I was born and raised here in Alabama. I come out of a family of… of a… a dysfunctional family. Both parents were there, but they were dysfunctional. I actually come up in the street. They did what they could with what they had, but I come up in the streets. So I learned all of the street jargon, how to make money, how to get fast money, how to hustle. Drugs was a big part of my life. From 16 till I was about 40 years old.

I dropped out of school early because I couldn’t function in school. It wasn’t because of the drugs, it was because I was just slow. Nowadays they got classes for that… So I dropped out of school and my drug expenses was really devastating for me because I was looking for the right stuff in the wrong places. I gravitated toward drugs because I had a void that I was trying to fill and I couldn’t fill it. I used drugs to try to shut the door on the pain that I was having.

So from 16 up to.. I was about 30, 40 years old, I did every kind of drug that you could imagine or name. I started out with marijuana. My mother’s boyfriend was- he turned me out to drugs- because he had lost his job and we started to sellin’ drugs together. So, that landed me in prison. At the age of 19. I went to jail in Alabama, prison.

From there, while I was in the street, we hustled, we hustled drugs, because I couldn’t function as far as school was concerned, didn’t have a job and all that stuff, so that’s what all of us would do. We turned to drugs, that’s how we made our money and functioned in the street. It started out with marijuana and then we started testing cough syrup with codeine and graduated from that to cocaine and heroin. That’s when my life really started to turn into something that I had no control over. It was a real, ah, challenge, to stay alive you know because my addiction had gotten so bad, until I was totally- by the age of 38 I had totally, I was out of control.

My life was unbearable. It was non-productive. I was ineffective. I was walking around in the world ineffective. I had three kids by three different ladies and… I messed their lives up. And today, even today, we are trying to salvage those relationships. But the drugs, here in Alabama, that was another thing that was real easy to do was pharmaceutical drugs. They was just as easily get as the other drugs were. And that was a big problem too, because when you get pharmaceuticals, the guys in the south didn’t have a bunch of body problems, like abscesses, because they were using clean drugs, pharmaceuticals. So if we couldn’t get cocaine or heroin, we could always get pharmaceutical drugs, which was morphine and Dilaudids and stuff like that. Opiates- it was a derivative of the poppy also.

When I left Alabama and went to Detroit then the drugs were not clean and they was cut with talcum powder and anything you could get to enlarge the volume of the drug so you could make more money. That taxed my body real hard. My kidneys were in trouble, my liver. I was bleeding out of my rear. My stomach, I had ulcers and you know, my teeth was gone. I was just almost to a point of death.