Welcome to Back from the Abyss, where we bring you stories of hope and healing, recovery and redemption.

I'm Dr. Craig Hickok, your host and resident psychiatrist.

Names and some details have been changed in these stories to maintain confidentiality.

About a third of my patients struggle with addiction, and while sobriety is often the goal, it isn't always the goal.

For many people, the goal is harm reduction or moving away for more dangerous and destructive patterns of use to less toxic and life-wrecking substance use.

Our guest today, Larry, progressed from heavy drinking and marijuana use during adolescence

to smoking methamphetamine and then finally injecting both meth and heroin

and whatever else he could get his hands on.

Larry grew up with a mentally ill mother, who was supposedly homeschooling the kids,

but in fact much of the time was frantically writing religious tomes during her weeks and months of mania.

Larry was an extremely talented dancer, and as an adolescent was invited to join a world tour.

Spending late nights with the dance company, he was introduced to alcohol,

and soon he was drinking to blackout and eventually kicked off the tour and sent home.

Shortly thereafter, Larry's older brother began cooking methamphetamine and testing quality of the batches with Larry as his guinea pig.

Meth soon took over Larry's life, and by his early 20s, Larry's hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute existence was utterly dominated by his addictions.

How long were you doing daily intravenous use?

Every morning and then like every afternoon I would do it, but then it was even worse because when I would come down, I would get so restless and all this.

So in order to get rid of the come down from that, I would do shoot up opiates to come

down at nighttime.

So I was like, I could sleep.

So I was doing meth all day and then I would do opiates at night.

Yeah.

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