Hi my name is Jessica and I’m going to tell you all about my struggle with drug abuse so that hopefully you won’t make the same mistakes I did.

             It all started about a year ago. It was summer vacation and I was out with friends all the time. They say summer is the time most kids start doing drugs and it’s true because your parents are at work and you are unsupervised for a long time. This is what happened with me. I was with people that my parents didn’t know and they were the wrong kind of people but I was having fun with them at first. It was with them that I started smoking marijuana. At first it was just out of curiosity then I kept doing it because everyone else was doing it and then I started to hang out with friends of the already “not so good” people. I was always surrounded by negative influences and I started to smoke weed all the time. Then I started at school during lunch or recess.

             That’s when my parents started to catch on. One night I was with a friend and we were smoking weed and drinking and I was too high to go home so I slept in a park and got home at 6:00 AM. My parents were worried sick. That’s when I started to realize I had a problem. Although I realized it, I was denying it. And I kept on doing it over and over again until my parents were fed up. That’s when they decided to send me to live in a group home called AMCAL. I really didn’t want to go and at first it was like boot camp. They gave us drug tests once a week to make sure we were clean and we had individual and group counseling on drugs and anger management and all that. We also had to do tons of chores that we weren’t used to doing so it was really intense punishment. I began to not mind my new home so much and during my 8 weeks in the group home I turned my life around. I left with a new respect for myself and I have been clean for the past 8 months. I’m now proud of myself and working on regaining my parents’ trust. My family is now happier than ever and so am I. If I had the choice to go back and do it all over again I would never have started doing drugs.

      I hope you have learned a bit from my story and I hope you never fall into my old shoes. It’s at all not pleasant but if ever you do there are group homes like AMCAL that are there to help.