A Life On Drugs-John

all right john mark how are you yes well where'd you go where are you from originally um actually i was born in sacramento um i lived there for one year moved to studio city for a year and then was raised south of the boulevard in sherman oaks california um and a very nice neighborhood that uh some of my neighbors were katherine bach of dukes of hazard so it was quite a eclectic um upbringing you could say uh school was uh a lot of uh actors at that time and their kids and a lot of musicians so i went to school with all sons of so many different you know actors and musicians um through the years of you know schoolmates were like weasel zappa or you know jake bucy gary busey-san you know people like that um so um it was uh a time i'd say uh when i was probably um eight years old my brother's six years older than me and uh nine or so he started to get into uh smoking pot and um of course my friends and i were all curious about it but we didn't know how to you know and then my brother realized this one day so he turned me on to some very very good pot and um so then it was this one guy that lived on our street he was the oldest his name was john tapo and we thought like you know my god this guy you know he moved out from his house and moved into the garage and made this he had this party room it was crazy and to get in there you had to cut up the pot really fine and smoosh in a two-hit ball and you had to clear that whole thing in one hit to hang out there so i was able to do that and um they had to hose me off that night i was so hallucinating and but both my parents being from greece um they didn't know anything about drugs they had no idea what pot was or anything of anything was so um um i had met a friend of mine named russ laffy and uh he was my best friend at the time and not by 9 10 years old and i remember one time when i was 10 he uh called me up and he said hey i found my mom's boyfriend's cocaine and quality supply you know and i said oh great i'll be right over so i tell my brother like hey i'm going over to russ's house to do a bunch of cocaine and he's like all right be safe that's all he said um well i get over there and russ pulls out this bag that i mean must have been a lot of cocaine i'd have to say probably if i would to think about it i would say at least an ounce looking back um he goes i took 15 quaaludes so here catch up with me so i took nine and um this is after school yeah what is it but this is after school what age um 10 years old he was 11. and bugs bunnies on you know cartoons you're after school watching cartoons and um i'm making out these lines on the glass table and i didn't know that you had to chop the stuff you know so i'm making out these lines that are humongous and we're starting these huge rocks you know and i mean next thing we know it's nighttime um i don't know we end up in his sister's room and he's like tunnel vision like a million miles away and i got this line i'm like russ russ russ russ do you want the last line line line line line line he's like no no no i'm okay my mom's boy boy boy boyfriend's ho ho ho ho ho and this the mom's boyfriend comes in and he looks at us because he's looking for a stash and he didn't say anything we just left i guess i don't know what happened all i know is that we had walked five blocks to my house on ventura boulevard this must be at probably six o'clock seven o'clock get people coming home from work and we're punching each other throwing each other into the windows of every store down ventura boulevard in sherman oaks nobody goes here's a 10 and 11 year old kid that looked out of their mind we turned on my street and my friend russ must have been walking like this it was on quaaludes so much and i was going dun dun i thought i was running like a six million dollar man so fast my brother is at the end of the street our house is towards the end and he took one look and he said oh my [ __ ] god you know he had to get rid of the neighbors so he tried locking us in our garage which was downstairs our house we had stairs that led up to this really nice house in sherman oaks and we got out of there and um so he he was uh very athletic um he used to ride his bike like 20 miles a day so he got on his 10 speed he couldn't find us anywhere we walked down ventura boulevard punching each other throwing each other into parked cars from hazeltine and if anybody knows ventura boulevard all the way to coldwater canyon which is a very long walk and we get to a friend of his house and um the babysitter of his friend comes out and sees us and she probably flipped a gourd i mean she probably went oh my god well my friend russ just went in to withdraw went into he overdosed right there he was throwing up he was going into convulsions so she called an ambulance for him and she tried to get my number out of me to call my mother and i couldn't say it and she's like i i can sing it so i think i did something like seven eight and she's like seven eight i'm like three [Music] one you know about an hour i don't know how long it took but i got it out 783-1568 my mom shows up and she goes can you walk to the car and i say sure i take one step forward and i just fall straight back hit the ground she with the babysitter i guess puts me in the car they drive me back to my house and um don't know how i made it upstairs i guess my brother must have helped me um my dad's home by this time he's a very conservative man you could say extremely conservative but my brother goes i got john and my parents said okay and they just went to the deck and watched tv and didn't think a second thought about it they probably had no idea what was going on so my brother did not know what to do with me and um by that time i had been playing guitar since i was seven so i was