'ALL MY LIFE HAS BEEN SUCH A BLUR'

The Son Of Addicts Struggles To Break Destructive Pattern

GULFPORT - George Michael, 46, of Gulfport was introduced to crystal
methamphetamine at age 10 - by his father.

His dad, a drug runner for the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang in California,
had a major heart attack, so he began using his 10-year-old son as a tester
at deals, "like a guinea pig," Michael said.

His parents divorced, and Michael went to live with his mom, but "she was
an alcoholic; when they split up, our life kind of went downhill. I had to
grow up fast."

His parents' decisions about using drugs and alcohol robbed Michael of his
childhood. But Michael's decisions about drugs and alcohol robbed him of
much of his adulthood.

Michael used drugs, did poorly in school and stayed in trouble. "Before my
17th birthday, my mom had me arrested for burglarizing our own home," he
said. "I went to youth prison for two years. I got paroled out to my dad,
but he got arrested again after that and went back to prison.

"I joined the Navy."

Michael became a cook on a destroyer and stayed in nearly five years, but
"was still doing drugs 90-miles-a-second the whole time." He tried to
re-enlist, but he had caught hepatitis C from intravenous drug use and
couldn't.

Twenty-five years old at the time, Michael didn't have much direction and
continued using, with crystal meth remaining his drug of choice.

"I got so bad at one point that I had two full-time jobs and was still
sleeping in an abandoned car in San Diego because I was spending it all on
drugs," Michael said.

Michael tried to clean up, soon got married and had two children. But he
kept going back to his drug habits.

"It took the birth of my second child to make me realize how out of hand I
had gotten," Michael said. "My wife was from South Carolina; her parents
lived there, so we moved there. I was trying to get away from the drugs.

"I did, but the only thing was, I just traded addictions from crystal meth
to alcohol. I had always been the type that could take or leave a beer, if
drugs were around. But when we moved to South Carolina and the drugs
weren't around, my drug of choice ended up becoming beer. That soon went
into full-blown alcoholism."

Michael couldn't keep a job. He put his wife and kids through severe mental
abuse. They left him. "I haven't been able to see my kids since '94," he said.

Michael entered a rehab program through a church and cleaned up. He soon
started attending Victory College to get a degree in biblical theology. But
within two years, he slipped back into "drinking and drugging."

Michael went back and forth between drugs and alcohol and rehab programs.
At one point, he managed to stay sober for a year and a half. But then he
relapsed, hard. "I got so bad that I ended up owing a lot of money to three
different drug dealers in the same gang," Michael said. "At one point, they
took me up to this old flop house, a crack house, and I know they were
planning to kill me, but I got out of it."

A VA program in Georgia helped relocate Michael to Gulfport in February for
a drug program and to escape the wrath of the dealers he owed. But the
program didn't have room for him, so he ended up at the Salvation Army
shelter in Gulfport.

Michael has been sober for about six months, has found his own place to
stay and is working for the Salvation Army's thrift store.

"It's a process, not a one-time thing," Michael says of his sobriety. "I
enjoy the work. I lose myself in it. It's therapy, it helps me get over the
bitterness, the whole, 'Hey, I didn't ask to be born into this whole deal.'

He attends a rehab program, and he and a couple of others have been trying
to start their own Bible-based program. Michael suspects recovery would be
impossible without religious faith involved, at least for him.

"The type person who lives the whole drug and alcohol lifestyle, they're
very 'Me, me, me; forget about you.' Spirituality isn't about me. It's all
about Him. When I concentrate on what He wants me to do, I get out of all
that. I want to help others."

Michael gives a warning to those thinking of trying drugs or alcohol:

"It sounds cliché-ish, but a life of drug addiction is going to land you in
one of three places: jail, some other form of institution with people
making your decisions for you, or dead - or a combination of all three. All
my life has been such a blur. I didn't get to enjoy anything. My parents
are both dead - at least I know my dad died in San Quentin. I haven't seen
my mom since I was 17. I assume she's dead. I didn't get to see my kids
grow up.

"I want to say just don't do drugs, but that doesn't even begin to cover
it. There's so much more to life than that. I'm 46 years old. There's no
telling what kind of potential I've wasted."