Before we knew it, we found ourselves strung out on heroin and methadone, clinging on for dear life. We were on our own, navigating the filthy waters of this great American opioid epidemic, without the faintest idea if we’d ever make it back to shore alive.
This wasn’t my story alone. This was the story of hundreds of thousands of other addicts who had fallen victim to the same epidemic. All over America, there were people just like me who spent their days feeling sick, defeated, scared, and ready to give up.
There were fathers who’d gotten injured while teaching their sons to play basketball and wound up hooked on prescription OxyContin, only to turn to heroin when they ran low on cash. They lost their jobs, their houses, and custody of their children as they struggled to support their addictions.
There were beauty queens from high schools like mine who’d decided to act cool at a party and weeks later found themselves unable to break a dependency that developed like a fever and detained them like handcuffs. They would soon find themselves selling their bodies to older men in exchange for heroin and a dirty needle to take away the pain.
There were stories of all-star high-school basketball players who went to the same parties I did and tried the same pills, but instead of becoming addicted and having the chance to battle their addiction, they collapsed on bathroom floors or stopped breathing altogether in the back seats of cars after their very first time using Oxy.
Some of these people had been prescribed drugs. Others had made an unwise decision to experiment. None of them were bad people. None of them could have ever imagined the horrors that their decisions would lead to in their lives. None of them deserved to die. But so many of them did. And they continue to…every day.
I was eventually admitted to Connecticut Valley Hospital for Addiction Services, but in the months before, my life had taken a turn for the absolute worst. My drug use had led me down an indescribably nightmarish road. I had progressed to smoking large amounts of crack cocaine, snorting entire grams of heroin, and drinking up to a liter of vodka a day. I was also abusing Xanax and other prescription drugs.
Before detox, I was going entire weeks without sleep. When I finally did sleep, my nights were filled with terrifying nightmares, massive tremors, and night sweats. Every bone and muscle in my body burned and twitched from withdrawal and lack of sleep.
The month before I walked through those hospital doors, I began to experience a new emotion—a feeling I hadn’t experienced before in the context of my drug use. It wasn’t the feeling of pain from withdrawal, or guilt for betraying my family and closest friends. It wasn’t the desperate state of my life, or loneliness, or depression. It wasn’t even anxiety over my probation officer filling out paperwork that recommended my imprisonment for the full five-year felony sentence I had narrowly avoided until then.
For the first time since I could remember, I felt only one prominent emotion: fear.
Pure, unadulterated fear.
I knew I was going to die. It was inevitable. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when.
I was scared that I was going to leave behind a family who truly loved me and wanted nothing more than for me to come back to them and return to the person I once was. I was scared that all the dreams I’d once had for myself in life would go unfulfilled. I was scared that I would be remembered only as Mike Majlak, the drug addict. The kid who threw his life in the garbage, traded it all away for a few lines of heroin or cocaine. Swapped his family, his friends, and his potential for a good high and an early coffin.
This new fear—this belief that the end was close and the thought that I might not see another sunrise—pushed me through that set of hospital doors on a hot July afternoon.
Through this fear, I found another feeling that was burning deep within me—the courage to change. With that courage, I would forge a new path that would allow me to reclaim my life and inspire other addicts and sufferers to continue fighting.
This new path would be perilous, filled with its own failures, setbacks, and heartache. In the end, my decision to change would give me an opportunity to experience the one thing I had dreamed of for so long: redemption.
one
2005
U.S. opioid deaths: 14,918
“You better not be getting blood all over the place again!” Nicky smashed his fists against the locked bathroom door. “Last time, I couldn’t get the blood off the fucking wall. Come out, you fucking pendejo!”
He beat the door so hard, I thought he was going to break it down.
Inside the bathroom, I huddled over the tiny porcelain sink. Blood poured down my face. I barely registered the sour taste on my tongue. In my hand, I held a rusty razor blade.
Outside, Nicky continued to pound on the door.
“Leave me alone,” I shouted. “I’ll be right out.”
An hour earlier, I had sat with three others, bagging up hundreds of grams of powder cocaine and heroin. The basement was dimly lit and moist…so dank it sometimes made bagging the drugs nearly impossible. But still we persevered.
Sometimes I would sneak off, after hours of bagging up powder and snorting line after line after line, and find solace in this cramped, dirty bathroom. It was my safe place…a place for me to be alone.
My nose was numb from twenty-four hours straight of sniffing, but I could still feel the scab tickling at my damaged septum. It clogged the passage of air. I couldn’t breathe through my nose. My mouth was dry and parched. I wanted to clear the scab out. I needed to…I had to get rid of this nuisance.
So just like the night before, I dug at the scab with a razor. Blood dripped out of my nostrils and down my chin as I scraped the inside of my nasal canal with the rusty blade. The pain was a dull, throbbing background noise, numbed by the drugs and not nearly as important as my primary mission.
Finally, I severed the tissue. It gave way with a tug, releasing a gush of red liquid.
I pulled the rubbery tendon from my nose.
Satisfied, I gave one last hard blow into a tissue, filling it with blood, mucous, and cartilage. I turned the light off in the dank, dingy bathroom, leaving a streak of fresh red blood down the white switch.
When I came back into the room, Nicky was sitting at the bar in front of the digital scale and a mound of unbagged cocaine. He looked at me with revulsion. “I told you to stop with that shit,” he said. “It’s fucking disgusting.”
I ignored him and took a seat at the bar. A loaded 9mm handgun lay next to me on the glass aquarium that doubled as a makeshift countertop. Two cameras equipped with cheap night-vision lenses gave us a full view of what was transpiring outside from monitors set up in the basement.
Nicky broke off a piece of scaly rock from the baseball-sized chunk sitting on the counter and crushed it under a Bic lighter. We’d just scored a pound of this “fishscale” cocaine, so named because its holographic surface resembled the textured skin of a fish.
With my debit card, I scraped the yellowish white powder over to my side and lined up a massive rail. I rolled up a bill, scooted my stool closer, and sniffed the massive line into the same side of my nose I had just finished gouging out with a razor.
The fine powder tore through the raw flesh of my nostril like shards of glass. Ignoring the pain, I inhaled deeply, tasting the pungent mixture of cocaine and blood dripping down the back of my throat.