very into playing guitar and um so my brother made me play jimi hendrix's purple haze all night long and he said every time i got this look in my face like this devilish looker i was getting out there he'd slap me as hard as he could just slap and keep playing purple haze so i kept playing you know dun dun dun dun dun [Laughter] and the next morning um i got up to go to school and uh i was still that i think that entire week out of my frigging mind um i don't i can't remember anything of even going to school or even how i got through that um i have no clue so that was um the first introduction to i'd say harder drugs um at 10 years old so by that point um i'd say that um i was uh much more interested in experimenting with other uh substances of that point i wanted to try acid i wanted to try you know this because acid sounded cool to me you know like blue dragon like you're gonna see a blue dragon or something i mean it's a kid's mind you know and um because i was maybe a little hung out with a six-year-old brother and all his friends and my brother was a dealer at his high school notre dame high school so this is where he got another light that would be great um notre dame high school so um he was selling pot to all his friends and um so i um basically by the time i was in high school i my friend that that happened with oh thank you very much his mother um she was doing a lot of cocaine herself and uh smoking cocaine became a big thing so when we were i'd say he was 15 i was 14. we would take her bank card and clear her bank out of all the money to buy coke so she stopped that by trying to maintain us on a half a gram day habit but we would freebase with her i would tell my parents i'm gonna go sleep over at russ's house oh okay no problem and we go to russ's house and his mom connie would cook the cocaine up and um we were freebasing and this went on through all through high school and um we had a boy we smoked a lot of cocaine i'd have to say at that time so um i had quite a habit uh going this is freebase not crack no this is freebase unit free basically before crack took off yeah before crack took off um my dad um had moved up in the executive world where now he was working for uh running an insurance company that he was president of where he was uh we were in the million dollar range of family at that point so my dad's and wallet he'd put a above the refrigerator at night and my mom would put her purse there and each of them would have probably about two thousand three thousand dollars in there just go and reach in there and i'd take that money out and i'd go score and my dad would just go you know you know to my mom oh helen you know i'm short you know can you go to the bank and pull me out another five grand they didn't think anything of it they didn't even notice it going on like that so um um this went on through all the way through art college where i was uh just doing massive amounts of that and that soon led to um one of the people i was buying it from was heroin they decided to uh you know turn me on to that and i thought this drug made me ill when i first did it i mean it's like rap poison you know i snorted it i was throwing up it was but i thought you know my guitar heroes all did this and i thought like you know well this is going to make you a better player you know i mean jimmy page and you know keith richards and stuff i mean you know there's got to be something behind it the reason why they're doing this type of stuff so uh then turned on to slowly uh playing around with that for quite a few years um [Music] i got into a band when i was 18. i formed a band and we got the singer and she knew about that because she was signed to xxx records with jane's addiction at the time with the chili peppers in a band called love dog all-girl punk band that was very big i played scream which was a very big club in downtown l.a they played big shows so her boyfriend auditioned for us as a keyboard player you know he ended up being a keyboard player for the flowers and now it's with the foo fighters so um she said no heroin you know anybody on heroin so i stopped for that point and um we got a record deal that didn't go through ended up playing more and more i played with a few acts then it all stopped and i started working as a scenic artist and then cocaine got replaced with crystal meth i got turned on to that and that put cocaine aside it made that seem like nothing um speed was back then unbelievably good and uh unbelievably strong and i mean you do a little bit you're flying for days and uh i had a lot of work i was getting paid twenty thousand dollars for murals i was doing so i'd be up for two weeks working as many jobs as i could and running around and all of this um and at 30 years old um my dad finally got hit to what was going on and he decided that at that point he was going to get me clean i seem to have screwed up my whole career at that point because i had a a job um doing these blue sky and cloud ceilings in this big mansion in beverly hills and there was we were subcontracted with a lot of other people and um they just weren't paying me my second payment and um it got to be where it was a lawsuit situation so i went to my dad i said hey dad you know could you uh help me out with this um and i thought you know this would be great you can help me out with this and uh and i i had this you know this time this heroin problem now i'm you know i'm strung out so i thought okay i'll tell my dad and uh you know and maybe it's the right thing to do well it didn't turn out to be the um right thing to do um i don't know many 31 year olds that get grounded by their fathers but i did so um i went through uh a horrible period of time working different jobs for fine art packing houses and trying to keep this heroin