Fighting Back: Part 4c

DRUGS' FORCEFUL GRIP HARD TO ESCAPE

With the sun coming up, his cocaine and a whole paycheck gone and the high
fading, Jeff Hasty no longer wanted to live.

This isn't me. This cannot be happening. I'm a normal guy, from a good
family. I was Student Council president. I can't control it.

I can't take it anymore.

Hasty washed down a large bottle of Tylenol PMs with a bottle of Scope
mouthwash. He locked himself in his room at his parents' home. He expected
to die. He was 22 years old.

On Aug. 5, 1996, Hasty had reached the end of a slide to hell.

The slide began - about this he has not one single doubt - when he was 11
or 12 years old and started sneaking beers with friends.

It seemed harmless enough; so did the the pot smoking with a couple of rich
kids from school that soon followed.

But it threw a switch. It woke some demon in Hasty's psyche.

After six years in recovery, fighting that demon remains a day-by-day battle.

Wreckage of the past

I'm all right, as long as it's just beer. I'm all right, as long as I just
smoke pot. I'm all right, as long as I don't shoot drugs. I'm all right as
long as I don't smoke crack. I'm all right, as long as I'm not as bad off
as him.

Now 28, Hasty still looks like a teen-ager. He is blond and handsome with a
face that could appear on a teen magazine cover.

But his eyes cloud as he tells of the "wreckage" that is his past. He
becomes nervous, animated, as he describes "nasty" things: having his
stomach pumped and being fed liquid charcoal after he overdosed, twice;
being robbed while trying to buy drugs (they even took his shoes); stealing
from his family and seeing people, places and things a middle-class kid
from a good family in Pascagoula shouldn't see.

Hasty's hands move in an odd way during parts of his story. They are,
subconsciously, remembering how they once held a lighter and a homemade
crack pipe when he had reached bottom.

"You don't tell yourself, 'I want to become a crackhead when I grow up,'
for God's sake," Hasty laughs - this statement mirrors a nationwide
anti-drug slogan that ran on television for years. "Not good, normal
people. One thing just leads to another."

Hasty first drank alcohol at friends' houses, sneaking beer from their
parents' refrigerators, and smoked his first cigarettes about the same time.

"I mean, I wasn't a raging drunk at 11 years old or anything," he said. "We
were just trying it. When we were 14 or 15, we started drinking more,
weekends, parties. We would just pay a bum to buy it for us."

Hasty was an average student through middle school and junior high. In
ninth grade, he was elected Student Council president at Trent Lott Middle
School. He got along well with others, but always felt like he didn't quite
fit in.

"I jumped around social groups a lot," he said. "I was kind of a chameleon,
not really content with who I was, but just trying to adapt to whoever I
was around... I've always kind of had this thing about rich people. I
wanted to fit in with the people from a higher economic status than me."

Hasty smoked his first joint at 13, when he caught a ride with two rich kids.

"I wanted to be in the clique with the kids from affluent families," Hasty
said. "Marijuana was just pretty much present around school, pretty readily
available."

With the clarity of hindsight, Hasty knows his problems started way back
then, but he couldn't see it at the time, and he managed to hide his
growing alcohol and drug use from his family. Classmates knew Hasty was
becoming "one of the pot heads" at school, but teachers didn't figure it
out, as far as Hasty knows. His grades began to drop by high school.

"I would drink to get drunk, until I passed out," Hasty said. "I started to
get into more drugs, tried acid, ecstasy. I got more involved, started
smoking a lot of marijuana. I started taking prescription drugs - other
people's prescriptions."

High school days were filled with drug use.

"We would drink on the way to lunch - we had open-campus lunch, so we could
leave. We smoked weed in between classes... We did inhalants."

His health suffered. Already slender, Hasty became gaunt and would "wheeze"
from smoking. He had begun hanging around only with other drug users.

When he was 18, Hasty was introduced to cocaine.

"I fell in love," he said. "It was my drug of choice."

Relapse and recovery

I need help.

Hasty tried crack cocaine first, then the powdered version. He also
continued smoking lots of pot, taking LSD, prescription drugs - anything he
could get his hands on.

Drugs had taken over Hasty's life by the mid-90s.

"The tail was wagging the dog," he said.

He couldn't hold down a job. He began small-time drug dealing, stole from
his family and "hustled" for money to get drugs. Hasty will not elaborate
on what hustling involved.

"I had probably 60 to 70 jobs, lost them," Hasty said. "Even to work at
Waffle House, they want you to take a drug test... But it's like an
underground economy. If you have pot, you know people who work in
restaurants where you can get free food. It's like its own world. I know
whole families that do nothing but sit around getting high, watching 'The
Price is Right.'

Hasty continued to live with his parents, who began to realize he had a
problem and tried to help him. But Hasty didn't want help.

"They couldn't have stopped me," he said.

He continued to use and started smoking lots of crack cocaine.

In 1994, Hasty overdosed on a "cocktail" of drugs and was hospitalized.

Soon after, Hasty's parents had him committed to a state hospital. After 21
days, he was released and began attending addiction recovery meetings
regularly.

But Pascagoula is a small community, and all the druggies knew Hasty's
reputation. It seemed the temptation of drugs was everywhere. Hasty
relapsed within months, but he kept trying to make recovery meetings, right
up until Aug. 5, 1996.

"I was working at Ingalls, and had just gotten my paycheck," Hasty said. "I
had been to three (rehab) meetings that day. That evening, I picked up a
guy from the meeting. We decided to buy some crack."

Hasty ended up in the other guy's ratty apartment in Pascagoula, on a crack
binge that lasted all night.

"We were like Santa's little elves, working away at getting high," he said.
"We would run out, then he would go get more. You just chase the high all
night until everything's gone."

The depression set in as Hasty returned home that morning. "Death seemed
preferable," so he took the Tylenol PMs and mouthwash, the first things he
could find.

After being hospitalized again, Hasty decided he wanted help.

"I was sick and tired of being sick and tired," he said.

With the help of a 12-step program and meetings, church and his family,
Hasty has remained sober.

He went to college, received an undergraduate degree in anthropology and
attended law school for a year.

Law school wasn't working out. "I still have problems dealing with
authority," Hasty said. Now, he is looking for a job and a career.

"It still affects a lot of things," Hasty said. "My skills at dealing with
personal relationships didn't develop like normal people's."

Staying sober remains a day-by-day avocation.

"You keep it in the day, in the here and now, and remember you can't fix
everything at once," Hasty said. "The meetings have saved my life.

"I needed a higher power to intervene," Hasty said. "August 5, 1996, is
like a birthday to me. It feels great, to know what all is possible for me."