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The video above was shot at an event in LA I was lucky enough to speak at. I have to say that of the hundreds, if not thousands, of public talks I have given this one was the most unnerving. This is possibly due to the fact that I had no visual aids this time or it might be because I've never publickly filled 10 minutes with my own personal story.
Still, I thought it would be worthwhile to share with you here. Below is the text I was supposed to stay more true to. I did my best, I promise. I was very nervous.
Breaking Good - Popcorn talk - April, 2015 at The Virgil in Los Angeles
What’s the worst way you’ve ever lost a job?
Maybe you overslept and missed an important deadline. Maybe you got chewed out in front of the entire office. Maybe you even got caught doing something embarrassing, like when I was fired from a grocery store at the age of 15 for credit card fraud. I didn’t have my driver’s license yet and so my dad had to come retrieve me from a back room after my meeting with the regional manager who was called in to resolve the problem and almost ended up calling the police. It was mortifying and dangerous—and I’m sure for plenty of people, it would easily qualify as the worst time they’d ever been fired—but for me, it doesn’t even come close.
That’s because the worst way I’ve ever lost a job was the morning I woke up with a pounding headache to 12 fully-armored members of the Beverly Hills SWAT team, crammed into my bedroom, shouting at me and aiming tactical shotguns at my face. Which is one of the ways you lose your job when your job title is Wholesale Drug Dealer.
The funny thing is, in the years between that silent, disappointed car ride home from the grocery store (the only words my dad uttered were “we are NOT telling your mom about this"), I had actually applied myself to growing a self-made business that, in some sort of social vacuum, might have made my dad proud. I started my so-called drug empire with seven-hundred and fifty borrowed dollars, and worked my way up to six-figure drug buys and first-class plane rides. I’m not saying my strict, Israeli Jewish father would have been at all approving of the private rooms at strip clubs or the angry electronica club kid persona or the drug binges in high-roller suites in Las Vegas. But I’d always been accused of being an underachiever, of not applying myself, and for once in my life, I’d turned a little into a lot through effort, determination, and persistence. Unfortunately, what that really meant is that I had turned seven-hundred-and-fifty borrowed dollars into a mountain of cash, ecstasy, cocaine, ketamine, mushrooms, LSD, GHB- and methamphetamine. Especially methamphetamine.
Even more unfortunately, there was no way a person who thought the way I thought back then was going to be surrounded by all of those drugs and not indulge. Which meant I was using a lot of my own merchandise. It also meant that while meth was my primary source of income back then, it was so much more than that. My best friend. My engine of productivity. And my shield against every self-doubt and negative thought I’d ever suffered through.
At least, that’s how it felt in the beginning. But as late nights turned into all-nighters and all-nighters turned into 15 hours of artificially drugged-out sleep a week, the lifestyle was taking a toll on me. By the time I woke to find Beverly Hills’ finest tactical team stuffed inside my apartment, I wasn’t exactly the picture of health—an 125-pound skeleton, fingernails down to stubs, face picked to death, eyes bleary from the upper-downer cycle every tweaker suffers through—if you’ve ever seen an episode from the last few seasons of Breaking Bad or an anti-drug ad from Montana, you probably already have a good picture. Let’s just say that when the cops carried me from my bedroom and cuffed me on my living room couch underneath a massive poster of Tony Montana from Scarface, Tony might have hung his head in shame to think that I considered him an inspiration. Then again, we all know how his story ended, also.
To make a long story short, the SWAT team had burst into my bedroom that morning because three months earlier, I’d been in a motorcycle accident in which the first responders found half a pound of cocaine inside my jacket while I was still writhing on the asphalt. And while I thought I’d expertly escaped their clutches by giving them a fake address and cell number, they had somehow managed to tracked me down—did I mention I was doing quite a bit of meth back then?
While I was awaiting trial, I checked myself into rehab—not because I realized I was on the road to self-destruction. I had no problem recognizing that I was addicted to meth, I just didn’t think it was a big deal—meth was like the best friend I’d never had. I checked myself in because my lawyer convinced me it was the only possible way I’d catch even the slightest break from the judge. I was facing 13 felony counts, including a firearm charge and pretty much every drug you’d expect to find on Justin Bieber’s tour bus. If I went down on the full slate, I was looking at 18 years in prison, at the age of 25. That would mean that even if I had behaved myself well enough behind bars to get a 50% sentence reduction—and I’m the first to admit I’ve never been great at following instructions—I would have been released this year.
I had my issues with rehab and bounced from one to another, but I was 8 months clean at the time of my sentencing in 2002, and the strategy worked. I got off the hook with “only” a 12-month sentence, truly a gift from the judge given the case against me.
It’s right around this point in the story that many people ask me what jail was like, so here’s a fun thought exercise: picture having to have every bowel movement of your life right out in the open in front of people you barely know, are at least somewhat afraid of and who you have absolutely no interest in talking to. Then picture that aside from the guards who make you feel like an abused stray dog those same cell-mates are the only people you ever get to interact with. You eat food that makes leftovers feel like a birthday cake and are constantly watchful of getting in a fight, or worse… That’s jail. And it sucks. And when you get used to all of it, when the fear fades away? It’s endlessly boring. And boring can be even worse. And that’s all you really need to know about spending a year in jail.
When I got out, I’d been sober for nearly two years and a somewhat active member of AA. Of course, I looked for work, but even Foot Locker wouldn’t hire me. When most of you see that box on a job application that asks “have you ever been convicted of a felony,” you probably glaze over it because it doesn’t apply to you, right? I don’t. That little box was, and still is for me, a constant reminder at every turn that my life will never be the same.