habit so i decided to go to a methadone clinic and um they started me on a maintenance program i had no idea what that meant at the time and uh you're supposed to to even get on maintenance you're supposed to have proof that you've done heroin or been on methadone or something for a year well i tried a detox program for one day six months earlier and they said we're just gonna slide on that we're just gonna you know let you go ahead and get on this on the methadone maintenance program how many milligrams you want to start on i got i don't know what should i start on these we suggest 80. um i'll put it this way five milligrams of methadone is incredibly strong 80 milligrams to get on methadone the chances of getting off of that is not you're going to be on that for life there is i mean it's so powerful it's overpowers heroin it overpowered um heroin couldn't even get me high anymore i had um started a xanax kalonapin soma addiction because that would be the only thing that would work with that and for 15 years i was in that clinic every morning going there between five and seven for the hours they were open to get my dose of methadone and um one time i i missed it um at christmas time and i didn't have i if you miss it for three days you have to have a doctor see you to get restarted on it again and um well it was christmas time he was out of town i went nine days it was probably the worst withdrawal i think i i can't even i blacked out most of it it's it's so horrible it was uh um unfathomable well my father ended up dying of cancer 2003 and um at that point we got some life insurance money of his so um i went to go do what they call a rapid detox at the weissman clinic now to do heroin it's a one-day event if you're on methadone it's a three-day event costs eighteen thousand dollars and what they do is um they take you to this hospital they put you on a morphine drip the minute you get in there and then when you're ready to do the rapid detox they take you and they put you under anesthesia they put a tube down your throat straps you to a table and fill your stomach full of naltrexone which is um an anti-opiate like if you use it makes you sick so that all your withdrawals happen that would happen over a year or two years happen in six hours so for six hours um supposedly they had five black eyes holding me down i broke the straps i mean a mess all i know is i woke up in a tub and up to my neck and diarrhea just completely and they gave me vitamins the whole week they said you need to cleanse your system because you know you really need to cleanse and i mean i had the runs all week i thought i cleansed the system i had no idea that you know this drug backs you up quite a bit um so this nurse comes out he cleansing me up and this happens seven more times and i'm like jesus christ this is you know a lot and um i am feeling everything like so sensitive that it's like time to take a shower i'm like shower great and shower they wheel me to the shower and it's like nails hitting me i was like getting a shower of nails and um then they took me outside in the sun and uh that might as well has been like a ray gun shooting me in the eyes i mean i was i was like get me out of the [ __ ] sun if you can [ __ ] do this anything and i get back to my room and um i am i must have thought that it was a smart thing to do to call every friend's mother that i knew and say that i was clean at three in the morning just seemed like a smart thing to do at the time i think um all i know is my brother my mom came to pick me up my brother thought i lost my mind he thought that whatever process they did that i was crazy and um they told me to go you're as clean as the day you're born by the way there's not a trace of it in your bones in your mirror and nowhere you're as clean as you can ever be and you just take this naltrexone every day you won't have any cravings and make sure that you did clean your house of all heroin uh anything of paraphernalia right because if you come back you will have a problem with that and i thought i cleaned it well enough well i came home and there must have been uh some foil with some heroin on a straw somewhere i could smell that the minute i walked in the door i started throwing up put me instantly into withdrawals i was like mom get that out here cleared that out so i stayed clean for a short while and then um i'd say after a year or so um i uh i uh kind of lacked on taking this naltrexone and um one day uh i had stopped taking it long enough where like that i needed to score heroin again after not thinking about it for a year and a half i mean didn't have a craving in the world didn't want it couldn't stand the smell of it i mean maybe throw up but i'd never touch it again stop taking that and all of a sudden um there was that need to get some so i had bought a 20 bag of heroin went into my bathroom locked the door put it on some foil didn't even think i don't think i finished taking that hit and all i know is that my mom broke into the bathroom slapping me awake i was pulled into a cold shower it was like i mean that one half a hit or whatever was so strong that um it was like must've been like you know first time i've ever you know trying something that strong and of course uh that led to wanting to do it again so um i ended up doing that again and um of course my father thought helping me out of a good way was doing that was telling all my uh clients that i was on drugs because uh he never was a big fan of art or music or anything like that the way he was raised in greece was it's another story for another day so i got blacklisted so i just became as i told him i said well i'm going to be the best heroin addict you've ever met and my father and i went you know uh that was before he died but after he died i just