Cocaine Confessions
Abstract
This autoethnography adds my story to the scholarly literature on adolescent drug use. I examine how and why I used cocaine as an adolescent. However, to understand drug use, one must carefully unpack the psychosocial, cultural, environmental, and historical factors that influence this behaviour. Therefore, I explore each of these factors and their influence on my experiences with cocaine. Also, with any personal story about drugs, it is crucial to provide honest and thoughtful narratives about how drug use can affect someone’s life. This approach can help address the misconceptions and stigmas associated with this behaviour. As such, I genuinely and painstakingly share how cocaine affected my life and how I perceived it to affect the lives of my peers. I consumed cocaine for a variety of reasons: I was curious about the drug, it helped me temporarily escape my life problems and find short-term relief from my distress and emotional pain, I had a desire to experience euphoria, drug use was a means of socializing and cocaine became the most coveted substance among my peers, using cocaine helped me gain and maintain status within my peer groups, and I used and continued to use cocaine because I likely developed a substance use disorder. My experiences with cocaine were truly a collective experience, as I never consumed this drug alone. Cocaine significantly shifted our peer group dynamics and strongly influenced our interactions with each other unlike any other drug at that point. In terms of impact, cocaine had a negative overall effect on my physical, psychological, and social development. Most notably, this drug interfered with my ability to create and sustain healthy relationships, and I believe that cocaine contributed to the development of my mental illness. This study has the potential to help young people, parents, educators, policymakers, health care providers, those in recovery, and others better understand the intricacies and more contextual factors that influence and are involved in adolescent drug use. This paper offers an olive branch to those willing to see things from a different perspective and possibly change their existing beliefs about adolescent drug use.