Good Morning Crackheads

The Insanity of Crack Cocaine

2011-04-09T08:57:00.000-04:00

The insanity of smoking crack and doing nothing else but smoking crack every awake moment of everyday is maddening. I had a relentless desire to smoke crack at any and all expense

Crack Cocaine IS the Devil's Candy

2011-02-08T10:38:00.002-05:00

What else could it be?
It must be evil!

The Crack Stops here!

www.devilscandy.com

The Crack Conqueror!
a.k.a. Todd

devilscandy

2010-11-04T23:37:00.001-04:00

come to my website for help stopping crack cocaine
www.devilscandy.com

Ya Know When Ya Know

2009-06-08T18:34:00.000-04:00

Day 1

2009-03-15T22:46:00.008-04:00

DAY
1

This day is the beginning of changing your current life. This is just the beginning so relax; everything will work out according to God’s perfect plan.

Close your eyes and gently visualize the opposite of the madness that got you to Day 1 of this journey. Find the relax mode inside yourself. Breathe deep and slow. On one time of breathing like this, hold the air in for 10 seconds counting slowly. Then force yourself to let it out VERY slow. Feel how relaxing that is? This feeling will be very important throughout this journey. Learn this technique and remember this feeling. Repeat this as often as necessary to keep as relaxed as possible under the circumstances cause from smoking crack cocaine.

~ 1 Corinthians 3:1,2 ~
Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready.

Quip of the day: Dear God: Please help me become the person my dog thinks I am

Good Morning Crackheads!

2008-10-28T07:34:00.005-04:00

Wow!
AND MAKE YA SPELL WRONG! :)
What crack does to an individual is so pathetic.
Can you believe someone who has no more than 4 months clean can palgarize content from my website program and actually think they wrote it?! Unbelieveable. Well not really with crack cocaine. I watched a person go from helping to attacking and stealing. BUT hey w/crack what should I have expected. The evil and deception from this person is so sad to watch. But it matters not as long as you have us to attack crack and we will let "those who steal" pay the price from what comes to thieves, including crackhead thieves which is real easy to understand.
Todd

Group-Forum-Ministry-Idiots

2008-06-17T07:31:00.002-04:00

From Forum:
This ministry is a spiritually supported detoxification format for the process of de-contaminating your body, soul and spirit from the possession of crackcocaine.

Feeling possessed by the crack-bite is the loneliest, darkest, sickest, most ugly gnawing and truly captivating all consuming demonic place to be.

Nothing gets in the way of crack cocaine once it has possession. Standard treatment does not address the extreme possession that does occur during crack cocaine use. From experiences and truths, we need to be careful if we treat crack cocaine just like any other drug. Crack cocaine does take you over and possess your body, soul and spirit. Crack cocaine goes as far as completely possessing and then destroying your body, soul and spirit.

AND we are here to deal with all this stuff...we will do it consistently and with conviction on how it should be done.

I have gotten rid of those who threat to "shut me down" and have gotten rid of 3 "undercover" crackheads lurking around waiting to cause trouble.

I am The Crack Conqueror...I cannot be denied the priviledge of destroying crack cocaine forever!

Watch out crack...we are coming for you!

The Crack Conqueror!

From Group:
I have gotten rid of those who not only want to but theatened to "shut me down"! I also found 3 "undercover" crackheads lurking and waiting to cause trouble. I have banned them and am denying them access to devilscandy.com website at all. They cannot even look at it as of yesterday.

I am sure they will attempt to "get back" in or at me....but I care not. When it comes to our websites and conquering crack...we are not to be messed with. In the last few weeks the enemy has really come at this ministry to attempt to "shut us down" or to keep me hopping away from the mission.

Once again a failed attempt. We are stronger than yesterday. I have really pissed the enemy off...again I care not.

We have God's permission and blessing on this mission that we did not want or choose...but God has a way of doing what HE wants and not us...and from that we have been blessed beyond my wildest crackhead vision.

Do not get me wrong...I am glad we are doing this...it is very horrible and wonderful within seconds of each other sometimes.

We have been given this ministry mission...and we have embraced it right from the beginning. Up until right now 7am 6/17/08 I was not sure of why all the attacks and why I kept going each time a set back came.

This morning I know that answer.
I am the voice against crack and for God.

Could not ask for much better...even though I did not ask.
How stupid of me was that! :)

Crackheads attack!

Todd

Be sure to check out today's audio blog

From the Forum to You

2008-06-15T23:18:00.000-04:00

Good Morning Crackheads,
Because of all this "stuff" lately, I am exhausted...but a good exhausted. Nothing is like the crack-exhaustion.
I am going to do MY Freedom Forum posting from my blog. To SIMPLIFY things from the frantic mommie & crackhead son always changing episodes, it iwll be 2 for the price of 1. Today that is a good deal. A good deal? I thought this was a treatment center...."We are the Home Depot of treatment" :)
This post will be my first on my way to serious blogging against crack.
So Happy Crack Attacking!
We will see you here soon and often...
The Crack Conqueror DVC, CCR, 75913

Stupidity

2008-05-30T06:43:00.001-04:00

Coming here to post an addiction website! How stupid is that. Oh yeah crack is just another addiction, right? Go ahead and go to meetings and call your sponsor and have that stop the demonic pull to smoke crack. Afterall that works, right? Why do stupid people keep trying to change what works. I know! Without the theory of addiction instilling the fear that "their way" is the way to stop crack! Ask a true blue professional crackhead (oops I mean crack-addicted person) what stops crack for them! I know you will NEVER hear them say, I just make that call or walk to a meeting. Yeah that'll really work to stop the enemy! The enemy? Crack is not the enemy. It is an addiction only....
Listen stupid people...in case you did not know I see stupid people....I have been given the gift of "seeing stupidity"...and the stupidity I see surrounding crack, is more than amazing. CRACK COCAINE IS THE DEVILSCANDY!
Oh it's not? Well then what is it really? I would like someone who has never smoked crack to answer that. You will find your answer on page 13, section 75 and the 913th word on the page. BUT before you go there...read Proverbs 12:1.
Oh there you go again Todd, preaching God again.
Well without God life sucks. Then when you add crack...life really sucks. But hey it must be really complicated to stop smoking crack. We have to remember all the people who need to get paid to stop crack...judges sentencing crackheads to 12 steps, the insurance backed "programs", the "addiction specialists" and all the rest of the network that believes all crackheads have bi-polar and have had some deep family issue along withn some brian mal-function that leads to crack.
Can't we crackheads all just get along. All crackheads want the "usual" programs to keep going because that will insure crackheads getting and continuing to get and smoke crack...and we really understand that they will have this "addiction" the rest of their lives.
Gloom and doom.
Can't stop.
My sponsor wasn't home.
Boo hoo stopping crack can't be that simple.
It must stay impossible...unless.............................
Todd

Answer to 2 Questions

2008-05-20T06:55:00.004-04:00

1st: I do not believe crack depletes brain cells. I believe it adds "stupid brain cells". I smoked crack everyday for 10 years and I still have most of my brain cells although some would disagree. :) I do notice some "physical" stuff from crack It affected my sight and hearing, but as far as "smart", I am still smart even after 10 years of crack. If such anger is present, I do not believe they are free...maybe stopped but such anger with freedom is a plan to smoke crack. Go listen to my show about "crack-anger". Crackheads with money go to jail, prison or die! Crackheads who can't get crack, pout, shout, argue, fight and use anger as a reason to go out again. The time associated with this anger has nothing to do with anything. Anger is being used as a means to be unhappy and that will lead to smoking crack because "things are so tough", QUOTE:"You just don't understand"!, Yeah I understand...you can't smoke crack! Boo-hoo. So if I can't smoke crack, I will make everyone else miserable. I do not believe they are "saved". I am very leery of the "phrase" used to say someone has turned their lives to God, instead we are "saved" yet our lives are still in a "pile of crap"? and this is what God had in mind? by saving us? I think not. So if a person is "saved" and yet act like an ass, is that being saved? and then what do you do?
Tell him to do our program and see if he is for real or not. I suspect he will get MORE angry when you try this and then you will see the truth.

2nd: I do nt belive crack causes "bi-polar". I believe the medical field does not know what to do with crackheads and are using the "symptoms" of a crackhead to say they have "bi-polar". In our ministry we have seen over the last 9 years about 75% of crackheads are diagnosed with "bi-polar". Rather than looking at the inside "spirituallity", it is immediately "bi-polar". I was told I have severe "bi-polar". Well what do you think? I have "bi-polar" because I smoked crack? No Todd you have "bi-polar" because all the things caused by crack are showing up as "bi-polar"! Hmmm?! If that is true then I have found the "CURE" for "bi-polar" and that is the DVC Ministry methods for crack cocaine and the bi-product is a cure for bi-polar. How cool is that! :)

I hope I have answered both questions to you satisfaction,
Todd

Here We Go Again

2008-05-14T06:22:00.002-04:00

Well now that our site is looking like the most powerful website in the world to attack crack cocaine. Of course those that are saying "attack crack"? what is that?
We know how to destroy crack forever. It will take a lot more than just meetings and a sponsor. Crack cocaine IS the devils candy. Do you think the enemy will just let us take the evil candy away that ruin lives and has a sweetness of deception so deep we cannot really see what crack is.
Oh well...crack is crack...sad but true!
Todd

WOW! How cool is this!

2008-01-13T22:34:00.000-05:00

Just like this Festival jam...when we persevere in FAITH...great things happen!

Congratulation Son. I knew you could do it. I am amazed at your growth over the last
75 days, and more amazed at my own. You have been an inspiration for many and this old man is among the many. I feel confident that the next 75 days will bring more growth and
inspiration. I am actually on your day one now, so let us continue in our growth together.

Thanks MiKe.

I love You

Dad

Thanks dad and I love you very much. I am very thankful that you have been a prt of this with me even though we are 2,000 miles apart.

I am really excited that you want to do the 2nd round with me. Im going to buy you one of the 75 Day DIYGTCF Books and send it to you, that way you can read it and the posts I make will make a little more sense as to whay I am focusing on certain things petaining to that day.

I know its hard for you but if you can try and listen to the daily radio shows to, they shed a lot on this whole thing and i know you would enjoy them.

I love you and am blessed to have you for my dad!!

7:15.....+.......75--------+--------13

Grace & Consequences

2008-01-04T11:35:00.000-05:00

Grace & Consequences...
The sooned we take FULL responsibility for our consequences from OUR smoking crack cocaine, the sooner we can really start the true journey to freedom.

It was so bad it is embarrassing to even tell myself. The memories now are the kinds that make you put your head in your hands and say in breathy sighs, “Oh my God”.

It was so bad I should have died. The physical abuse to myself was horrendous. The price I pay later in life I truly hope has some grace bestowed upon it.

It was so bad I ruined every relationship I ever had. I ruined my relationship with life. I ceased to exist. I was written off many times. Never to correct himself. A crack-head lifer earning a degree in crackology to become a crackologist.

It was so bad living in my car was Ok. That way no rent was due.

It was so bad...

Most of the Time

2008-01-01T10:03:00.001-05:00

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Most of the Time we do not take crack cocaine seriously. We make it to be just another drug. Crack LOVES this advantage. Crack LOVES to stay labeled as "just a drug". That way it can surround you and attack before you know what hit you. SO...because we now know this, why would we take that chance? I would suggest you take a chance on this ministry...the DVC Ministry...and quit thinking you know how to stop crack cocaine...if you did...you would not be reading this right now!
Todd

Todd

2007-12-28T15:52:00.000-05:00

I remember driving to meet Todd. I remember it because I was rehearsing for the entire evening. How I would to talk and walk. How I would control my words and stay cool, not break a sweat. Most of all, how I would appear exciting but not excited.
We met at a local downtown Grand Rapids bar. As I walked through the door I tried not to hyperventilate, I spotted Todd right away. The first thing came to my mind was oh my gosh!...he is so tiny. How in the world am I going to get out of this? I shook his hand (tightly so that he knew I wouldn't put up with any crap). Then he asked me what I wanted to drink. I told him “Bud Lite”. He predicted I would change my taste for it now that I met him. As he stood at the bar paying for our drinks, I did notice his nicely shaped butt … (sorry could not help myself had to put that in).

The Last Page

2007-12-21T06:48:00.000-05:00

Is there one simple cure or program? At the moment no. Maybe there never will be. Crackheads are complicated substance abusers. We are people, mostly women with some primitive instincts, which can force us into a heart-mode separating artistically every single aspect of life not related to a problem we insist on solving with the shear, will of just our heart. My daughter said I helped. So- it was GOD, he says! He is not denying all the other things but…Todd said he was so terrified of the feeling, the overwhelming lure of that future moment he was sure no matter how many sponsors or books or meetings or memorizing of triggers or help of any kind-he could not resist.

It was a lot of things, least of all the right time. Time to collect-time to understand-time to hurt too much-but what I wanted above all………

Todd's miracle was a package deal. He did try to help himself and we learned how to help him; many people including a society of people, the counselors bravely walking through wilderness with no road map for crackheads. Pat at Bail Bonds Dept., whose last name I never knew, came into our lives so briefly yet was part of this miracle. I would not want to take one card form the house of cards for fear it would all tumble down. It is hard for me to separate any one part of all the things that helped Todd, and say this is the one that really did it. He traveled a long road with many people to even get miracle status. Perhaps he needed to. But for Todd, after collecting all he had collected on his journey, and taking this journey with all the people he did, his terror of the desire was the greatest obstacle and only GOD could remove that. And HE did.

Pissy People

2007-12-17T07:19:00.000-05:00

Sometimes crack causes pissyness.

Years had passed since the phone call to me in Nashville and his crack crap was suddenly thrown at me, before the crack-crap had spread out to include more than him and us.

I suppose he got tired. He had tried keeping a fabulous job and life together with crack. He had tried a cry for help to us, and we could not find the help from experts he needed. He had tried giving up, giving into it, living in squalor at the bottom of life, with crack, and could not do it. He had tried keeping a half of a life together with crack, and some petty employee crime. What was left?

It turned out that Todd was right. He did not need the money I was keeping from him to do crack. The detectives and police and business owners started to show up at my door, and call on my telephone about six months into his retail sales job. Todd had written several bad checks over the last year. Most were under $100. It was difficult to know if this was during an off time, on time, good time, and bad time or in between time because his life was so cluttered with all of the crack-crap.

By then he was into just shrugging, frantically wondering if he was going to jail. He would smile in and at all the right times and right places. There was just a hopeless exhaustion and had reached a point in his life where he just shrugged and said this is my life as it were.

Crack Sucks

2007-12-16T09:41:00.000-05:00

The journeys that crack took me on, ended up being many blessings. It exposed me to the evil side of life. It is there that I found and ate and loved the “Devil’s Candy”. This hideous stuff could be nothing but evil.
The insanity of smoking crack and doing nothing else but smoking crack every awake moment of everyday is maddening. I had a relentless desire to smoke crack at any and all expense. I did this no matter what, no matter who, no matter how, no matter why, no matter when, no matter where, no matter…it was truly a horrible passion.

When I finally looked at crack-cocaine as an actual force, I concluded that this is by far more than just substance abuse or addiction. This is when I was finally able to fight the tremendous pull crack-cocaine has on one’s soul and spirit.

The question becomes, “Why do crack?”, if this is what happens and the consequences that follow.

Standard treatment does not address the extreme possession that occurs during crack use. To say we need to treat crack like all other ‘drugs’ could be a mistake. The Devil’s candy does take you over. It possesses you and completely destroys your soul and spirit. If you ask a crack-head if and when they ever decided to try and quit and they might have said, “I am never going to smoke crack again!” What happens? The temptations come at you faster and harder. The urges and triggers jump at you to the point where you start entertaining thoughts of the “Devil’s Candy” again and now you are off to the races again. At times believe it or not it seems easier to keep smoking crack than to quit and deal with the onslaught of the most intense spiritual battle one could ever imagine. Getting past that is no different than making any commitment to GOD and getting the ‘fallen angel’ gunning for you constantly. For years I battled over this.

Todd

There is no enabling with crack!

2007-12-12T07:29:00.000-05:00

Some would consider this enabling. This is a word that became part of my vocabulary three months after I was assaulted with Todd's crack-crap. This I feel is because they do not understand anything about crackheads. They think it is the same as alcoholism. It's not. They both are devastating substances, but that is the only thing they have in common. Overeating can be devastating, yet no one has suggested that we send crackheads to weight watchers as another quick fix for society's mounting endangerment from crack cocaine. There is a very fine line as to this being enabling. One can only follow their heart. Each case is different. There are no experts regarding crackheads. There are no rules written in stone. Not yet, anyway.

I never did give him money. Some in the family did at first, but not later. We all believed there were easy answers. I did not bail him out of jail after the first time. I did not, nor did anyone buy him necessities of life. What little he had came at gift times. However, I must confess, we all over gave to him. And each gift was drenched with tears for a love we had so little opportunity to express.

And it went on for years. Would he make it this time? Next time? He was always with us at holidays. On those brief occasions we all put out of our minds that he was a crack-head. Still, he was Todd. He was OK. He was a human being, there but for the grace of GOD, go I, Todd, son, brother, grandchild, brother in-law, uncle. He was OK, even when he filled the room with his pain.
Todd

The Crack-Bite

2007-12-11T11:39:00.000-05:00

When you are fully contaminated and in the midst of despair, anything or just something could help. Doing nothing won’t. Because it is so spiritually binding, I know it becomes a spiritual battle.

Even though you do not have to use, sometimes it seems like you do have to use…to stop the onslaught of this overpowering pull to smoke crack. It never lets up. It picks at all parts of your inner being. It is so quick and fast and sneaky before you know it, here it is again. The process has to be slowed down in order to have a chance to microscopically penetrate even a slight pin-prick of the evil crack stench bubble. If one’s confession to being a crack-head is completely revealing, including places (as in plural) where they buy crack, where they smoke crack and who they smoke it with or where they smoke it by themselves. By doing this it exposes all the places and people and all the lies. It won’t be an end all to end all, but it does mess up their pattern, and by doing so you might get an ever so small chance to plant a seed or another seed if you have already done so. Every crack-head has a smoking pattern. It starts way before the crackling sound fills the bubble and starts the journey to Crackville, USA.

Feeling possessed by the crack-bite is the loneliest, darkest, sickest, most ugly gnawing and truly captivating all consuming demonic place to be.

Yup...that is it!

Crack and Jail...same thing!

2007-12-10T07:10:00.000-05:00

The Steeple Outside My Window

The last clang,
of the door at night
I hate. Sounds dead.
Another day…wondering…
Not looking out my tiny sliver window.
Scripture seeking
for truth and peace.
Sleeping?
Always with a lite.
Another kind of ‘light’ please.
Thankful for food,
although little I eat.
Thirsty for words,
that will heal me deep.
Twenty days?
Longer it seems…
So unaware of life’s continual pace.
Blinded
about my plight.
Crawling. Stumbling.
Can not find the light.
Numb to oblivion.
Close ones I miss…
Mom, family, my sweet lover!
Then one day…
Some relief.
Looking out my tiny sliver window
all I could see
was a steeple for CHRIST.

78 Million Seconds? Are you kidding?!

2007-12-09T11:43:00.000-05:00

Our program contains a spiritually supported detoxification format for the process of de-contaminating your body, soul and spirit from the possession of crack cocaine.

It is not in any religion that an answer can be found. Answers start to formulate when we develop a relationship with printed words of powerful healing truths. Scriptures are where they can be found.

Smoking crack cocaine will devour everything and everybody that is willing to let it. Crack cocaine holds no boundaries. It does not care about your age, your race, or your status and could care less as to what you do and how you live.

Giving in to the urges to smoke crack cocaine is such a vicious cycle controlled by a power that wants nothing more than to possess and destroy all life, even if by flying planes filled with people into buildings filled with more people.

Where do you start with such a horrible insidious substance? How can I possibly just say words on how to end your madness with crack cocaine and expect that to just happen? Because of the harsh reality of what a stupid punk crackhead I had become, gives me the ability to do just that, give you words to attack crack so you too can conquer crack cocaine and be free forever just like I am. With crack, ya know when ya know.

Todd

Crack Cocaine Got My Prize Guitar

2007-12-08T14:50:00.000-05:00

How much joy can I express in printed words that describe the ultimate high in life…to play music that moves the soul and spirit; a life long dream since I was 6 years old.

I had some emotions from other events surface through the guitar while I was messing around and my door to serenity was wide open and I was running through it this time.

At the age of 29 I smoked crack. Playing guitar was not on life’s list anymore. I pawned my one prize possession in life…my 1958 double cut away Sunburst finish with circle fret marks Gibson ES-330 or 335, I am not positive which number exactly, but it was a dream guitar bought by my parents for my 11th birthday from just a guy going to Vietnam and was so sad to sell it. They bought it for $150. I pawned it for the last time for $75, to smoke crack, and I never was able to get it back.

In 1983 I had 7 guitars and stuff. From 1985 through 1997 I did not have 1 guitar or even think of playing or even wanted to. Looking back, it is clear that during this time my soul and spirit were empty, very empty.

It is amazing to me now, that person that I used to be. I am so thankful that I have an opportunity to share what has been given to me. I am very blessed to be alive and able to extend myself through my truths, experiences and my guitar to reach out and bring the truth about crack cocaine to "all the still suffering crackheads" :)
Todd

13 Quips to Destroy Crack With

2007-12-07T07:13:00.000-05:00

Everyday Book Quips

1. Dear God, please help me be the person that my dog thinks I am.
2. Happiness is a choice.
3. Honesty is essential for recovery.
4. If it don't apply let it fly.
5. To fail to cry is to fail to live.
6. Anger alerts us to the fact that something is not right.
7. The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.
8. Those who forget their past are doomed to relive it.
9. The best way to replace a bad habit is to replace it with a good one.
10. Choose your companions with care; you may become what they are.
11. Suffering is defined as, 'anything about which one says, Oh No!
12. One form of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect different results.
13. Worrying is paying interest on troubles that may never come due.

What Does Camille Say?

2007-12-06T07:20:00.000-05:00

Understand that crack cocaine is the Devils Candy
If you want power over crack cocaine you must expose all the crack cocaine lies
Be honest with everyone and in everything you do
Show actions not words
Understand that when your family is nagging, crack cocaine is attacking them and to answer all nagging with a good attitude
Understand Crack cocaine’s purpose is to kill you and destroy all those who care about you
Commit to 6 months of not touching any money for any reason
Commit to not handling money issues for 2 years after the 6 months of not touching money
Except help and understand you can not fight crack cocaine on your own. It takes a team of those willing to follow your program. If they are not willing to participate 100% they can not be apart of your life for now.
Understand when your family hides their money and things of value that it is NOT because of YOU but because they do not trust crack cocaine and do not want crack cocaine to torture you with the urges. Your job is to protect your family from crack. Crack cocaine is very jealous of what you have. It wants your family members, its wants all your money and all of your families money, it wants your TV, it wants your VCR, stereo, CD’s and anything of value you own. It wants to destroy those who care about you, their spirit, their self worth, their joy, their happiness; it wants to suffocate your kids or future kids. It wants your life!
Get our quit crack 75 Day Program and do it! It works when you work it.
Listen to all past radio shows. There are well over 30 hours of audio rebroadcast radio programs. Read everything in our websites.
Do 30 shows in 30 days!

Crack and Court...www.devilscandy.com

2007-11-29T07:10:00.000-05:00

When Todd’s court day came, I went to it. Mostly out of my curiosity, because I had never been to someone's trial. The judge sentenced him to 12 months in jail with no time served (4 months) meant that he was to be in jail 13 months. Todd was able to get into a work release program. His father hired him to sweep floors at his factory. A manager picked him up each morning and I drove him back to jail each night. During that time, we really got to know each other. All we could really do was talk, but we did have some fun. Even took Sue “trick or treating”. A no…no but Todd always found a way to have good time and create memories.

My first experience with crack happened a few weeks after Todd got out of jail. Todd’s dad owns a hot tubs factory, a very fine line, #5 in the industry. A big hot tub show was happening in Atlantic City, NJ. Todd traveled there with his dad followed by a short crack vacation in Florida.

Todd had called me every night while in Atlantic City but when traveled to Florida to visit his grandmother the calls stopped. I knew he was to fly home soon and I had not heard from him so I called his grandma to ask about him and she told me he disappeared. I tried to get information but grandma, was too sad to talk. I thought something terrible happened; little did I know; something terrible did happen. I called his dad and had to hold the phone away from my ear he was so angry at Todd I think he could of killed him. I was very upset I had no idea what was going on. Todd’s dad just said he did it again… I kept asking what? He just screamed in the phone I’m so f**kn sick of it and slammed the phone down. I received a call back from Todd the day he was to fly out and he just said he’ll explain when he got home. My spirit was torn inside, I paced the floor until the minute he finally walked in the door which was several hours after he should of.

Seriously, as I am writing this, trying to recall the incidents seemed impossible. It’s all a blurb in the past. I will share the incidents that I remember. All the in-between stuff really does not matter. What matters is that you understand that I understand what you have been through or are going though. Hopefully by the time you finish reading this book you will find hope that you too can become a survivor. Hopefully you no longer are a victim of crack cocaine, by learning to live in victory over crack cocaine.

Miracles Can Happen...Even with Crackheads

2007-11-28T07:26:00.000-05:00

Todd's miracle was a package deal. He did try to help himself and we learned how to help him; many people including a society of people, the counselors bravely walking through wilderness with no road map for crackheads. Pat at Bail Bonds Dept., whose last name I never knew, came into our lives so briefly yet was part of this miracle. I would not want to take one card form the house of cards for fear it would all tumble down. It is hard for me to separate any one part of all the things that helped Todd, and say this is the one that really did it. He traveled a long road with many people to even get miracle status. Perhaps he needed to. But for Todd, after collecting all he had collected on his journey, and taking this journey with all the people he did, his terror of the desire was the greatest obstacle and only GOD could remove that. And HE did.

My daughter said, "You had a lot to do with this. I do not know if it would have happened without you". Why didn't I feel that's true? I would stop and think when she said it, of what specifically did I do that made a difference? I never could pinpoint it. I do think it was not as people think it was. Similar, but not the same. Certainly there were things I did with no motivation other than help or cure Todd. But that could not be sustained for long in the chaotic ups and downs, disappointments and failures of having a crackhead son. What I did was sustain myself. Help myself to get through it. Made myself feel as good as I possibly could to endure it. Had he died, I would have been able to draw on this. As it was it got me through, and in the process helped him. It did not cure him. Only he could do that.

He was not entirely alone, either. Neither was I, because it was a very lonely time for both of us. To death, or to life, I had to take that walk with him, or I could not have lived with it.

AGAPE LOVE? It seems too perfect a feat for me. Maybe a mini Agape Love was achieved-sometimes.

If I can...You certainly can!

2007-11-27T07:36:00.000-05:00

They live in the underworld of the criminal, the hopeless, the ignored, the forgotten, and the lepers of our society. I searched for a link, any link to the warmth of human beings living a normal life, something to keep the memory alive. I welcomed every small and seemingly insignificant opportunity to bring him out of this black hole of life he lived in a as a crack-head and bring him into a brief moment of fresh air.

I never did give him money. Some in the family did at first, but not later.

We all believed there were easy answers. I did not bail him out of jail after the first time. I did not, nor did anyone buy him necessities of life. What little he had came at gift times. However, I must confess, we all over gave to him. And each gift was drenched with tears for a love we had so little opportunity to express.

And it went on for years. Would he make it this time? Next time?

After Todd's many grueling years of being a crack-head, the family would always ask me 'the big question' (like I had the answer) will he make it this time? Because it was I who said I was sure he'd make it one of these times. It was I who said he's starting over again, trying once again, or he's failed again.

I would always answer the same, "I do not know"! And I would count off the good things on my finger for them, like a magic potion.

It All Sucks When It Comes To Crack

2007-11-25T11:21:00.000-05:00

I could mourn the crack addiction. I could pray for it to leave. I could try to contribute to its death. I could pretend it was not here, year after year, or that it might always be here.
Maybe even that death might take it away, as well as my son, or that there is and was a quick and easy answer.

I was there to share another starting over again. There was never any doubt he had to try again. Just as I knew he would make it, maybe this time or maybe next time. How to retrieve his fast dwindling boxes of worldly possessions was always first on my list of 'enabling actions'. In this moment of a zombie-like existence, while entering back into the real world, when only a moment ago deep into hell, he would have let someone saw off any leg of choice, truly believing he did not deserve this added aid to re-enter the world of 'normal'. I knew starting over again required some semblance of material possessions to function at least with a little dignity and being able to have some personal moments to weave the days together. He would sleep on my davenport and go to the mall to sit and wait for me to get out of work. He was not allowed in my house anymore when I was not there.

When he became angry at his bleak life, I reminded him that this was the life of a crackhead. When he sighed that he could not walk through another Michigan winter, I again reminded him this is the walk of a crack-head. I said these without bitterness, and without anger or judgment, just a quiet reminder of the sad facts. I wished I could make it not so. But I did not know how. Only Todd could figure out how for himself.

It Was So Bad...

2007-11-21T06:59:00.000-05:00

It was so bad:
It is embarrassing to even tell myself. The memories now are the kinds that make you put your head in your hands and say in breathy sighs, “Oh my God”.

It was so bad I should have died. The physical abuse to myself was horrendous. The price I pay later in life I truly hope has some grace bestowed upon it.

