D. Harris Resources

Morrison, M. & Harris, D. (1986, September). My seventeen years as a drug addict. McCalls.

OVERVIEW

Martha Morrison says she grew up in a sheltered and loving home:

Mother was a typical devoted housewife. Dad was an accountant and respected business manager for an auto-sales firm. They were good and loving parents in every sense; upper-middle class, Southern Baptist; staunch pillars-of-the-community types. Why I grew up to dislike them and their values in adolescence I never really understood.

I have a brother, 12 years older, whom I looked up to and admired and who to this day is straight as an arrow. But the pain was there and I felt as if I were the only one who hurt as badly as I did.

Martha’s mother suffered from migraines. When Martha was 12, she began to take her mother’s Darvon. She took it for her own headaches and for "emotional pain of which I really had no understanding. But I never took just one pill. If one was good, then 3 or 5 or more were better."

Martha continues her story:

At 13 I had my first drink at a party...My friends and I planned it...got drunk on Vodka, and it felt good...At 14 I got drunk at a friend’s house, cut my head and ended up in the hospital...received 20 stitches and was treated for a concussion. I got drunk again the next weekend.

At 16 I was double-dating with a girl-friend and two college guys, and I smoked my first joint. In a small college town in Arkansas, this was daring, wicked, exciting. We smoked all afternoon and half the night. I loved what pot did to me. It made me mellow, able to cope, to remain cool. I had discovered a way to deal with everyday heartaches of adolescence.

After a few months of smoking pot, Martha tried hallucinogens, LSD and mescaline. One night, her dealers—four young men—were breaking down speed and shooting up. She had her first hit of Preludin. The 300 milligrams were a dangerous dose, but it hit her with a rush that hooked her "for life." She remembers the experience as if it were yesterday:

This is my life and my love, and I’ll do this drug until the day I die. It was like a total body, mind and soul orgasm; an all-encompassing, instantaneous rush of overwhelming, intense pleasure and stimulation—on just a moment’s notice. Nothing could compare. Not the pills, the pot, the booze, sex, or any other experience I’d ever had. I had found what I had been searching for. I was born to shoot speed.

That experience was truly the beginning of the end for me, only the end did not come for another 13 years.

At 17, Martha was experiencing blackouts. She was sick from hepatitis and ran away from home, but was still able to do well in high school. Finally, her parents had her arrested as a runaway.

Locked up, she went through withdrawal. After 10 days, she was able to talk herself out, and returned to her dealer with whom she was living. Immediately she dropped an amazing amount of pills. Another 10-day hospitalization only altered her choice of drugs. Despite the drugs and having dropped out of school twice in her senior year, Martha graduated seventh in her class!

Martha was in college one month when she dropped out and was re-hospitalized. Back in school and still taking drugs, she was accepted for medical school at the University of Arkansas. She was married to a medical student who was also a drug addict. Soon they were divorced. Three months later, Martha married her pharmacology professor. Her research into drugs brought her an award from a major pharmaceutical company.

And all the time I stayed so loaded it was unreal...I had proven I could do it. I had graduated from medical school with honors—and drugs. My residency involved teaching substance-abuse classes for medical students and consulting on drug cases in three different hospitals.

But time was running out on me. The year 1979, the last year before I found my way into recovery, was the worst one of my life...Finally, the time came when I could no longer get high. The only thing that ever worked for me in my life, the only thing I could trust and turn to stopped working for me.

I was eating speed right and left and...taking codeine...Tylox...I was using 12 different drugs daily; even with all my connections, I could no longer get enough. And then there was cocaine. I have used, abused and been addicted to all of the above, but cocaine is the king and the queen. There is nothing to compare to the compulsive, driven, irrational need for this drug if one is addicted.

At the end, I was injecting a gram of unadulterated cocaine in my veins in a single hit. But nothing worked any more. And I knew I was dying.

About this time, Martha’s behavior attracted the attention of the Arkansas impaired-physicians committee. Two doctors confronted her and directed her to Dr. Douglas Talbot’s treatment center in Georgia.

She denied everything, but she became so desperate that she checked into Atlanta’s Ridgeview Institute. There, she went through terrible psychotic withdrawal. Adds Martha, "I had the longest detoxification of anyone in the history of Ridgeview...for a while I was catatonic, withdrawn, paranoid. I just sat and hallucinated."

Her second divorce was long and painful, and the relationship was still stormy. Not able to accept the love she felt from the staff, she needed someone she could trust. That someone was Dr. Doug Talbot, himself a former addict.

After six months, Martha was still miserable. One day she stumbled down to the bank of a nearby river, knelt down and began to cry:

I was facing another six months of treatment, and I knew I couldn’t take it any longer. I found myself praying: ‘God, please help me; I can’t do it alone.’

In retrospect I think that, by admitting I was powerless, I really took that critical first step toward recovery. I came to believe that I could make it. I could recover with God’s help.

When I got up, I felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. Ironically, as I walked off the river bank, I met two young men smoking pot. They asked me if I wanted a joint, and I said no. I believe to this day that I could not have done that one minute sooner. The compulsion to use drugs—a compulsion I lived with for 17 years—was gone. It has never come back.

That was September 11, 1981. Dr. Martha Morrison has been sober for five years. She is married to the son of Dr. Talbot, and is currently the director of Ridgeview’s adolescent chemical dependence program.

About her, G. Douglas Talbot says:

Martha was as far into addiction as anyone can go—and still live...What Martha’s case shows is that there is always hope of recovery if you can get the abuser of drugs or alcohol into treatment. Her treatment was long, and the suffering profound, but her recovery has restored to the medical practice and to the community a talented, sensitive, beautiful human being whose special skills and experience are now being directed toward the huge and growing problem of adolescent addiction.’