Tessa’s Story Part Three

This is a story about a girl we will call Tessa. This is Chapter three in a multi-chaptered series. Tessa struggled with drug addiction and finally went to a Narconon Treatment Center. This is the story of how she got there.

Tessa and Friends Start Using Cocaine

Once Tessa started high school in her new school in New Jersey, she had a good group of friends that she had become really close with. She had a couple of girlfriends that she considered all to be her best friends.

One of the girls that Tessa would hang out with in her freshman year of high school had a boyfriend who was a senior. Tessa liked to hang out with her friend and her new boyfriend and the girls were impressed with his older man experience in life. After her friend had been dating the guy for a year, he introduced the girls to cocaine. They started to go with him to his house on the weekends and would stay up all night snorting coke. Tessa said she did not really like it very much, but it just seemed like the thing to do since she was hanging out with people who were doing it.

Tessa and her friends began making this a weekend ritual. They would stay up all night listening to music, watching movies, talking about various topics and doing blow. One weekend their ritual changed.

Tessa is Introduced to Heroin

One weekend Tess was hanging out with her girlfriend and her older boyfriend. They were doing coke as usual and as it got to be early in the morning and the group was thinking about heading for bed, the boyfriend announced that he was going to put something in their coke that was going to help them to come down and go to sleep.

The thing that he mixed with it was heroin. Tess and her friend tried it and immediately Tess loved it. She said to her friend, “I wonder what that stuff would feel like without the coke in it.” Her friend echoed Tess’s question, but they kept it to themselves for a while. They started to do cocaine laced with heroin over the next few days until they decided that they wanted to try heroin just by itself.

Meanwhile, the following Monday, another really good friend of the girls went to court for a traffic violation. After getting sentenced to a fine, she went to wait in line to pay it off. While she was waiting, she got to talking to the guy behind her. Somehow the conversation led to the point where she found out that the guy was a dope dealer. He sold anything that anybody wanted, including heroin.

The next weekend it was on. All three of the girls got together in addition to some other people they were friends with and they got heroin from the guy who the one girl had met at the court house. They used it all weekend.

That Sunday after using heroin all weekend, Tessa noticed that she could not fall asleep. She also noticed that her stomach hurt and she just wasn’t feeling very well. She thought that maybe she was coming down with something.

The next day at school Tessa started talking to one of the other girls she had been hanging out with that weekend. Tess told her friend how she had had a lot of trouble falling asleep and how her stomach felt really icky. Her friend said that she had had the same problem that night also. Later the girls talked to a few of the other people they had been using heroin with as well, and everyone was not feeling all that hot. After discussing it at length, suddenly a light bulb went off. The group realized that they had all developed a physical addiction to heroin. Some of the people in the group were quite upset; others did not think much of it. Tessa and one of her best girlfriends decided that they were just going to snort a little heroin everyday so they would not get sick. They did not think much of the problem, or much of the solution. It was something that had kind of just happened.

Tessa did not tell her mom that she had tried cocaine, nor that she had gotten herself a heroin addicted. While her mother had not minded if her daughter smoked pot or did mushrooms, any drug that was not completely natural was not something that she would approve of and Tessa knew this. Her mom had heard of Narconon Treatment Center, but at this point, Tessa had no interest.

Tessa Tries Crack Cocaine

After Tessa and her friends start using heroin regularly, they got to be pretty close knit with the guy that was supplying them with their drugs. It was the same guy that the one girl had met in line at the court house. He worked for another lady that ran a crack house. They started to become regulars there and began to add crack to the other drugs that they were doing. Now

Crack Cocaine

Tessa is a small girl anyway, but when she started smoking crack she got to be really bone thin.

One weekend she went to visit her father and he asked her if she was smoking crack. By this point she was in her senior year of high school. There was no way that Tessa was ready to admit that she had a drug problem, so she told her dad that she was not using drugs at all. He looked at her suspiciously but accepted her answer.

Soon after her father asked her about smoking crack, Tessa received an acceptance letter from NYU. She and her family were happy but not surprised. Tessa had always made very good grades, and she really could have gotten into any college that she had wanted to.

A few weeks before graduating Tessa’s family discovered that she was using heroin.

Continued in Chapter four