It was so bad I lost every worldly item one could imagine. I had stuff at one time. A whole bunch of stuff. Lots of stuff. Really good stuff. Lost it all. I guess not really lost, more like willing to pawn, sell or trade for crack.
I lost respect for myself. I hated myself. I would get so angry at screwing up again. I would go to meeting after meeting. I would go in and out of treatment centers. I believed I would never get rid of this crack-crap! I had resigned to a life with this hell. Let me see if I can make some kind of life, and have the “Devil’s Candy”, too. This can’t be done.

The only true meaning to the word can’t is….You CAN”T mix a life and crack-cocaine. CAN’T be done. CAN’T smoke crack and have a life of any substance. CAN’T be done.

What a moron I was to my mother. What a creep I was to my father. What an idiot I was to everyone. What a looser I was to my family. What a complete fool I was in God’s eyes.

It Was So Bad...

Our Girls

2007-11-20T06:34:00.000-05:00

To Sue: You too, my lovely daughter, are a crack cocaine survivor. God is good. He allows us to move on and forget some of the bad things we’ve lived through. I love you. I know “Toddy” loved you first. You will always be his first and our first. I am so proud of you.

To Sarah & Staci: You’re both too young to understand, but in time you will. I thank God for both of you and for allowing both your dad and I to be in your lives. God has great plans for both of you and I am privileged to be apart of that.

To those still suffering in the crack cocaine madness:

NEVER GIVE UP!

You may think it is hopeless, but hope anyway. You may think you are losing, but never, never surrender. Believe me you can win this battle. My family is living proof. You can not only win the battle, but together we will win the war! What a sight, an entire army of ex crack addicts and heir battle weary loved ones….a blessed people traveling out of the darkness into the light. Survivors all, moving towards the lives they have fought so hard to live.

This is my survival story……….yours is waiting to be written.
Camille

The Difference Between

2007-11-19T07:10:00.000-05:00

Who and What To Believe?

2007-11-16T06:36:00.000-05:00

No decision should be made without knowledge of all the available facts. By examining the facts and looking through eyes of truth, we can conclude that there is some sort of true resolution from this madness. There has to be. What to believe? I can say this; do not believe anything a crack-head says. As long as the contamination is there, there is zero trust regardless of how sweet it seems, and until non-users get it straight on how ‘this’ stuff destroys the soul and spirit, and it could depend on how “you” respond to this stuff and its behavior…as in you could be the person that says the word that penetrates the “bubble”, or could steer them in a new direction that could enlighten one…or could be the one to keep a thin string of the reality of life in the grips of the poor contaminated soul and plant that seed of hope and help nurture it slightly from a loving distance.
My hunger for truth ended up being very difficult to hear and see. It hurt. I can only imagine my hurt was way less than some hurt I caused from my desire to smoke crack. I believe all crack-heads can rid themselves from the power of the lure and uncontrollable urge to smoke crack no matter what happens from smoking crack. I believe every person possessed and addicted to crack can quit. I believe all cocaine addicts can leave it alone forever. I believe if you shoot up cocaine and maybe even mix it with heroin; you too can forever stop poking your skin.

Once you expose the lie it becomes harder to keep it a secret. The secret is when you know the truth and that is what you can believe. I have told you the truth. Now you do know. It can develop into and become just a simple decision to quit. But…not until you have faith in what you do believe, and faith in God, and faith that now you know you do not have to smoke crack, and faith that smoking crack is not what God wants you to be doing with your time; but…most of all have faith in yourself. You can quit forever; that is what to believe.

Guitar Dreams from Devil's Candy by Todd Wm. Gibson

2007-11-15T07:20:00.000-05:00

How much joy can I express in printed words that describe the ultimate high in life…to play music that moves the soul and spirit; a life long dream since I was 6 years old. I have had vivid dreams of recording a record or an album (a CD nowadays). The year of 2002 was the year a life long dream was fulfilled. I recorded a CD in my new basement on my home computer recording studio that I am very proud of. The melodies are soothing harmonic melodies. Some originated from right in the midst of the crack despair and hoping to find some peace. Then some emotions from other events surfaced through the guitar while I was messing around and my door to serenity was wide open and I was running through it this time.
When I was 5 years old I saw a guitar in the window of a store called D & C- 5 & 10 store. It costs $4.95. I went home and soon earned the money. My mother brought me to buy it and that was the start. She bought a book that had some pictures of chords and exercises and she showed me how to pluck the top string with a pick and strum down on the rest…pluck-strum strum, it was a C chord or at the time sort of a C chord. I liked it and was on my way to playing guitar. I had lessons and played in a lot of places in life by the time I was 13.

At the age of 29 I smoked crack. Playing guitar was not on life’s list anymore. I pawned my one prize possession in life…my 1958 double cut away Sunburst finish with circle fret marks Gibson ES-330 or 335, I am not positive which number exactly, but it was a dream guitar bought by my parents for my 11th birthday from just a guy going to Vietnam and was so sad to sell it. They bought it for $150. I pawned it for the last time for $75, to smoke crack, and I never was able to get it back. I have nightmares about this. It is a deep regret of mine as far as a thing I wished I really had now that I have actually done a CD. I still cry over this one. Life’s irony. The thought of not having my guitar and the reason why, keeps me humble. Just another bad crack memory.

God's Touch

2007-11-14T06:37:00.000-05:00

There is no doubt that the music that is on my site comes from God's touch. I have played guitar since I was 5 years old. I pawned my prize 1958 Gibson ES 335 double cut away Sunburst finish dotted fret guitar for stupid crack...never getting it back. I now have 4 wionderful guitars...but still to this day have nightmares on letting that guitar go for crack. My mom got me that guitar in 1969 for $125 from a guy going to Vietnam who cried over selling it to go there. I truly hope whoever has it...has the blessing of that guitar. It had such a sweet sound...and now that I have my own music...I do not have my prize guitar. See what crack does...steals everything. My guitars that I do have now have the same blessings from how I got them, the strings I use to the sound I do get from them. I am blessed with wonderful guitars with the horrible and sad memories of giving in to crack by letting my prize guitar go...and just to smoke crack! Now that ought to tell you the power and pull of crack...and...crack cocaine is PISSIN me off!

WHY?

2007-11-13T07:01:00.000-05:00

Why the 75 Day Program?

Where do you start with such a horrible insidious substance? How can I possibly just say words on how to end your madness with crack cocaine and expect that to just happen? Because of the harsh reality of what a stupid punk crackhead I had become, gives me the ability to do just that, give you words to attack crack so you too can conquer crack cocaine and be free forever just like I am. With crack, ya know when ya know.

I nearly lost my soul from smoking crack cocaine. Through that I found incredible power against crack cocaine in writing. I wrote everything down on paper. All my thoughts, food intake and quality, physical accomplishments, cool words that I read, phrases I heard spoken, scriptures I somehow was pointed to, feelings of being a complete and lost crackhead and hating that description of me, some trivial ideas of grandeur for some kind of life for me, names and places of interest, plans for success, charts of my existing life in treatment barracks, fantasies of love and family, stupid idiot behaviors witnessed by me and anything in any category you come up with in a facility that facilitates crackheads. This process lasted 87 days from the 90 day alternative-to-jail-program I happen to be in. I found power in writing words. For some unexplained reason, the power felt like it was going directly against crack. Even then I was not sure how to explain this and was quickly labeled “never to get better for asking questions and stating feelings”. I just had this compelling power being aimed directly at crack cocaine through writing and hope started to manifest. My narrow crack-existence was now opening up. I was writing more and finding the old Todd as God created me. I was experiencing this weird feeling of power over crack cocaine for the first time in my crack-filled life.

The Foundation of DVC Ministry

2007-11-12T06:11:00.000-05:00

I sat down after Christmas Day and wrote this to my son.

Everyone in the family wants you to know we are here if you need us. This is not just your problem, it is our problem together. We are all experiencing 'the crack crap' as well as the emotional and mental dysfunction it causes.

We do not know everything but we know enough. We do not have the answer or answers. We will constantly seek for them or it. We stumble and falter and briefly give up. But we get back up and begin again.

Our support may seem meaningless to you especially as we travel further along in this and try and choose the support in areas we have learned is not helpful to you. Our support will have to come in your faith that it is there, and it does mean something.

We have made mistakes collectively and individually. We believe in the successes not the failures. Divine intervention needs its place, not just when all else fails, but to believe that there is an answer.

I felt very much alone writing this. I needed to write it. I knew the family in their hearts did feel this way, but had really given up on him. Why then could not I?

I also found George Medzerian' s book. It opened a door inside me that would allow me to continue being a partner in my son's fight with crackcocaine. It gave me a role and function, which made sense. A way I could live with his crack-crap. The new point of view allowed this.

George Medzerian is an adjunct professor at the University of West Florida.

Must Do List

2007-11-10T12:34:00.001-05:00

1. Research and Study both our websites:
www.devilscandy.com and www.crackcocainerecovery.com

2. Listen to Recorded Radio Shows every day: 75 Day Radio Show List Page

3. Join our Freedom Forum and write in it daily: Freedom Forum

4. Follow The Crack Don’ts exactly as described: The Crack Don'ts

5. Believe our 13 Beliefs have the power to conquer crack: 13 Beliefs

6. Purchase our Guaranteed Quit Crack Power Tools: Quit Crack

7. Get your FREE Journal and use it daily: FREE Journals

8. Call us for instructions before a crack episode catastrophe. Contact Us

9. Recruit a Crack Attacking Team: Questions and Answers

10. Listen to Todd's music: Todd's Music

The Crack Monster

2007-11-09T11:25:00.000-05:00

Feeling possessed by the crack-bite is the loneliest, darkest, sickest, most ugly gnawing and truly captivating all consuming demonic place to be.

It is not in any religion that an answer can be found. Answers start to formulate when we develop a relationship with printed words of powerful healing truths.

Smoking crack cocaine will devour everything and everybody that is willing to let it. Crack cocaine holds no boundaries. It does not care about your age, your race, or your status and could care less as to what you do and how you live.

Devil's Candy

2007-11-06T06:51:00.000-05:00

It is just as it was and will always be just as it is.

It is amazing to me now, that person that I used to
be. I am so thankful that I have an opportunity to
share what has been given to me. I am very blessed
to be alive and able to extend myself through my
truths and experiences to reach out and tell the truth
about crack-cocaine. Everything imaginable to
prevent me from doing this has manifested. Simply
realizing where the “Devil’s Candy” IS coming from,
helps in understanding the spiritual battle over my
soul and spirit. At times it is an onslaught. Like a
wave of evil. Presented in such a sweet form of candy
to the neurotransmitters in one’s brain…

A State of Mind...if you have one left.

2007-11-05T06:36:00.000-05:00

Agape Love; unconditional love, a perfect feat of
balance. Not just a state of mind, but a state of doing.
One we often dream of obtaining. One, we can easily
assume we live in naturally. Seems most of us do not
get the opportunity to practice it.
I stumbled unaware into it. At the time I was so
absorbed in the terror and desperation of events,
surrounding my crack-head son. Agape Love as a
motivation or end result was not even on my mind.

Crack-cocaine does take you over and
possess your body, soul and spirit. Crack-cocaine
goes as far as completely possessing and then
destroying your body, mind and spirit.
Giving in to the urges to smoke crack-cocaine is
such a vicious cycle controlled by powers that want
nothing more than to possess and destroy all life,
even by flying planes filled with people into
buildings filled with more people.

Must Be Easier to Smoke Crack than Donig Our Program Exactly

2007-11-04T18:12:00.000-05:00

Hmmm...seems our program is too tough.
I have thought about fluffing it up but am not sure exactly what that would mean. Could mean we give in and crackheads are ultimately right. Even though they have never gone without crack for more than at least a year ? probably less... the answers are just flowing, for example: I have been clean again (after a close-killing-binge) for less than 25 days and I get to drive a vehicle. Even though it was stated how difficult it is on the job to be vehicle-less, this was from either boredom or someone not willing to assist in following this program exactly. "Those that do not support how (I) need to do this program must step back"...this means YES we might be bored and alone which again is going against this program.
CONCLUSION: The DVC Minsistry Program works to be free forever from the possession of crack cocaine...BUT it is way too difficult to do.
Hmmm...seems our program is to tough.
The CrackConqueror

75 Days

2007-11-02T11:32:00.000-04:00

How the 75 Day Program Works

This program may take more than once to fully detoxify the possession of crack cocaine from your soul.

1. NOT following the rules and instructions exactly as described in this program will directly affect the outcome and results of learning how to squash the crack cocaine urges.

2. Believe crack cocaine is the devils candy and act like it.

3. Understand and accept this is a spiritual battle for your soul.

4. Learn the crack-attacking scriptures, and attack crack with them.

5. Carry the 75 Day Booklet with you at ALL times. No excuse’s not to.

6. Practicing faith and earning trust are essential components in our actions, words, willingness to change and being able to see those results.

7. We expect and accept anything that works to attack crack only.

8. Do not be ashamed or shy about saying the powerful words of healing truths in this booklet loud enough for anyone to hear, including the enemy.

9. Spend more time doing this 75 Day Program a day than thinking, searching, lying, conniving or anything else going towards or about crack cocaine.

10. Do not go ahead. Stay on the day you are on. You may go back to a different day to find power over crack cocaine, but DO NOT GO FORWARD. After the first time through this book, if a second, third or more times are needed, then you can use any day that helps after doing the days in order (like the first time through), then using any other day after for extra power.

11. Get really pissed-off at crack cocaine. Get so angry it will be okay to yell at crack cocaine. Go ahead and yell at crack. Try it and start attacking crack.

12. Commit to God’s word and to this 75 Day Program until you’re free from crack cocaine possession forever. This program will work when you work it. It has never failed me and it will not fail you. You can fail the program but the program will NOT fail you.

13. REMEMBER: Stopping the madness of smoking crack cocaine sometimes gets worse before it gets better. Knowing this helps in how long it will take for you to get serious about finding a life crack-free! The stranglehold from crack cocaine tightens before it loosens, especially now that this journey has begun.

Crack cocaine can be conquered and destroyed forever!

Let your journey begin!

Day 2

2007-11-01T06:35:00.000-04:00

Right at this moment you are away from the madness. Create a file of this feeling in your head and file this reality feeling away for future reference.

The time you are spending starting this journey to better your life is not wasted. Any time spent on crack cocaine in any capacity is wasted. You might be feeling like all this is a waste of time, but it is at this moment not a waste of time. Time spent on crack cocaine wastes so much time and right now you have no way of knowing exactly how much. No more wasting time on crack cocaine.

~ 1 Peter 4:3 ~
For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry.

Quip of the day: Instead of counting your days, make each day count.

Day 1

2007-10-31T07:08:00.000-04:00

This day is the beginning of changing your current life. This is just the beginning so relax; everything will work out according to God’s perfect plan.

Close your eyes and gently visualize the opposite of the madness that got you to Day 1 of this journey. Find the relax mode inside yourself. Breathe deep and slow. On one time of breathing like this, hold the air in for 10 seconds counting slowly. Then force yourself to let it out VERY slow. Feel how relaxing that is? This feeling will be very important throughout this journey. Learn this technique and remember this feeling. Repeat this as often as necessary to keep as relaxed as possible under the circumstances cause from smoking crack cocaine.

~ 1 Corinthians 3:1,2 ~
Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready

Quip of the day: Dear God: Please help me become the person my dog thinks I am.

Against Crack

2007-10-30T06:06:00.000-04:00

Well...what did you do to attack crack today so far? Oh you have not...yet. Well what are you waiting for, crack to attack you? Why take that chance and wait. We know crack is going to attack. We know crack does not care. We know that if you wait...crack will get you...for it is not if, but when crack will attack you. So go ahead, take a chance and attack crack first.

New test

2007-09-04T21:36:00.000-04:00

just starting again
Todd

12 Steps Do Not Work for Professional Crackheads

2006-07-01T12:27:00.000-04:00

Why? Because there is not one scripture in any part of this fellowship. Why? Because this was formed by a drunk for atheist drunks. When we choose a God and form and shape this God to suite a lifestyle and say something like I am a born again Gay Christian, it is like saying I am an active crackhead and you CAN trust me with your money and valuables! When we read DO NOT LAY WITH A MAN LIKE YOU WOULD WITH A WOMAN, THIS IS DETESTABLE...what part of what word do I have the incorrect meaning of? Hey I know let's change it to mean "I do not WANT to lay with a woman, therefore that would be detestable because that is not what I WANT to do so I will lay with a man because I WANT to so that is not detestable because it is what I WANT to do. There...that's better.
Todd
The non-gay non-smoking non-possessed non-12 step non-crackhead crackhead

www.devilscandy.com

www.crackcocainerecovery.com

Why Not Crack Anonymous?

2006-06-28T18:43:00.000-04:00

Maybe because 12 steps do not work to conquer crack possession. Oh maybe for abstinence but not for complete freedom. How about the new 12 steps of Crackaholics Anonymous? If we can invent a disease for whatever we have such as road rage, and push the responsibility towards anything but ourselves, then big money happens except not in your pockett. The new IED's that are insurance accepted brings us to an all time low regarding diseases of addiction that really do not exist anyway. So hey, then why not Crackaholics anonymous! Rageaholics anonymous! I don't want to do Thataholics anonymous! Eat stupid foodaholics anonymous! Just plain stupidaholics anonymous! Wait this is it...Anonymously Anonymous Anonymous! Hi I am Todd and I am an Anonymous Anonymous....Hi To_ _...oops your supposed to be anonymous, stupid!

Compassion Does Not Mean Acceptance

2006-06-26T20:25:00.000-04:00

A deep awareness of your suffering is the compassion I have. I pity the possession you feel. I understand how demonic crack is and because of this understanding I know how to stop this demonic madness dead in its tracks. Are you ready to do what it takes for freedom forever or just ready to ease the chaos long enough to get a better crack smoking-plan? Until your are completely ready for complete freedom, crack will have its way with you litle by little then in huge chunks out of your life. Are you completely ready? If so click on this link, www.devilscandy.com or this link, www.crackcocainerecovery.com do what they say, trust our 27 years dealing directly and specifically with crack cocaine and you will find freedom from crack cocaine possession. Then it is up to you to keep that freedom and pay your price for your freedom. We do not know what that is, but it has to be worth it, don't ya think?

Great Day To NOT Smoke Crack Cocaine

2006-06-19T22:37:00.000-04:00

Well today is a great day to NOT smoke crack. How are you going to do that? Do you have a road map for that journey? Do you even know where to find that? This treasure can be found. What treasure? Complete freedom from crack cocaine possession, forever! How do we know this? We have over 27 years experience with direct involvment with crack cocaine on a daily basis both smoking and attacking and now COMPLETELY FREE FOREVER. We continue to be the same as we have been and always will be...because we know the truth about crack cocaine and have our websites to expose that truth. It is up to you to believe, follow, trust and try what will work. This is of course ONLY when you work the 75 Day Do-It-Yourself Guide correctly. Otherwise the only reason to not follow a proven and effective program, is ONLY because deep inside your soul you are still planning a crack-episode. In other words you are not ready to NOT smoke crack cocaine.
Todd
www.devilscandy.com
www.crackcocainerecovery.com

Just Doing What Is Right and Needed

2006-06-17T19:12:00.000-04:00

Technorati Profile
Hope this works.
Todd

Let's Keep Crack Cocaine Not Tied To Anything

2006-06-16T17:49:00.000-04:00

It is amazing how many crackheads cannot handle the truth. And 12 steppers...WOW are they sensitive to THEIR "program" being the way, the truth and the lifestyle they love, because hey it IS better than smoking crack! Then we have being gay with a small "g". If crack is an issue, we need to look at ALL parts that may be holding us back from freedom and the truth. Just think...one can follow scripture and stop the madness of smoking crack cocaine. Just think...one can follow scripture and see that programs that admit defeat and WILL NOT support scriptures will keep crack cocaine doing what it does best, destroy. Just think...one can follow scripture and see that laying with the same sex is detestable to God, of course that is until YOU change the words to suit your life so it becomes OK and has nothing to do with crack or "drugs" except that the connection and "tie" that I am pointing out is that THE SCRIPTURES being the truth and the way to set one free is the same for all 3 items mentioned. So we still cannot connect being gay, going to meetings for a disease and smoking crack and becoming a crackhead having nothing to do with one another? Hmmm...let us think again.

Smoking Crack Cocaine Is Not A Disease

2006-06-14T12:29:00.000-04:00

When we put all addictions in a box and call them diseases, we do get benefits, disabilities and a life time label of never getting rid of any addiction. This is completely false and stated without any financial motivation or benefit. Smoking crack cocaine is not a disease. OK maybe the disease of stupidity. Good news is this so called disease has a cure. Don't smoke crack, your kids depend on it.

Crack cocaine is the devilscandy.

2006-06-11T13:21:00.000-04:00

Believing this is just the start. Acting like it, is the beginning. Continued faith by actions will guide you to freedom from crack. Thinking that crack is just another drug or just another sin as we say a drug is a drug and all sins are the same is what the enemy loves most. What we do know is crack cocaine is the devils candy. Until we ALL believe that and act that and have actions that attack crack before it attacks you is what this is all about. Nothing more, nothing less.
Todd

Blogging Against Crack

2006-06-10T20:57:00.000-04:00

Again we just want another day free from crack. How do we do it? There are many ways. Some do a complete job, some just for a day at a time. Both do good. One is a life style filled with daily requirements directly towards the specific "situation". Ours will bring you freedom that you will have to hang onto, or continue to do the crack-spin. You can make a choice. You do have the power over powerlessness. I am proof of that.
Todd

Good Morning Crackheads

2006-06-09T21:20:00.000-04:00

Lets start by not smoking crack today. This will be a place to get daily replenishing spiritual nourishment. So come back daily and this will start June 10, 2006.
Todd

Powerful Words of Healing Truths

2005-10-18T14:12:00.000-04:00

Text Body of Healing Truths
This day is the beginning of changing your current life. This is just the beginning. RELAX.
Close your eyes and gently visualize the opposite of the madness that got you to day 1 of this journey. Find the relax mode inside yourself. Breathe deep and slow and on one time of doing this, hold the air in for 10 long seconds and force yourself to let it out VERY slow. Repeat this as often as necessary to keep as relaxed as possible under the circumstances.

Scripture of the Day
~ 1 Corinthians 3:1,2 ~
1 And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ. 2 I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able;

Quip of the day:
Dear GOD, please help me become the person my dog thinks I am.

Finally Some Blog-Time

2005-09-16T13:54:00.000-04:00

Well blog-ing is a difficult item to find time for. It has been too long since I blogged. Hey I know become a blogger! My goal is to make an effort everyday or 2, and blog about conquering crack or maybe tell a little story for encouragement.
My crack-hell days were so horrible EVERYDAY, I am amazed I am alive to tell you just that. I hate to think of the torture of dying high on crackcoaine! The enemy loves that thought. I truly feel that is the goal. To keep the crack smoking going until people die high on crack. Our souls will be lost forever if we continue to smoke crackcocaine.
I realize in some lives many tragic events have happened. It is incredible to hear of all the sexual abuse suffered at a young age. A lot if not most NEVER get free from that bondage. When I get real nasty towards crack, and those that keep relapsing over and over agian even with apparently some program they seem to be working, it is because I know ONCE you do in fact get free from the stranglehold crack gets on us, then we can begin to conquer the "other" layers that have been squashed from crack-use. When you learn HOW to stop crack dead in its tracks, you can do this with ALL the enemies darts. That is what all this is about. Squashing ALL of the enemies darts. Whether from moloestation, addiction, being beat, never knowing true love and all kinds of other situations, it is up to us to find that faith we talk about so much. This is not easy. The mystery of faith can elude us in an instant. Then when we include crack cocaine, it is magnified a million times over. AND that is just what the enemy tries to accomplish. Breeding NO HOPE! Well I am hear to tell you, when we squash crack, we squash the enemy. AND why would you NOT want to do that! When you do that, it releases crack's grip forever. That is it. Just like that.

Articles, Email and Feedback

2005-08-15T07:31:00.000-04:00

Article: A North Carolina couple is wanted for their role in allegedly dealing crack cocaine in Rutland. Eric D. Brooks, 27, and Nicole M. Parker, 19, with listed addresses of West River Road in Franklin, N.C., were expected Monday in Rutland District Court to answer to crack cocaine charges stemming from a drug bust in late June. Neither appeared in court and $5,000 warrants were ordered for each. Rutland City Police said the arrests were part of an investigation involving a confidential informant into crack cocaine dealing in the city. According to the court records, the incident leading to the charges took place around 11:30 p.m. on June 23. Brooks was parked in his 1994 Mazda 626 in Rutland when the informant went up to the vehicle and purchased crack cocaine from him, police said. Police followed Brooks' vehicle and soon pulled Brooks and Parker over on Robbins Street, city Detective David LaChance wrote in an affidavit. Brooks had a suspended driver's license and agreed to let police search the vehicle, the affidavit stated. Police said they later found that Parker had packed 1.8 grams of crack cocaine in her body. Parker added that when police pulled over Brooks' vehicle he gave her the crack cocaine and told her to hide it in her body, the detective wrote. At first she said she refused, but then agreed to do it, the affidavit stated. Parker also told police she and Brooks had traveled about two weeks earlier to Rutland from North Carolina and Brooks had been selling crack cocaine to a "couple of different customers" in the city, the affidavit stated. Brooks denied knowing anything about the crack cocaine and told police he came to Rutland to help a friend drywall a house, LaChance wrote. Both Parker and Brooks face charges of possessing and selling crack cocaine. They were both released on citations after their arrest to appear in court Monday to answer the charge, but did not show up. If convicted of the charges, they each face up to seven years in prison. EMAIL: I don't know what else to say since finding your website this morning. My husband is back to the crack after a couple of years clean and it is worse than ever. I fear he will die this time. we are in our 40's and his health is not that great. Driving to work this morning I felt I was losing my faith. I am a very spiritual person, but lately this drug seems to have beaten me down. Until i saw your website i was ready to give up. I feel desperate, helpless and hopeless. I felt like God really doesn't care and all my prayers were unanswered. I felt like it was time for me to give up on him and us. After reading your articles I have the decided that THE DEVIL WILL HAVE NO POWER OVER ME TODAY! Crack will have no power over me. At least not for today. Hy husband, Ken, does hate the drug and what it is doing to his life. I know he still wants to be free but I can also see he isn't trying as hard as he could be. As of late I have stood back and watched, but now I will take some of your advice and lay down some very important boundaries, the first one being to stop hiding it. I refuse to give crack power over me. Thank you for renewing my faith and strength to go on. Please pray for me! Thanks again and God Bless You! melissa Feedback: So nice to chat with ya, Toddster..:-)) Sorry I took up so much of your time......but I thouroughly enjoyed it.... Have a GREAT weekend......Say hi to Phil Keaggy for me! :-) "The Effexor/Klonipin User" Karen We had the great pleasure to attend an all day music festival Saturday the 13th. We saw, Peder Eide, Goeff More, Petra, Phil Keaggy, Jars of Clay and Steven Curtis Chapman. It was so cool and sounded great! Just what we needed to refresh our brains! Have a great week living crack-free! Todd and Camille Gibson, the girls, the dog and of course the cats and the hamster (rat!).

Stupid Crackheads

2005-08-15T07:29:00.000-04:00

This part is for STUPID CRACKHEADS. We want to give equal crack-rights to ALL crackheads. We will post their "stupid" letters, comments and in general their "stupid stuff", sort of a forum for them to release (or relapse) their stupidity so maybe, just maybe they will see it someday. STUPID CRACKHEAD ALERT: WARNING EXTREME DANGER Crack-Terrorist ALERT: This is a very serious situation! BE AWARE! We are sending out WARNINGS even as this is being written. Please take this seriously! These people are so lost; they do not know truth when it slaps them in the face. You never know where they might come from. Could be a letter, or a phone call or maybe even an email! Those who are about to read the following story, I need to tell a story about the person who submitted this one: As you will read, this person said how glad they were to find our site. In fact (he) said it possibly saved his life. Well, another person online in our group happened to be online "friends". with this story writer. This "friend" started to post nasty messages swearing at my wife on her personal e-mail address, cutting and digging at our beliefs (which are posted for all to see), and each person can determine if they agree or disagree with our format and beliefs, to the point where we HAD to do something. We decided to expel (her) from our group and refuse to respond to either one of these people. It is their choice to be at this site and have conversations about our possible differences...but we will not allow personal attacks...I will not allow personal attacks towards my wife from anyone for any reason. We were even threatened. This story writer TOLD us to take his story off our "Psycho Site". I will not do that. It was submitted in good faith and we appreciate it being here on our site. I will though out of respect for a fellow crack-head remove his name. That is all I will do regarding this story.....Todd *** I am xxxxx and I did my first hit in 1984 in Central, Texas. I was gone until 1992. During that period I lost my love, self, home, and everything material. Losing my self-respect was the toughest. I have seen people die and then helped hide what was left. I watched my second wife fish and nearly die many times. I finally decided I didn't like what I saw in the mirror on June 22, 1992. I checked into a rehab center and stayed there 38 days. I managed to stay clean until June 3, 2003. I found myself unable to work do to an injury and I was bored. I had stopped working the program in every aspect. I figured I was healed and smart now. I danced again and I danced hard. Fortunately I found this site and it guided me where I needed to be taken to get back into recovery. As I type this I am on day 10 and I have hope! All I have to do is let go, let god, and do this one day at a time. Them 13 years were the best of my life and I want to feel those happy feelings again. Know what's cool I know I can and I know I don't have to do it alone. From this letter to the next one. Must be the crackcocaine. Is this the same person? Dear Idiots I don't recall giving you permission to use my name or my published thoughts on your ignorant website let alone your satanic radio show. I want you to look up the name Jerry Spence in the attorney's referral service directory. He and my mother were high school class mates and he has been on CNN several times. He has NEVER lost a case in court. I also recall asking you to remove my story from y9our satanic orientated website. You have not complied with my request. Now I see you are slandering me. I have tried to live in accordance with the "live and let live" motto, but you two idiots have pushed me too far this time. You call my friends crack whores etc. That's real Christian of you isn't it Minister Todd almighty? I am for the last time ordering you too remove my name from every stinking part of your satanic ministry, and ordering you to not mention my name or alias on any of your broadcast/ Failure to comply will result in a lawsuit. Mr. Spence has reviewed this crap and yes Todd you have committed internet fraud. This is your last chance. Have a very nice Christian day. "Give more than you expect to get! Expect a miracle!" Yeah, the miracle of redemption. From grateful crackhead on his way to freedom, to a stupid crackhead terrorist lost in his own self-pity. Don't kill yourself over crack, buddy. At least have a much better reason, like oh say "stupidity".

