A pile of white oblong pills with scored lines and imprinted numbers.

Tim’s Story: Breaking the cycle of opioid addiction


By Rena McCain | 

Happy Weedsday, everyone! I hope everyone is doing well!

So…who knows how bad the opioid crisis is here in the United States? Throughout the course of my life I’ve known of many people who struggle with drug addiction whether it’s been heroin, pharmaceutical painkillers, cocaine or some other drug. The struggle is very real and in my experience, most do not strive to become drug or pill addicts. However, as badly as a person wants to get clean from it, it is an uphill battle.

This week I would like to introduce a three-part testimony from a good friend of mine, Tim LaDow of Hemp Helps. His story goes like this:

July 3, 2009

I woke up to the same old alarm from my Blackberry in my little apartment like clockwork, but today was different! After earning an internship in high school training to be a full line automotive technician, I worked through high school as an intern and was given the opportunity to become a full-time employee when I graduated. I naturally took the position because the people there were well-trained professionals that were always there to help me if I needed it.

Most of all, I loved waking up and being excited to go to work, especially because I had just sold my Buel 250cc baby bike and upgraded the night before to a 1997 Honda CBR 900RR. I owned it for 10 hours.

My morning ritual was simple: start coffee, complete hygiene ritual, start my motorcycle (warm it up), come back in to fill my thermos and then off to work.

July 12, 2009

My eyes opened. The thing I remember the most, once my eyes stopped spinning and the blurriness cleared up, was the white tile ceiling like you would see in a medical office. It only took me about a minute to figure out where I was and as I was trying to put together the how I got there, a face slowly began to slide into view from my right. It was my dad.
Yup, I knew exactly where I was; apparently, I had been there for a little over a week, medically sedated in the ICU.

They took me off the breathing machines and began pulling all the tubes from my sides that drained the fluid from both of my punctured lungs as well as the tubes down my throat and nose that fed me and let me breathe. Then they moved me to a general room to start healing and monitor me for the next three weeks.

According to what I was told, while I was on my way to work, the person driving a truck didn’t see me coming and made a left-hand turn in front of me. I T-boned the side of his truck, slamming onto the hood. I ended up with a pulverized chin that required maxillofacial reconstruction, an armada of titanium, a king’s portion of pain and a pallet of pain medication.
From 2009 to about 2011, I was on a rapidly increasing dose of Oxycodone because every time I went to the doctor I was still in pain, so he would just up the strength. This was before people started to catch on that Big Pharma is still selling us legal heroin, but honestly, I was young and in too much pain to care. After two years of visits (keeping in mind he upped the dose every time) this learned scholar decided, “OK, let’s take an x-ray.†The hardware that was put into my wrist was pinching my nerves and catching on the tendons, causing all of the pain, and the level of painkillers he had me on at that point was enough to kill a junkie.

Please stay tuned for next publication for parts 2 and 3.

Rena McCain is a co-founder of the Cannabis Open Carry Walks. Find her on Facebook at Rena McCain, or via Twitter @sassikatt24 and Instagram at ganja_grrl420.

Related Posts

About author

Related Posts

Comments are closed.

Do not miss