A Cost-Free Price

    “The first time I did it, we were going fishing and we smoked a bowl (of weed) first and I was feelin’ alright and we got there and we started fishing and my buddy was like, ‘Here, take half of this Xanax,’” said Taylor Price, a sophomore majoring in sports management at the University of West Florida, as he recalled the first time he used pills to get high. “So I took it and, you know, I was already high from weed, and I remember just lying there on the dock, just flat. Just like, staring up at the sky.”

(Google images: xanax & weed)

     Price wasn’t raised in a bad part of town. His parents were not alcoholics or drug addicts and they made every effort to stay involved in his life and to let him know that they loved and supported him. Nothing about Price’s childhood adds up to the fact that he began his journey through addiction to painkillers in just seventh grade.

     “It was just my friends hanging around, man; we had older friends influencing us,” Price said. “One day we just got together and were like, ‘Dude, let’s try this.’ And we did. From there it just kept going and going. The kids older than us were in 9th or 10th grade at that time, they both ended up eventually dropping out. We were in middle school. The kids that I decided to do it all with were all in 6th grade and I was in 7th grade.”

     If you’re thinking to yourself that middle school seems like such a ridiculously young age to get started with using painkillers, you aren’t alone.

(Scene from the 1995 film, "KIDS")

     “It’s been so long ago that when I hear stories about kids doing that stuff now, it shocks me, even though that was me,” said Price. “It’s like, ‘What the heck was I thinking?’”

     Price and his friends’ transition from milder drugs like marijuana to har

der drugs like Oxycontin came somewhat naturally, considering that they didn’t really have to put forth any effort to obtain the pills. One of his friend’s parents were prescribed to the meds, and whether or not they actually needed the refills, they kept getting them. And the kids kept getting into them.

     “The reason I switched to Oxycontin was probably something to do with [my friend’s] parents because they’re the ones that gave it to us, as crazy as that sounds,” said Price. “So I guess when they moved onto bigger and more potent things, so did we.”

(Google images: Oxycontin)

     Many advocates of today’s war on drugs attribute marijuana use as a large reason for so many young people’s introduction to the harder and more addictive drugs. Price doesn’t feel that this was necessarily the way it worked in his case. While he did technically smoke marijuana before he started taking pills, it was only a matter of a couple uses before he was onto the more serious stuff. He feels that marijuana was less of a ‘gateway drug,’ and more like a ‘partner drug.’

     Something else that stood out about Price’s involvement in the painkiller scene was that of his preferred genre of music. Oftentimes music gets associated with certain types of lifestyle. For example, rock music gets thrown in with thoughts of anger and acts of rebellion, reggae makes people think of being happy on a beach and possibly smoking marijuana, and rap music is typically associated with big cars, women, money and drugs.

     While Price was living out his drug-induced years of middle school and high school, he was listening to country music. What’s more, is now that he is clean, he has stopped listening to country and has turned to rap music.

     “I think [country music] just reminds me of that time of struggle in my life,” Price said.

     Many drug addicts will take to either stealing or drug dealing to make ends meet and to ensure that they always have enough for one more fix. While Price did sell marijuana to make a little bit of money on the side, he never really had to actually pay for his pills. He more or less bartered for them. He would trade weed for pills. And while he and his friends did rob people from time to time, he explains that it was more for the rush of it, than to get money for drugs.

     Not everybody was so lucky as to get out of the lifestyle of heavy drug use and theft before it became a serious problem, though.

(a cartoon thief found on Google images)

     “One of the older kids, Joey, ended up robbing people for pills,” Price said. “He ended up robbing his own family members. He eventually got caught by the cops when he broke into his uncle’s house and his uncle hit him in the head with a bat. In his most recent mug shot, from whe

n that happened, he just has a straight line of stitches straight down the middle of his head.”

     What ended up pulling Price out of his Oxycontin-laced rut, was a young man by the name of Matt Galecki, who ended up being one of his best friends. Matt kept inviting him to church, and eventually convinced him to attend a fall retreat. Price says that nothing really clicked until shortly after returning home.

     “I guess it was the night after we got back, I was just in my room going about my business and I just broke down crying,” Price said. “I didn’t know why, so I called Matt and was just like, ‘Dude, what the heck is going on right now?’ and I’m sure I used some expletives. He was like, ‘That’s God man. It’s time to turn your life around.’ So I took his word for it and started reading my Bible more and from that night on, I didn’t touch any of that stuff.”

 (Above: Taylor Price, absent of drugs & full of love in Oct '11)

      There was no use of drugs to help him come off the drugs. There was no admission to help facilities.

     “I just quit,” said Price. “That night when I broke down, the next day I gave all my stuff away and never went back to it. I had about a week and a half of nausea and that’s it. Compared to other stories I’ve heard, that’s easy stuff.”

     Looking back on his life and where he is now, Price has no intentions of going back to his old ways. He has found himself a new group of friends and is enjoying sharing his story with others to help encourage them to get clean and stay clean of drugs.

     “I would love to coach a team,” Price said. “There’s not much money in it, but I would love to coach a high school team because that’s when kids are going through a lot and they’re really malleable as to the way their lives end up from there. That’s when my life got turned around, so I think if I could go back and share my love of basketball with kids and not only be a coach, but be a mentor to them, it would just be awesome.”

     One person who has benefited from the sharing of Price’s story, is Patrick Goen. Price and Goen met at UWF while playing basketball after the Thursday night BCM (Baptist Collegiate Ministries) meeting was over.

     “I was just sitting down because I was still detoxing at this point,” Goen said.  “I was just feeling like crap, and [Taylor] just started talking to me and shared that he was a recovering addict too. Me and him clicked because we both love basketball so much.”

     Goen has since sought out further help to get off drugs and while Price is not his official accountability partner, he does attribute much of his strength to him.

     “It’s cool to see somebody else who’s gone through addiction that acts like Taylor. Just to know that he went through that and he’s this great guy now, that’s pretty cool to look at that.”

     If either you or someone close to you is struggling with addiction, To Write Love On Her Arms, is an excellent place to start the journey towards getting your life back.