Scriptures and Truths of the Week

2005-08-15T07:27:00.000-04:00

We attack crack here. That is what we do. We are the best at it and are qualified to tell ANYONE including you, how to stop the madness of smoking crackcocaine. This is the first scripture that penetrated the crack-stench bubble that surrounded my sorry crack-ass. AND it was SORRY! Whether it is pastorally or theologically correct matters not. God's word is what it is when you read it and how God intended it to speak to you at the moment you read it. These word's given to us by God, is truly my attacking crack scripture and STILL is today. Try it on for size. Crack's size is smaller than God but larger than you the crackhead. Romans 7:14 thru 20 14We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. 15I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.[a] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do-this I keep on doing. 20Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. It is not in any religion that an answer can be found. Answers start to formulate when we develop a relationship with printed words of powerful healing truths. Scriptures are where they can be found. Feeling possessed by the crack-bite is the loneliest, darkest, sickest, most ugly gnawing and truly captivating all consuming demonic place to be. Smoking crack-cocaine will destroy everything you ever thought, felt, desired, loved or believed in. The insanity of smoking crack-cocaine and doing nothing else but that, every awake moment of everyday is maddening. Every CRACKHEAD can be free from crackcocaine forever, in spite of what you may be being told either by a crack-counselor who has never smoked crackcocaine or a clinical treatment person who wants you to believe you are doomed for the rest of your life with a disease that tells you that you do not have this disease and will physically MAKE you light a crack-pipe after of course this disease makes you hunt for crack or possibly steal for crack. This disease I hear could make you kill for crack. There is a known cure for this disease. Funny thing is, is that this disease will also MAKE you NOT go to meetings or call you sponsor which BOTH are proven and known cures for this disease. Wow! What a disease! Ya know if I did not know better, it kind of sounds like a possession. Naw, that is too simple. Hmmm?! Romans 7:14 thru 20. Again just words. Words CAN'T stop crack. Right? I wonder what tradition supports God's word. Oh. Traditions say to NOT promote? Not even God. NO! We do not say Jesus, we say you have the right to have a God of YOUR understanding not the truth that Jesus IS the SON of God. Not the AA God. The true God almighty. I wonder if HE is sittin at a table drinking coffee smoking a cigarette? I wonder? Hey, Todd how can you say that! Well if is OK not saying Jesus and relapsing, then this disease is kickin in and making me real confused. I have the crack-disease of denial too?! I'm doomed. I think I will just go read God's word. My comic book in life. God is good, ALL THE TIME! All the time, GOD IS GOOD! Call your sponsor and ask them if it is OK to quote scripture. Of course it is Todd. Quit being an addict in denial. Quit acting like an addict. But duh I am aren't I? Yes you are a diseased addict of addiction. OK. I am. I' m doomed.

Why Should You Listen To Todd and Camille?

2005-06-13T08:52:00.000-04:00

...

TOPIC: Why Should You Listen To Todd and Camille?

I don't know.

DAY 43: Looking for and finding some real support is essential today if we expect the success we are aiming for. We define real support as places, people and ideas or books, programs or anything that is going the same way you are, on a journey to living life crack-cocaine free. Support is what we need to maintain the process of eliminating the possession of crack-cocaine. We do need to prepare for tomorrow. We do not need to worry because if we are doing and getting all that we are supposed to be getting and doing, then tomorrow will only mean we are ready and that day could be the one day when it IS finally getting better and we start to feel that we are going to be alright.

Scripture for Day 43: ~ Proverbs 28:19 ~
19 He who tills his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits will have plenty of poverty.

Quip of the day for Day 43: Development of character involves replacing our pride with patience.

Belief #5: We believe we do not know everything about crack-cocaine, but we know enough.

Last week's show exposed some of Todd's crackhell episodes. Todd was willing to let his Aunt and Uncle tell what is what like from their point of view regarding a real crack-episode. Why would Todd do this? To sensationalize crack? Maybe to put himself out there so someone can see the importance of exposing crackcocaine!
Email letters:
#1: I have recently been very active on your site and I would love to say thank you for taking your time to get this message out. I have found the "crack dont's" very helpful (and if you still have the whole list I would love to see it). I really like your idea of offering any side possible, I even enjoy your crack jokes. Again....thanks P.S. This message is meant for both of you. I simply picked the first addy and assumed you didn't want to read the same email twice.

#2: Hey Tod this is bryan i spoke with u a while ago when the time wasn't really good. Now things are really bad i have lost everything i have hit rock bottom lost my truck, friends. and and starting to lose my family i don't know what do do now. I need some help because if i don't my life will be no more i think. so plz if and when u get this plz call me i really need ur support and awareness on this cause i am losing fast. well i better let u go for now i hope 2 hear from u soon OK see TTFN.

#3: Dear Camille and Todd, It is a blessing to know you are there for those of us affected by the madness of crack. I wrote to you once last year and once again am feeling the pain crack cocaine brings so many people. I am 20 months into recovery from crack and alcohol. Life is still tough but not anywhere near as humiliating or degrading as it was when I was using. A man that I met in recovery and have had a 2 year relationship with has relapsed, again. It has been a whole new trip for me to know how to be there for him from a distance. He has lost everything but his life. I don't feel like going into all the horrible details at this time. I just want you all to know how comforting it is to have people out there who have felt the lonliness crack brings. Most people don't realize how really really hard it is to stop using. I pray hard every day for my man to get better. I pray for all addicts and hope maybe I can help someone today. Thanks again. Mary D. in Portland

#4: He's actually went through about $22,000 in the past two months. It simply boggles my mind. The $150.00 a day is what I am actually able to see. Being "only" his girlfriend, I don't have access to accounts or anything. During the entire month of May, he was only home 8 days - - and that was simply to rest up to go back out and use more.

#5: dear todd and camille, my name is crystal. i started smoking crack last year about this time. ALOT, IT SCARES ME to think about, ironicly when i stopped smoking it in january , things fell apart for me. most recently, my power was shut off a few weeks ago. i'm scared for my self and my two small children. we have no lights, heat or water. the power company would not let me make power arrangements where it was not my name on the bill. that person does not exsist. also, the power compant said i had i pay it regardless, because i told them she moved, and where i and my boyfriend both have power bills over due we wer responsible for paying them off as well, along with an 800 deposit upfront before they will hook it back up. we tryed really hard to pay the bill before it was disconnected but could only manage 100 dollars, but that was not enough. we called our mla for this town and he said the high power in the power company would be calling us, and we never got the call. my son starts school next year and my youngest just turned 1. we are trying so hard to mke a better life for our selves and the longer we stay away from crack , the more turmoil we run into. i dont know what to do i dont know where to go for help. i dont want to lose my children because we have no power and i dont know how to pay it off. i'm in trouble here and mazz from the uk told me you may be ablwe to help me, but not finacially. im past day 75 todd, and it seems to get harder and harder especially with these lifes lessons. is this my punishment? i stopped smoking it and i still lost everything.

#6: A'lo there, My name is Mehgan and I'm 16... I just wanted to start off by saying I am not a crackhead, and I have never touched nor personally even seen a pipe so I'm rather uneducated and I'm seeking direct information. You see... My older sister's bestfriend, Beth was just recently proposed to by her fiance, T-Bone ( I have -no idea- what his real name is ) and they have 2 children one girl who is about 2 years old and one newborn baby boy. Beth is a struggling Mother and she just recently found out that her Fiance was doing crack. The money is being used for such - the money she busts her ass for - and the bills are not being paid so it is my guess that T-Bone is addicted. I'm really interested in anything and everything you guys may tell me about crack like, Can it physically harm the children at birth? If T-Bone comes home high one night could he possibly be a threat to the children and his fiance, Beth? And is it best to just take Beth and the children from the home? ( She lives in GA and I in Florida ) I looked around your site but it was just hard to obtain the information so I thought it best to e-mail you both personally. I appreciate your time and anyway you can possibly help. Thank you.

I AM THE CRACK CONQUEROR
I AM not afraid of crack. I AM not afraid to expose crack. I AM not afraid to hurt YOUR feelings. I AM not afraid to tell YOU the truth. I AM not afraid to shame myself to "attack crack". I AM not afraid of crack.

TOPIC: Why Should You Listen To Todd and Camille?

The whole purpose of tonight's show is to piss off crackheads and those who keep crack-alive by NOT doing what it takes to conquer crack! I truly feel some of you DO NOT know how to get REALLY pissed-off at crack! NOT angry or "mad" at someone or thing, but REALLY pissed-off at crackcocaine. So hopefully you can either get REALLY pissed-off at crack, or you could get REALLY pissed-off at me! Yeah let's try that. Get REALLY pissed-off at the crackconqueror and THEN turn that towards crackcocaine and attack crack!

WARNING: The names HAVE NOT been changed to protect the GUILTY!

1. Ask the Borher family how much we care about their crack-episodes. It took a lot of communication, understanding and most of all trust in Camille and Todd. In no way did they understand what we were saying to do at first. With trust and actions based on that trust, their situation at this writing has hope. A LOT OF HOPE. The situation is still in process and hopefully it will bring freedom for their son.

2. You could call or email Karen and ask her how much care and concern we have towards her situation and what crack brought to her life AND how she now attacks crack! At first she just simply did not know how POWERFUL this stuff called crack was. Oh she knows how horrible it was BUT not how to "attack crack"! She does now because she trusts and listens to our suggestions and if she does not do it exactly how we do in fact suggest, just by having faith and trust in our ministry she finds a way to attack crack. See if you trust and have faith that Camille and myself are being directed by God to glorify HIS name through attacking crack, ALL crackheads would find freedom. WE DO NOT CHOOSE HOW GOD WANTS US TO RAISE HIM ABOVE ALL! Attacking crackcocaine is how we have been given that task!

3. Dave you never did give up the money long term. A crackhead cannot find TRUE freedom when money is ALWAYS accessible. In some situations some money is OK to use when that is the ONLY way to function in a day for that exact situation, BUT no money no crack. Dave you stated to carry a cell phone SOON after you stated the program. WAY TOO EARLY! Maybe you should hire someone to run your business and Judy controls ALL the money and you have NONE, BUT all the bills are paid, business is good, life is boring BUT you have your freedom from crack. Dave what your heart desires is what you will find. I have a feeling you LOVE the lifestyle surrounding crackcocaine. Stop having to be the big man on campus. If you desire freedom from crackcocaine THAT is what you WILL find. If you desire crackcocaine, heroin, danger, fear, the lies and deceit and ALL that crack-crap, then go chase that and divorce Judy, give up the business and disappear into crackhell through the crackabyss and have a nice cracklife and hopefully you can die while being high on crack so the enemy can own your soul forever. That is what you will get. Dave really think about it and hey get REALLY pissed-off at me and then turn it on crack forever. Try it or I am afraid we are going to loose Dave as we know him mentally and we could possibly loose Dave as we know him physically! Such a waste of such a great guy!

4. Shannon you NEVER gave up any money and have had access to money anytime you have wanted it and have used it so EASILY when you get the crack-bite. How in the hell do you ever expect to conquer crack when money is there for you whenever you FEEL like or CANNOT help it when you smoke crack! Look in the mirror and TELL me what you see. Your sister smokes crack on an hourly basis, brings it to your face, is pregnant while smoking crack, "What you say she only smoked a "little" while pregnant so that could NOT be the reason her baby died"! WE are to believe 2 active crackheads that a pregnant crackhead only smoked a "little" crack during her pregnancy? And when her baby was born and died and THE DOCTORS said it was NOT crackcocaine? Who is lying here? Certainly NOT 2 or 3 active crackheads. No they would never lie! NEVER! Anyway doctors know way more than Todd. They have ALL smoked crack right? Or is this one of those "clinical" "textbook" ways of dealing with crackcocaine. Hey if the Dr. said so IT MUST BE the way it is. The crack-lies continue. "As The Crack Turns" daily at noon on channel 1. As a little extra comment, "In no way can continued crackcocaine smoking during a few years and in the amount of a "lot", could EVER cause permanent headaches, NEVER"! So when a Dr. prescribes a medication (for your headaches) that will INSTANTLY kill you if you happen to smoke crackcocaine is the way for you to quit forever, hurry up and get some headaches and run NOT WALK to your Dr. and get some of THAT medicine. And oh yeah, you can smoke just a "little" crack while pregnant and it will NOT kill your newborn or still born baby because a Dr. who looked it up on page 33 said it won't. Of course this is from a Dr. who does not smoke crack or does? Would this be like asking a guitar player how to play a D chord, they show you and then another guitar player says you cannot EVER play a D chord like that unless there is a picture showing the ONLY way to play a D chord? No it is not like that! Crackcocaine lies and causes death ALL the time, except in Houston!

5. John I think it was a little too late to save the relationship. So much time and energy was spent on "crackcocaine" that your relationship with Amber suffered from that. It does NOT help when you beat her ass too! This would have MANY a good women leaving and I suspect she said I have had enough and there MUST be a better situation out there for me. There she goes. Now what is ahead for you John? My suggestion is to continue to NOT smoke crack and get your freedom forever so the NEXT woman in your life does NOT have to have ANYTHING to do with crackcocaine. Just a suggestion. An extra suggestion: Be careful who you hang out with, you might become who and what they are. If gambling is a desire for you, trust me when I say this, the crack-demon will just get a hold of his cousin and give him your name so he can be ready to destroy your life through that means, oh you say no one in YOUR life has that issue, hhmmm? Take another look around yourself John. The enemy LOVES to BLIND us. Look what he did to Amber and you! Be careful John.

6. Barry you went drinking after I told you NOT to do anything. You said aw alcohol is no big deal. It that no big deal like your silly "worship" wanna-be anything or anybody but God and HIS son Jesus? BARRY, we talked and you know you should NEVER drink! NEVER! Of course if you like jail then you and booze make a GREAT team! Of all people I have talked to I am so disappointed in your foolish behavior especially since I KNOW how smart you are and how POWERFUL you COULD be in attacking crack. BUT you insist on being the "man" and pretending to be more than who you need to be. You said life is so boring! Is that more or less than jail? Is that with or without crack? I am confused. You said you love Sovia yet you love crack too. You are infatuated with alcohol and worship false beliefs. Now you are in jail. Which is better, jail or a boring life filled with love and truth and faith and trust! The only area I feel concerned about is these take work and once you have freedom then you have to maintain life as it comes to you and know in faith that God WILL bring peace to your heart. Well it is easier to follow empty promises and false hopes. They take absolutely no effort. Pick 1 and do it Barry and quit being a stupid crackhead who drinks himself to jail. DUH?!

7. Rick's mom simply said, "I just left my purse out for 5 minutes"! Duh lady. I cannot believe it took Rick THAT long to take the $20. Then after that everyone was so SHOCKED at what happened. This still did not help. This family is so deep in the river in Egypt, they are changing there citizenship soon! This is an OVER prescribed Dr.'s dream. The pharmaceutical companies LOVE families like this. When I mentioned this they just shut down. I am NOT saying medications are not needed in SOME situations and for awhile getting back on track and sometimes forever (not many) BUT the amount of "other" prescribed drugs in this family, WOW! HUGE! BUT until the crack IS gone, the other issues WILL not get resolved. Crack does not and will not share. I get so frustrated when Dr's just prescribe. Here TAKE this, you will be FINE! F - FEELING, I - INSECURE, N - NEUROTIC and E - EMOTIONAL. Just WHAT the Dr. ordered!

8. Shannon before you ran across the freeway to get high, you told me NAW I am not itching to get high. I just need to get things straight with this person (crack-whore) before I quit. Yeah right. You manipulated it so Crystal turned off on the exit so you COULD do just that, RUN to your true LOVE, Crackcocaine! This was after she bailed you out of jail (against our suggestions) and you promised to go to her house. You did not even come close to home. Now you are locked up and I wonder how you feel about smoking crackcocaine and getting "things" straightened out with your crack-whore? Was it worth it? I cannot believe you choose crack and crackbitch OVER Crystal! It is so unbelievable! OOOPS! I forgot we are talking about crackcocaine here! My fault I am sorry!

9. William you are just a STUPID PUNK CRACKHEAD! That is it. Plain and simple. You have NOT worked ANY of our program, period. You lie. You try and control. You lie. You try and fool me. You lie. You try and keep the truth from reaching you. You lie. You try and make Camille and me out to be wrong. You lie. You blame your crackhead life on everyone BUT yourself. You lie. You try and act like you are tough and NOT afraid. You lie. You act like you are some great Dad. You lie. You pretend to be a husband. You lie. You think you got it going on. You lie. You are close to dying from crackcocaine. You lie. William you are a STUPID PUNK CRACKHEAD that LIES! But that is what STUPID PUNK CRACKHEADS do. Hey William, tell you what, blame it all on me. It is MY (Todd Wm. Gibson's) fault you smoke crack. At least it is my fault you continue to smoke crack. Was I at fault for you smoking the first time? Oh it was someone else? Phew! I thought it was ALL my fault. I am glad to know it was only my fault for your continued crackhell. What a relief!

10. Jerry you are NOT the man anymore. You blew it on crack. Wake up. Or you could go back to the neighborhood where they ALL love and cherish you and get you crack. Oh you say it is to hang out and play ball? That in the neighborhood they respect you. Hmmm? Is it because you still have money to buy crack so you can be da' man! If you screwed up your professional basketball career from crack, then like duh what is wrong with you? Oh yeah you got to be da' man, I forgot. Well Jerry, you is da' man, the crackman!

11. John in NY. You got caught so you exposed the expense check that was funding crackworld. It was because you got caught NOT because you desired freedom. Crack-lies. We suggested you change jobs. You said you could not afford to do that. Well the money you spend on crack does not justify a lower paying job and being crackfree so money DOES NOT go to crack? Do the CrackMath John. A job that had money going to crack and therefore bills get behind and we decided to move and NOT change jobs because it would pay less, hmm wait let's see: Job money to crack, new job less money but no money to crack, hmmm? Borderline stupid crackhead.

12. Kim's husband JEFF in Houston. Hey Jeff you the big man responsible for ALL the cocaine coming into Houston. What a guy! Why in the world would you ever want to stop crack. You would not have any power then. Kim I think it is wasting your time trying to help your husband. He wants to have that TITLE and life. He told me if he stops using crackcocaine "they" will kill him. Hmmm? What is that? Crackcocaine will kill him too! He must choose between the 2. To try and get me into the "story" that he is Mr. Cocaine SR. and that IF he stops using he will get killed by the mafia. What? The Cocaine Mafia? What the hell is that? The Cartel? In Houston? So not one person involved in cocaine can stop because they will die by way of getting killed? So let's just give up right now. No hope. All is done. Jeff has spoken and there is no way to stop crackcocaine. Sorry folks. Crack is going to get Jeff, but not us! Jeff you are a sorry excuse of a man. That you are not. Maybe a crackboy but certainly not a man. Have a nice cracklife Jeff. Sorry Kim.

13. Bryan in Florida you had no business going off on your Dad. Just because he called you a crackhead? You are a crackhead! Hey CrackBryan you are acting stupid. Are you trying to get on my stupid crackhead page? Keep acting like you did and you will end up a stupid crackhead in "jail"! I realize you are reaching out NOW and that is great, but I suspect your going to struggle with this simply from your arrogant attitude that I have seen in just the short time we have had contact. You say your life is falling; well that is what happens when we smoke crackcocaine. It will not just be "normal" from stopping. It is a process that takes awhile. It WILL NOT happen JUST because you now admit you have a problem. It is a process. Are you ready for the fight of your life? Somehow I feel you feel this should just happen and hey I am not smoking crack right now, why is everyone STILL on my case? Well Bryan I am not sure you are ready for a fight. I think you expect life to just click in place. Reality of smoking crack is it takes awhile to correct the crack-crap once it catches up to us and takes a chunk out of our sorry crackass! Bryan do our program. Start RIGHT NOW! Not after the NEXT episode!

Why Should You Listen To Todd and Camille?

I don't know.

Maybe they know HOW to conquer crackcocaine.

Why Should You Listen To Todd and Camille?

I don't know.

Get REALLY pissed-off at Todd. Go ahead! I mean so pissed-off that you want to slap him. So pissed-off you never want anything to do with him and Camille. So pissed-off you turn that towards crackcocaine and conquer crackcocaine forever! That IS all that matters. Stopping the madness of smoking crackcocaine.

Why Should You Listen To Todd and Camille?

I don't know.

Chapter 6 Guitar Dreams

2005-06-08T09:22:00.000-04:00

...
How much joy can I express in printed words that describe the ultimate high in life…to play music that moves the soul and spirit; a life long dream since I was 6 years old. I have had vivid dreams of recording a record or an album (a CD nowadays). The year of 2002 was the year a life long dream was fulfilled. I recorded a CD in my new basement on my home computer recording studio that I am very proud of. The melodies are soothing harmonic melodies. Some originated from right in the midst of the crack cocaine despair and hoping to find some peace. Then some emotions from other events surfaced through the guitar while I was messing around and my door to serenity was wide open and I was running through it this time.
When I was 5 years old I saw a guitar in the window of a store called D & C- 5 & 10 store. It costs $4.95. I went home and soon earned the money. My mother brought me to buy it and that was the start. She bought a book that had some pictures of chords and exercises and she showed me how to pluck the top string with a pick and strum down on the rest…pluck-strum strum, it was a C chord or at the time sort of a C chord. I liked it and was on my way to playing guitar. I had lessons and played in a lot of places in life by the time I was 13.
At the age of 29 I smoked crack cocaine. Playing guitar was not on life’s list anymore. I pawned my one prize possession in life…my 1958 double cut away Sunburst finish with circle fret marks Gibson ES-330 or 335, I am not positive which number exactly, but it was a dream guitar bought by my parents for my 11th birthday from just a guy going to Vietnam and was so sad to sell it. They bought it for $150. I pawned it for the last time for $75, to smoke crack, and I never was able to get it back. I have nightmares about this. It is a deep regret of mine as far as a thing I wished I really had now that I have actually done a CD. I still cry over this one. Life’s irony. The thought of not having my guitar and the reason why, keeps me humble. Just another bad crack memory.
In 1983 I had 7 guitars and stuff. From 1985 through 1997 I did not have 1 guitar or even think of playing or even wanted to. Looking back, it is clear that during this time my soul and spirit were empty, very empty.
In my last confined facility, (a work release program) ironically a guitar showed up. I brought in some new strings that had just been given to me by a guy that bought a hot-tub at the factory I worked at just out of the blue…ironically these are the ONLY strings I can use on this guitar. Every Saturday in the pool room I would get to play uninterrupted or hassled for about hour and a half. This lasted about 10 months. The last 3 months there, the guitar was locked up because some moron did something to ruin what was a decent thing. I was very eager to get a guitar now that I got a taste of playing again.
While in this facility I would play some blues and some classical pieces, and try and get some peace from playing. A tiny little seed was planted then, to again pursue playing the guitar. It was a magnet. Truly a healthy obsession. It was a direction that I put my time into this time. Grew up and decided to do something with my life and feelings. I let it go to God as I have heard said so many times from so many people in so many different ways, its head spinning. I just sat down and said, “God, if playing guitar is my door to serenity, please I want to go through it. Play through me. Help me find a way to express my new found freedom and share it and most of all keep it.”
Some of my new inspiration came from my long time hero of guitar playing-Phil Keaggy. At a local concert/clinic (with a ticket given to me by my wife for my birthday present) he shared some tips on how he went about playing. One thing he said was to go and tune your guitar to how it sounds good to you and let the guitar and the tuning take over, let it guide you. I did the minute I walked in the door and tuned my guitar to some really different sounds and just went for it. Some cool stuff started to happen.
My life had gotten to a point where I had some solid clean time playing my guitar. I would practice late at night and into the early hours of morning while my daughter and now pregnant wife slept. All together I would say I played on average 20-25 hours a week for 18 months. A whole lot better than being in the madness. This was a time for my soul and spirit to solidify their position in my physical existence. Finally true serenity. Another prayer answered. Today when I play guitar I feel complete serenity. A oneness. Complete. Ten feet tall and bazooka proof. Relaxing……Amazing.
When I was right in the middle of despair and sitting on the fifth floor in the facility I have mentioned before, with tears in my eyes, praying for some relief and then to start playing the song “I’m Sorry”. I felt I now had a way to communicate without speaking. By now my words were worthless anyway, along with all the broken promises. To say I’m sorry was pointless, but playing it felt like a start back to reality. Unfortunately it was just that, a start.
I do a lot of “Looking Back” and it does help me stay focused on the right now, especially when the bad crack memories push their way to the front of all thoughts and then I have to quickly move them to the here and right now thoughts as to how is my life right now. Otherwise they occupy too much space in my head…again the psychological pull of crack cocaine is the monster we are talking about.

Crackhead Mom with Agape Love

2005-05-14T09:13:00.000-04:00

...Agape Love by Marilyn R. Lyon
...episodes about Todd Wm. Gibson alias ie: "Crackhead"

Chapter Eleven

I was becoming an expert on organizing a crack-heads life after a fall. Something I never would have believed possible. I felt like George M. with a skill no one wanted.
When I received the last call of distress and failure I would ever receive from my son, I was calm, collected, organized and dedicated. As though I had been called at a professional emergency help facility.
I picked him up on a cold wet fall morning from a street corner about 2 miles from where he lived. He had on a summer hat, an unlined cotton jacket and no socks. He had just said, "pick me up". I did. Neither of us said anything.
I drove to a restaurant and we sat down over hot coffee. This time he did not start an explanation with how much he had failed, how low he was, how helpless he was. He matter of factly explained as though he had just visited a relative at the hospital who was in serious condition.
He had picked the lock on his landlady’s bedroom door and stole $200 in tips she had left on her dresser. He re-locked the door. She was retired and worked part time and did not really need the money. A week or two previous she suspected Todd but never did or said anything. Instead she had a bolt lock put on her bedroom door. So next time he broke in the window and this time stole $400 in quarters.
When she discovered the second theft and the dislodged window, she called the police. Todd was so mindless he was just in his room as usual. When the police arrived he and his sleeping mind hid in the closet.
However strangely, when the police searched the room and the closet, they found no one. It is hard to say how much crack related crime they had already been drenched with that day.
When they left he went out the window and wandered around half clothed in the bitter cold until it was late enough to call me.
I went to see his landlady that morning. She was amazed that a crack-head she had living in her house had stolen money she left laying on a dresser behind a locked door. She also seemed to enjoy the excitement of re-telling the story and made a very large point of making me look in his room to see that she had in fact packed up all his things. But really had a waitress from work come and pack his things as though that would have some significance in my then soggy mind. I looked at the pillows on the bed and wondered if they were Todd’s, but just wanted to get his things and go. I did not even look in the drawers or closet. I knew more about what he had lost than what he had left.
Very soon we discovered a shark tooth necklace my brother had just given him while visiting form Florida. A beaded necklace made by his sister for Christmas last year; a typewriter he had bought while in school. A pair of pet shears he had for 15 years, and a new portable heater in a box and his toiletries in the bathroom.
Todd had done something very, very wrong. The courts would see to it that he pay back every dime. As well as the fact that Todd would feel loosing his stuff was what he deserved. But the personal things from my brother brought tears to his eyes. The typewriter was one of the few things he had bought for himself in 5 years. His wrong did not seem to us to make their wrong right.
I called the landlady thinking that these things had been overlooked. She hung up on me. I just wanted to retrieve the necklace not because they were so valuable, but because of their personal meaning.
Although he never spoke of it, I am sure he knew there would be a warrant out for him. So did I. He had committed his first felony that I knew of, or that he had been caught at. Although I was operating efficiently, I was very, very numb inside. Inside I was not operating, not thinking and not feeling anything.
I was drained. Todd talked about having to go back to the hotel he had been at the last year. He went immediately that day and got a job as a waiter at a new restaurant that had just opened. He was numb too and dumb and living in some fantasy world that by getting a job getting a place to live and by pretending it never happened, it would go away.
He was frantically running. I was humbly waiting. I saw Todd’s body in my house but I did not feel connected to it.
Somewhere I must have known he had to be punished for this, and that he would be punished. Nothing seemed to matter to me. I just went through the motions.
It was only a few days after he had called me on that cold wet morning when I looked out and saw police converging from all sides of the house. They hand cuffed him. I kissed him and gave him a hug and cried. I said to no one in particular, "He is a crack-head, not a criminal", as they took him away.
Can this be happening to me? I could not see how it could. But it was. This was not a TV program. This was happening to us.
I sat around like a zombie when I was not at work. Scott would call me with the details of charges and things that he called to find out about. A felony did not connect in my mind. All crimes were the same to me.
Then I got a telephone call one day when I was sitting at my desk starring dazed and empty, out the window. She was calling from the Bail Bond Dept. of the jail to find out some information so she could advise in bond being set. I did not give her a chance to ask any questions. A volcano erupted inside me. "It doesn’t matter what the bond is", I told her, and "He does not have it". None of us were going to pay it, and I started to cry. "He’s a crack-head. We are all still standing by him but he is a hopeless crack-head. We have tried everything. He has tried and failed so many times. He use to be a completely different person". I cried, "He needs a good drug program, or even a bad one. He was so much stronger than he was 5 years ago. I know he is on the brink of being able to stop. He just needs some help, some tools, and some information. I tried and tried and cannot find any help". All this poured out of me again like it was coming from someone else. Like I was reciting something to an empty room again.
"Well. If you think a drug program would help him, that’s where we will put him".
Just like that. I was silenced. Did I hear her right?
"Hello"? She said.
"Yes I am here. OK. I do think it would help. I know it will help. He is ready. Maybe it would not have helped in the beginning, I do not know. I know he is ready now. Thank you. You really mean it? Just like that you can get him in a drug program’?
My son never knew about my conversations with all the people I have talked to. He did not know about this one. When he stood in front of the Judge and the Judge said his sentence would be 6 months in a re-hab facility, he asked, "Why"? "Why now"?
"You have committed a felony", the Judge said.
"You mean I could have gotten in a Re-hab program before, if I had committed a felony"?, He asked?
"Yes", the Judge answered.
"I wish someone had told me", my son said.
The judge had no idea what he was talking about, naturally.