kept that going that attitude and i moved from smoking it to injecting it and uh next thing i know it's almost 35 years later that um still to this day i um have a problem with it and i try um many different ways to get off and it is after 30 after you hit 30 years of doing this drug um it uh it creeps into you in ways that i i can't explain it's um it's if it was easy for people then everybody that would ever that ever got hooked on it would be able to get off of it and everybody's reasoning for getting on that drug is doesn't really matter but once you venture into that and whether you start off with doing narcos or oxycontins and um you can't get those anymore from a doctor and you decide to try it and you think that i don't need to use a needle i could smoke this and smoking it is okay and you don't realize that you're signing on to a lifestyle of hell that's the best way i can put it it's uh it's an awful experience because you uh this is not something that you can just use occasionally and say oh i'm fine you need this to stay well you don't get high anymore you just do it to um be normal you do it so your nose doesn't run so your eyes are not watering you're not sneezing machine gun sneezes in front of people and uh you know getting very sick so you know um i had to do you know four shots before i came here so i could be so my hand wouldn't be shaking that would be smooth so i wouldn't be like that um just to be able to talk about it interesting enough um and i told my uh girlfriend you know make me some more you know because i might need some just even talk about this and she had him ready for me but the uber came i just said [ __ ] it you know i'll just uh i'll rough it so this is roughing it for me actually right now um you know my nose a little bit runny and i'm a little bit you know you know it would be uh at the point when i get home i'll you know be running to that for sure how was i now i'm 52 years old 52. and do you have any hope of ever getting clean from is it heroin or fentanyl though um i don't use the fentanyl uh day stuff and i i have testers that you get from the needle exchange to not do that i have been in this this uh world for so long that um i have been able to um work so many different angles i have done so much i kept a moral standard that i wouldn't do certain things um i i don't believe in stealing i won't steal from anybody i'm not a thief i hate thieves a lot of people that's what they are first and then they do heroin second it seems to be their big thing is to steal from somebody or steal from some house or something i uh would uh more less uh get got good connections at good prices and would be the middleman between people you know you want to get an ounce i can get it for you for you know six hundred dollars i could get you know the best heroine you've ever tried for you know less than twenty five dollars a gram you know or 19 a gram you cannot beat that you know just give me a little bit off the top but and um you know now i'm on disability um you know i uh i'm able to afford uh an amount that supplies me healthily at that so to try to get off at this point my girlfriend i've been with her for four years she was a heroin addict for many many years and with her life mate who died five it's now six years ago uh his name was jimmy bain he was a bass player for d.o he never got off david he died while on tour on a boat so she had gotten very sick and she had copd very bad and she ended up kicking in the hospital and she said i never want to feel that again so she's hasn't touched it since so she i get it i give it to her and she gives me my allotted amount each day and she is trying to wean me down to a point where um and at that point we really are kind of playing it by ear we don't know what to do really tell the truth um i am not quite at the point where i want to stop because there are certain things at 52 in my life that has not happened i'm not particularly happy with uh where my life has gone and the things i've done and what i've not experienced what i could have so um sometimes i just you know want to just go into that nice warm place where i don't have to have any worries any problems no stress of nothing um i have a singer i've worked with for a long time her name's morag and she uh she's fantastic um her story is a story that is her own and i won't even get into that um but she's very talented but she will not want me to be on that in any way she had performed she says that she can notice my plane there's a tad off when i play so if we're rehearsing i won't do it when i'm with her so if i go to her house for three days to play i will just rock it i will go through whatever i have to to be able to write the songs we write and uh you know play my parts the best i can whether my nose is dripping all over my guitar i don't care because i do play better if i'm not on it and i do paint better if i'm not on it actually i do everything better if i'm not on it if i'm on it my posture is different my shoulders slouch in a different way my language is a little different my you know if you know me well you'll just my body movements you know just it's littlest things but you can pick up on it you can see those things and um it's obvious as day and i can see it in anybody else i come across i know immediately if i meet somebody i know immediately if they're using or not i can watch a television show and just go that person's been using for 15 years at least i mean it's uh and it's an epidemic that's um so funded by our government that they don't want anybody to get out heroin it was a time when doctors could write scripts for you of norcos or oxycontin now this hurt the cartel greatly and um even though the cartel may bring a lot of heroin over the border 96 of it comes from afghanistan