People have to literally hit rock bottom before they wake up...that is jail/prison for some, rehab for others...
Thank you, that is it in a nutshell.
For me, rock bottom was a combination of things...like standing on the corner trying to sell a broken VCR for five bucks, while wearing clothes that hadn't seen a washing machine in three months, then offering to allow my place to be used as a spot for crack dealers to cook up large quantities of coke to make crack in exchange for getting "a piece broken off" so to speak, then having a marble table top broken over my head because a karate instructor turned crackhead decided it was okay for him to slap his girlfriend around in my apartment, and me getting arrested as a result while he walked out of my apartment with some of my valuables unmolested by the police.
The fight occurred just outside my door, hence I wasn't exercising my right to self defense as far as the cops were concerned.
They didn't believe my story because why would a karate instructor feel it necessary to hit someone with a chunk of marble if they were a martial artist. I was arrested for assault but it got bargained down to resisting arrest/disorderly conduct. Yes, I learned once again not to argue with the police if you're being arrested.
Simply put, Mister Martial Arts Instructor wasn't so deep into it yet that he looked and acted like a crackhead, whereas I looked and acted every bit the part, and I probably "smelled" like one, too.
And no, his girlfriend wasn't going to offer any exonerating or mitigating information, why would she? She didn't get arrested either of course, only me.
Thirty days in county jail, out in 14 on good behavior. For the first time in my addict years, the first thing I wanted was a decent toothbrush, not a chance to call my dealer. I wandered across the street to a small office building where there was an AA meeting I'd heard about before, and pretended to be an alcoholic instead of a crackhead, it's just a different flavor of poison anyway as far as I'm concerned.
I finally kicked about twenty-five years ago. I fell off the wagon a couple of times at first but the treatment "took" and stayed with me at last.
It was a really wonderful bunch of people at that AA group, and when a guy who became my sponsor finally learned that I was a crackhead, he told me to stay at AA, as his experience with Cocaine Anonymous was that "they don't know what they're doing, we do."
I took his word for it, plus I didn't have to sit through a lot of cocaine user "fish stories and urban legends", with the unintended consequence that would boil down to making me WANT MORE coke. Because I had to "filter" the alcohol stories, it forced me to confront the mechanism and my own personality.
There were drunks who were also addicts, to be sure, but they stuck to the AA narrative.
Yes, I know a lot of people don't believe in AA but it worked for me.
And I was never even a drunk, just a coke fiend.