Conquering CrackCocaine

2005-05-05T09:49:00.000-04:00

...

Conquering crack cocaine does not involve just the user. It starts with you obtaining knowledge and transforming that into power over how crack cocaine has entered your life. Then we plant a seed of hope and lovingly from a distance, nurture it. While contaminated, a user does not believe that there is a way out. We need to eliminate all the ways this person gets access to money. Never put money in the hands of a person possessed by crack cocaine, not even a penny. You may have to be drastic like sleeping with a purse or wallet in a plastic bag for a noise alarm to keep money away from the hands of a crack-head. Leave your valuables in a safe box or at someone else’s house. Camille had to do these type of things long enough to get a grip on the situation so a plan can be executed. Are there pop cans lying around? Take them in yourself. It only takes $5.00 to get going on crack cocaine again. Get a storage place and store all things that could be sold or pawned for money to get crack cocaine. Have pay checks direct deposited into an account he or she does not have access to. This is not an option. If a crack-head says they want help, they probably do. A sure fire way to see if this is real, is to direct deposit without exception. If this one simple thing is not complied to or agreed to, then the time is not right for them to quit. At this point YOUR survival is first. When they hit below bottom again or are in jail, they will cry for help again. Same thing then. Drastic measures for a drastic situation! If they need food you go buy the food and give it to them. You can pack them a lunch. Absolutely no money. Find a local food pantry through a church or program. If they need clothes, you can buy them and then cut the inside label off and write their name on the inside collar and you KEEP the receipt so it can not be returned for money. If it is possible and they are working, arrange to drive them or find someone to do it or buy a monthly bus pass so they can get to work only. The bus pass is only to look for a job or to get to a job. If they are looking, the names and times need to be on paper and verified. Your conversations should be limited to conquering crack cocaine. Nothing else matters. When he or she begs for money say NO! Practice saying NO. If they are being evicted give them the address to a local shelter if you are not able for some reason to have them in your home because they cannot be trusted yet. Print out pages from our website and give it to them for a present instead of material things. Todd's father bought him a gravestone and coffin for Christmas. Is this being mean? NO it is being real because crack cocaine does and will kill. Sometimes having tougher than tough love is needed to get that window open. Some people have to leave, some divorce, others have their children taken away. Many have to have protective services or the police called just to open that window. You have to fight crack cocaine with all your might. Sitting around worrying gets you nothing. Driving around looking for that person gets you nothing but out of gas. They will be back when they have exhausted all means of money or they are physically unable to continue. Pray to God for their safe return so you can continue the fight. There does come a point of deciding to let go. How do you know when that time comes? When your loved one shows no signs of progressing in the process of conquering crack cocaine. Progress could be as sad as they brought back $20.00 of their paycheck instead of nothing. The progress may be a little micro dust mite, but any and all progress is a sign to continue. When all progress stops, then yes there does come a time to let that person go. That does not mean that it can’t happen at a later time, but it means you might have to move on in hopes they will get to the point of desiring progress again, or needing it. The fact is, that some people never get there and crack cocaine kills. Crack cocaine is draining and exhausting. We are living proof that it is worth the fight.

We get a lot of questions on when do I trust again? Trust is earned not given. You give trust a little at a time until that person proves his or her trust ability. Little droplets of trust at first and that does not even begin until they have significant days clean (at least 45 days minimum) and are showing signs of progress. Camille let me carry money only when she was with me, for example: when we went out to eat Camille would let me hold the money and pay for the meal so I felt better in front of others, but the minute we got in the car I had to give what was left back, and it better add up. Keeping your loved one connected to the real world is very important to their ability to form positive self-esteem again. Having birthday parties, Christmas, family gatherings, taking them to church even if they just got high, going to a movie, buying a hamburger etc… normal events of everyday life. Sharing new ideas you read about. These things need to take place even if you have to drop them off back in their crack-infested neighborhood. Keeping in touch is a way of planting seeds of hope. Remember how your loved one use to be? Maybe you can help them get there again. It is possible. Crack cocaine can be conquered! This takes a team participation. Those in your family who wish not to participate, might have to step aside for a while.

Expose crack! Tell everyone you know that your loved one is possessed by crack cocaine. It does not matter who knows. The more you expose crack cocaine the less power it has on you or your loved one. Camille even told the grocery clerks about it and gave the manager a picture and told them Todd is possessed by crack cocaine and may try to cash a bad check here. You know what? They did call when Todd tried to do this. Camille would tell local police, neighbors, all family members, pastor and EVERYONE she came in contact with and it worked! Crack-Todd started to lose power and my Todd is the man we knew he is! Crack-Todd could not go anywhere in the area we lived in without Camille finding out. So SPEAK! This is your life and your loved ones soul you are fighting for. Embarrassment never gets you to a crack-free life, but taking control does. Tom Petty has a song that has a line in it that goes, “I'm taking control of my life, right now!”. So can you. So can your loved one.

We know crack cocaine can be conquered. We are here to help anyone through the process. When we went through this we had very little help. Our goal is to reach as many people as we can. We are not here to debate programs and whether they work or not. We are here to share our beliefs, uphold them and share any and all ways that allowed Todd and I to conquer crack cocaine.

Truth

2005-04-30T12:39:00.000-04:00

...

Developing a program to living your life crack-free is a process of finding ways that will help you. We need to not worry about making mistakes. We will have to learn from those mistakes. A strong support team and developing your relationship with God has to be. We have a belief that there is a better life than the pathetic one that crack cocaine brings you to. Crack cocaine can be conquered! You can live your life without it. We are here to bring you our truths about crack cocaine. Addiction, disease or possession? Or all three?! First we need to understand what crackcocaine is. Addiction is the habitual use and feeling of need of a substance. Disease is a pathological condition of a part, organ, or system of an organism resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress, and characterized by an identifiable group of signs or symptoms. Possession is to take into control. Crackcocaine takes a person's soul into control, even changing their character (attributes, traits, or abilities) and rapes them of their moral values, and keeps them from having a valuable life. This is true for both the person using and those involved with the user. It is our belief that when a person uses crack cocaine it possesses their body, soul and spirit. We visualize that the smoke of crack cocaine is the very breath of Lucifer. We believe crack cocaine is an actual evil force out to destroy those that are possessed by the breath of Lucifer and the sweetness of the devil's candy. In a disease, the affects are to the individual; an addiction affects first the individual. Crack cocaine immediately effects everyone involved with the user, including the user. So, forever possessed? No, crackcocaine can only possess you as long as you let it.

Before you start the process.
First you must view yourself as just a person who wants to stop smoking crack cocaine. This is even if and when we say we don’t want to stop.
Second we must accept the fact that no one can do anything to make you stop smoking crack cocaine. You must choose what works for you to stop smoking crack cocaine. If one way does not work, try another way.
Third important item is to accept all progress however seemingly small and seemingly insignificant it is, as success. When you fall, pick yourself up from where you fell, apply all the knowledge and progress you have obtained and continue your program for living your life crack cocaine free.
The fourth thing is…have hope in yourself. The hardest obstacle in front of you, is you. You have heard testimony that living life without crack cocaine is possible. Your experience with adverse situations will provide the strength and desire for this new life.
Start with thirty days to cleanse, either in a treatment center which is preferred because of the medical things that can happen when getting crack cocaine out of your system, or you can devise a plan to do this at home.This one would mean zero money, no car, no job, no phone, no alcohol, no drugs unless prescribed by a doctor…nothing. It does not matter if you have a job because the money was already going to crack cocaine anyway. Go to church or a meeting or both. Start going to safe crack-free places. Begin gathering your support team. This does not have to be forever. It does need to be right now until the behavior and actions support a non-crack cocaine daily pattern.
Read the bible or any other printed words of healing truths. Write in a journal everyday. Writing is a wonderful and powerful tool, maybe the strongest. Be safe in a safe place with safe people, ALWAYS! Do not go anywhere alone. Always have a safe person with you. Do not be alone during this time, not for a minute, not for a second. Use your own or any kind of support team to help you. On line chat groups are available during times when it is not possible to have a person with you at home. Be safe in a safe place with safe people 24/7, no excuses.

Crack Don't...s

2005-04-26T07:11:00.000-04:00

.............

1. Don't EVER let a crackhead have money.
2. Don't believe anything a crackhead says.
3. Don't leave valuables around the house when and if a crackhead is present.
4. Don't believe you are the reason they are possessed by crackcocaine.
5. Don't call their employer and make excuses for them.
6. Don't mask crack-possession with just an alcohol problem.
7. Don't give a crackhead access to ANY vehicle.
8. Don't buy presents for ANY known crackhead ever.
9. Don't allow anything but DIRECT DEPOSIT to an account they cannot access.
10. Don't be afraid to SAY crackhead.
11. Don't pay any bills, rent, food, check charges, crack-dealer debts, NOTHING.
12. Don't be afraid to confront their crack-behavior with truths and facts.
13. Don't allow a crackhead free-rent if you choose to let them live with you.
14. Don't protect a crackhead from crack-behavior consequences.
15. Don't offer more than "the streets" or "rehab"...that's it.
16. Don't chase them or crackcocaine. Pray for safe return.
17. Don't be afraid to call the police.
18. Don't accept calling or coming home late again - go sleep at the crackhouse.
19. Don't be inconsistent.
20. Don't focus on perfection...focus on progress.
21. Don't expect immediate 100% freedom.
22. Especially do not believe ANYTHING said from a crackhead-in-jail.
23. Don't be afraid to "PISS 'EM OFF".

Just For the Blog of It.

2005-04-18T11:39:00.000-04:00

Detroit "Attack on Crack" Presentation Saturday April 17, 2005 415PM - 845PM
Wow! It is so amazing how difficult it is for a crackhead to give up the money! The ONLY reason for this, is somewhere in their mind, they are still thinking about smoking crackcocaine. Real men give up their money to someone they trust or love or both. Even "realer" men DO NOT HASSLE, MANIPULATE OR GO AGAINST THIS MONEY GIVING UP, after they have agreed that they are a crackhead and money gives them "access" to the ability to buy crackcocaine when one of those "squirrelly" moments come! The impression that it was and is NOT THAT BAD is so mamby pamby, soft, fluffy, phony and full of B.S.! Smoking crackcocaine is wrong, bad, horrible and kills everyone and the crackhead from the inside first, before the secular or the "reality" world kills the crackhead for real! Crack-Kills. Crackhead pride again reared its ugly head Saturday. Hey I know, I think I will screw up my life again so I can move back home knowing the rules and then NOT follow the rules and act like my parents are fools! There is a possibility I could get my life in-order so I will never have to deal with my parents "foolish" rules and can actually decide if I want to go to a meeting instead of being ordered by a judge, probation officer or a non-ever used crackcocaine person who only wants us to NOT smoke crackcocaine and know of no other way that society has to offer with addiction and especially a possession --- of your soul. But hey, this time you know what you are doing, what it is been a week right? That should be enough time for you to know how NOT to smoke crack right? Certainly by you the "crackhead" saying sure I can quit for 25 days or at least 21 days, well we KNOW if you had the money and the access to getting and smoking crackcocaine, you would fall even further in the crack-abyss. Of course I do remember being told hey maybe today is the start of never smoking crack again! Yes it could be. I hope it is. This is a process that is so spiritually draining, we know crackcocaine has incredible power when it will actually have a crackhead finding it easier dealing with crack-crap than the spiritual onslaught that comes when we decide to attack crack. One other interesting comment, when I talked to this crackhead before going to Detroit, he did agree and say that crack talks to you. When I asked him in person in front of everyone, he denied that crack talks to him. He just shrugged it off as if to say hey Todd, see I am not THAT bad of a crackhead because crack does not talk to me, or like purposely going against our presentation to show me up in front of his family. Anyway he knows crack talks to him. I know crack talks to him. Why he is so defiant, is an indication to me he is doing what it takes to keep daddy and mommy happy (because he screwed up again smoking crackcocaine and had to move back home) instead of really wanting freedom from crackcocaine. His next crack-high is really all he wants to go towards. He is not willing to sacrifice ANYTHING to earn this freedom we are talking about. For some reason he thinks freedom is free. Maybe he should ask a soldier in Iraq, or better yet ask a family who lost a member to Saddam's demonic rule for over 30 years, but I have a feeling this "crackhead" from Detroit who DOES NOT do laundry which REAL men do when needed or asked to help with, feels freedom should be handed to him especially since he has NOT smoked crackcocaine for 8 days?! Unless there is a commitment to do the things that WILL stop crackcocaine dead in its tracks, this Detroit crackhead will NOT be able to resist an enemy a lot stronger than all of us, unless we unite and agree to attack crack in any way that exposes it, confronts it and destroys crackcocaine. Every crackhead CAN BE FREE from the grip crackcocaine has on possessed souls. ONLY the crackheads themselves can release the crack-demon from themselves. The enemy has them tricked that this is not possible so stop trying. Crack-demon, it is just cocaine, a drug just like ALL other drugs but NOT a demon. It could NOT be that simple. Yes it can and is. EASY? Not even close to easy. SIMPLE? This is the simplest truth about crackcocaine and what it takes to conquer crack. Crackcocaine IS the devilscandy. That is what it is. John 10:10 tells us the "devil" deceives us so good, like a piece of "candy", once we smoke crackcocaine, he has owner-ship of your soul. The lie goes even deeper when the enemy convinces us we can have crackcocaine and a life too and we will spend many years trying to achieve this and never will. NO I HAVE NOT met any crackhead with a life. There are none. Phony false ones sponsored by the enemy to once again trick us into a "hush hush" and shhhhhh attitude about crackcocaine. Let's not talk about it and by the way give up MY MONEY that I earned the right to spend on crack? No way. I know how to NOT smoke crackcocaine. It is easy. I do it every few weeks or so, NO I MEAN I do not smoke crackcocaine every few weeks! Gosh, you act like I am a crackhead or something!

WOW!
Crackcocaine is such an evil, arrogant and deceptive tool fromthe enemy! The more we attack, the more deceptive it becomes. Butthat is part of the plan from the enemy. If we would just trust,believe and have faith in a life WITHOUT crackcocaine, it woulddiminish the power crackcocaine has on our soul and spirit. There islife in abundance wihtout crackcocaine. Can anyone say that aboutlife with crackcocaine? How is it that NOT being able to STOP smokingcrackcocaine is a disease? Is this the same as NOT being able to eatjust one Lay's potato chip? Crackcocaine IS the devilscandy. That iswhat it is. And if we need a label put with that, the label will becrackcocaine is a "disease of possession"! The cure is to believe inthe FACT that crackcocaine can be conquered and destroyed forever! Ofcourse this goes way beyond substance abuse and JUST an addiction.Why is it that the simple truth is so difficult to believe? Maybebecause it is too simple. I mean how cute to call crackcocaine "thedevilscandy". What a great gimmick Todd and Camille have come up withto hawk their books and programs! Damn straight it is a greatgimmick. You want to know what though? IT WORKS! Whether a gimmick ora truth of simplicity, it works to STOP CRACKCOCAINE DEAD IN ITSTRACKS! If someone could explain to me how the "evil" got inside ofthose idiots who flew palnes into the Twin Towers, and why when wesmoke crackcocaine this cannot be the same evil (of course withoutscientific data) that possesses the crack-user. WHY? Maybe becausesomewhere poeple do not want the crackcocaine to go away. It wouldcost a lot of jobs in our prison's, treatment centers, probationofficers, and hey let' not forget the crack-punk dealers. Maybe thereis a crackunion out there promoting that NOT being able to STOPsmoking crackcocaine IS a disease, and knowing a lot of people willnot buy into that and Tod and Camille just have a gimmick...lookslike crackcociane is poised to continue to destroy because it IS toosimple to be free forever...Todd the CrackConqueror

CrackHead 101

2005-04-09T10:40:00.000-04:00

This weeks class is on how we do NOT give a crack-head money ever, and no reason is good enough to put money in any amount in a crack-heads hand; and if you do, you are responsible for the consequences, not the crack-head! (if the money did come from you)
I need money for..
Request: Lunch Answer: No you don't here is your sack lunch.
Request: Gas Answer: No you don't I filled your tank.
Request: Cigarettes Answer: No you don't here is a pack opened and with one missing.
Request: I got to pay the dealer back or he'll kill me Answer: Not if you don't go back there.
R- I need bus money A- No here is a bus pass.
R- I have a flat tire A- I will meet you at the tire store.
R- I have bills to pay A- Who do I make the check out to, what's the account number and how much?
R- I need new shoes A- Lets go to the shoe store together.
R- We need to tithe A- Sure lets get a money order with our church name on it and you can place it in the offering plate while we are at church.
R- I need to pay for a doctor's appointment A- What's the doctors name I will write the check and take you.
R- I need a haircut A- I will take you; What salon do you like?
R- I have court fines A- What's your case number so I can call and get the amount and send them a check.

NEVER PUT MONEY IN THE HANDS OF A CRACK-HEAD, EVER! That does not mean forever. Right now though, NO MONEY PERIOD!

How do you know when your crack-head has conquered crack? Crack is conquered when being accountable does not bother them. Crack is conquered when they do not fear crack-cocaine. Crack is conquered when they can hold a job and manage their money, pay their bills and have fun. Crack is conquered when God and their family come first. Crack is conquered when they are happy with their accomplishments and are at peace with themselves and their current surroundings. Crack is conquered when you and family members can trust them again (this happens only after they can trust themselves first). Crack is conquered when they can live their life crack-cocaine free without the assistance of anything else except the truth about crack-cocaine being the devil's candy that is seeking only to kill them. Crack is conquered when they are willing to help others conquer crack-cocaine. Crack is conquered when they can live with themselves the way they are without crack-cocaine and attack the urges and resist.

We frequently like to go over signs and symptoms of crack-cocaine use. We do this to remind you of what to look for.

Crack is cocaine cooked in baking soda and water to form a chunk like piece and then broken in tooth size pieces and is kind of an off white color. The name crack comes from the sound it makes when lit. Crack came about in the early 1970's by American dealers by chance. They had placed some cocaine on tin foil and burned it to test its purity. Then they discovered sniffing the vapors was quite an intense high and the birth of freebasing cocaine was born. From being cooked in baking soda and being so small yet so potently devastating to all life allowed for easy transportation, packing and selling of this horrible drug. The simplicity and abundance of crack-cocaine lead to extreme use and lots of money for crack-punk dealers.

The first thing to look for is his or her pupils will be huge and glassy. Then profuse sweating, drastic weight loss, sensitivity to light and sound, very hyper and does not sleep then followed by complete exhaustion, not eating then eating like crazy, sexual dysfunction, extreme sexual fantasy but cannot follow through, dramatic mood changes, extreme self-confidence, anger, depression, paranoid, suicide thinking, unable to hold a job, intense arguing, very chatty, financial and legal problems, not paying bills, no food in the house, not a penny to their name and are very highly skilled at covering up the where's, the who's, and the what's with denial and lies. He or she may have burns on their lips or hands from smoking crack and sometimes are unable to control urination and bowel movements possibly from having an allergic reaction to the additives in street drugs, menstrual cycle problems, malnutrition and a ton of others that slip the mind.

In pregnancy there can be miscarriage, premature birth, low birth weight, still birth, addicted newborn, deformities and a number of other problems for the baby. Other risks include: aids, hepatitis and sexual diseases are possible from the practice of un-safe sex for crack. Ways he or she may buy crack include: stealing, writing bad checks, pawning anything he or she can carry, bringing pop bottles back, pan handling, sexual favors, allowing crack-dealers to use their car, giving rides to other crack-users, selling crack, delivery of crack, trade food stamps for crack, give blood for crack, rob banks and people, spend their welfare on crack, steal others checks and forge names, prostitution, break into cars, receive gifts and return them for the money and lots more the list is too long for this news letter. The worst jobs for a crack-head include: waiting tables, cleaning houses, jobs that require traveling alone, jobs at retail stores, driving cab or any job that deals with handling cash and I am sure more that I am not thinking of.

CrackHeads with Money = lives ruined again and still!

2005-04-06T12:53:00.000-04:00

This is from a lucky crackhead with money who only smokes 2 rocks a week! Geez...what a lucky crackhead with money. How come I never was a crackhead as lucky as this one. I was such an under priviledged crackhead.

hi, i am in a strange position. i have been smoking
crack for about a year after abstaining for 15 yrs. i
am now 56. i read all these stories and they all say
about the same thing. what bothers me about my habit
is that once i do my two 20.00 piecies i always stop.
i do it once a week, that is my habit. how is it that
i am always able to controll the amount i do and how
much i do it? these people i read about seem to do it
for days. what is it about my habit that i am able to
controll these things. my body always tells me enough
is enough. if i smokede any more than i said, i get
really nausious and my heart would give out. anyway
its really bad and i have been straight for almost
three weeks. i hope i never do it again. i read your
people stories every day. i never got to the lows of
these people who tell their stories. i have been in
bad places as a result of using the drug, but never
had to resort to stealing, although i know what the
lying is all about. how long do you thing it will take
to get rid of the physical urges at this point after
being straight for 17 days? and what about the mental
urges? do they ever stop like they mostly do when you
stop smoking. i have been nicotine free for 5 months.
i have no physical urges, and dont think about it much
until i see someone smoking. i guess if i saw someone
smoking crackk like people smoke cigs. it would be
really hard to quit. what do u think about my
comments?

thankyou for your response, although i wish you would
look at my specific comments and questions without
sending me back what appears to be mostly a " form "
response. if you care to look at my specifics, even
though you said i was lucky, i would appreciate it. i
know it must be so hard responding person to person to
everyone who writes, but i appreciate the fact that
you responded at all!!!!,

Thank you 2 rock crackhead.

This is from a crackhead with ONLY $40 on them. Have money...will smoke!

Well as of today I am not good at all this past Friday I did the unthinkable again! YES LUCIFER got me! I am soooo ashamed!!!!! Todd I do not know what happened all I know is I took my brother to court in Wharton and they revoked his porbation due to fees and that had me crying all theway home then got mom something to eat then made an excuse to leave!! WHY???? I am not myself at this moment in time. My man has forgiven me for the $40.00 I spent but is still hurt that I did it......I am on day number 2 again and will try to find my way again....get myself up and dust myself off and no pity party for me got want to get back on with my life because I want my life right for good this time!!!!!

This is so sad...crack is crack -- sad but true! Crackheads with money smoke crack!

This is from a crackhead who thinks leaving money elsewhere will stop crack. Any money ANYWHERE with access to it will bring cracksmoke to the fire of desire to smoke crackcocaine.
Easy...HELL NO! Simple....oh yeah...very!

I tried to get my twin out of using but instead i ended up using too. So far i have been beaten up, lost alot of money, my self respect and need help.
I am alone with two adult sons who dont know that i have used and i have been using for about 8 months now, my twin for 4 years. i hate it, i know it is evil, i see the evil in everything and everyone who does it. i know it is on a seek and destroy mission with everyone it touches. everytime i feel despair i run to it, but all it does is make me not care about everything or anyone. i feel unloved and think if no one loves me why should i love myself. Then the next day i do care about everything, when i go to it i leave most of my money elsewhere so i wont spend it. i think that i am limiting myself but instead end up begging someone for more. One is a tease and 1000 is not enough. please help

Whereever you go you will follow...the enemy knows the deal with money...too bad crackheads do not!

This is from a crackhead with lots of money so he could buy more than he thought he should? HUH?

My name is XXX. i been smoking this shit for 2 weeks. I had a lot of money, so i was buying more than i thought i would.... I had been up for 3 days.... on the 3rd night, i got home with my last 2 rocks, and i smoked them both then started smoking a spliff of cannabis to go to sleep.... Then i could hear this drum beat very repetitive, and getting louder..... my mouth was dry and i needed water yet i decided not to move..... all of a sudden i felt a presence....i ran outta my bedroom into the kitchen downstairs, and drank some water.....the presence had followed me and fully entered me...... something had control of me.... i could talk, but couldn't stop moving......i knew something was inside me trying to gain full control, but it couldn't.....it was enough to scare the shit outta me..... my arms carried on moving, i couldn't stop moving my legs.... my brother got scared.....i rang the ambulance and told the operator i had been spiked with something in my cigarette......when they came, i ran up into my bedroom (where i had been smoking it like a dickhead) to put some clothes on and open the windows...... but i heard the "hell beat" again..... this time i could feel the presence deeper, and i ran out of the house...into the ambulance....they took me hospital and left me in the waiting room for 1 hour.... i was still moving but a lot less than before......i was still stuttering when i taLKED and also rubbing my chest , my legs, licking my lips, talking very fast and carelessly...... plus i was understanding exactly everything around me....but i just couldn't help being normal...... i was fucked properly....the doctor came out to see me and told me to get lost and go home.....he treated me like a junkie and didn't have the slightest care for what i had just gone through or experienced.... my heart was still beating fast.... i rang a taxi and got a lift home....i'm lucky it was still early morning and no one really saw me in that state....i was still moving and stutteri g really fast....thye driver dropped me outside my house and went.....i knocked my door, and my sis in law opened it.....i entered the house and went up to get my trainers, but as i looked up the stairs, i felt the presence stronger than ever, and my vision went temporarily red with smoke from upstairs....no one else could see or feel what i was seeing and feeling... i ran to the kitchen for more water but "it" chased me and got hold of my left arm, i could feel pains there......i ran out of the house, then it weared off....... then i realised this must be the gateway to your own personal hell, that i have just created.....every time i'd heard about this shit, i thought it was rubbish until it happened to me...... this was the most (messed) up experience of my life..... that has made me stop this shit...., also it makes me feel like killing every bastard that sells it or promotes it...... thats all....... i thought i was the only one....
I am from a little town called Bedford, in England....

Angry crackheads possessed and with lots of money will bring the enemy to devour your soul, chew it up and spit it out...right in your stupid crackhead with money's face.

This is from the woman in love with a crackhead with money. Gift money at that. Here have the gift of death...money for crack!

Hi Camille. Well, things were trying to be good. Seems as soon as the job came along, our lives have been turned upside down again. XXXX finished his 75 days, and shortly after decided to have a drink on his birthday Nov 5th, then 2 days later more and more after that etc...so went back on antabuse. blah blah
He got a nice new job and they said they could give him a check so he would have some Christmas money. On Thursday he decided not to meet me after work on Friday. (Plotting already I guess knowing he would be paid that day and did not tell me) Instead, he got paid, bought crack and weed. Today, Monday, I come home and he's not here. TV, lights and heater on. He's gone. Then I listen to my messages. It's good ol Karma again. He got himself picked up and put back in jail somehow. Same ol scenario. The system still has this warrant on file that has not been updated. Well, I call it Karma. he belongs in jail for what he "really" did. Too bad they didn't find drugs on him. Needless to say, I'm fed up. I am telling him this is his last chance. If he can't deal, he's going to a 2 year program. Won't see me for 18 months either. I think that's fair. I'm sorry, I'm venting. I can't go to the group because no one there is very supportive, just a bunch of angry people. and listen to me....lol What a joy I am.
I just want you to know what's been going on since 75 days. After 75 days, it seems like he just went no further. What do people do after the time is up with this program? What is the next step? That part was really unclear. All just fell flat on its face. We are at a loss with this. I did my part the best I could. I really feel like I am losing all respect and a lot of love for him. How can I when he disrespects this house and puts us at risk? I can't even tell you anything else. It's all too shocking and embarassing. Did you get my last E-mail? I didn't hear back. Please let me know that you got this one.