So, the way I saw it, my options were limited to two choices: go back to drugs, or go back to school. I chose school. Cal State applications didn’t ask about felonies, and while my grades during my drug dealing student career were far from ideal—meth, as it turns out, only makes you feel like a genius—I knew it was now or never to turn my academic career, and my life, around. I applied myself like I’d only ever done before to drug dealing, and I over a 2 year period ended up with both a 4.0 GPA and a scholarship that allowed me to eventually return to UCLA, where my previous drug career had once upon a time both flourished, and then collapsed.
And that’s the summer I started drinking again.
Now, depending on the makeup of the audience listening to me deliver these words that bit of information either goes completely unnoticed—or it explodes like a hydrogen bomb. Because most of us, whether we think about it or not, have been indoctrinated by society to view addiction as a black and white, all-or-nothing value proposition: once a person is a capital-A “Addict,” no matter the substance they’re addicted to, they are once and forever an Addict, and that condition means they cannot ever touch any addictive substance, lest they be sucked back into the world of serious addiction.
As a neuroscientist, I can tell you that this is a dubious scientific assumption. The supposed switch that gets flipped when a person moves from non to addict has never been discovered and my sense is that it ever will—people with substance abuse problems, or any addiction for that matter, most likely fall along a continuum instead of fitting into distinct buckets. And as a former methamphetamine addict who has been drinking socially for the last 12 years, I can tell you that my experience suggests that this sort of dogmatic, prohibitionist philosophy is a little like thinking that the only way to heal a broken ankle is by amputation. But at the time that I took my first drink after 3 years of total sobriety, I couldn’t have told you any of that. I was simply a good kid that had made some very bad decisions, got addicted to meth and was trying desperately to balance my desire to make up for past mistakes with an equally burning desire to just feel normal. But see, there wasn’t really any conventional wisdom that told me it might not be the end of the world if I were to take a drink. This even though I hadn’t had a drink in years, not in any serious or problematic way, even when I was addicted to meth.
So after months of painful deliberation, I found myself sitting on the beach with my girlfriend, and I took a fateful sip of champagne. And sitting there, that little bit of champagne trickling down my throat, I waited for those old familiar demons to attack.
And they didn’t. And they never did. And here I am, nine years into this experiment, waiting to see how social drinking would change the life of an ex-meth-addict.
Here’s how my life has changed: I’ve earned a PhD from UCLA. I’ve started a family, a successful website and writing career, and I’ve opened an addiction treatment center that meets people where they are and challenges pretty much everything most of us are told about what happens when someone gets into trouble with drugs.
You see, I like telling my story, but that’s because I think my story can reveal a wider message. We are wrong in so much of what we think we know about substance abuse and mental health, not only from a scientific perspective, but from a behavioral and functional one as well. In our rush to understand addiction—an especially maddening, perplexing element of the human condition if ever there was one—we understandably overreach, slapping the label of “addict” on the forehead of every lost soul to pass through treatment as if burning out the sickness was the only way to ensure it would never return. But in that process, we apply a one-size-fits-all label to a condition that science tells us is anything but, and in our efforts to help, we inevitably, invariably hurt the very people who, more often than not, were suffering from never being understood in the first place.
People like me aren’t rare, but our stories are. That’s because there’s an embedded, accepted movement in our society that says that someone cannot solve a specific substance abuse problem without accepting that they have a lifelong spiritual disease. Often, people like me who find that their issues and the solutions to those issues are more nuanced choose not to speak that truth out loud, lest the pushback forces them back into silence. In our absence, the perpetual Hollywood examples of drug-addled failure and teen death are paraded as evidence that addiction is forever and that everyone is at risk. But I meet these people every day, and I hear their stories. I know that the one-size-fits-all dogma of religiously motivated drug treatment serves two masters, and nobody can tell you better than a former addict that serving two masters means one will eventually get the short end of the stick. So we hide while they read the Lord’s Prayer.
And this is what’s so very dangerous about our society’s accepted method of addiction treatment—it leaves no room for nuance. And in the process, it forces every different kind of person with an “addiction” issue to acknowledge right from the beginning that they are morally and spiritually corrupt failures in an all-encompassing way that completely ignores the reasons for their substance abuse in the first place and condemns them to damnation if they don’t perfectly walk the line.
But I am not damned.
In fact, I’m blessed. I have a life I love, with a family that I depend on, that depends on me, and a social life that includes responsible substance use that doesn’t harm my life in any way. It’s a life I fought for, and, according to some, a life I don’t deserve. They wait in the wings for a sign of failure, of weakness so that they can jump out and waive their book and tell me that they’ve saved me a seat. Yet here I am, doting father, loving husband, and responsible contributor to society—or so I hope. And I don’t think that every person with a serious drug problem can necessarily get to where I am today. But then again, many can probably accomplish even more. The point, in the end, is that just as I had to discover my own way, so too does everyone else, and that means thinking outside of the paradigms that have limited our progress in the past. I am in no way advocating reckless experimentation—I’m recommending tackling all of your own problems, substance-based or not, with an approach that acknowledges you as an individual and treats your issues in context—who could possibly argue that understanding the specifics of a problem would make for a less exact cookie-cutter solution? To put it as simply as possible: the current accepted method of addiction treatment is so rigid that it writes off as a lost cause many of the people most in need of help. That’s simply not something I’m willing to accept.
If you know someone who struggles with addiction, or if you struggle yourself, know that there are options out there. Not only can you get better- no matter who you are—but getting better might not look the way everyone thinks it does. For some people, finding their own best self might include traditions, or 12 Steps, but if it doesn’t, you shouldn’t let that stop you from finding a healthy, happy life that you love.
Because that’s exactly what I did.
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© 2015 Adi Jaffe, All Rights Reserved
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