recovery
Marianne Merten
Garry has been clean for 18 months. He survived crack addiction.
“It brings people to their knees quicker than anything else. You lose weight. You can’t sleep. I often sat in my room high on crack, highly emotional, wanting to cry. I couldn’t. It leaves you hollow.”
Garry came to Cape Town from Pretoria where he grew up. For 16 years he hid his addiction to Mandrax and later crack by holding down jobs and paying bills regularly. Then, for 12 years, he lived out of a backpack across South Africa. “I was very manipulative. I’ve always managed to have some sort of a semblance in my life.”
In Johannesburg he got involved in crime – burgling and mugging people. In Port Elizabeth he got involved in a syndicate smuggling guns and drugs. He got off a fraud charge and some drug charges.
One night in Cape Town he was alone in a bare room feeling suicidal. That for him was rock bottom. He had sold everything but his car. “I was going to use the car to drive off Chapman’s Peak. At that stage I had two choices. I could scream for help, or drive off Chapman’s Peak.” Garry decided to seek help.
Garry unsuccessfully tried to stop drugging many times. He says he was so used to manipulating people that he tried the same during recovery. At one stage he would go for counselling and smoke crack. “I’d leave [counselling] walking on a cloud. There would be a little voice in my head. My car was on autopilot back to the merchants.”
Garry remembers getting into his car sometimes as often as four times a night to drive to his dealer while living half-an- hour’s drive away. “The cravings are intense. The craving just overwhelms you.”
Once he did not have anything more to sell except his car. He was on his way to another fix of rocks. “I remember thinking: I can drive to the dealer and sell the car, but I don’t feel like walking.”
He checked in to the Stepping Stones rehabilitation clinic. Three weeks into the programme he was asked to leave for breaking the house rules, but returned after apologising.
Of the group of 12 admitted, four are still clean. Garry attends a support group of former drug abusers. “People know exactly what I feel, where I come from.”
Recovery means detaching himself from old places and associations, facing up to the addiction and taking responsibility for his actions. Garry says without the programme and the support group he would not be here.
“I think I’d either still use drugs or I’d be dead. I am an addict, but I will die with my addiction, not from it. I don’t want to go back there.”
Garry did not want his surname published