Thank you for the Christmas card and thinking of us. We just received it.

Merry Crackmas!...All I want for Crackmas is my crack^^money, my crack^^money!

This is from an offer to buy devilscandy.com....the enemy never stops trying eh?

Hello,
Are you willing to sell devilscandy.com to me.
I am starting a new business and thought this would be a good name. I'm making an offer of 1500 USD. please let me know.
Thanks for your time.
Best Regards,

$1500.00 USD....do ya think that is enough? Hmmm?! I don't think so...devilscandy IS NOT 4sale...not now not ever...NO AMOUNT OF MONEY WILL EVER BE ENOUGH! Are you kidding! The enemy comes to me with a million$..to sell and then not be here to bring the truth about crackcocaine! NICE TRY Luci...

This is from a crackhead about ready to loose everything because he lies about his money and has to have it...oh he gives his girl some...lies about other money coming and smokes crack...DUH?!

Todd,
In the quest to conquer cocaine addiction, is it ok for a crack addict to
drink? My boyfriend who is trying to conquer crack addiction seems to think
anytime he chooses since he is 45 years old is ok, he didn't hurt anyone or
anything. He just gave me a check the other day he cashed last week of $750
because he had cashed it and had temptations. He still holds the atm card
and has access to his money, because he doesn't want to be controlled. I so
much long to help, but am very hurt tonight because he gets upset everytime
I question him when he decides to drink. I am seriously considering giving
up on this relationship of three years. I have waited two years for him to
stop and even tells me how he can't drink when I'm not here and how he
messed up over the last month almost every weekend for a month. I was gone
to Florida with a job, and he used every Saturday night or Sunday evening.
Made it to work everytime he did it on a Sunday evening, but does that make
it ok, does that mean he is getting better?
Any advice would help!
Thank you,

This crackhead with money is about to loose his job, woman and everything just because he cannot give up the money to someone who he supposedly loves and trusts. Thing is he trusts the enemy more...and that is obvious. Hmmm? Let us see...I trust myself as a crackhead with money more than my beautiful woman who loves me...and would rather put money into a crack-punk dealer and support crackcocaine evil than to give up the money so he can stop the madness. This qualifies as a really stupid crackhead with money!

Another offer to buy devilscandy.com? What is going on! No it is not for sale!

Hello,
Are you interested in selling devilscandy.com?
If so, please respond with your asking price or at least a price range if your looking for offers. We are planning to make a web portal. Our purpose is to buy this domain from you and use it in this project. We can make the domain transfer operations safety, over escrow.com. I can pay for the cost of domain transfer operations. If you accept, please let me know.
Thanks for your time.
Best Regards,

No sale...no money...no crack-smoking!

This is from a crackhead with money who does not think he has a problem and refuses to DIRECT DEPOSIT.

I'm going to get a phone card so I can call you later on. ( Don't have long distance on the phone) Is there a good time to call you thisd evening? I don't know if my husband would be willing to talk this time. (His name is Nick.) Like I said, this time he SWEARS he doesn't have a problem. His mom said, " He said he was just TESTING himself." Then why did he call a crack dealer the next day? They enable him to do this because they give him a place to go crash. It's insane. I think he would rather divorce me than admit he has a problem. No, I'm not working right now. Had to stay home and babysit him. We have 3 girls and 1 boy. I am 22.He is only 25. (My name is Michelle- everybody calls me Shell though) He isn't willing to direct deposit that check somewhere. In fact, he got his settlement recently and I couldn't even TOUCH it. He carried around that much cash in his wallet. I'm in Pensacola Florida and we have central time. I love him more than anything in this world and I do not want to leave him. I said earlier, there is a GREAT man in there somewhere.

A great man in there somewhere with money to buy crack. Crackheads with money are not great men...there are stupid crackhead guys men fellas....

CrackHeads with money = lives ruined again and still!

Chapter 10 from Agape Love by Marilyn R. Lyon

2005-03-31T10:17:00.000-05:00

A picture of Todd from Sept. 1992..is on "Crackheads in Jail" page at
http://www.devilscandy.com
http://www.devilscandy.com/crackheads_in_jail.htm

Halfway between the months of August and December of 1992, Todd began to get very nervous about his money. He had claimed from the beginning that he could not handle money even under the best of conditions. It was only by the Grace of having had such a plentiful amount always coming in those years previously he managed to make ends meet. He was convinced that getting a check and going to cash it was a trigger that made him eventually give into crack. This was especially true after he had picked up the pieces of his life and things were running smoothly again. To his credit even with the profound lure of crack plummeting through his system every day after a failure his resolve to set his life functioning again on some level was so strong he could concentrate on only that. He would be able to use this strength someday to stop. But as his life began to run again the lure moved further to the front and talked to him loudly. "You can have it all this time. This time it will work".
I came home from work one day and there was a badly scribbled note in large letters taped to my bedroom door. His door was closed. Basically it said he was the lowest crawling slimy scum that ever was put on earth. He had cashed his check and went right to the crack house. He spent all but a few dollars for gas and food. This included spending his rent money. He promised under oath and death that with next weeks check he would make it up. He apologized and apologized and apologized. He also added that he was so depressed and suicidal he could not talk about it right now.
This was a slip according to George Medzerian's book. I went immediately into his room uninvited not knocking. He was curled up in a ball with all his clothes on including his shoes with the covers pulled over his head. I pulled the covers off his head, rubbed his shoulders briefly and sat down.
I told him," You have slipped again. Get out of bed. Tomorrow is another day. Start again. If it gets worse then this we will have to rethink your staying here. For now just start again".
He sat up on the edge of the bed telling me he was hopeless he was so low there were no words for it.
I told him this was ridiculous to feel this way. He was lying to himself. Why do that? He had been a raving success 90% of his life. He was loved by everyone who met him. He must start again. Take it day by day.
He said he needed my help with his money. I would need to meet him at the store when he cashed his check. He would give me my rent money, buy food and I could hold the rest of his money for him. It's funny I never honestly felt that his crack-crap was a weakness in him. More that he was in the grips of a demonic profound substance. I felt this even from the start. I felt this thing with his money was a weakness, and I was enabling him. How could one function out there get rid of crack with no money passing through their life? He was convinced this made a difference.
Enabling or not, I did it. I was sure there were so many triggers and reasons and answers for his crack-crap so this one would not profoundly change anything.
School became a measuring stick to me. He was taking accounting and computers. If that part was still functioning, then he had to be. As we neared the Holidays again he was still very busy, still home when he was not at work, school or keeping his car running. Except when some friends came into his life. Non-addicted friends of course he assured me. He was very, very lonely. I was not happy with these friends although I did not know them. For a long time now he would not tell me even what side of town any people he spent time with lived on. Because I would be there driving around looking for his car if he disappeared. Taking out my anger and frustration on his friends because I could not take it out on him. In the beginning I had told all his friends I did not want any of them around Todd if they were using. They all pledged sincerely to me they were not. Which was not true. Those who I found out about, I would chase off my porch and hang up on if they called. We had both become jaded and dysfunctional from this lethal substance.
As the month went by he became moody and withdrawn. The trips to the bathroom started again. He dropped one of his classes. He began to stay out overnight once in awhile or coming in very late, avoiding the day as long as possible. One day I went into his room and smelled his pillows and blankets on his bed and gagged. The old drug smell, like no other smell on earth was back again. He was back on crack. By the time the smell arrived he was out of control again. He had been still giving me rent money and buying food, but he had started to run out of gas at least twice a week.
I stripped his bed and started to pack up his things. I was going to ask him to leave, but he never came back. The school began to call. Where was he? Finals were starting. As the week of his absence progressed, his cat became very ill with pneumonia. I sat up all night with Tigger. In the middle of the night I waded through the snow to my shed to find a box so I could put a rug in the dryer and warmed it up and put him into the box. I thought he was going to die before morning and I would have to put him outside in the cold until the Vet's office opened. The next morning I took him to the vet and made arrangements to have him put to sleep if he did not get better by evening.
I went to Todd’s job, but his car was not there. I waited to see if he would come in late. At lunch I went again thinking maybe he would come then. It was payday. I called his job and he had not been to work for days and had not picked up his check.
Later that day they brought his cat into me and left me alone with him, thinking he was mine and I wanted to be with him before they put him to sleep. I did not. I could not. I ran out of there not even paying them. I went to Scott’s office and made him go back and pay them. I could still hear his cat crying this mournful distressed cry that cats have when they are somewhere they do not want to be. Todd had always said he would be with his cat when they put him to sleep. He wanted him buried in a separate grave with a grave stone. I paid extra to have him buried in a plot where only 4 or 5 cats were buried together, rather than twenty. The rest I could not manage.
I cried as though it were Todd I had lost. I cried for him and for me. Mostly I cried for him. This too, he had missed. This too, he could never retrieve. It would live inside him forever. This knot of pain that he had missed this too. He could not go back and re-do it.
The weeks went by this December month and no one heard from Todd. I tried to talk Scott into believing we should report him missing. He would agree then change his mind then change it again. Then Scott started to see him drive by in his car always going in a direction he could not easily follow. He always saw him in the general area where Scott lived. As though in the throes of drug suicide Todd wanted to be near someone. Then I saw him one day. By the time I got turned around I could not find him. His car window had been broken and a piece of plastic covered it. He was dirty disheveled and bent forward intently over the steering wheel driving very slowly.
At least he was alive. I think he obviously left my home before he got so totally out of control he emptied it out. Another shred of strength and integrity that he could still conjure up in the midst of a total crack-crap journey. I collected these things.
As Christmas neared Scott received a call from Todd. He was in jail about 35 miles out of town. He wanted Scott to get his tools and a few things from his car because it was going to be impounded. Todd had been stopped for a traffic violation and he had a warrant out for him for failing to pay more than a few payments to the courts on his bad check charge in the last 4 years. The judge gave him the choice of going to jail for 4 months and have the checks paid off, or to work it off through community service as well as make payments.
Todd, who 4 years previously had begged to be kept out of jail, was now immune to such trivia in the life of a crack-head. He chose jail. There were 9 people in his cell. All but one was there for crimes related to crack.
The Holidays passed without him. Scott was the only one who visited him once. I have never visited Todd in jail.
We all took a rest for 4 months. He was alive and safe in jail for now. Except we could not help but speculate: Was this the magic answer as society seemed to think and others were sure of? Had he and I avoided this all these years only to find it did the trick where all else had failed?
Scott went to clean out his car and he called me. He 'd found bags of sales receipts and others thrown around in his car from a lot of different stores. We puzzled over this. We knew he had to be doing something to survive on crack alone. But what? He had been picked up for a traffic violation not theft. His body was so saturated with crack that driving had finally become too difficult.
We finally put together the small business enterprise he had devised to survive on his several month long journey. We speculated that he would collect sales receipts from somewhere, the trash or ground. Then steal the item and return it.
At that point my imagination began to work overtime and had he not been stopped on a traffic violation I could see him progressing to bank robbery. I talked to everyone in the court system trying to explain to them that my son was on an accelerating crime binge to get crack. Could they do something or anything? Could they help in getting him in a drug program. Their response was either one of boredom, disinterest, professed ignorance or just plain "no".
I moved on to his Probation Officer who had been in his life since he wrote the bad checks at the time I first found out he was a true crack-head. She was a very ignorant female. I explained, I analyzed, I philosophized, I cried, I begged and pleaded with her to treat Todd as a crack-head whose crimes for crack were going to get worse and to get him into a drug program or prison was close at hand.
She was so bored with the conversation she could have easily yawned. She was unimpressed, sarcastic and cynical, almost non-communicative. She reluctantly admitted she would be appearing in court about Todd shortly and she would 'mention' it to the judge. She doubted the judge would agree with me. I asked her did she want me to come and plead with the judge. She did not.
I also wrote a letter outlining everything we'd talked about and sent it for his file. It seems I was the only one who read it.
Nothing ever came of it. As Todd and his Probation Officer traveled together and Todd got more and more out of control on crimes and crack, I both felt that she treated Todd as though he were a privileged person who deliberately just for the fun of it like some jet set spoiled brat, did crack. To think that someone so privileged also had some special power over crack and could therefore just stop, la-tee-da. Not like her other non-privileged deprived social outcasts, who had long lists of legitimate reasons for their chose of drugs and crime.
In light of the facts, most of her caseload had to be drug related. Yet this woman was not only feeding her own biases as though from some TV soap opera, she could not have been more ignorant of drugs and related crime. At least to me that is how she presented herself.
Even in light of the fact that probation officers may be required to have a bit of an attitude, her attitude was fueled by her own personal fantasies and ignorance. It went way beyond the call of duty.
Todd had called his brother only that once from jail. Eventually he called me to ask me to find out how he could get back in school. Then asked if someone in the family could get him the daily newspaper. He was sitting in the cell all day and had read all the books in the shabby skimpy library. I did. I also sent him a few dollars 2 or 3 times. He budgeted with more discipline than I could have. His Grandmother sent him a small amount of money, as did his brother and sister (reluctantly after much thought). It was a very small amount compared to others there, who were seasoned residents, whose families considered this part of their life operating expenses: Sending along a few hundred dollars plus paying the criminal rates of $2.00 a minute from the only pay phone available for calling out collect. It seems that not only do we punish the criminal but those who are connected by blood.
After he had bought toothpaste and deodorant, Todd spent most of his pitiful little money on food. Everyone gave him whatever vegetables they had and rice when they had it, and he lived on that. He was rail thin when he immerged 4 months later. Many times he traded his paper or money for someone's vegetables and rice. He was promised a job making $7.00 a week, which never materialized. So foraging for reading material and vegetables were his main objectives each day. Both of which certainly must have had a profound effect on his ability to dump the lure of crack when he got out. He sent me the following article he had written for the jail newspaper.
What Re-Hab Means To Me
Rehabilitation comes from a desire, not a need. Without a true desire, it cannot be done. It takes a lot of work. If we would put as much effort into Re-Hab as we do in chasing our "hit", it would be so simple, really. But we don’t. Maybe for awhile at first, then we think we are strong and clean, shit happens. Lies, excuses, relapse. The breakdown of the word rehabilitation is helping me. I hope it can help at least one other person, too.
R- Recognize the problem of your addiction.
E- Eliminate anything or anyone that supports your addiction.
H- Honest. Be honest. Truth heals all lies in time.
A- Accept the fact you cannot control any addiction.
B- Believe in a stronger power, rather than your weakness.
I- Improve working on small simple skills.
L- Like yourself. Be happy with how the mirror looks back at you.
I- Isolate. Better to be alone and positive, than negative in a crowd.
T- Terrorize yourself with thoughts of all the disasters caused by addiction.
A- Attitude. Keep a positive attitude.
T- Talk about being addicted. Hearing thoughts out loud can be therapeutic
I- Introspection. Analyze yourself. Force yourself to achieve goals.
O- Offer help to someone in need. It is amazing how this feels.
N- Never give up, and pray.
Maybe this time was all I would allow myself after reading it. It seemed almost child-like in its simplicity. Crack-heads can be child-like at times. Looking for a cure for crack-heads all by yourself can make you child-like, vulnerable, confused while searching for how to be a good person again.
I did wait anxiously for him to get out. I tried to find some special interim housing he could go into right from jail. There was not any available. He would have to come to my house again.
Scott drove 40 miles to pick him up at midnight so he would not have spend one more night in jail. He slept on my living room floor. My spare bedroom was rented.
The next day he was a whirlwind of energy and organization. Within three days he had gotten housing and a job as a waiter. Within two weeks he was gone. There was no doubt that he had changed and that he had motivation and resolution than he had had in a long time. In the past this had meant success for him in whatever he did.
I thought the hotel was the end of the road, but found there are endless dead ends. Each one worse than the one before. The place he now resides was for people in temporary need of shelter, or so the paper said.
Both male and female were housed here in three floors above a row of business in a decaying area. All one block from a renovated glamorous downtown. A great many of the residents level of seriousness about their life involved around hanging out on the sidewalk and congregating in someone’s room and yelling out the window at people. There may well have been a lot of people there who one never saw because they truly were looking for work and a place to live and locked up in their rooms when they were not. Rent was from zero to whatever you could afford. Todd paid $25.00 a week. You could stay only temporarily, then you had to move on. So a lot of people who considered this their permanent residence, moved out for a few days and then back in making sure their personal possessions were kept at a minimum to accommodate this lifestyle.
The place smelled of unwashed everything or badly washed everything or impossible to wash everything. It was stifling hot in winter and summer was a dark dimly lit cavern teaming with surly hyper bodies whose language had long ago lost trust and hope. At least jail tried to keep up with the sociopaths they knew for sure that they had housed there. Here because you were not in jail. The premise was you were therefore not dangerous, and not having any mental hospitals, we are caring for our mentally ill on the street, and this place was one of the more blatant dumping grounds for those with serious mental problems. These who were not getting gov’t money, a gov’t room or jail or prison.
I did not go up there, ever. I sat across the street and waited until Todd came out, however long it took. My doors locked and car running. Except, one night at midnight.
I called him at work about something, and discovered he had not shown up. The people at work were sure that something terrible must have happened to him if he did not come to work, me too. He had been happy with his job and very dependable. It was too soon for him to fall off the wagon, especially with his present level of motivation and enthusiasm. I did not think of crack. I thought of dead in his room at the place he lived.
All day I became more panicked. I called the emergency room number several times because that was the only way to reach them by phone. No one had seen him. By late evening I was beyond polite inquiry. I called and insisted someone go look in his room. They could not do that unless they got the manager down there to do it. I asked them to knock on his door. While doing this someone said they had seen him that day. Scott refused to go down in that area at midnight, or go into that building and advised me not to.
I told them I was coming down and exactly how I was planning on doing that. There was no parking in front of the building and so I would pull up on the sidewalk and park directly in front of the door. Someone would have to come down and escort me from my car inside the locked building.
The young man waiting for me was shivering patiently. He was polite, sweet and concerned. He also looked very down and out from the main stream of life, with mismatched clothes and uncombed hair. He was very, very large. He unlocked the door and went up into the cavernous darkness to the desk explaining to me that he was the one who had seen Todd go out of the building at suppertime. This would have been several hours after he should have been at work. I was totally mystified and feared the worst, but not crack.
The man on the front desk was engrossed in schoolbooks and TV bored and sleepy. I kept him engaged in conversion hoping to find something about Todd. As I was getting ready to leave, at least convinced that Todd was alive, he had something to say to me. I could tell he had not intended to say it, and he leaned over the counter to talk in a low voice. "I have been on crack. I am trying to get my life together. Todd…well…he may still be messed up, but do not ever give up on him. My mother never gave up on me".
I went down the stairs with my escort thinking I was not a crazy intruder into a world crazier yet, but just another mother of a crack-head. I was stunned. Drugs, again so soon? I kept thinking it was not, though. But what?
Todd did show up at work the next afternoon. He had been hit over the head from behind with a butt of a gun one block from where he lived and his money stolen. He lay on the sidewalk for some time, semi-conscious. No one stopped. When he finally got up, he could not remember anything, least of all work. He wandered around in a daze for several hours. Got on a bus and rode someplace just to get out of the area. He finally went home and lay down. His head ached so he went out to get some pain pills. He became afraid to go back because he was sure the people who hit him lived there also. He did not call anyone or me in the family. He went instead to a motel for the night. Compared to crack, this seemed one of life’s smaller endangerments. He had a large lump on his head for days. I got him to at least call a doctor who told him if his concussion were serious he would have worse symptoms by then.
Todd also has a scar on his lip where someone had crept up on him while he was waiting at a red light, reached inside his open window and hit him with a pen sticking out the end of his hand. What caused it is not important. Why it happened of course is because he was either too high to notice someone creeping up on him or some place he would not be if he were not a crack-head.
Neither time did I point this out to him. By then I knew that crack-heads already know this. It does not always help them stop.
A very dear friend of mine had raised three beautiful intelligent talented boys. One is a crack-head. He was almost shot one night when one of his "buddies" disagreed with something he said and shot at him sitting in a chair across the room. Fortunately the man was too high to aim well and the bullet crossed over his lap and went into the arm of the chair. Another time he tried to break up a fight and was stabbed.
At present he has been off crack for 5 months (1994) and attending a group organization called CA. Here no one is allowed to OD on a continuous story of how bad they were on crack. You can only talk about solutions. Eat your heart out. An AA for crack-heads.
Todd was too afraid to go back to where he lived so he came to my house again. Very soon an older lady who had been working at the restaurant for many years approached him and told him she sometimes rented out one of her rooms. She was retired and did not need to work, but worked as few hours a week just to keep busy.
She told him he could move in. She also knew he was a crack-head. By then so did several people at work. The charge for the room was very, very low. She set to work immediately to mother him. She cooked huge greasy American fare for him, although she knew he was a partial vegetarian. Perhaps she thought it was the lack of meat and potatoes, which caused his crack-crap. She claimed to have a relative with a child who was a crack-head. They had excellent insurance and simply sent them away to be cured. She assured me that she knew how bad crack-heads could be.
The restaurant Todd worked at was quaint Mexican Restaurant with beautiful and unusual décor inside. It had been a very successful neighborhood restaurant for many many, years. He liked his job and the people he worked with. This had not been true for many years. He made excellent money. We could not help ourselves, we were all very hopeful. Every one of us spent a lot of time with him that summer. My mother came to visit for the summer and we all went out to eat and to the movies almost every weekend. She bought him several articles of clothing.
The months passed from April when he had gotten out of jail and into the last of the summer. He was always where he was supposed to be and he was always available to find. He seemed positive and happy. He started to make friends at work. He talked about going back to school.
I breathed no sigh of relief, gave no shout of victory. I was hopeful but not convinced. He was changed no doubt about it. He was stronger than he had been in years. He had some of the old zest and organization and confidence and resolve he always use to have. I felt that he was near to stopping. He had grown slowly towards it and I felt every step he had taken to get there. But, I was still unsure if this was that one and only never to be forgotten, blessed, jump-off point of no return to crack.

The Difference Between

2005-03-25T14:48:00.000-05:00

The difference between night and day, long and short, male and female, jail and treatment, mom and dad, stupid and smart, good and evil, acute stage and chronic stage, Christian and Jew, love and hate, up and down, me and you, Sept. 10th and Sept. 11th, life and death could be so thin, it is not visible to the human eye.
For me just the simple difference between right and wrong explains, and everyone has experiences with these two.
To be truly strong, cross over the line of selfish pride. Be humble before you are humbled. Swallow your pride. Make the first move to reconcile a situation, even though your feelings of you being absolutely right are so strong you do not want to back down. This only blocks looking at a difference. Get past the “who is right” and the “who is wrong”. It becomes unimportant when communications seize to exist. What becomes important is returning to being creating equal and allowing life to flow honestly without snags of bickering, or finger pointing, or the I am right ‘so there’ attitude. Self centered pride brings on total blindness to even knowing when to humble ourselves. The arrogant attitude of being prideful hardens our awareness of the need to be truly humble. Once we think or feel we should only apologize or recognize and if that is all we feel we should do…we will overlook actually seeing the need to feel humility, or the need to be truly humble in certain situations or to a certain person. Instead we pride fully just say “I’m sorry” and go about our business. When what we really need to do is show submissive respect for a difference or for a different point of view, or even respect for the opposite of what you think, even if you feel you are right, but humbly admit your are wrong for not respecting or recognizing that maybe there is no right or wrong, just a difference.
Humility comes before honor. With crack cocaine I cannot see how this happens any other way. When we humble ourselves we admit our mistakes. In a spiritual way we humbly ask the Lord, have confession with humility. Lower oneself so the Lord becomes higher.
The difference between crack cocaine and other drugs: Crack-cocaine had entered kindergarten! A horrible example of this is on Feb. 29th, 2000 in Flint , MI; a beautiful 6 year old girl was shot and killed by her 6 year old classmate. The gun was found by this boy between the mattresses in the crack-house he lived in with his mixed up mother and the crack-punk boyfriend. The media kept zeroing in on the gun factor. Like crack cocaine was not the main reason, the gun was. The lie at work again. To say it was not directly from crack cocaine being around in any capacity is, well, it really frosts my ass, (to say it as my dad would say). Hard to believe it did not go past the crack boyfriend just selling… Not crack cocaine?! Just the gun! It is this stupid mentality that keeps the cycle going. Let us look the other way. What way?
All the stories, news and crime associated with crack cocaine are at times very dark. Other times, so unbelievable it makes me cringe when thinking about all the horrible things I did just to smoke crack cocaine. The seriousness of crack cocaine has whittled down to $5.00. This is all it would take to contaminate me again and keep any contamination alive in anyone else’s soul and spirit. That is an awful thought, but a true fact.
The difference between prayer and no prayer is quite clear to me. I have tried both and without does not work in keeping the devil’s candy away. The serenity prayer is so simple yet powerful. My grandmother gave me a plaque with this prayer inscribed on it. This meant a lot to me. Getting this from her made my heart jump. It did not stop the madness but it did plant another seed of hope. I broke the prayer down into sections for myself to read and remember and apply when I could. For those who do not know the prayer or have lost touch with it, this is it:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…
The courage to change the things I can…
And the wisdom to know the difference.
For me some of the things I cannot change carry a lot of pain, hurt and guilt, mostly caused by my past behavior during crack cocaine use. Without a power greater than myself, I feel there is no way of letting go or having acceptance of these burdens. By asking God to grant me, is surrendering to a power and believing it is there and will work. Trusting that by asking, surrendering and believing, serenity will manifest. Without serenity there is no acceptance. If I can change it, it might take massive courage. Change is unknown territory until you get there. Fear can grip you so hard; it will prevent any form of change needed. It takes courage to overcome serious change.
Is this a change that should be done? How do I know? I might not try if I am not sure it is needed or if I can even do this change at all. Wisdom is not inherited. It is a gift from God. If I humbly ask for serenity and courage and mean it, I trust wisdom will be there, and it is.
The difference is today I know where it is coming from, (like a lion in the night to kill me). By understanding, it empowers me to not give in to the pull to smoke crack. It is still a daily spiritual battle. Each day I am at some point humbly reminded of crack cocaine.
The difference between yesterday and today is, I am crack-free today.

Crack Editor

2005-03-24T16:07:00.000-05:00

There are many ways to stop smoking crack-cocaine. As simple as this seems, it really is true. Crack-cocaine lies. It convinces you that you can have IT and a life, you just have to work it out…again…and again…and again.
This booklet is in a format that without a doubt saved my life. When I was jotting down all these notes, I had no idea it would come to this. As we know GOD has weird ways to get us where HE wants us to be. HIS way works.
It takes 75 days to completely get the spiritual possession (not the secular addiction) of crack-cocaine out. The secular addiction is an on going life long dilemma as long as we buy into we can never completely get rid of an addiction. Well this is not true. This is from our experiences and truths. Clinically it can take about 75 hours. This is not a clinical battle. The spiritual and mind possession can tempt and prod you for quite awhile longer than this format is set up to do. When you do get to the end of the 75 days, the plan and goal is to be exposed to the real truths about crack-cocaine and to have disarmed it to the point that it has started to leave you alone so you can work your program and fight the spiritual battle of your life, for your life. The following pages are set up to be a daily guide. Each day will have one spiritual issue with a scripture of reinforcement. My daughter Sue says we should do these as memory verses. I agree. We also have a quip of the day. There will be more than one spiritual issue per day coming at you, but our focus is on how to accomplish one issue at a time. Each day away from crack-cocaine brings us closer to being completely free from crack. With a true desire and the understanding of where this stuff is really coming from and its only mission to destroy; this understanding and desire will bring you the strength necessary for success. Our measure of success is in our 1st belief and to quote: We believe in each success, not every failure. Success is what you make of it. When contaminated, an hour can be great success.
I do suggest that when a fall, slip, relapse, or picking up again, or whatever term works for you…IMMEDIATELY get back up and go to where you LEFT off…and do it again and again and again until you get it right. Ultimately it goes full circle…and remember…it took me 3 years AFTER I knew what I know now as the truth revealed to my soul as to what this stuff really is…this approach works for me and crack-cocaine will never penetrate me again…this is ONE thing I do know for sure about crack-cocaine… BUT do not worry…I am not too confident…it is just when you do finally get how to do this…it is simple.

