The Real-Life Horrors of Addiction

What is it about addiction? Many people end up becoming addicted to alcohol and drugs such as meth, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and even prescription pills, do so because they don’t know the truth about addiction–that it destroys lives.

Beyond what movies, music, and other media shows you, there is more to addiction stories. In fact, taking time to listen to real-life addiction stories can be an effective catalyst for an addict to mirror their own problems. These stories can even spur them to find help, as well as to see that they can still turn their life around.

Below are some real-life horror stories of addiction we have compiled from Reddit: This is under the thread, “Give me the most brutal drug addiction/abuse horror stories” by dasdatsherm.

• “I know a few who’ve gone insane due to IV research Chems/meth/heroin/pcp. A few commuted suicide, some died driving and some just sit in their room brain dead at 27. I somehow made it out” (Whitestmold045)
• “I don’t think I’ll be able to find a link to the comment but I remember reading a nurse’s story on a front-page thread a year or so ago. Long-story short, an overweight woman came in who had been injecting heroin directly into her taint/perineum which had developed into an abscess. She continued to inject into the same site despite the pain (and presumably little effect?) for many months. By the time she came into A&E the abscess extended right up inside her for a good couple of feet. They had to drain it and clean it. Apparently there was an inch-thick pool of puss, blood, and shit covering the theater by the time they were done… I don’t know if you’ve ever played Left 4 Dead but apparently the closest description the nurse could think of was the Boomer zombie from that.” (merryman1)
• “I watched a girl I used to date OD on heroin. Her eyes rolled back and she was gasping brutally every ten seconds or so. It was awful to watch. Even worse, I found out she was only a week out of rehab. She survived, but we don’t talk anymore.” (spiderlanewales)
• “Stories like this infamous one where some guys cousin huffs gasoline until he’s a braindead vegetable, or this one where a guy abuses nitrous and LSD to the point that he has chronic nerve pain for 14 years so bad that it drives him to suicide multiple times.” (dasdatsherm)
• “I abused psychs for about a year and got to the point where I was tripping sober in some aspect very stranger. Toward the end of my adventures all of the journeys had gotten very satanic in my perspective and pushed me to kill myself during the experience. Since have completely stopped tripping and everything is better than it’s ever been.” (Pineapples_420)
• “…My friend who dabbles in and out of meth was telling me of one time when they went to go score some. They went to this very small town of about 200 people and entered the house of where the meth was being sold. Instead of a nice home with furniture, tables, and chairs, it had nothing but a few metal fold up chairs, a blocky box tv on top of a bucket, and the TV was showing footage of security cameras that were outside of the house. He also said every window just had garbage bags over them Everyone in the house was tweaking out as well and he said it was the sketchiest thing he had ever encountered…I don’t know if that’s the most brutal story, but a house that’s dedicated to strictly meth use is brutal enough for me.” (MindDerp)