He would keep bottles hidden in all kinds of pngslaces around the house.

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Sal sat in the front row, terrified about what he was about to do. Someone else was standing in front of the roomful of 50 people reading the 12 steps of Cocaine Anonymous. After that, another CA member was called up to read the 12 traditions.

Sal felt on the verge of a panic attack as he anticipated the chairman of the meeting introducing the speaker for the evening. It was him, of course. Sal had never spoken before a large group of people before (to him, 50 was large) and so much fear was swimming around in his head.

Would he make sense? Would he freeze and not know what to say? Would people laugh when they weren’t supposed to – or not laugh when they were supposed to? This was all typical of Sal’s pattern. He spent so much time worrying about what other people were thinking that it stopped him from just living his life. Everything he did had to be measured against what people would think.

Somehow he had to overcome that fear to tell his story to the group – his hope, faith, and courage. When his name was called he headed to the front in terror. He turned around and saw a sea of expressionless faces – or at least that’s how he interpreted them.

He began to tell his story: how it was, what happened, and how it is now.

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As Tom sat in his cell, he thought about some of the serious mistakes he`d made in his life. They weren`t all due to his addiction to cocaine, but many of them were. Certainly the more serious ones were a direct result of his need to satisfy his insatiable need for the drug. But at 30, he had been clean for almost a year. He only wished it hadn`t taken prison for him to find recovery.

That recovery came in the form of an Alcoholics Anonymous group that he attended in prison. His embrace of the 12 steps and his willingness to find a higher power had changed his life so completely that he barely recognized himself.

The way he made the long days inside pass was by helping others who were also battling addictions.

Tom first got into drugs when he was about 16. While his family was relatively stable (his parents weren`t exactly demonstrative, more on the aloof side), he still felt the need to act out, to rebel. He wasn`t even sure what he was rebelling against most of the time. It was if there was an anger boiling just below the surface.

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From my earliest memories, I felt different. It didn’t matter what the situation, I found a way not to fit in with others. And because of that alienated feeling, I ended up not fitting in with anyone; I made sure of it.

I grew up with addiction all around me. My father had been an alcoholic many years before I was born. My older brother had become one, too. And he had mental health problems – he was bi-polar and depressive – that only encouraged his drinking.

I had uncles who drank, cousins who were drug addicts. The only person close to me who didn’t drink or do drugs was my mother. But she clearly struggled to cope with this environment of addiction. The result was that she became more and more isolated within the family.

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The first time I tried crack cocaine I was 33 years old. Long after most of my friends had cleaned up and moved on to careers, families, and house payments, I was reliving my teenage years.

There was something exciting about the idea. I had driven downtown to look for some company, and I saw a really good looking young man hanging around one of the corners that was known to be a spot for male hustlers.

I drove past slowly letting him see that I was interested. We made eye contact and I pulled over to the side of the road. He came over and we started talking. I was really nervous; I had only done this a couple of times before. None of my friends knew I was gay, and I had certainly never told my family.

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Abby hadn’t even started drinking when her problems with addiction began. Sometime after she turned 17 she started to feel depressed although she had no idea why.

All she knew was that she stopped wanting to get out of bed in the morning. She lost interest in school and even stopped seeing her closest friends. Her parents sent her to see a psychologist, but even after several months of therapy she continued to feel the same.

When it became clear that Abby was suffering from clinical depression, she was sent to see a psychiatrist who was actually a family friend. The woman prescribed an anti-depressant. It took several months and several adjustments in dosage, but Abby finally began to feel her depression lift.

In fact, she started to feel better than she ever had before. The medication has a stimulant effect, which Abby fell in love with. But she decided that if one pill per day made her feel better then two pills would make her feel twice as good. Well, that’s what she thought anyway.

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Edward was always surrounded by chaos. He craved it; he attracted it. But it also kept him living in misery and uncertainty for most of his adult life.

The problem was that Edward never seemed to realize that the chaos swirling around his life was originating with him and resulting from his actions. He always thought of himself as the victim of other people’s actions. The problem was never his fault.

This lifelong pattern led to a crippling addiction to alcohol that had a devastating impact on virtually every aspect of his life. It made him an unreliable employee, an unsupportive husband, and a horribly unstable father to his two children.

Edward let unchecked emotion – especially anger – rule his life. This kept people at a distance from him, including those who should have been closest. The biggest challenged he faced was in understanding and accepting that he was making the same mistakes over and over again.

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There were two things that Sammy loved most – medicine and football.

From the time he was a young boy Sammy wanted to play in the NFL. He watched football for at least eight hours every Sunday afternoon during the season. His favourite team was the Miami Dolphins, and he dreamed of being Dan Marino.

As he moved into his teens he continued to watch football, and to play. In fact, he had turned into the best high school quarterback in the city.

But despite Sammy’s dream of a pro sports career, he was very practical and realistic. He understood that making it big as an athlete was still a long shot. That’s why he worked towards his other dream – to be a doctor.

The plan was for Sammy to go to medical school, if possible on a football scholarship. But he was told that this wouldn’t be very practical given the extraordinary time demands of medical school.

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Andy will never be sure just how much his early life experiences affected what was to happen to him later. But he certainly seemed to be running from something – hiding from feelings he just couldn’t face.

Andy had been molested as a young child by his father, something that continued for three years before his parents split up. He never talked to his mother about what he went through. He’s not even sure she knew about it, although he suspects she must have.

The result of this early life trauma was that Andy was excessively rebellious – always fighting with other kids and always looking for what he could take from others. He didn’t trust people and would always push them away before they could reject him.

As he got into his early teens, Andy began to seek out the types of kids he could relate to.  Those were the toughest ones who were always looking for ways to be destructive and to take whatever they wanted no matter who it hurt. This would prove to be a very difficult pattern to break.

Andy was smoking by the time he was 12, and by 14 he was stealing alcohol from his mother’s liquor cabinet. That was soon followed by smoking joints and doing a little hash when he could get it.

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Christine was not prepared for the first time she tried ecstasy. The feeling she experienced was something she couldn’t have imagined. Her skin felt alive, the whole world around her seemed to sparkle in the most wonderful way.

When she and her friends went to a club to dance, the combination of ecstasy and speed seemed to launch them into another existence where the outside world ceased to exist.

Christine and her new group of friends were making the clubs a regular part of their weekends. Often they would leave the clubs at closing time only to line up for an after-hours club where drugs were freely available. These establishments weren’t legally permitted to sell alcohol, so they sold energy drinks, juice, and other “soft” drinks.

But a major part of the after-hours experience were party drugs like ecstasy, speed, and Special K, among others. Christine and her friends woulddance until morning; the clubs stayed open until about 10. She hated the mornings and would have gladly continued if she could have.

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