Ariel - How I Became a Drug Addict
Introduction
Meet Ariel, a 30-year-old woman living on the streets in Miami, Florida. In this interview, she shares her addiction story, opening up about trauma, homelessness, and the experiences that led her into substance use. As she reflects on her life, she describes how abuse, instability, and survival shaped her path in ways she is still trying to understand.
Despite everything she has been through, Ariel remains hopeful that recovery is still possible. Her addiction story is one of hardship and resilience, but also of reflection and the possibility of change.
Ariel - One Year Later
"It blew my mind. I really wasn't expecting how much support I was going to gain from it [the video] and that support really pushed me forward. It helped me to know that I'm not alone and people can relate to my story. It made me feel really good because it allowed me to realize that I'm helping other people too at the same time as I'm helping myself."
Explore more interviews from the How I Became an Addict series, where people share their experiences of addiction, recovery, and the paths that led them there.
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Quotes
"I was going through a lot of physical and emotional abuse with my mom and her remarried husband … he would do a lot of scary things like chase me around with two by fours … it forced me to the point where I felt like I wasn't safe at home, so I ran away and lost my virginity being raped … I feel like it was the main turning point in my life because it changed all of my relationships with men."
"I got hooked on meth to begin with. I started smoking meth, I loved it, it made me feel awake. And I was really self-conscious about my weight when I was younger. I was bulimic for a period of time, so when I smoke, it just made me feel alive to be honest."
"They had loaded up the needle and shot me up with it and I just remembered thinking to myself, where has this feeling been all my life? It just took care of all my worries, all my stresses, it made me numb to all the pain and trauma that I had gone through … and then when the high was over, it would come back tenfold so I kept on having to chase the high."
"Now that I've been sober from fentanyl and the shooting [heroin] since last November, I would say, I like to think of my scars as something beautiful to be honest because it shows where I've been, where I came from, and the fact that I'm okay with myself. If someone even says something about how I look ... they don't know what I've been through, and that makes me who I am today ... that makes me strong."
"Right now, lately, I've been using crack cocaine and molly ... I both use it by smoking. I would say that I really do both the same amount. Lately I've had a different mode of getting money, just as far as my situation ... I'll go and boost or steal - not from people because ... you have to have a certain code. There's certain things that are okay and not okay and even if it's not okay to some people that you're stealing out of the store, in my mind ... they have insurance that covers that."
"You have to change your environment. You have to change the people you're around. You have to create new hobbies and fill your boredom time with healthy things to do again because the thing about being a user is you become so used to doing the same thing every day that you forget who you really are. You forget what you like to do, what makes you, you."
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