Todd called me as soon as he was able to tell me the news. Pat the social worker at the Bail Bond Dept. had already called me to tell me she had appeared in court and Todd was definitely going into a Re-Hab Program. Todd and I waited anxiously for an opening to come up. He was euphoric but very nervous and very serious.
He had wished for a long-term residential program for so long and thought it to be hopeless. Now that this had arrived he was terrified that it too would not work. He was terrified that he was hopeless. He was moving neared to that place where crack-heads can not stop and can not live as a crack-head any more.
He finally heard of an opening and was scheduled to move in immediately. He called and gave me a list of things he needed me to buy at the store, and which of his clothes he needed. I had already packed his bag. It had been waiting for weeks. When I arrived with toiletries from the store he had made a list of the cost of each one and totaled them including tax.
"I can get a job and a pass to go to work after I have been here a month. I will pay you back from my first check". And he did.
I visited him every Saturday afternoon for 2 hours. He was both serious and euphoric with energy, zest, confidence and dedication. The old Todd was back. He was very happy and impressed with his caseworker that was on the premises every day. She was able to put what was best for the patient 1st. She gave him many books to read and he devoured each one, taking notes on them! He would bring the book and his notebook to the visiting room when I visited and talked about each one in detail. He even had me get the books I had read from the library and let her read them. Todd was ready to take any program, good or bad into his heart and try and make it work.
He talked non-stop for 2 hours every week. It seems he had lucked out at this facility, which housed people from a large area, even out of state. It involved some serious felony prisoners and all types of substance abuse. Consequently the program was broad and varied. The reading material covered a range of ideas about crack. The lectures were balanced with a variety of types of people with a variety of approaches to various abuses. Meetings were held with a format ranging from AA's to a newer more free-form supportive more positive approach. Todd soon found leaders he admired and identified with. Something that had never happened at meetings he had gone to before.
He was both terrified at the thought of leaving the facilities and impatient to have a life again. He took to heart one of the main aspects of the program, which was whatever is bothering you, whoever is bothering you, however small and insignificant, please, please tell us immediately. Your happiness and peace is very important to us. Your recovery is #1 in our life. We will do anything to help you get there. He became an avid complainer. It always worked. This was his first taste in 6 years of wanting to live his life in a certain way and having control over something that was making this difficult or impossible.
Of all the things he devoured here, that one helped him to take the biggest step. Control over his life control over crack.
While he put everything under a microscope, in every aspect of his life, he began to separate the people around him. Those who were not interested those who were weak and those who 'might' make it. This was another mark off point for him. Seeing himself and seeing those around him just as they really are.
People in the program assured him continually that his recovery was his recovery. Whatever program worked, was the right one. Whatever people helped him, were the right people. He was the free agent here who could design and find exactly what he needed. He was OK. He did not have to fit into an AA program. He could find his own personal program. If someone designated as help, and this person did not say things that had meaning to him, he had the right to reject them and find other people. In spite of this TLC, Todd constantly admired those counselors who also had, a you can not bullshit me, I know all the moves tough and brutally honest, and even a little cynical. He recognized this combination as real tough love.
The counselors did not spend a lot of time on how lethal crack was, or how desperate the life of a crack-head was. Most were pretty well aware of by now. There were those there who did not want to know. The why's were left a lot to the individual to find. The what's were stressed. Not so much here is a list of how to's, but what could work for you. In the midst of a monolithic mortally lethal substance epidemic, with no road maps, were these brave souls-the counselors and addicts were trying to find their way out of the wilderness together. That is what made it work. Together. Crack-heads do not need experts to write out a program in stone. They need people to work with them through this wilderness, pooling resources as if they were a combat unit shedding real tears when one of them did not make it.
I studied his body language. I studied his words. I studied his program and for the first time I was content. I would not hook myself into making stone chiseled proclamations. It would be 9 months out of the program before any of us would say, "I think he is going to make it". But I felt something shift in him. There was new grease in the gears.
He felt it too and there were days when he knew positively that he could do it. And days when he was terrified to be out there alone again. He wanted to leave every day and get restarted on recapturing life again, but he was terrified too. As though some monster from "Alien" was out there looking for any organization of society to eliminate, and it was just him and this slimy grotesque animal to battle it out. He counted the days to his release and clung more tightly to what was around him!
It seemed that no matter how strong he was, how armed, how padded, there was still this terror of this monster out there. Was he really strong enough, armed enough, and padded enough? What was enough? It was the nightmare of all nightmares. It was the creature of all creatures.
It was that his brother Scott who came down every Sunday to pick him up and drop him off at a church. By then Scott believed only GOD could give any real guarantees in Todd's life and none of us cared who gave Todd the key, we just wanted him to have it. We were all dedicated in our own way to try and bring it all into Todd's life, to try.
If you ask Todd what was the key that finally took away that terror that still lurked inside him, even with the Re-Hab Program working miracles in his life, he will tell you he prayed and prayed for GOD to take away the desire for crack. Because this was the terror inside him even with all the tools, the strength and the steps to help him, he was terrified that the desire was still there and might be more powerful.
Until one day he walked out of the church and the desire was gone. He said from that day on, "I never think of crack. I have no thoughts about it and am not interested in it. I have no reason to or no need to ever do it again.
The terror inside him was so great, this miracle to Todd was above and beyond anything else. His need to have; no thoughts or interest or desire for crack, as well as the emotional and intellectual tools and so eliminate the terror of a monster that had gripped his life for 6 years was so important to him that there were no miracles above this one.
I can live with that. Certainly I believe most completely in miracles, and GOD"S power. I also believe GOD helps those who help themselves and who know what to do with that help and who truly needs it. And HE helps those who help others.
Todd's miracle was a package deal. He did try to help himself and we learned how to help him. Many people including a society of people, the counselors bravely walking through wilderness with no road map for crack-heads. Pat at Bail Bonds Dept., whose last name I never knew, came into our lives so briefly yet was part of this miracle. I would not want to take one card form the house of cards for fear it would all tumble down. It is hard for me to separate any one part of all the things that helped Todd, and say this is the one that really did it. He traveled a long road with many people to even get miracle status. Perhaps he needed to. But for Todd, after collecting all he had collected on his journey, and taking this journey with all the people he did, his terror of the desire was the greatest obstacle and only GOD could remove that. And HE did.
My daughter said, "You had a lot to do with this. I do not know if it would have happened without you". Why didn't I feel that's true? I would stop and think when she said it, of what specifically did I do that made a difference? I never could pinpoint it. I do think it was not as people think it was. Similar, but not the same. Certainly there were things I did with no motivation other than help or cure Todd. But that could not be sustained for long in the chaotic ups and downs, disappointments and failures of having a crack-head son. What I did was sustain myself. Help myself to get through it. Made myself feel as good as I possibly could to endure it. Had he died, I would have been able to draw on this. As it was it got me through. And in the process helped him. It did not cure him. Only he could do that.
He was not entirely alone, either. Neither was I, because it was a very lonely time for both of us. To death, or to life, I had to take that walk with him, or I could not have lived with it.
AGAPE LOVE? It seems too perfect a feat for me. Maybe a mini Agape Love was achieved-sometimes.

Belief #7..."We believe this is not just your problem because it becomes everyone's problem.

2005-03-20T13:17:00.000-05:00

Conquering crack cocaine does not involve just the user. It starts with you obtaining knowledge and transforming that into power over how crack cocaine has entered your life. Then we plant a seed of hope and lovingly from a distance, nurture it. While contaminated, a user does not believe that there is a way out. We need to eliminate all the ways this person gets access to money. Never put money in the hands of a person possessed by crack cocaine, not even a penny. You may have to be drastic like sleeping with a purse or wallet in a plastic bag for a noise alarm to keep money away from the hands of a crack-head. Leave your valuables in a safe box or at someone else’s house. Camille had to do these type of things long enough to get a grip on the situation so a plan can be executed. Are there pop cans lying around? Take them in yourself. It only takes $5.00 to get going on crack cocaine again. Get a storage place and store all things that could be sold or pawned for money to get crack cocaine. Have pay checks direct deposited into an account he or she does not have access to. This is not an option. If a crack-head says they want help, they probably do. A sure fire way to see if this is real, is to direct deposit without exception. If this one simple thing is not complied to or agreed to, then the time is not right for them to quit. At this point YOUR survival is first. When they hit below bottom again or are in jail, they will cry for help again. Same thing then. Drastic measures for a drastic situation! If they need food you go buy the food and give it to them. You can pack them a lunch. Absolutely no money. Find a local food pantry through a church or program. If they need clothes, you can buy them and then cut the inside label off and write their name on the inside collar and you KEEP the receipt so it can not be returned for money. If it is possible and they are working, arrange to drive them or find someone to do it or buy a monthly bus pass so they can get to work only. The bus pass is only to look for a job or to get to a job. If they are looking, the names and times need to be on paper and verified. Your conversations should be limited to conquering crack cocaine. Nothing else matters. When he or she begs for money say NO! Practice saying NO. If they are being evicted give them the address to a local shelter if you are not able for some reason to have them in your home because they cannot be trusted yet. Print out pages from our website and give it to them for a present instead of material things. Todd's father bought him a gravestone and coffin for Christmas. Is this being mean? NO it is being real because crack cocaine does and will kill. Sometimes having tougher than tough love is needed to get that window open. Some people have to leave, some divorce, others have their children taken away. Many have to have protective services or the police called just to open that window. You have to fight crack cocaine with all your might. Sitting around worrying gets you nothing. Driving around looking for that person gets you nothing but out of gas. They will be back when they have exhausted all means of money or they are physically unable to continue. Pray to God for their safe return so you can continue the fight. There does come a point of deciding to let go. How do you know when that time comes? When your loved one shows no signs of progressing in the process of conquering crack cocaine. Progress could be as sad as they brought back $20.00 of their paycheck instead of nothing. The progress may be a little micro dust mite, but any and all progress is a sign to continue. When all progress stops, then yes there does come a time to let that person go. That does not mean that it can’t happen at a later time, but it means you might have to move on in hopes they will get to the point of desiring progress again, or needing it. The fact is, that some people never get there and crack cocaine kills. Crack cocaine is draining and exhausting. We are living proof that it is worth the fight.

We get a lot of questions on when do I trust again? Trust is earned not given. You give trust a little at a time until that person proves his or her trust ability. Little droplets of trust at first and that does not even begin until they have at least 30 days clean and are showing signs of progress. Camille let me carry money only when she was with me, for example: when we went out to eat Camille would let me hold the money and pay for the meal so I felt better in front of others, but the minute we got in the car I had to give what was left back, and it better add up. Keeping your loved one connected to the real world is very important to their ability to form positive self-esteem again. Having birthday parties, Christmas, family gatherings, taking them to church even if they just got high, going to a movie, buying a hamburger etc… normal events of everyday life. Sharing new ideas you read about. These things need to take place even if you have to drop them off back in their crack-infested neighborhood. Keeping in touch is a way of planting seeds of hope. Remember how your loved one use to be? Maybe you can help them get there again. It is possible. Crack cocaine can be conquered! This takes a team participation. Those in your family who wish not to participate, might have to step aside for a while.

Expose crack! Tell everyone you know that your loved one is possessed by crack cocaine. It does not matter who knows. The more you expose crack cocaine the less power it has on you or your loved one. Camille even told the grocery clerks about it and gave the manager a picture and told them Todd is possessed by crack cocaine and may try to cash a bad check here. You know what? They did call when Todd tried to do this. Camille would tell local police, neighbors all family members, pastor EVERYONE she came in contact with and it worked! Crack-Todd started to lose power and my Todd is the man we knew he is! Crack-Todd could not go anywhere in the area we lived in without Camille finding out. So SPEAK! This is your life and your loved ones soul you are fighting for. Embarrassment never gets you to a crack-free life, but taking control does. Tom Petty has a song that has a line in it that goes, “I'm taking control of my life, right now!”. So can you. So can your loved one.
We know crack cocaine can be conquered. We are here to help anyone through the process. When we went through this we had very little help. Our goal is to reach as many people as we can. We are not here to debate programs and whether they work or not. We are here to share our beliefs, uphold them and share any and all ways that allowed Todd and I to conquer crack cocaine.
Todd and Camille

Quips

2005-03-16T07:58:00.000-05:00

Everyday Book Quips

These “quips” are not claiming to be original, some are. If I’ve used yours, no infringement intended. They were used to quit smoking crack. Thank you for the help.

1. Dear God, please help me be the person that my dog thinks I am.
2. Happiness is a choice.
3. Honesty is essential for recovery.
4. If it don't apply let it fly.
5. To fail to cry is to fail to live.
6. Anger alerts us to the fact that something is not right.
7. The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.
8. Those who forget their past are doomed to relive it.
9. The best way to replace a bad habit is to replace it with a good one.
10. Choose your companions with care; you may become what they are.
11. Suffering is defined as, 'anything about which one says, Oh No!
12. One form of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect different results.
13. Worrying is paying interest on troubles that may never come due.
14. Discipline means taking responsibility for our behavior and the consequences.
15. If you do not stand for something, you will fall for anything.
16. Grief is a profound part of recovery.
17. If we look close enough, we can say that every choice we make is a love choice.
18. Denial and avoidance are the enemies of recovery.
19. There is no such thing as rejection, only trying to fit in where you were never meant to be.
20. Instead of counting your days, make each one count.
21. Even though you cannot control some of your circumstances, you can control your entire attitude.
22. I must have an awareness of my own ignorance.
23. Who we are looking for, is who is looking.
24. Lying distorts reality.
25. Cannot heal what you cannot feel.
26. Emotions are expressed in the body even before we're consciously aware of them.
27. We are directly responsible for our own wrong doing.
28. The more nothing changes, nothing changes.
29.The only thing that holds us back is ourselves.
30. Unresolved grief is almost always about undelivered communications of an emotional nature.
31. The first screw that works loose in a person's head is the one that holds the tongue in place.
32. When we need outstretched hands, we must let it be known.
33. Loss must be experienced in order to be shared and it must be shared in order to be healed.
34. Pain is reality, misery is optional.
35. We should consider ourselves as spirits having human experiences rather than humans having an occasional spiritual experience.
36. Humility comes before honor.
37. To get out of a hard situation, try a soft answer.
38. Resentments do not punish the other person, they punish us.
39. Resentments are hardened chunks of anger.
40. Life has a way of humbling us whenever we get a little too impressed with ourselves.
41. Discipline means understanding there are logical consequences to our behavior.
42. Drug use dulls the pain of the dysfunctional family loneliness.
43. Our own 'inner' child has to be disciplined in order to release its tremendous spiritual power.
44. Debate and argument are our tools for finding out what path each person needs and wants.
45. It is the heart that must be nourished and live; "Out of the heart are the issues of life”.
46. A strong ego is needed to transcend ego.
47. Soul is the essential self, ego is your adopted self.
48. Creating your own life takes the courage to risk new ways of being.
49. People must seek balance in their lifestyle before they can obtain contentment.
50. Anger needs to be discouraged as soon as possible.
51. Resentments are the block that holds us back from loving ourselves and others.
52. As adults there are conditions we must meet if we expect another to share love with us.
53. Human ability cannot guarantee genuine success.
54. A wise person, especially a discerning superior, has a pleasurable temperament.
55. Take time to think where you are going, or you may not like where you end up.
56. It is not that you do not remember...it is that you chose to forget.
57. Nothing is difficult, once you get used to it.
58. The way we handle our problems and troubles determines the quality of our life.
59. The way to handle life's problems is to solve them.
60. Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
61. Fewer things are more contagious than cheerfulness.
62. Without desire and wanting, our life energy gets crushed.
63. Part of growing up is learning to delay gratification which means more pleasure.
64. Strength is more impressive yet less effective than wisdom.
65. Growth is moving from one set of problems to a better set of problems.
66. Our one aim should be to have perfect harmony between conscience and conduct.
67. It is not what is wrong with us that counts, but what is right.
68. Everything in life we need to experience, it is exactly what we need in order to do the work we're doing now.
69. You cannot know what you do not know.
70. What we love we soon grow to resemble.
71. If we are what we should be, it automatically follows that we will be doing what we should be doing.
72. Do we need to loose our minds before we come to our senses?
73. Dying and not knowing who we really are, is the greatest tragedy of all.
74. An addiction is a pathological relationship to any form of mood alteration that has life damaging consequences.
75. You sought the heaviest burden of all and found yourself.
76. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
77. Nurture your marriage and you will nurture your soul.
78. Drugs and the devil can put a hole in one's soul.
79. Optimism and trust are the soul of intimacy.
80. We must never forget the 'value' of being a role model.
81. Do not hang onto the good things that come your way; pass them on they’ll have the power to bless.
82. It is easy to point our finger at another, but it is more rewarding to gently point it at ourselves.
83. The one thing we are never free to choose is choicelessness.
84.We need a balanced sense of responsibility; accepting consequences for what you do, refusing to accept consequences for what someone else does.
85. It will work if you will work.
86. The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our disposition and not on our circumstances.
87. We need to stop dreaming about what we do not have and be content with what we do have.
88. Development of character involves replacing our pride with patience.
89. Sound instruction and practical insight can help us avoid traps such as pride, impatience, disillusionment and resentment.
90. When we accept the way we are, others accept us for what we are.
91. Grief is something that cannot be hurried.
92. Grief is emotional not intellectual.
93. When we are unable to grieve, we cannot finish the past.
94. Grief is the healing feeling.
95. Our tears are to be cleansing showers, not am endless flood.
96. Tears of regret, remorse, and despair water the roots of love and life itself.
97. Graceful existence integrates past, present and future.
98. Constructive words of wisdom are no match for destructive weapons of war.
99. Honesty is never having to remember what you said.

Here we go again...Another website addiction know-it-all on crack...Crack Is Crack---Sad but True!

2005-03-08T15:33:00.000-05:00

#1...Here are 2 questions from another site with the only answers:
Can you help me understand? and How can I help?
We understand that the approach to this horrible addiction is tainted with self-pity and anger beyond human comprhension...because you got bit by crack. Better yet you got stomped by crack. Of course you had nothing to do with this...right? If only you had had the information we provide for freedom from crack...maybe you would get how this NEEDS to be done. As far as helping...well your idea of helping is kicking EVERY crackhead to the curb...BECAUSE you are the one on file that says and I quote, "There is no hope for crackheads"! This is not true, except in your angry clueless world of bringing a message from the enemy of zero hope. God tells us to have faith and hope will manifest...but on this guys site there is NO HOPE EVER!
#2...Everyone thinks they can help their addict. This is the furthest thing from reality... attempting to help an addict only enables him to further his addiction. This is a very difficult concept to grasp. For the moment just understand it is a big misconception.
***Key word is "attempt". What is that? Like trying is dying. You do not try, you do and get done. Divided...the enemy wins! United we conquer crackcocaine. So EVERYONE thinking of helping "YOUR" addict...stop and give up because this website says you cannot help "YOUR" addict. Difficult concepts are a cover up for having an incorrect concept...DUH!
#3...I believe that crack is a two part problem composed of physical addiction and a unique lifestyle.
***HUH? What is that? "Unique lifestyle". Is this guy an idiot or what. Smoking crackcocaine BECOMES a lifestyle. Not unique...just horrible and possessed by evil. Crackcocaine IS NOT PHYSICAL...period. Obviously this guy does NOT know what he is talking about. Of course having NEVER smoked crack...how would he know. Crackcocaine is a possession of the body, soul and spirit. Nothing more...nothing less. Easy CONCEPT? NO! But a simple concept of truth.
#4...If you are an easy mark, you will be manipulated and become a part of their life. If they see you are interested in romance, you are in big trouble. No, your love isn't going to change them. It's going to destroy YOU.
***WOW is this guy hurt or what?. Easy mark? What the hell is that? AND love won't change anything? OK...lets try hate. Yeah that will work for a crackhead. Let us hate the person and NOT the crack. Yeah that sounds good...cool consider it done. After all there is no hope for ANY crackhead...and love is meaningless...and hate is the answer!
#5...Dealing with a crack addict is totally disarming. It will interfere with your sleep, your work, your driving, appetite and general concentration.
***I guess when you don't get it...you don't get it! Interfer? This is just so depressing I am not sure I can continue with this crackgobbletygoo...but I will persevere to expose ALL the cracklies.
#6...Crack is very dangerous because it is an easy transition from marijuana.
***NOW I AM convinced this guy from this "other" website is a complete fool. To mention pot and crack in the same sentence because you go right from pot to crack? From my personal summary: "Crackcocaine fools a fool". This is a great example of why I wrote that.
#7...Never take an addict to buy drugs. Undercover detectives stake out drug houses 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
***This is the most stupid NON-CRACKHEAD statement I have EVER heard. Why would you need to even say this. If you are following a true and correct program...this is not worth mentioning...period. Man this non smoking crackhead who has this site of crackstupidity is stupid.
#8...In my opinion women are most vulnerable to crack. It seems as though there is something in a woman's personality that causes them to be more easily addicted.
***You are right...it is just your opinion...and it is again stupid. I cannot do this much longer...I am getting stupid cutting and pasting this crap for you'all to see the "other" side.
>>>>>>>OK 1 MORE THAT IS IT<<<<<<<<<<<<
#9...If you try to make sense out of their actions, you will drive yourself crazy.
***Quite simple. Their action are a result of being possessed by the enemy through crackcocaine. SIMPL. Once you get this you won't want to "figure out" a crackheads behavior. I am sure this is why this guy is so "stupid" in his search for THE crack answer. We have the answer...too bad he didn't when he really needed the true answer about crackcocaine....then maybe he would not be so angry at this "girl" and focus on being really angry at crackcocaine and attack crack not the "drug", "the person", "the treatment" or any other "item" except crackcocaine itself.
***I have had enough of crack-stupidity today...gotta go!

Other People TRYING to quit crack! TRYING IS DYING!

2005-03-06T13:59:00.000-05:00

GOOD LUCK!

I am a recovering cocaine addict and I have been clean and sober for over 6 years. Getting clean and staying clean have been the hardest thing I've ever done.
***UPDATE: This person has relapsed real bad this year...sorry your "sobriety birthday is no longer". If only he had taken 1 MORE step to 13. TOO BAD relapse is part of this person's recovery. It does not have to be. One should listen, learn and try any and all ways to stop the madness of smoking crackcocaine instead of "acting like you know what you are doing"!
**SPECIAL UPDATE: Here is the same person's statement but different..."I am a recovering cocaine addict and I have been clean and sober for over 5 years". Well what is it? 5 or 6 years?
Maybe we are spending too much time counting days INSTEAD of making each day count.
Making each day count is detoxifying your contaminated soul and spirit. NOT sharing war stories, finding NEW connections or telling or hearing YET another sad story of an angry day, or some normal daily functioning "feeling" trips them up almost if it hadn't been for you people around these tables, or issues that caused them to smoke crack. Rhetoric groupology of meaningless words that OBVIOUSLY DO NOT stop crack dead in its tracks. Oh well...do what you think will work for you.
***VERY SPECIAL UPDATE: Here is yet again another mish-mash of words from the same perrson describing "counting clean time"...this is soooo confusing..."I have finally found the strength to stay away from all substances for the last three years". 3 YEARS? Is it 5, or 6, or 3 years? Now even I do not know what direction to go to find this "only way" to beating this regular "disease of addiction". WOW. What a mess and no crack has been smoked...phew, that was close.
****INCREDIBLY VERY SPECIAL UPDATE: This is amazing. Here is more of the same...-- "for me it was the 12 steps of NA
putting my huge ego aside and surrendering -
finally a glimmer of hope although it has taken me twelve years to get 5 years.
There is hope - for the hopeless". HOPE? This guy RAN from that word when we said it to him and now he claims hope? AND this IS even after he relapsed again just under 75 days ago? Hmmmm? Let me think about this a minute...OK. You say NA, AA, CA or any "A" is the way to "get rid of crack" or arrest it, and yet relapse IS part of your recovery plan....except this time you will go what maybe 7 years? Now I AM really confused on how to do this...and if I AM confused...no wonder you cannot get this simple task in your life...to be free from crackcocaine for the rest of your life instead of "for awhile" or "whenever a relapse" occurs. Hmmm? I am speechless...and that is rare!
*****A PHENOMINAL SPECIAL UPDATE: Here we go again...you decide...again same person..."I again work in a job that I never felt I could obtain again and most of the time I have serenity". MOST OF THE TIME...SERENITY? So is it when you do not have that "serenity" you relapse? You might want to take a look at this point. You are clean for what 3...then ...5 then 6 years or something like that and you have serenity MOST of the time? Why not all of the time. I know the answer... do you? I suspect you do not.

*******ANOTHER WONDERFUL UPDATE: Yes from the same person. You-know the one who arressted crack for awhile, relapsed and is now counting days again...yeah that guy..."Yes, I had to hit bottom before my recovery could begin. It was only at that time that I became willing to change". CHANGE? You are willing to change? What happened this last time? You have not changed since I first met you. You have the way. The only way. AND OBVIOUSLY it is OK in "your group" or "website" to relapse as part of the planned recovery program. Great positive program. HEY FOLKS COME JOIN OUR GROUP...YOU CAN ARREST CRACK...RELAPSE ON CRACK...BE ACCEPTED BACK...AND WE DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN AND AGAIN. Phew. I am tired!
********THE FINAL GREAT UPDATE: Same person..."that there is hope for the hopeless, recovery is possible". POSSIBLE? What your way? Not much of an example of hope there buddy. Of course NOW I am sure that you will be going forward with a renewed vigor and holler that is was a missed meeting, or call to your sponsor or oh yeah too much time spent on YOUR WEBSITE OF CRACKRELAPSE! Wake up and smell the crack...you know who this is about...YOU!

My Mom's Book....about the crackhell I put her through

2005-03-05T10:47:00.000-05:00

Agape Love by Marilyn R. Lyon

I could mourn the crack-addiction. I could pray for it to leave. I could try to contribute to its death. I could pretend it was not here, year after year, or that it might always be here.
Maybe even that death might take it away, as well as my son, or that there is and was a quick and easy answer.
What I could do is share with him the place I reached after many years of both our failures. I could give us both a relationship, of sorts. It could be called Agape Love, although at the time I called it my program for surviving my pain. I have no judgments. I have not got the answer. I did share my strength and encouragement with my son to try one more time again, never give up hope. Eventually some inner belief planted itself that he could find an answer one of these next times. Then the new uplifting knowledge that each time he tried and failed, he could start again from where he left off the last time he…
He could call me when he failed. I would sit across from him, wanting to breakdown in total despair. I wanted to beg him to succeed, so I would not die of my pain over all this. In those moments sometimes I would lash out with bitter, angry, or clipped remarks. Mostly I did try and not say any judgmental or despairing things. At those times of being in despair myself, raw and vulnerable, Todd would accept my momentary lapses, stoically. He believed more than I, that he was no good, a total failure. I did not need to remind him, although I did it for me. It was my anger and pain. Todd, was not my enemy or I his. We had reached a point after many years of 'crack-crap' where he knew this. I was grateful for this. The long journey to get this was old and well traveled.
I was there to share another starting over again. There was never any doubt he had to try again. Just as I knew he would make it, maybe this time or maybe next time. How to retrieve his fast dwindling boxes of worldly possessions was always first on my list of 'enabling actions'. In this moment of a zombie-like existence, while entering back into the real world, when only a moment ago deep into hell, he would have let someone saw off any leg of choice, truly believing he did not deserve this added aid to re-enter the world of 'normal'. I knew starting over again required some semblance of material possessions to function at least with a little dignity and being able to have some personal moments to weave the days together. He would sleep on my davenport and go to the mall to sit and wait for me to get out of work. He was not allowed in my house anymore when I was not there. After a failure, it could be a fast or slow slide into some kind of pit that endangered his life. He was completely drained of everything. It literally would take months of dedicated good 'effort' just to regain an existence that would not be a danger to himself or anyone else. All this was a daily reminder to Todd and me, that he was a crack-head still. And I did remind him of this, when it fit easily into our conversations. When he became angry at his bleak life, I reminded him that this was the life of a crack-head. When he sighed that he could not walk through another Michigan winter, I again reminded him this is the walk of a crack-head. I said these without bitterness, and without anger or judgment, just a quiet reminder of the sad facts. I wished I could make it not so. But I did not know how. Only Todd could figure out how for himself.
There would be rides to find another scum flophouse for him. Occasional rides to yet another interview for a bottom of the heap job. And there would eventually be rides to look for another junk car. Fixed and imprinted on my mind forever are those businesses that are a dumping ground for the drug addict's in-between binges. These companies are supplying America with cardboard boxes, hinges, and pieces of plastic and cheap hamburgers!
And he was started again.
Some would consider this enabling. This is a word that became part of my vocabulary three months after I was assaulted with Todd's crack-crap. This I feel is because they do not understand anything about crack-heads. They think it is the same as alcoholism. It's not. They both are devastating substances, but that is the only thing they have in common. Overeating can be devastating, yet no one has suggested that we send crack-heads to weight watchers as another quick fix for society's mounting endangerment from crack cocaine. There is a very fine line as to this being enabling. One can only follow their heart. Each case is different. There are no experts regarding crack-heads. There are no rules written in stone. Not yet, anyway.
My program was my program. I believed in it when I was doing it. My program was an attempt to keep my son linked to the edges of the normal, to keep him in touch with real life. Crack-heads have lost every link to normal life. They live in the underworld of the criminal, the hopeless, the ignored, the forgotten, and the lepers of our society. I searched for a link, any link to the warmth of human beings living a normal life, something to keep the memory alive. I welcomed every small and seemingly insignificant opportunity to bring him out of this black hole of life he lived in a as a crack-head and bring him into a brief moment of fresh air.
I never did give him money. Some in the family did at first, but not later. We all believed there were easy answers. I did not bail him out of jail after the first time. I did not, nor did anyone buy him necessities of life. What little he had came at gift times. However, I must confess, we all over gave to him. And each gift was drenched with tears for a love we had so little opportunity to express.
And it went on for years. Would he make it this time? Next time? He was always with us at holidays. On those brief occasions we all put out of our minds that he was a crack-head. Still, he was Todd. He was OK. He was a human being, there but for the grace of GOD, go I, Todd, son, brother, grandchild, brother in-law, uncle. He was OK, even when he filled the room with his pain.
After Todd's many grueling years of being a crack-head, the family would always ask me 'the big question' (like I had the answer) will he make it this time? Because it was I who said I was sure he'd make it one of these times. It was I who said he's starting over again, trying once again, or he's failed again.
I would always answer the same, "I do not know"! And I would count off the good things on my finger for them, like a magic potion. He's going to school part time, he's never done that before. He's working every day; he has a place to live. He's saving his money for an old car so he will not have to walk again all winter. You could get him some long winter underwear for Christmas, or gloves, maybe a warm hat. Just in case his car breaks down.
Eventually there was an aurora of peace and belief in something only I could see. The family bounced off it with their own negative, hopeless feelings, but always came back to the hope, wanting me to convince them to believe he will get it one of these days. Never realizing they were not around on those heart pounding 3 AM jump up and think he is dead kind of things.
Driving to his place, seeing his car there, a light on, was not a testimony to his being alive. I took this crumb home with me, not knowing that I really had been holding my breath until someone called who had seen him since that night and I'd let the air out.
Pulling together my own private program was the only way I could go on. Because I wanted to go out in the streets and lay down and pound the pavement, screaming for an answer. I wanted to buy a gun and search out those responsible, threaten those who went on with their lives in the face of such a massive epidemic of hopeless despair, my son being just one tiny fragment of it.
My despair reached such proportions at times, people advised me to forget my son and run for my life to the nearest counselor. Instead I turned to learning. I filled my notebooks with bits and pieces of information, I collected these fragmented shreds, and the next time Todd failed I would share them with him. He was vulnerable at those times. He'd listen to anything. I became a student of counseling a crack-head. I could not make anything be his answer. I had this huge need to let him in on everything I could find on the subject of being a crack-head, just in case something clicked with him. Most of the time I was just there, another human being across from him who was flawed, difference being I do not have crack cocaine contamination or possession. We are different. Not less, not more, just different.
And so I searched for answers. Against all the experts' simplistic answers, such as AA's program that had been put through three washes and it came out the other end as a quick and easy simple comfortable solution for crack-heads, something to soothe society back to sleep with. Here's the program. And a drug is a drug is a drug. And addiction is addiction is addiction. If it does not work, it is because the crack-head doesn't want it to work.
The more I learned, the more "suspect" I became. If AA's program was the only answer, how come it was not and does not work for true crack-heads? Not just for my son, but for all the others too. Would I have to wait for a program to be invented? Would he be alive by then? Would he be too old to start again?
On my lunch hour one day while leafing through a book written for drug counselors at the library, I almost hyperventilated over a paragraph in front of me. Guess what? That's what! I wanted to stop everyone in the library and tell them, alcoholics are always alcoholics, never an ex-alcoholic. Crack-heads could be ex-crack-heads. It seems someone discovered that when a crack-head had a relapse, it was a lapse. They did not loose all their progress. Whatever strength, resolve, and knowledge they had hopefully accumulated while being off crack the last time did not disappear. In fact it stayed right there with them. Starting again for a crack-head meant not starting all over again. But starting form the point they left off. Whatever personal bits and pieces of ammunition that had hopefully been gathered over however many years was still there.
I also found a definition for drug addiction. It is a learned response. The learning process starts as a user. Like with alcohol, not everyone goes beyond this step. For many, they easily slip into abuser before the user even notices. After that, 10% of the millions of users will slip quickly across that line into addiction where they are completely out of control.
At the next failure, I added this to my mantra of trying again, and a belief that he would make it. You have not lost whatever skills you had to quit the last time, and the time before. I told my son they were still there to use. And this time you will add some more, and one more time might just do it.
Did he cling to this as much as I did? Was this single piece of flotsam in an empty ocean of the War on Drugs Gobblety Goop enough to 'do it'? I do not know. But I clung to it. It was my life raft. And I guess I picked him up and put him in it, no matter how many times he fell off.

