Greg: What is going on, everyone? It is Matt and Greg here from Project Unbroken. Make sure you subscribe below, share this video if you can. I’m trying to get the word out about Project Unbroken. Today we’re going to be kind of rewinding time. We’re going to be going back to our days of a heroin addict. We’re going to take you through what a day looked like for us being a heroin addict. We want to do this because we want you to know how a heroin addict lives, and then also if you’re someone who maybe is worried about someone, maybe some of our actions throughout the day will tip you off or kind of raise a flag.
Matt, maybe take them back to when you were a heroin addict. What would your day look like? Let’s go from the time you woke up.
Matt: Using right off the bat. We were waking up … or I was waking up pretty early. I guess we both were. For a majority of our addiction, Greg and I worked together. I would get up in the morning, use, go to work, kind of get my day started. It’s probably, I don’t know … Maybe every three to four hours using again. That’s at least. That would bring to me about our coffee break.
After that, it’s kind of just smoke a cigarettes, go on back to work, using again. Just kind of day-to-day until we were finished with work. Then, it was just going out to find more bags, or trying to find more money to go find more bags. A majority of the nights were spent either waiting for our hookup to buy off of, because he was always two hours late. Then, just kind of sitting around doing heroin, really. We would go out sometimes. We were fairly social, more in the beginning stages of our addiction. Then I would pretty much just use a couple more times before bed. Again, every couple of hours.
Then, the cycle would continue. … I don’t know. I mean it’s a little bit different on the weekends, obviously. That was day-to-day, that’s pretty much it.
Greg: Yeah, so I’ll take you kind of through what I remember, then we’ll talk about the life of a heroin addict kind of. So again, I’d wake up like Matt did. The first thing I would do pretty much is open up a bag. I would use and I would head to work. I think I was definitely more … a heavier user than Matt. I probably used about twice as much as he did. I would use more often, probably every couple of hours or so. I’d get to work, maybe hang for an hour, go in the bathroom, line up the bag in the bathroom at work, sniff it, go back out and start working. Go smoke a cigarette.
Then, I start thinking, ‘Okay, how many bags do I have? How much do I have left? How much money do I have? Can I get ahold of our connect? Call him, make sure ‘Are you going to be around at this time? Yes, no. Okay, I can meet you there.’ I would leave in the middle of work, go pick up bags, driving around every day with heroin on me that I would go to jail for.
Matt: I’d cover for him.
Greg: Yeah, come back to work, sniff more, get Matt whatever he had, and then I’d sniff more, go home, sniff more. Basically, I would be sniffing bags and then just kind of going through the motions. That was pretty much my life. I think that is what it’s like for many heroin addicts is they’re just kind of going through the motions. Really, it’s all about, ‘Okay, when am I sniffing my next bag? How am I getting my next bag? How much do I have left?’ Then, making sure you have some for tomorrow and a plan in place.
Our life was basically going in bathrooms, sniffing bags, then going through motions. Going in the bathroom, sniffing bags, going through the motion. Bullshitting people.
Mom: ‘Is something wrong with you?’
‘Nah, I’m good.’ Maybe at times you can’t get them.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Yeah, I’m just not feeling good today. I don’t know, just feeling a little off, a little tired.’ Always playing it off. When you don’t have it, you got to play it off and lie to people. God, man. It is a constant, constant struggle.
Matt: It’s not even fun to talk about.
Greg: It is constant struggle, man. The life of a heroin addict, the daily life of a heroin addict sucks. It’s all about using, when you’re going to use next, can you get it, and then tricking people into either getting things to you or when you’re feeling sick, tell them that you’re okay and lying about it. God…
Matt: It’s a never … It’s like the worst cycle. You can’t … It’s really difficult to get out of. It’s because you’re constantly focused on heroin. Like Greg said, you’re either doing it or thinking about how you can do it, or buying it, or thinking about how you can buy it. Everything else takes a fucking backseat. Greg and I, we actually opened up our first business right in the beginning stages of our addiction. I remember, a kid we were friends with who was using, he was a little bit further into his addiction.
He said, he was like, “Man, I’m really impressed that you guys are holding this together because, you know, everything I do seems to like slip through my fingers.” I didn’t know what he was talking about at the time; maybe six months later we shut that business down.
Greg: Shut it down is one way to put it.
Matt: Yeah, or it fell the fuck apart.
Greg: Yeah.
Matt: Then I knew what he was saying. Nothing can be successful in your life: relationships, businesses, nothing because 100% of your focus is going towards your addiction. That’s it. That’s where everything goes. It’s all your spare time. It’s all your thoughts. Everything you do is focused around addiction.
Whenever you try to keep up with something else, it’s not going to be as important and it will fall apart. It’s just it’s literally a matter of time. It’s actually … It’s crazy when you … I could actually see the stuff start to crumble, but there was no way to fix it because you had to go do something to get money, or you had to go meet up with a connect, or you had to do whatever. There’s no time for anything else. There’s no time to kind of fix the damage that you’ve already done.
Greg: It’s crazy. Yeah, so daily life of a heroin addict is basically … your life revolves around heroin. People make that phrase when you’re an addict, your life revolves around it; but hopefully us was describing that kind of paints a clear picture of what is … Literally, it’s when am I doing it next? How am I getting it? When I don’t have it, how am I going to lie about how I feel? How am I going to get it so I can feel better? It completely is your life. We didn’t really have a life outside of it. That’s all we did.
Matt: It’s not … fun. We were both in a job that we did not enjoy. We were both in a place in our lives that was not positive at all. It was just the only thing that was keeping us afloat really that we thought was the heroin. That was the only thing that kept us from being completely depressed, I think. It’s because we just weren’t … being successful in the areas of our lives that we needed to be successful in. We were just kind of coping with that with heroin. You just get stuck in like the same terrible cycle.
Greg: Yeah.
Matt: Really difficult to get out of. I think Matt and I, we’re both very highly motivated people. One thing I noticed is the heroin just completely shuts down everything. Things like … All your feelings, and all your ambitions, it just shuts them down. Now, we both have successful businesses. We’re successful in health. We’re trying to start new businesses. We both … have families. We’re fathers. We’re very ambitious. When I was on heroin, it was like…
Greg: Zombie.
Matt: I was … didn’t like my job and I didn’t even think about how am I going to get out of this job? It was about how am I going to get heroin? A day in the life of a heroin addict, everything else is shut off. The ambitions are gone. You don’t care as much about your relationships. You don’t care about your future. It’s all about right now, how am I going to get this heroin? That’s a day in the life of a heroin addict.
Greg: The longer it goes on like that, the worst it gets. Greg and I were still fairly functioning at a somewhat high level when we started to get clean. The longer you live that life, the worse it gets because everything keeps falling apart like that.
Matt: Yes, very good point. Yeah, so that is the day in the life of a heroin addict. If you want us to go more into depth into anything like that, let us know. Basically just our life revolved around heroin. That’s what a day in the life of a heroin addict is like. So subscribe below, comment, let us know what you think. If you have anything to add if you’re a heroin addict or a former heroin addict, what’s your experience like? Is it any different? Let us know and we’ll see you all in the next video.
Greg: See you guys.