and it is funded by private armies um with gucci keflar and their beards and they got the fields there and they're for zinc copper and heroin that's the main thing coming out afghanistan that's why the war is never stopping there because that heroin is coming there and it's basically pure it's the strongest heroin probably is ever this city has ever seen they have sent put runners out in every middle-class upper-class neighborhood that you call somebody and within 10 minutes they're at your house delivering you whatever you want that's how easy it is you can just walk around and they will drive up next to you and they can tell your heroin act and say you know here's my number call me and i you know i'll bring it to you that's how crazy it is so um and these doctors writing these scripts the cdc the government has gotten down so hard on them that they've uh they've lost their licenses and have all been um charged for because the people of od parents have charged you know got charges against them and uh they've lost their licenses and no longer can they write these any doctor you go to you go to the hospital and you break your arm and you're in bad pain they may give you some opiates but they will not give you anything to take home with no way you do not any hospital anywhere and after 35 years of using it i have found myself in a lot of hospitals shooting heroin leads to abscesses leads to many type of infections that i have had i got surgeries at one point i got called from santa monica ucla saying that i had 85 emergency room visits in one year for abscesses to be lanced and um when i talk about an abscess being allowed so talking about the size of like a softball on my arm i mean it's you know i have gone into the hospital one time at 41. they gave me a 10 chance of living i was in septic shock and that's somebody calling me on my phone and i don't know how i made it through um a lot of faith and a lot of belief in uh that there's uh a purpose for me and a reason for me to be on this planet that i lived it's the only way i can think that i got through that situation one time i was in the hospital the blood infection poisoning that they said we have no antibiotic that can cure this infection i'm sorry you're gonna be here till you die it could take a week to take two years i was there in icu temperature of probably i know they put me on ice i was hallucinating i mean i was i was on my deathbed there was no chance i was coming out i was 34 years old and i had [Music] taken over my dad's business at that time as an insurance broker i was a teacher an insurance broker and uh i had hired an employee who's armenian and she um went to this church and uh it's called saint nichtarios the saint of healing there's a bone in armenia that um supposedly is 2 000 years old and it secretes oil once a year and they mix it with holy water this church opened up and they had this holy water and she brought it into me she came in my room i thought she was the devil she was half purple and half green in her face and she was holding my dead cat who was alive and the whole time she's doing the cross on my wrist with the oil my forehead i didn't know this i thought she was uh i was maddening you know like what the what are you doing you know she scared me i thought she was the devil and i didn't realize that my fever had reached a point where my blood was boiling the next morning i woke up on the second floor and i was out of there what i would really point out about this is that it is not glorious it is not um anything that whether it's you know to somebody who has lots of money can afford it to the your person out here on the street that's suffering for it it's probably the worst thing that can ever happen to somebody and it's um [Music] it's not something to be proud of and uh in no way i hope anything i said is glorifies it in any way because it's not a glorified thing at all it's actually probably one of the worst things that can happen to you in your life and it brings nothing but wreckage and uh and it'll tear up every relationship love you have if you don't you know eventually put this down and i'm hoping that i will put this down and at this point in time i'm not there yet but um i have faith that i will get there and i really hope that i do reach that point because i don't want to my ending to be that that be my legacy and that the you know of all the talent i have kicked out the door because i just needed to have dope so um you know uh you know it's well you do it for two years or 25 it's it takes its toll and um you know drugs seem like a fun thing but alcohol drugs whatever you want to use it's just not it's just not going to take you anywhere but down you know and that's what um a lot of people don't realize and it's sad because i see a lot of young people jumping into that because they haven't experienced anything in life they want to experience you know something uh you know and it's a saddest thing to see somebody at 30 years old starting an addiction like that and you just know like going god i'm 52 you have no idea what you just got yourself into you just signed a deal with the devil and that's what i consider it to be pretty much so you know that's the moral of the story of that as best i can say all right john thank you so much for sharing your story no problem super interesting thank you very much you're welcome thank you you

Channel: Soft White Underbelly

Views: 1,534,939

Keywords: soft white underbelly, swu

Id: GW5PSU5ap5c

Length: 39min 44sec (2384 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 09 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/godamen]

This is horrible. What a fucking nightmare.

[u/benevolent_keerah]

Video is well put together

[u/joelmooner]

Very good video. Verry easy to listen to.