"Attacking Crack"

2005-02-28T07:52:00.000-05:00

Well well...what a few weeks of the crackcrap! So many of you are NOT doing what you know you should be doing to "attack crack". You are accepting crack in your life in some capacity. It could be in your "home" BUT not in your "room". Or it could be a person is still out all hours of the day and night and are still allowed to live and stay and eat food and even watch TV in this "home". It could simply be just turning and looking the other way. My favorite "river in Egypt" excuse is the, "it is a really bad hang over", or " he has an alcohol problem", and better yet, " I have JUST an alcohol problem"! In whatever capicity crack has crept back in, simply attack "it" again and watch it run and hide...fast. Crack DOES NOT like to be attacked. The really sad part is a lot of you have "attacked crack" and actually watched it run from your life...fast and far! Now you have stopped attacking crack in less than 6 months and look what is going on. Crack-is-back! So 6 month or maybe 2 1/2 years is too much to be free from crack forever? Am I asking too much? Maybe you are asking yourself too much. Our average days alive on earth is 27,375 days. So it probably IS asking too much to sacrifice oh maybe 180 days and maybe up to 900 days to live 21,000 days crackfree? 4% of your life attacking and fighting crack? It is not your fault your are possessed by crack. It is your fault for NOT "attacking crack". So lets recap. We live 27,375 days. If we say crack contaminates at 15 years old, (which is getting truer by the day) and we ask and you ask yourself to fight for your soul and spirit for 900 days or less and you will be free forever, and can LIVE your life crackfree forever...naw I guess it is not worth it. Nevermind.....Todd

Back up and Blogging

2005-02-25T21:50:00.000-05:00

This blog site has been down since Feb. 13, 2005. It has been difficult to get a response to correct the problem. Well tonight it has been fixed and now I can continue to attack crack with text blogs! Who would have ever thought blogs against crackcocaine! What a concept!

So here we go a-blogging again....Todd

From Within Jail Walls

2005-02-13T10:35:00.000-05:00

The Steeple Outside My Window
by Todd Gibson
The last clang,
of the door at night
I hate. Sounds dead.
Another day…wondering…
Not looking out my tiny sliver window.
Scripture seeking
for truth and peace.
Sleeping?
Always with a lite.
Another kind of ‘light’ please.
Thankful for food,
although little I eat.
Thirsty for words,
that will heal me deep.
Twenty days?
Longer it seems…
So unaware of life’s continual pace.
Blinded
about my plight.
Crawling. Stumbling.
Can not find the light.
Numb to oblivion.
Close ones I miss…
Mom, family, my sweet lover!
Then one day…
Some relief.
Looking out my tiny sliver window
all I could see
was a steeple for CHRIST.

Crack-A-Smile

2005-02-13T10:33:00.000-05:00

Q- What do you call a Crackhead using a soup can for a crack pipe?
A- Soup and CRACKer

Q- What do you call a Crackhead using an antenna for a crack pipe?
A- Wireless

Q- What do you call a Crackhead using a pop can for a crack pipe?
A- CRACKcola

Q- What do you call a Crackhead who was beaten by his crack dealer?
A- All CRACKed up

Q- What do you say to a deadbeat Crackhead?
A- You’re not all you’re CRACKed up to be

Q- What do you call 3 Crackheads looking for crack?
A- The three CRACKitiers

Q- What do you call a Crackhead sharing a crack pipe with other crackheads?
A- Dead

Q- What do you call a Crackhead with a computer?
A- A mamas boy

Q- What does a dealer call 6 female Crackheads?
A- A business opportunity

Q- What do you call a Crackhead parent?
A- a CRACKrecruiter

Q- What do you call a Crackhead husband?
A- LOOOSERRR

Q- What do you call a Crackhead wife?
A- Jail bait

Q- What do you call a Crackhead in high school?
A- Dropout

Q- What do you call a Crackhead with money?
A- High

Q- How does a Crackhead get her email?
A- At the Library, of course

Q- How many Crackheads does it take to change a light bulb?
A- None. A Crackhead would not waist money on a light bulb. Why should he buy a light bulb? He has no electricity anyway.

Q- What do you call 10 Crackheads parked in their cars at the mall?
A- Mobile home park

Q- What do you call a Crackhead in front of a judge?
A- sentenced

A volunteer walks into the homeless shelter to help serve breakfast and noticed a Crackhead sitting a table by himself staring at a empty can of orange juice. A half hour the volunteer brings out a plate of food to the Crackhead and out of curiosity asks the Crackhead who is still staring at the empty can of orange juice, “Why are you staring at that empty can of orange juice?” Without looking up the Crackhead says, “it says concentrate.”

Crackhead walks into the hospital holding his chest "Doctor HELP me, I'm having a crackattack" Doctor says, " Nurse, quick get my pipe, its an emergency!"

Another Article from Years Ago...Crack is Still Crack!

2005-02-09T16:55:00.000-05:00

"ADDICTS ANONYMOUS:
Recovery From A Broken Will"
January 26, 1997
Cornerstone Community Church
Introduction
A. I am not an alcoholic, nor a drug addict, nor a workaholic, but I know as well as anyone what it means to be an addict. And, no, it's not because I'm addicted to TV or sports or chocolate or electronics stores. I know what it means to be an addict because I am addicted to sin.
B. I wish that weren't so. It's rather embarrassing to have to admit that, being a pastor and all. You even pay me to be good, right, and here I am standing in front of you admitting that I am addicted to thinking wrong thoughts and acting in wrong ways. But what gives me the freedom to admit my addiction is that I know I am in good company. The Bible tells us that all of us are addicted to sin. Even though we know that sin will ultimately do us more harm than good, and even though we know our sin will catch up to us sooner or later, and even though we often don't want to sin, we still sin.
C. And so we are here this morning not just to learn about the problems of "other people," about people who are addicted to alcohol or drugs or sex or work or gambling or food -- we are here to learn how we can all become free from our own addiction, our addiction to sin. In John's Gospel we read these words of Jesus: "I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin." (John 8:34) And that "everyone" even includes "religious" people. One of the most religious and most devoted followers of Jesus who ever lived was a man named Paul. Listen to what Paul wrote about his addiction to sin:
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do ... As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me ... For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do -- this I keep on doing.
Romans 7:14-19
D. In moments of sober reflection, we would all admit that we know exactly what Paul is talking about. We understand what it means to do something that is wrong even though deep down we really want to do the right thing. We know the frustration of feeling powerless to stop ourselves, to feel powerless to change. We may never have felt powerless to stop drinking, but have felt powerless to stop sinning.
E. But with that said, we must also face the fact that there are many people in our community and in our church who suffer with particular addictions that some of the rest of us don't have, and who likely know far more about the pain of being an addict than I can even imagine. Let me give you just some of the statistics to help us put the problem of addictive behavior into perspective:
- Six million Americans are addicted to cocaine. Americans consume more than 60% of all illegal and addictive drugs in the world. Three billion dollars is spent every year in the U.S. on drug paraphernalia.
- Ten million Americans are addicted to prescription drugs.
- Alcohol is the most widely used drug in America. Two-thirds of the American population drinks on a somewhat regular basis. A tenth of those who drink consume half the alcoholic beverages sold.
- 55 million Americans are addicted to nicotine. Every year 40% of all smokers try to quit. Statistically, most are unsuccessful.
- Between 60 and 80 million Americans are compulsive overeaters. Between 5% and 15% die from their overeating. Americans spend $20 billion every year on weight loss products.
- Eight percent of all women are bulimic (purging themselves by self-induced vomiting); one in every 250 women is anorexic. Ninety-eight percent of women say they would change their looks if they could, and many women have become addicted to plastic surgery.
- As part of the evidence of the sexual addiction of many Americans, consider the fact that 60 million Americans experience sexual abuse by the time they are 18 (one-quarter of the population).
- There are 12 million compulsive gamblers in the U.S. The suicide rate for compulsive gamblers is 20 times the national average.
- An estimated 15 million Americans are addicted to work. These are men and women who become physically ill when they are forced not to work. (This is one I really can't relate to.)
- Finally, it is estimated that every addict directly affects at least ten other people. In a Gallup Poll, 41% said they had suffered physical, psychological or social harm as the result of someone else's drinking.
F. To have an addiction is to be stuck, to be trapped, to be locked in a jail cell with no way out. But that's not the whole picture. According to Jesus, our sin and our addictions may have enslaved and may have locked us up and thrown away the key, but the truth for those of us who know Jesus is that we are locked in a room with open doors.
G. Think about that for a minute. Try to picture being locked in a room with open doors. When I was a kid I became fascinated with Harry Houdini, the greatest escape artist of our time. Houdini could escape from anything. No chains, no sealed boxes, no airtight jail cells could hold him. My favorite story about Harry Houdini is when a small town in England challenged Houdini to try to escape from their jail cell. Houdini boasted he could escape from any jail in the world, and this little English town took the dare. With much fanfare Houdini was shut into the cell while the townspeople and the media waited outside. Most people expected Houdini to make quick work of this challenge; that was certainly Houdini's expectation. But to Houdini's surprise, the door to this little jail cell proved to be harder than usual to crack -- much harder in fact. For an hour Houdini struggled to open the door, with no success. After a brief break, he went back to work. At the end of two hours Houdini was soaked in sweat, utterly exhausted, and -- to his embarrassment -- totally defeated. He could not open this door. In defeat Houdini slumped to the floor and fell against the door -- which to his surprise swung wide open. But the most surprising discovery was still to come. It turned out that Houdini had nothing to do with unlocking that door, because the door had never been locked to begin with. The jailer forgot to lock it. Harry Houdini, the world's greatest escape artist, had been locked in a room with an open door.
H. As addicts, whether we are addicted to some substance or some sin, we are locked in a room with open doors. Jesus has opened the doors for us, and made it possible for us to escape our slavery. But while freedom is possible, it is not automatic, not for any of us. So let's see what we can discover about how to get free from our addictions.
I. The Truth Will Set You Free: Understanding Addictive Behavior
A. Just before Jesus told his listeners that everyone who sins is a slave to sin, he said this: "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31-32) With that hope in mind, let's spend just a few minutes discovering the truth about addictive behavior.
B. Let me give you a definition of "addiction." An addiction is any self-defeating behavior that a person cannot stop despite its adverse consequences. I've already given you some of the statistics on addictions and some example of addictions, but let's see if we can get a little more sophisticated in our understanding of the problem.
C. First, it is helpful to break down the general problem of addiction into some categories. One way to do that is to note the distinction between substance addictions and process addictions. Substance addictions are addictions to mood-altering substances that are deliberately taken into the body and which almost always create, over time, a physical dependence. I don't have any of those kind of addictions. I don't need to take anything to help me get through the day. As long as I have a gallon of Coke a day, I don't need anything to alter my moods.
D. Process addictions are different. Instead of being addicted to a substance, like caffeine or alcohol or drugs or food, process addictions are addictions to certain behaviors or actions. Gambling and workaholism are just two examples. Another example that might be too close to home for those of us who have grown up in churches is addiction to religion, which is one of the fastest growing addictions in America.
E. Another way of categorizing addictions is to note the distinction between hard addictions and soft addictions. Hard addictions are those addictions we all worry about and we all agree are harmful -- such as addictions to drugs or gambling. The soft addictions are the "socially-sanctioned" addictions, the addictions we sort of wink at and sometimes even laugh about. Workaholism is one of the soft addictions. We almost celebrate workaholism in the Silicon Valley. That's what it takes to get a start-up going -- hard work and long hours to the exclusion of everything else. Here's another soft addiction -- shopaholism. Since I generally hate going shopping, this is another way that's hard for me to relate to, yet on the other hand it really isn't. I've felt the rush of buying something new. I know the intoxication of walking into "The Good Guys" and hearing all these big screen TVs calling me, "Buy me, buy me!" Yet for many people -- male and female -- shopping is an obsession. They buy things they don't need or want because of the rush of buying.
F. So how do we can we tell whether we or someone we love has an addiction? How do we know when they've crossed the line from liking certain substances or behaviors to being addicted to them? And what kind of harm do our addictions cause us? Let me briefly give you five characteristics of addictive behavior and how they impact us.
G. First, addictive behavior is obsessive. When you obsess about something, you invest a great deal of time and emotional energy thinking about your obsession and planning your next "fix." You can't wait to do it again. The thought of not being able to do makes you anxious and panicky. My family will, I'm sure, be glad to tell you about some of my obsessions -- like my obsession with cleaning gutters and vacuuming in straight lines -- but my kids can have their own obsessions. One night Kelsey, our four year old, was pestering me and Brenda for dinner. We were both at our respective desks, and we kept telling her we would have dinner soon. Finally, little Kelsey, who weighs all of 35 pounds with her clothes on, stomped into my office and with a very stern voice announced, "If I don't get something to eat, I'm going to panic!" There you go, one of the signs of an addiction -- panic at the thought of not getting what you want.
H. Second, addictive behavior has negative consequences. A true addiction is harmful to the addict and to the people around him/her. Addictions cause us to live restricted, cramped lives, lives that have little room for people because they are full of our addiction. Addictions limit our capacity to love. Then there are the obvious consequences of addictions -- the destruction of our health, the financial drain, the draining of our energy, the guilt, the destructive things we do to the people around us, including the violence and the abuse of people we love.
I. Third, addictive behavior involves a loss of control. In a true addiction, once you have begun the activity, you find it next to impossible to stop. An alcoholic can't take just one drink; a gambler can't place just one bet; a television addict can't watch just one show.
J. Fourth, there is denial. The addict really believes he/she really is in control. They really believe they can stop anytime. The addict will minimize their problem, he will avoid talking about it, he will blame other people, he will rationalize, he will excuse it, cover it up, and just plain deny that he even does what he does. The experts on addiction, which I am not, are all agreed on this -- Denial is the biggest problem when it comes to overcoming addictions.
K. The fifth characteristic of addictive behavior is what is called tolerance and withdrawal. What this means is that the addict always wants and needs more and more of the substance (or process) in order to feel satisfied. The "high" a person once got from two drinks now takes five drinks. The "high" you once got from making a thousand dollars now takes a lot more, and so you risk more in the stock market or you work longer hours or you do whatever it takes to get more money because you've got to have more money to feel the high again.
L. And at bottom, what is so tragic about our addictions is that they make us less than human. It is not how God designed us to live. I've listed for you the five characteristics of addictive behavior, behavior that makes us less than human. Let me list for you the nine characteristics of a person who is fully human and fully alive, the person who is living life as God designed us to live it. This list comes, in fact, right from God:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Galatians 5:22-23
M. To be fully human and fully alive is to have self-control, to be in control of what you consume, what you think, what you do, and how you treat the people around you. And Jesus tells us that it is possible for us to walk out of the cell of our addiction and through the open door into a life of self-control and joy and peace and goodness if we so choose, that he can give us real help to make a real recovery from our addictions. So how do we do it? How do we who are locked in a room with open doors get free of the addictions that have dehumanized us and threatened to ruin our lives and the lives of the people we love?
II. The Truth Will Set You Free: Getting Real Help For A Real Recovery
A. Let me take you back to Romans 7, that chapter in the Bible where Paul talked about his slavery to sin and his inability to do the good he so much wanted to do. Let me show you how you concludes that chapter of his letter:
I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God -- through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Romans 7:22-25
B. I want you to look closely at that phrase "body of death." Let me tell you what Paul was referring to. That phrase describes a particularly gruesome method of execution used by the Romans in Paul's day. A cadaver would be attached to a condemned person so that the prisoner could not get free from it. The rotting flesh of the carcass would begin to pollute the body of the prisoner. Eventually, the prisoner's own body would become diseased and infected and the prisoner would die a slow, painful death.
C. That, Paul said, is what his addiction to sin was doing to him. And that is what our addictions, including the addiction every one of us has to sin, do to us. Slowly but surely, they kill us. But Paul also discovered the good news that by his death on the cross for our sin and his resurrection from the dead, Jesus had set us free from the body of death. He has cut the cords that bind us to the body of death, he has unlocked the door of our jail cell. And so the first thing all of us who are addicts need to know and to believe is that there is hope. Because of what Jesus did, there is hope we can be free, there is hope we gain regain control of our lives, there is hope we can recover from the havoc and the misery of our addiction, there is hope we can live differently. No matter how far you've fallen, no matter how many years you have been tied to the body of death, no matter how many times you have tried to change and failed, you need to know that there is hope.
D. But as much as I would like to tell you that you can be free of your addiction if you just close your eyes, click your heels together three times, and say "There's no place like home, there's no place like home," the truth is that recovering from a broken will rarely happens overnight. For most of us, recovery is a process, a process of owning up to our addictions and taking responsibility for the hurt we have caused, a process of repenting of our sin and making amends for the damage we've done. And it is a process that only really works when it is done in a community, when it is done with the love and support of other people who can help you a step at a time to walk out the door Jesus has opened.
E. If you have been involved in any kind of recovery group, you know all about the Twelve Step Program. The Twelve Steps were developed by one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, a doctor who by his own admission was a "drunk." But you may not know that the Twelve Steps are based directly on the Bible. Bill Wilson was a Christian who was inspired and helped in writing the Twelve Steps by his pastor, Rev. Sam Shoemaker, the pastor of Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City. We surely don't have time to talk about each of the Twelve Steps this morning, but let me simply list the basic concepts of the Twelve Steps as summarized by Lyman Coleman:
Step One - Move beyond denial
Step Two - Put our faith in God
Step Three - Repentance
Step Four - Take a moral inventory
Step Five - Admit our wrongs
Step Six - Desire for God to remove our wrongs
Step Seven - Ask God to remove our wrongs
Step Eight - List people we have damaged
Step Nine - Make amends with those we have damaged
Step Ten - Regularly take personal inventory
Step Eleven - Pray, read the Bible, meditate
Step Twelve - Share our experience with others
F. If you are struggling with an addiction, I strongly encourage you to take advantage of the real help that is available to you. There are scores of people who know exactly what you are struggling with and who would love nothing more than to help you begin the journey to wholeness and healing of the Twelve Step Process. We have literature for you in the lobby that you can take with that tells you how to get real help, that lets you know who you can call and where you can go. And you should also know there are many people sitting here this morning who are both qualified and willing to help, if you'll let them.
G. Let me leave you with this one last thought. When Jesus left this earth, his disciples were very scared. They were scared of being alone, they were scared that they would have to do all the things Jesus told them to do on their own, and they weren't sure they could do it. But Jesus didn't leave them alone, and he hasn't left us alone. He sent his Holy Spirit to live in us, to give us the power and the strength and the courage and the will to break free from our addictions. In 2 Timothy 1:7 the Bible says, "For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline." If you are a follower of Jesus, you don't ever need to say, "I just don't have any self-control. I just don't have any discipline." If you are a follower of Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit living in you, and he is a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline. He is your real help for real recovery.

How It Is Without CrackCocaine In My Life

2005-02-04T13:01:00.000-05:00

How it is; is nice, very nice, incredibly nice, and phenomenally nice. Life without crack cocaine is life. Outside of death, which is a weird event in itself, nothing could spin me away from the truth I know about crack cocaine. Kind of the same no kidding when one finally gets the God concept! You mean there is a God? No kidding! There is only one. We cannot serve two God’s, so crack’s gotta go. Simple as that.
How it is; is scary and terrifying. Especially since 911. Scary in the evil sense. Terrifying in the you never know sense.
How it is; is I believe even more now that crack cocaine is the devil’s candy. Nothing else has ever worked for me to resist this stuff. As long as it works to resist is all that matters.
How it is; is now I have a wonderful family. I have three beautiful daughters, ages 9,3,and 2. I am happily married to a woman who if she could put up with all that came at her and still want me…there is a God just based on that. I live in a beautiful home in a nice quiet neighborhood and now have healthy financial responsibilities along with being in shock from how good life is now. I just have to keep thinking about all the money spent to smoke crack cocaine...all the money spent…all the money spent…all the money spent…
How it is; is I have been free from crack cocaine for several years. I still work a program. It is my program for me and it works and that is all that matters. I do not go out and party, I do not do much else but go to work about 8½ to 9 hours a day, come home, settle the kids down and get some fun in, eat dinner and do the evening duties and routines that have been established by our family. This works for me. It is only part of my program because “my program” changes to life’s needs, whatever those are at the time of need.
There does come a time when crack cocaine does not dominate your entire mind. It could take some time to get there. It still trickles in little pitiful almost thoughts to try and trip you up, and probably always will. He never knows when he might get one again, but not me.
Just thinking of all the wasted time on smoking crack cocaine is staggering. Now I get the most out of the time a day gives. Today I am not rushed to get more and more and more of anything, especially crack cocaine. Having a new peaceful heart allows me the good fortune of not doing the crack cocaine spin. I am able to keep my balance. Looking back it is hard to come up with why crack cocaine had such a hold on me, except that it is the devil’s candy.
I did not run to alcohol or other drugs to compensate for the loss of crack cocaine. There is no other substance that gripped me like crack cocaine did. In other scenarios where someone should not either drink or maybe do prescription drugs or any other drug is an individual situation. Not all people who fall victim to crack cocaine are alcoholics or addicts. This fact goes completely the opposite direction of the addiction disease treatment plans. A lot of crack-heads are other heads of something…so to say it is just a possession for them is probably one or two steps away from being reality to them in their lives. In some cases or maybe most concerning certain other mood altering substances, zero usage is the way. Most will have to find out for themselves. I will never agree to someone going clean and slurping down just a 6-pack every night, soon to be just a few more…
Now that my life is activated, my wife and myself (had a social life before our last 2 children) have fun. Sometimes we toast with wine, and sometimes we pop a cold one. Most of the time we do neither. We believe in the sanctity of our marriage. We sit out on the deck in our cool back yard and enjoy cooking burgers on the grill while the girls share turns jumping on the trampoline that has a cannot fall through surround attached to it, like a huge play-pen.
When life is about truth, honesty and faith, is when it gets real peaceful. Inwardly peaceful. The outside worldly stuff keeps its usual pace. Family. That one word is what life is all about, in any kingdom. My family, your family, their family, God’s family. All levels. I guess this is the one crack-crap thing that is to me the first clear warning sign that something is definitely wrong. When the family structure decays from crack cocaine, this is the casting of the crew. You are being picked for a performance. By destroying the family, our strength and structure are seriously diminished. This allows the candy to appear so sweet. The instant wow this is so intensely good……and the race is now on. How it is…great.

