Well said. I went through similar situations myself. Completely threw away about 5 years of my life to oxy pills. It literally terrifies me to think back to those years. Just reading your post got my stomach turning bad.

I finally got clean by going to rehab and then to NA meetings, both which I'm forever grateful for. They saved my life. But after a few years of staying clean and going to meetings, I started outgrowing it. I started realizing that there wasn't just 1 road to recovery. What works for Bill might not work for Joe. I was also getting bothered by the fact that I was surrounding my daily life by the memory of my ugly past. It didn't sit right with me. It also didn't sit right with me being told that if I smoked weed or drank a beer, that my life would go right back to the awful way it was. I know for a fact that this is true for a lot of people in recovery, but in my heart I knew it wasn't true for me. I started trusting my intuitions, and instead of continuing to live in the past, I chose to look to the future. I decided to start smoking and almost instantly my life began go improve. I moved out of my parents house, got a promotion at work, started going to the gym, eating healthy etc. Fast forward a few years and my life is greater than its ever been. I've never been so happy. My life right now is the life you daydream about when you're in the throngs of addiction. The one you would give anything in the world to have, but feel like it's utterly hopeless, because it'll never be possible to get out of the grave you've dug for yourself.

More than anything, I credit weed for where my life is today. It has helped me see things more clearly and to think things all the way through. Something about it makes me strive to be better in all areas of my life, regardless of how diffucult things may get. Narcotics Anonymous got me clean, but weed has kept me clean, and has only improved everything else from there on. That's the road I taken to recovery.