Yeah, dude. The earmark of every addict/future addict is they think that they can be weekend warriors and keep it together. It's entirely possible that they quit while they're ahead, but they would have to accept first that they need to quit now or very very soon if they want to make sure they don't go down that path. But when you're in it, you think "eh, no I'm fine. I'll just keep going. I'll wait until it starts to get bad, then I'll pull back." but by that time you may or may not even be aware of it or you're in deep enough that pulling back is REAALLY hard.

I came right to the cusp. I blew through a couple grand in a few weeks on roxies without even realizing what I was doing (and I'm not the junky type. I can't prove that to Reddit, but only my dealers and my best friend even knew what I was doing. I'm in a good grad school on scholarship).

It only occurred to me that I have gone too far without realizing it when I started thinking it was fine to FB message former user friends to find a new source when mine went dry. I'm still so embarrassed but I can't message them now and be like "Oh, uh... Sorry abt that." Eventually, I found an internet hookup. I'm a god damn grad student on scholarship and I meet up with a complete stranger from the internet by myself in the hood - IN THE HOOD - to buy roxies and a few opanas. Of course they jipped me. But I came home like "Whoa... you've got a problem. You are lucky that wasn't a sting and your life isn't ruined. You'd have lost literally everything you've built over the years. At best, you're lucky you didn't get robbed, just jipped. Who the fuck are you?"

At no point before that did I realize that I was slipping. It just seemed casual until that point. I kept it under wraps for at least a year, just using "as needed," which slowly became more frequent. It's like the frog in hot water - he'll jump out if you throw him in, but if you just slowly turn it up he won't even notice before he's dead.