[Editor’s note: This story is a part of today’s special issue focused solely on drugs.]

Just try it, my friend said as he snorted crushed-up painkillers on his living room coffee table.

It was the summer before my freshman year of college, so why not, I told myself.

Five seconds later, two hydrocodone tablets were well on their way to my stomach. Minutes later, the effects became apparent. My mind and body were free of anything resembling worry or pain. It felt good. It felt right.

It was the start of a dependency that came to control my life.

Hours later, the come-down came. Tears. A weird trip to my then-girlfriend’s house and restless sleep.

So began my struggle with painkillers.

They’re not hard to get, really. Got a broken arm? Or some wisdom teeth pulled?

Someone knows someone who just happens to have a few extra they had lying around from their older sister’s dental surgery.

For me, it was never hard to find the pills. First came the painkillers, then the Xanax, Adderall, and muscle relaxants.

Mix some of that stuff and the effects can be … something. That something feels good, for a bit. But like all seemingly “good” things, it comes to an end. After the peak of the high, everything goes south.

Or, worse, get too high, and sprint out of the house on a wild tear. That happened to me once. The nausea and the spinning sensation that grips as one goes deeper and deeper into the high are as terrible as they are addicting.

It’s always important to get some sleep, though. Sometimes the sleep is a byproduct of the chemicals rushing through the body. After one or two months, we learned to plan our nights around the highs. We knew when it was time to go to bed.

Once the painkillers were gone from stuff I’d been prescribed, things got a little hairy. Breaking the habit was something I thought to be plausible.

It was, for almost my entire freshman year. But when it came time to go back home for the summer, the back of my neck started to itch. I knew they were available somewhere, and part of me wanted to do it again.

The second I got some alone time in my house, the search started. My goal? Search for any new narcotics someone had been prescribed and simply wasn’t using. Of course, no one knew.

Usually they were futile efforts, but on occasion there was something. So, I stole them. A lot of them. From my dad. From my grandma. Pretty nice of me, right?

It got worse coming home after my freshman year. I had stopped doing them while in school. Alcohol had taken their place.

But I was back home, and they were easy as hell to find again. More money blown (probably somewhere around $400). More pills stolen, (50-60, maybe more).

My girlfriend and I started to fight. More painkillers. Less her.

Falling. Into the trap, the despair, the anger. Soon she was gone. One night, I emptied the rest of my pill bottle.

Five of these little white pills, simply because my tolerance to the drugs was so much. Thinking maybe I’d taken one too many. Lying on my bed. Hating myself.

Then, nothing. Sleep. Waking up the next day with an empty pill bottle.

Carry on like nothing happened. Trying to fight the urges.

It’s been almost two years since one of those pills went down my throat.

I’m proud of that.

— a note from a DI staffer