Hi guys I am here with another PSA but not the normal one. Friday we had a guest speaker come in and I'll call him Tim for now. Tim was an ex convict who suffered from major drug and alcohol addiction. He went to a maximum security prison and if you don't know what prison is like it's like this, according to Tim;

You got maximum where you're isolated from the world. You have a room with a bed, shower, toilet, and sink. The sink runs for 5 seconds and it shuts off and you must wait another 15 seconds before you can use it again while if you used the shower you never knew when it would be shut off so it was a race against time. The toilet only flushes after ten minutes between each one and you're isolated 24/7 with this metal door, no windows, nothing but a little slider on the door that allows guard to peek in before shutting it on you. You only have books and letters and yourself as company.

Medium is like the ones you see in movies. You're with other inmates and there's a chain of command between prisoners and unspoken rules that everyone learns. The worst thing to call someone here is "bitch" especially in an all male prison. You can't do anything in private because either guards or inmates are always breathing down your neck showering or even going to the bathroom. According to Tim, there's a special cell where the walls were see through so guards could keep constant surveillance on you if you were suicidal or just on concerning behavior that could be detrimental to you or the guards.

Minimum is where most prisoners who are nearing the end of their time in prison will go in order to transition back into society.

Why am I talking about this? Well, this is kinda a little "don't do drugs kiddos" PSA but I'm not going to whip out the fucking DARE pamphlet and put unrealistic skits in this PSA I'm going to tell you exactly what Tim had told me.

Drugs ruined his life. Many people will claim that marijuana isn't a gateway drug but. . . it is. When Tim was in first grade he was diagnosed with ADD and was placed under eight different medications to help it but by the time he was in eighth grade he decided that self-medicating through the use of weed was a better alternative than taking the ADD pills he had been using a good portion of his life. He had a rough childhood with a borderline abusive mother who would scream and throw stuff at him but never dared touch him. She called the cops on him and placed him in the mental hospital twice, once for him saying that he didn't want to live a life she existed in and the second time because she was simply just mad at him.

So when he was in eighth grade he switched from the ADD pills over to marijuana but he learned that self-medicating himself through the use of an illegal substance (in Wisconsin it is illegal) he needed money. Being that young he couldn't get a job so he resorted to selling his ADD pills to students for money. This carried on into high school but his usage of marijuana stretched to alcohol usage at parties now and he would throw back so many drinks he probably couldn't remember the night the next day. His mother realized he went through his ADD pills too fast and stopped buying them so he ended up buying weed and selling some of it to keep his addiction going. His stepfather smoked, bought, and even helped him deal the marijuana so when Tim got even better marijuana the prices went up and his stepfather didn't like how he didn't get a discount and broke Tim's nose, made his fast swollen and the two of them were arrested but Tim's mother only bailed his stepfather out of jail. By the age of 16, Tim had a criminal record.

Once Tim turned 18 he was arrested for carrying about a pound of marijuana on him and he served some time under probation. Time passed and he begins to abuse alcohol. In the state of Wisconsin, we have OWI which is operating while intoxicated. The first time you're given an OWI it is like a gentle slap on the wrist you get a fine and you're let go once you sober up or have someone get you. The second offense is jail time from a day to three. The third is court and your final is prison time. He had received two. When he was nineteen someone he used to party a lot with came to him and told him she was having his child. He cleaned his act up the best he could and became a hard-working father to support his family but his baby mother began stealing money to buy herself drugs and then two years later she gave him a birthday card with a paternity test inside saying that the kid he had been raising for to years wasn't his.

He turned back to alcohol as a comforting object like a toddler would hold a stuffed animal while upset. He would frequent a tavern down the road and become a regular as he tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do with this information. The child he grown attached to thinking it was his own flesh and blood didn't have a father figure since the real father was in prison so he decided to step up and adopt the kid one day once he came to terms with this discovery. The girl he had raised the kid with tried to force him to adopt the child as his own when he wasn't ready and he left her life knowing he couldn't just be forced into something like that and it be healthy.

He became a heavy drinker and soon met someone who offered him a job. The job was to help make and sell meth. With his past experiences as a dealer, he knew he could make a killing off of something like making and distributing one of the hardest drugs. He took the offer and so his life began to fall apart. You are probably asking why I said MArijuana was a gateway drug because you're probably not seeing the bigger picture but as Tim stood in front of us, struggling to tell us his story without telling us something too bad, he said that you don't just wake up one day and think;

"I want to be a meth dealer. I want to be addicted to drugs and become an alcoholic and go to prison. No person wants this, it happens. Marijuana introduced me to it all."

You've heard the term; don't smoke/use your own products. We all have, it is a common knowledge in society whether or not you dabble in the drug industry. Tim ended up doing just the opposite. Sometimes he would go four to seven days with no sleep he was so screwed up on his own stash of meth and he would have 400 missed calls on his phone from clients who were frantic, desperate even, just to get their hands on more meth HE created. When I sat there listening to his speech, I could tell that he strongly regrets ever making and distributing meth because he finds himself thinking about how many people's lives he screwed up because he fed their addiction. You could see it on his face that he would have done anything to change those people's lives for the better but he just couldn't. He had done something so terrible he is being forced to live with this knowledge for the rest of his life and it probably eats away at him on the inside.

He and his friends became addicted to their own supply and they were arrested. Tim is 244 pounds now but when he was arrested he was 170lbs and he was locked in jail and for the first seven days all he did was sleep. While he slept he gained seven pounds. Meth literally screwed him over. He got his fourth OWI and was soon declared a hazard to society after he failed his probation and sent to a maximum security prison after he beat an inmate in medium security. He spent three years there doing nothing but reading psychology textbooks and trying to learn physics.

When they switched him from maximum security to medium who nearly beat a guard up after they discovered he and his cellmate started this drug cartel of sorts inside of the prison. He was then sent to maximum security where he served the rest of his sentence. Then, one day out of the blue, he was put into a rehabilitation program but it came with problems.

Usually you go from maximum to medium to minimum to society but he went from maximum to society. He went from isolation to the real world with the snap of one's fingers. He struggles to this day with suicidal thoughts, he told us that he makes nooses sometimes and would put it around his neck just to feel some sense of relief that he didn't have to deal with his demons anymore.

"There's a demon inside of me that feels like it's going to boil over and I hate it but as much as it eats away at me from the inside, it's the only thing that keeps me here."

Tim is now sober and he's in college and a career but he's forced to go through anger management classes so he doesn't do harm to his wife or siblings.

I enjoyed listening to his speech because it was just so interesting to hear this new side of how drugs affect your life and the impact it has on others around you. What I'm saying by sharing this little story is that if you're smoking marijuana, be careful because it IS a gateway drug whether you want to believe it or not and that it can lead you to hard shit in the future. I have friends who do the drug and they claim every day they would never do stuff like meth or crack but it isn't exactly a choice in your control because when your body doesn't get the same high from the smaller drugs you're used to you'll switch to something harder.

All in all, please be careful with the people you hang around with and the things you do because they WILL change your future for the good or the worse. Make Good choices kiddos.

It was a different kind of PSA but I really wanted to share it because you don't hear that side of drugs that often because those people are always in prison and Tim makes it a thing to go to schools and speak about why you shouldn't do drugs.

I also wanted to just say I hope y'all have a wonderful day!!

-Anri