A Scriptural Journey...defining CrackCocaine

2005-01-29T14:14:00.000-05:00

I find power and relief in the printed word, in both reading and writing, more in the writing than the reading. When my despair was below hitting bottom, I started writing anything that came to mind. I also started reading all I could, especially when the words felt healing. Then to be able to write words that felt healing and then to add playing guitar notes that seemed to blend together and these felt soothing, all this seemed to be what I was supposed to be doing. At the time I had no idea what it all meant but it felt like peaceful spiritual progress was being made in ever so teeny tiny microscopic baby steps…and the positive forces of life were leading me down into new territory and I was very willing to go.
When I describe scriptures and their meaning to me, this is part of how “my program” works for me. When I read scriptures and a meaning jumps out at me, I go with it. Most probably do not go along with a pastoral translation, but as long as words are not added or subtracted or changed then whatever meaning penetrates the evil crack stench bubble, than so be it. If it works then maybe God meant just that meaning for just you to believe and practice. All that really matters is that crack disappears from the face of the earth, and with the power of printed scriptures for us to benefit from, seek and you will find the right meaning for you the user or you the victim.
The first scripture that I read that actually felt real and that it might be true or at least I was desperately hoping could be true was Psalm 34. I was living in a rat and cock-roach infested rooming hotel. Every drug addict, pimp and easy crack babe were no further than 50 feet away at any given moment. After reading Psalm 34 I felt a very slight faint glimmer of possible hope. It was so small you would miss it if your heart was not actually crying out for relief from the madness of smoking crack cocaine. It was years later that I was crack-free. I am hoping in my heart I can save people some time with my truths exposed. Anything could help, a word, a song, a person who has been there and knows the truth. PSALM 34 - “I will extol the LORD at all times; his praise will always be on my lips. My soul will boast in the LORD; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Glorify the LORD with me; let us exalt his name together. I sought the LORD, and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame. This poor man called, and the LORD heard him; he saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them. Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him. Fear the LORD, you his saints, for those who fear him lack nothing. The lions may grow weak and hungry, but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing. Come, my children, listen, to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD. Whoever of you loves life and desires to see many good days, keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking lies. Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it. The eyes of the LORD are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their cry; the face of the LORD is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth. The righteous cry out, and the LORD hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles. The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. A righteous man may have many troubles, but the LORD delivers him from them all; he protects all his bones, not one of them will be broken. Evil will slay the wicked; the foes of the righteous will be condemned. The LORD redeems his servants; no one who takes refuge in him, will be condemned”. I really wanted what this was saying. I needed to have it or I would die. This only planted a less than mustard seed in my heart. I soon turned my back again and went for the madness of smoking crack. The words in Psalm 34 spoke to my heart daily. I chose to ignore them. The hope was there, but the sweetness of the devil’s candy was overpowering. What a journey this would be.
I sought scriptures that could place some semblance in the madness surrounding my zero life. I had tried everything else, nothing was or seemed to help or work in ridding my soul of this horrible contamination from the devil’s candy. God’s word penetrated the evil crack stench bubble that up until now had been able to block any attempt to be crack-free.
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened”. Matthew 7:7-8
*The initiative has to come from oneself. No one else can implement this. No matter how much desire or simply wanting the end stage or magic poof cleanness, none of this will likely happen on our time. Our time is just that-our time. The frustrating part is asking without instant results. In fact with crack the complete opposite seems or actually does occur. The instant I asked from the heart, it still took 3 more years (on my time) to be free completely from crack. Evidently my lessons were not done yet. The door was opened, I just had to hang on and trust God and keep going through that door until it closed behind me.
Jesus said, “What is impossible with men is possible with God”. Luke 18:27
I was around treatment people all 105 of them and being drilled that we are addicts and alcoholics period. Nothing more nothing less. This seemed very phony. I did not relate to this way of thinking. I gave it my best attempt, but just could not convince myself that this is it and that is all it is! I always felt it was a contamination of some sort, unable to identify it but felt it was. It definitely was stronger and more power than a room full of people preaching treatment and meetings and zero about the truth of the spiritual binding element that crack cocaine has, but then maybe they did not know from lack of true experience with the crack-bite and not from some page from a clinical textbook, page 402, section 13. Realizing it IS the devil’s candy allows my faith to overcome this sweetness of deception. It still is a daily spiritual battle; but now because of my faith in God, I have trust in HIS deliverance.
“Daughter your faith has healed you, go in peace and be free from your suffering”.
Mark 5:34
This scripture had me running out a door to get to a safe place. I went to yet another ‘treatment’ place, and it was a very horrifying experience for my soul and spirit. I will not say the name exactly, merely because in case someone is getting the “help” they need to get clean. This place was a “Challenge” especially for teens…I do not want to bury this places policies, but at the time I was there, it was a mess. I was there less than 15 minutes and joined the prayer group in the gym. Within minutes people were falling back on the floor kind of flopping and speaking in what they were calling tongues. The hair on the back of neck was completely standing straight up, stiffly. Some new arrivals came into the room and within minutes a few of them were flopping and speaking in the “hahbah hahbah aahhcktoo hahbah” stuff. Huh? What the heck is all this I asked quite bluntly. I was there to get better and really needed it and really wanted it, and now this phony stuff. I was told that this speaking is the manifestation of the ‘Holy Spirit”. I said yeah and…I was then told if you do not speak like this then you do not have the ‘Holy Spirit’ in you!! HUH? What a mess. I am here less than 30 minutes and this is not good. I was also a vegetarian at the time, and kindly asked for an extra banana or a salad and someone can have my calico beef slice of whatever it was, or they could have my gray hotdog and could I get maybe an extra yogurt or something. I was told quite sternly, when you are here long enough (this was a year program) you WILL eat what we serve or go hungry. This is bad. Real bad! How am I going to make it through this for a year. I went out to the back forty where we could go for walks. I completely broke down. I wanted to get better but this was not the place or program for me to do it. I was hurting so bad. I could not leave. That would be failure and everyone would think I do not want to stop smoking crack. This is a mess. No one would answer my calls and no outside world things were allowed. One day cleaning walls that were not dirty, but had to clean anyway, lunch was ready…hmmm….gray hot dogs, a huge mound of cheetos, 1 green apple and water with no ice. I was loosing it and very, very hungry. I had not eaten very much. I tried to find things to eat but you could not switch food with someone who might like too. I am really hungry. I left the lunch line and ran up to my room that housed 45 men in bunk beds 38 inches apart. I cried as silently as one could. With tears flooding my eyes I read Mark 34:5. I wanted to leave. They would not let me. They brought me into the office and had numerous people pray over me and speak (or whatever it was) in tongues. I was numb from remembering an earlier incident in the gym on a Saturday night about 9:30 PM , when a guy grabbed my shoulders and started squinting and chanting and sweating and shaking kind of jolting me while he did the tongue thing. I threw his hands away and got in his face and asked him what the hell he was doing? He said praying for you. If this is how you pray for me, forget it, I do not need that! All this was too creepy for me. Now I am in this office with these weird people speaking in this tongue garbage, holding me hostage, at least that is how I felt. Finally, four hours later I got my $10 from my personal money and they brought me down to the bus station to get back home, even though I had no home. When I called my family to please pick me up at the bus station, it was, well pretty bad. They thought I left because I did not want to stop using crack…when in reality I left to save my soul and spirit. I felt very weird there, like a spell was being cast on me..?! I know it does not sound right…but my truths have set me free and maybe they can help set someone else possessed free. What an experience.
“but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts”.
John 5:42
Not just lip service, from the heart. This is just a place that we get to from grace, mercy and perseverance. When we fall in love, we have little control over our hearts. We are also more vulnerable to getting our hearts crushed when our hearts are fixed on something and that something lets us down. God will never let you down. When our hearts fall in love with God, our focus becomes content and candy proof. Ask God from the heart to start the journey to being crack-free, and trust it will be done. This does not mean out of desperation from a crisis, this means after a clean period of time from crack, maybe 30 days or so, or better yet just time enough for your soul to neutralize, so acceptance can enter.
“I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism, but accepts men from every nation who fears him and do what is right”.
Acts 10:34-35
No crack-head is left out of God’s grace & mercy. The ‘fallen angel’ loves this lie. I felt that I was left out. I kept thinking ‘I’m a crack-head and will never rid myself of this insidious stuff”. I kept hoping God’s grace will go to whoever fears HIM, and does the right thing; like maybe me? A radio personality states it true when she says, “Now go do the right thing”! How true! God accepts us as from wherever, and HE will deliver our souls from the devil’s candy, when our faith has more space in our head than our desire or even just thoughts of smoking crack cocaine. The fear of God has to outweigh the fear of the consequences of smoking crack cocaine period!
“but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance: perseverance, character; and character, hope”.
Romans 5:3-4
There is that word, hope. Hope I can quit. I am sorry and regret that my lessons from smoking crack cocaine hurt my family, friends, my daughter, my wife. Hopefully from my perseverance to keep trying to find what would work for me, will help balance my life now. Why I am here today is directly from Susan and Camille. My daughter and my wife. There have been a lot of people affected by my crack-crap, my mother stressed herself to help find a way, my sister and I lost a chunk from our seamless brother sister relationship, my father just plain buried me early to avoid the reality that it might truly have happened, my brother stayed neutral and now that is a very good thing because I have a good relationship with my brother instead of loosing a chunk here too, I even exposed my crack cocaine behavior to my 80 year old grandmother and to my uncles family, and I am sure that there are others that have all tried and contributed to helping Todd. With even just a little faith in me I am sure pulled some weight. Prayers do get answered. I prayed right in the middle of the despair pit for a daughter and a woman to marry. Both were given to me. I am blessed to have Susan and Camille in my life. Both are phenomenal women, and I believe sent to answer my prayer.
“You shouldn’t stop giving yourselves to each other except when you both agree to do so. And that should be only to give yourselves time to pray for a while. Then you should come together again. In that way Satan will not tempt you when you can’t control yourselves”.
1 Corinthians 7:5
This is obvious. Life for us now is; Camille deals with the victims, and I deal with the user. We separated ourselves to pray for the madness to stop…we got back together…we are giving of ourselves…it says Satan WILL NOT TEMPT…this IS true…it may not feel like it, but we persevered and have faith…faith is the trigger for releasing God’s awesome power…

Agape Love in 75 Days

2005-01-26T09:43:00.000-05:00

There are many ways to stop smoking crack-cocaine. As simple as this seems, it really is true. Crack-cocaine lies. It convinces you that you can have IT and a life, you just have to work it out…again…and again…and again.
This booklet is in a format that without a doubt saved my life. When I was jotting down all these notes, I had no idea it would come to this. As we know GOD has weird ways to get us where HE wants us to be. HIS way works.
It takes 75 days to completely get the spiritual possession (not the secular addiction) of crack-cocaine out. The secular addiction is an on going life long dilemma as long as we buy into we can never completely get rid of an addiction. Well this is not true. This is from our experiences and truths. Clinically it can take about 75 hours. This is not a clinical battle. The spiritual and mind possession can tempt and prod you for quite awhile longer than this format is set up to do. When you do get to the end of the 75 days, the plan and goal is to be exposed to the real truths about crack-cocaine and to have disarmed it to the point that it has started to leave you alone so you can work your program and fight the spiritual battle of your life, for your life. The following pages are set up to be a daily guide. Each day will have one spiritual issue with a scripture of reinforcement. My daughter Sue says we should do these as memory verses. I agree. We also have a quip of the day. There will be more than one spiritual issue per day coming at you, but our focus is on how to accomplish one issue at a time. Each day away from crack-cocaine brings us closer to being completely free from crack. With a true desire and the understanding of where this stuff is really coming from and its only mission to destroy; this understanding and desire will bring you the strength necessary for success. Our measure of success is in our 1st belief and to quote: We believe in each success, not every failure. Success is what you make of it. When contaminated, an hour can be great success.
I do suggest that when a fall, slip, relapse, or picking up again, or whatever term works for you…IMMEDIATELY get back up and go to where you LEFT off…and do it again and again and again until you get it right. Ultimately it goes full circle…and remember…it took me 3 years AFTER I knew what I know now as the truth revealed to my soul as to what this stuff really is…this approach works for me and crack-cocaine will never penetrate me again…this is ONE thing I do know for sure about crack-cocaine… BUT do not worry…I am not too confident…it is just when you do finally get how to do this…it is simple.

from Agape Love by Marilyn Lyon

Todd called me as soon as he was able to tell me the news. Pat the social worker at the Bail Bond Dept. had already called me to tell me she had appeared in court and Todd was definitely going into a Re-Hab Program. Todd and I waited anxiously for an opening to come up. He was euphoric but very nervous and very serious.
He had wished for a long-term residential program for so long and thought it to be hopeless. Now that this had arrived he was terrified that it too would not work. He was terrified that he was hopeless. He was moving neared to that place where crack-heads can not stop and can not live as a crack-head any more.
He finally heard of an opening and was scheduled to move in immediately. He called and gave me a list of things he needed me to buy at the store, and which of his clothes he needed. I had already packed his bag. It had been waiting for weeks. When I arrived with toiletries from the store he had made a list of the cost of each one and totaled them including tax.
"I can get a job and a pass to go to work after I have been here a month. I will pay you back from my first check". And he did.
I visited him every Saturday afternoon for 2 hours. He was both serious and euphoric with energy, zest, confidence and dedication. The old Todd was back. He was very happy and impressed with his caseworker that was on the premises every day. She was able to put what was best for the patient 1st. She gave him many books to read and he devoured each one, taking notes on them! He would bring the book and his notebook to the visiting room when I visited and talked about each one in detail. He even had me get the books I had read from the library and let her read them. Todd was ready to take any program, good or bad into his heart and try and make it work.
He talked non-stop for 2 hours every week. It seems he had lucked out at this facility, which housed people from a large area, even out of state. It involved some serious felony prisoners and all types of substance abuse. Consequently the program was broad and varied. The reading material covered a range of ideas about crack. The lectures were balanced with a variety of types of people with a variety of approaches to various abuses. Meetings were held with a format ranging from AA's to a newer more free-form supportive more positive approach. Todd soon found leaders he admired and identified with. Something that had never happened at meetings he had gone to before.
He was both terrified at the thought of leaving the facilities and impatient to have a life again. He took to heart one of the main aspects of the program, which was whatever is bothering you, whoever is bothering you, however small and insignificant, please, please tell us immediately. Your happiness and peace is very important to us. Your recovery is #1 in our life. We will do anything to help you get there. He became an avid complainer. It always worked. This was his first taste in 6 years of wanting to live his life in a certain way and having control over something that was making this difficult or impossible.
Of all the things he devoured here, that one helped him to take the biggest step. Control over his life control over crack.
While he put everything under a microscope, in every aspect of his life, he began to separate the people around him. Those who were not interested those who were weak and those who 'might' make it. This was another mark off point for him. Seeing himself and seeing those around him just as they really are.
People in the program assured him continually that his recovery was his recovery. Whatever program worked, was the right one. Whatever people helped him, were the right people. He was the free agent here who could design and find exactly what he needed. He was OK. He did not have to fit into an AA program. He could find his own personal program. If someone designated as help, and this person did not say things that had meaning to him, he had the right to reject them and find other people. In spite of this TLC, Todd constantly admired those counselors who also had, a you can not bullshit me, I know all the moves tough and brutally honest, and even a little cynical. He recognized this combination as real tough love.
The counselors did not spend a lot of time on how lethal crack was, or how desperate the life of a crack-head was. Most were pretty well aware of by now. There were those there who did not want to know. The why's were left a lot to the individual to find. The what's were stressed. Not so much here is a list of how to's, but what could work for you. In the midst of a monolithic mortally lethal substance epidemic, with no road maps, were these brave souls-the counselors and addicts were trying to find their way out of the wilderness together. That is what made it work. Together. Crack-heads do not need experts to write out a program in stone. They need people to work with them through this wilderness, pooling resources as if they were a combat unit shedding real tears when one of them did not make it.
I studied his body language. I studied his words. I studied his program and for the first time I was content. I would not hook myself into making stone chiseled proclamations. It would be 9 months out of the program before any of us would say, "I think he is going to make it". But I felt something shift in him. There was new grease in the gears.
He felt it too and there were days when he knew positively that he could do it. And days when he was terrified to be out there alone again. He wanted to leave every day and get restarted on recapturing life again, but he was terrified too. As though some monster from "Alien" was out there looking for any organization of society to eliminate, and it was just him and this slimy grotesque animal to battle it out. He counted the days to his release and clung more tightly to what was around him!
It seemed that no matter how strong he was, how armed, how padded, there was still this terror of this monster out there. Was he really strong enough, armed enough, and padded enough? What was enough? It was the nightmare of all nightmares. It was the creature of all creatures.
It was that his brother Scott who came down every Sunday to pick him up and drop him off at a church. By then Scott believed only GOD could give any real guarantees in Todd's life and none of us cared who gave Todd the key, we just wanted him to have it. We were all dedicated in our own way to try and bring it all into Todd's life, to try.
If you ask Todd what was the key that finally took away that terror that still lurked inside him, even with the Re-Hab Program working miracles in his life, he will tell you he prayed and prayed for GOD to take away the desire for crack. Because this was the terror inside him even with all the tools, the strength and the steps to help him, he was terrified that the desire was still there and might be more powerful.
Until one day he walked out of the church and the desire was gone. He said from that day on, "I never think of crack. I have no thoughts about it and am not interested in it. I have no reason to or no need to ever do it again.
The terror inside him was so great, this miracle to Todd was above and beyond anything else. His need to have; no thoughts or interest or desire for crack, as well as the emotional and intellectual tools and so eliminate the terror of a monster that had gripped his life for 6 years was so important to him that there were no miracles above this one.
I can live with that. Certainly I believe most completely in miracles, and GOD"S power. I also believe GOD helps those who help themselves and who know what to do with that help and who truly needs it. And HE helps those who help others.
Todd's miracle was a package deal. He did try to help himself and we learned how to help him. Many people including a society of people, the counselors bravely walking through wilderness with no road map for crack-heads. Pat at Bail Bonds Dept., whose last name I never knew, came into our lives so briefly yet was part of this miracle. I would not want to take one card form the house of cards for fear it would all tumble down. It is hard for me to separate any one part of all the things that helped Todd, and say this is the one that really did it. He traveled a long road with many people to even get miracle status. Perhaps he needed to. But for Todd, after collecting all he had collected on his journey, and taking this journey with all the people he did, his terror of the desire was the greatest obstacle and only GOD could remove that. And HE did.
My daughter said, "You had a lot to do with this. I do not know if it would have happened without you". Why didn't I feel that's true? I would stop and think when she said it, of what specifically did I do that made a difference? I never could pinpoint it. I do think it was not as people think it was. Similar, but not the same. Certainly there were things I did with no motivation other than help or cure Todd. But that could not be sustained for long in the chaotic ups and downs, disappointments and failures of having a crack-head son. What I did was sustain myself. Help myself to get through it. Made myself feel as good as I possibly could to endure it. Had he died, I would have been able to draw on this. As it was it got me through. And in the process helped him. It did not cure him. Only he could do that.
He was not entirely alone, either. Neither was I, because it was a very lonely time for both of us. To death, or to life, I had to take that walk with him, or I could not have lived with it.
AGAPE LOVE? It seems too perfect a feat for me. Maybe a mini Agape Love was achieved-sometimes.

The House That Crack Built...12 Year Old Article by Kent Dixon

2005-01-15T21:56:00.000-05:00

This is a great read describing crackcocaine from the actual user view. Crack is so difficult to describe...and this article is one of the best I have read. Hope you enjoy it as much!

"There's a lot of talk about Crack these days but not much about the house that Crack lives in. So we the inmates of the Clark County Jail will take you on a tour of the Crack House himself.
So come on up here on the porch of this old house, it sure ain't no home. More like Grand Central Station with all the people coming and going. People laughing, people crying, people just hanging out--no matter the temperature. Guy standing on the porch in zero weather hugging his elbows--people wonder what's the matter with him?
Crack cocaine. He sold the coat off his back to the Dopeman for crumbs. Mere crumbs.
He could use that coat indoors: crack houses usually about as cold as they are bare. Electricity and gas . . . luxuries. No electricity equals no stove, no cooking, no TV, no popcorn. No hot tea. No ice tea. (No ice.) No phone ringing. Lots of fast food wrappers laying around or maybe crammed into a box or trash can, not that anyone ever empties it.
The couch sits squat to the floor instead of on its legs, sure sign where the decorator found it, in the dump. Also a table for important items: a glass stem, hollow like a straw, or maybe a metal one--these are your "pipes"--and a full Bic lighter, some empty Bics, a box of Chore Boy steel wool (for filters).
A candle for when the sun's gone and the Bics are empty. Matches for the candle so the Bics aren't wasted. Broken hangers or car antenna for cleaning out the pipes. No clocks, don't need them. Crack time is when's my next hit.
Come on in a little further. There's probably a hall, empty condom package on the floor, and here's a kitchen. The table is bare except for razor crumbs from cutting or shaving the rock, too small to see though though sure enough they'll be somebody down under that table on all fours looking. Maybe two or three of them.
An empty plate, an empty baggy box. An empty refrigerator if there is one. Empty cupboards, empty shelves, it's an empty place. On those occasions where it is somebody's home, it's almost empty and on its way to being trashed, gutted, shot up, busted out, and the occupant maybe beaten, maybe prostituted, maybe evicted--at least one of those, only a matter of time. That's because a crack house is nothing more'n a temporary site with one sole purpose: money.
Money for the dealer, from $100/hour for a little guy, to maybe $400 to $500 when everything is set up just right and all players are behaving. Maybe $1,000 on a good day, maybe $2,500 if you know how to satisfy the choicest clientele. I'm talking hourly now, and conservative. And money for the occupant, too. Don't forget him. Money or something much much better than money. Which is crack, poor fool.
THE PLAYERS
The more crack sales, the hotter the spot and the hotter the spot, the more faces you see, 10 or 15 people milling around at any one time. The hotter the spot, the more risk; the more risk, the more precautions necessary, which leads to the first player:
The Doorman--the one responsible for the door. Who is it? Say it's you. You don't leave your post without consent. After a couple of days you get pretty funky. You're a geeker (hooked smoker) and your wage is crack. And you get plenty extra on the sly, too, as middle man, breaking crumbs off other people's dope. Till you get caught.
So comes a knock and you open your door and your customer comes in. You ask them what they want. They tell you 20. Or 25 or 30 or 40...dollar amounts, a quarter rock ($25) being about this [ ] size and a little thicker, though not always. You take this money and count it and turn around and walk off in back to:
The Dopeboy--the main man, dopeman, the dealer, who does not want to be seen (hence the Doorman). Dopeboys travel in packs, three, four, five or six of them, for fear of being robbed. Each has his own stock--they're just together for security--and they take turns at the crack house, the balance hanging out in a "Safehouse" somewhere, a temporary and quiet abode, in this town usually on the north side in the university area or northwest along the park.
Called dopeboys because that's what they are, on average from 16 to 22 years old. I've seen them as young as 14, and rushers can be in grade school, 11 and 12 year olds. I know this 8 year old running for his folks, which is smart. You think they send an 8 year old to jail?
Back to the man. You, Doorman, hand him, the Dopeboy, the customer's money, and he hands you the dope and back you go to the customer at the door. He examines the product and nine times out of ten he ain't satisfied.
You repeat the routine, and more often than not the Dopeboy will give back the same piece of dope or one smaller, which you return to the customer and he complains. But as negotiations do not appear to be going his way, he takes it.
A frequent variation: Doorman breaks off a little bit on his way back to the customer, like maybe a $5 hit. Customer may or may not notice this little premium. Now if that customer is me--I know what's happening--Doorman hands me that tampered rock I say, No, man, give me back my money if he can't do better than that.
So he steps out of sight, puts back the piece he took off, and brings it back to me. I usually laugh and take it, but there have been times I said no again. Then he has to take it back to the Dopeman broken up. That's where some serious ass-kicking comes in. Hey, I'm smoking, you really think I give a shit after the sonofabitch tries to rip me off?
The Hit Man--a necessary feature. He guards the Dopeboy's back, his 44 magnum never far from reach. You meet that muzzle at the door, you've got no illusions the dopeboys are playing around. Believe me, they're not playing. Shoot first, ask questions later, after they pack up and find another spot. Where it starts up again, and goes on all night, all next day, twenty-four/seven.
The Rushers--the ones who run up to any and every car or even to ordinary people passing by: Hey, you looking? Come on, I'll get you hooked. Usually there's four or five of them, yelling and haggling and just rushing the shit out of the poor customer--he gives his money away just to get them out of his face! They'll rush anyone. I've seen these assholes run up to the wrong car and get cuffs slapped on them--comical as hell. These suckers get a $20 piece for every $100 they take to the Dopeman.
Then we have our Fake Rushers--these MF's are nuts. Somebody cruising, Fake Rusher stops him: Uh, man, I'm rushing for this old dude but he won't serve you but I can get you hooked.
So the Dumb-ass gives the Fake Rusher his money, so he goes in and buys a piece and goes out a different door while Dumb-ass just sits, and then you see him circle the block about a hundred times and all you can do is shake your head and laugh. Funny part is, the s.o.b. fakers never get caught. I call them Free Smokers.
Fleecers--"fleece" is fake crack, wax or soap or anything that can be made to look like crack and also burn like crack--which sizzles and crackles. You get the name there, but you sure don't get high off of fleece.
Fleecers are usually rushers who have built up some trust with their Dopeman, who then will give them say $100 worth of crack and tell him to get back to him, say $70. This is smart because it cuts down on the traffic at the door. It also causes debts, whippings, and sometimes loss of life. Simple fact is, the rusher smokes, so he messes up the dopemen's money by smoking up their dope, the whole $100 dollars worth, so he winds up selling wax or some other counterfeit that looks real but isn't.
It's not too hard to tell--wax tastes like wax and crack like crack. But there are a lot of dummies out there, giving real money for fake crack. A good disguise is novocaine in the fleece; that numbs your lips like the real thing, so you don't know sometimes till you light up and suck good, and wait, and wait some more, and guess what?--you been ganked.
The PFs and PF Whores--PFs stands for personal favors. These crack ladies, forgive me saying so, will do anything they're told for a hit, and what limit is there to a 19 year old dopeboy showing off how sick he can think? If you got a dirty mind, then stretch it as far as you can. They say women are more susceptible in this regard, will let themselves sink lower, but don't fool yourself: a man want crack bad enough, he'll be giving PFs in a wink. Self-respect is one of the first things traded for crack, somewhere in there just before your mother.
When I got out of the joint in '87, my mother put me on her bank account to help me get it together. I got it together alright, I smoked through her whole life savings in about three months. Man in this jail here sold his 11 year old daughter for a hit. You understand now? You get into this thing, nothing else matters eccept the next hit. And you could have a bathtub full of cocaine, too, and you'd be thinking, damn, what if I run out?
Tell you what else, if you're going to try the stuff, the fun is up front. There comes your rush, and that's a little like making love to God with every cell in your body, but then you spend the rest of your life on drugs chasing down that first high. It never gets that good again. Three months in jail gets you back a little bit closer God with Thee, because there ain't much yank in this jail--lucky to get chewing gum--so your tolerance drops back toward normal. But there's always that first time memory taunt-ing you.
MANUFACTURE
We're in some disagreement here on how they get cocaine from the cocoa leaf, but at some point the really big guys--your millionaire French connection types--they start cutting their pure white powder with additives like baby laxative or lidocaine (numbs the lips); baking soda's a common ingredient. This is called "stepping on it." Everybody below this international set, they're also stepping on it so pretty soon it's about quarter strength. They call the pure stuff "400% pure"--you toke in some of that by mistake, you dead. Len Bias dead.
Meanwhile every middleman has doubled his original amount and trebled his money. Tell me another commodity that can do that. It's magical. And then we got our chief executives and CIA's thinking they can manipulate this scene. They're in over their heads up against that crowd, just rich tourists fat for the trussin', while we get slammed and rot in jail. Ain't it the way
So your punk rusher out there gets lucky and lands a quantity of this powder, about 200% pure, and he steps on it. He might freebase with it but that's less popular now because it costs more and it's so strong it's kind of a luxury. It's a whole different market compared with the $5 and $10 sells of crack--we're talking Woolworths now, not Tiffanys. We're talking playground lunch money.
So nouveau dopeboy dissolves his precious snow in ether (because coke does not dissolve in water though most your additives do), and he adds his baking soda (make it set up, solid) and mixes up his little paste in his mayonnaise jar or whatever's handy and then cooks it in a double boiler or right over the flame except that's not always cool because of the ether (ask Richard Pryor), so the method of choice is to nuke it in your microwave for x many minutes until it starts "rocking up."
Bing, you got crack now. You scrape out your little quarter moon shape (the tipped mayo jar), cut it up into chunks, maybe a couple of $50s on down to little dime sizes (not too many: the more $50s you move, the less traffic), and if you're a dopeboy you don't even think to smoke it. They may be young but they're not stupid.
But the ones that are, they set the little rock on top of their little glass dick--another name for pipe or stem, because it gives so much pleasure, and runs the show too--and scorch it with their Bics, it being the fumes from the sizzling crack set on the tip of your upright stem that you inhale. Good idea to put some Brillo or Chore Boy at the bottom of your stemto keep you from sucking a hot piece of dope into your lung.
REAL ESTATE
I tell you something about how you acquire a crack house because that's one of the saddest things, seeing someone take over and just ruinate your house, often as not children involved. So these boys from Detroit or Dayton or New York or where have you, they come into town in their jalopy (inconspicuous) and find a good rusher (with only high paying customers, $50 and up), and it doesn't take him long to find somebody where lots of people are ready to spend their whole welfare and paychecks to statisfy their needs; and they tell him, Hey, you find us a spot and we'll throw you out something. So he's feeling out the real estate before they can even drive off.
So how much can you pay, someone wants to know. "Oh," says the geeker, "tell you what. Let us stay here and see how the flow is. If the spot's hot, we'll negotiate."
And guess whose terms it's on. (The homeowner smokes.) Not long, not long, the Dopeman takes over that house. Starts slow, pay $50/day rent or sometimes $25 cash and a quarter rock. Then they find someone in the group to mess around with the woman whose house it is, and sooner or later her credit runs out and they stop paying and start misusing the place.
They bring in other guys, call you names slap you around, beat you up, have parties, break out the windows, shoot bullets through the walls, no notion of picking up all their garbage, no concern that your kids are now stepping around girls turning tricks for $5 hits--sometimes they make them have sex with every guy in the house for nothing. I saw one dopeboy so lowdown he made a crack whore satisfy his German shepherd. You're on the bottom floor of hell here. Most of these women have babies. Crack is stronger. Lots of times I brought food and gave it to a woman's kids because I felt so bad at seeing their neglect.
HELL
I had a home, a fiancee, and kids, one of them mine, but because of one prior way back when I was 19, I'm being put away. I see my mistake and wish not to make it again, but I am away, 9 to 15, which means 4 or 5 at best and no fiancee waiting for me, not likely--would you wait 5 years, for a crackhead?--just me by myself starting over. It's my fault, but that doesn't make the comeback any easier.
Worse thing is, after all these programs and all my regret, you put that shit in front of me...Crack is hell. Once you've been there and been slammed, and maybe finally get clear, you ain't really clear because there's this other second hell of staying off the shit. Your every thought: How'm I going to stay off, or failing that, how'm I going to get more.
Talking about this has got me down, so I want to tell you a little truth, bring you down a little. You know how they say the ozone holes can't repair--or is it the greenhouse effect, I mix the two up--but I understand it's already a disaster, they just can't tell if the icebergs are going to melt in 50 years or 500, but the tragedy has struck, just a matter of time till we're all eight feet under water.
That's your greenhouse effect. Your crack house effect is the same thing. You see what I'm saying: the war on drugs is over. We lost. You see if I'm not right, 'cept it won't take 500 years to tell about the crack war. It's close to home, right there in your schools. All those new prisons, they're for your kids.
So you're in here with me, you understand? We're both victims. And that's our real story, of you and me and the crackhouse. What's mine is yours, brother. And you can have it.
The inmates' share of the proceeds from publication of this story will be used to fund a documentary video intended to draw community funds for a federal matching grant to build a halfway house in Springfield. The inmates call it the "House that Crack Built."
AFTERWORD BY KENT H. DIXON
"The House that Crack Built" began with a grant from the Lilly Foundation. I was given one course release from my normal teaching load to do some kind of community service, that I, and subsequently my students, could perform. I'd always admired writers who had taught in prisons, and I was told our local jail was safer than prison (it is), so I worked up a creative writing course in the county jail. The course is now run entirely by Wittenberg University students, in partial fulfillment of their community service requirement.
My particular writers were in the jail's "Freedom: Drug and Alcohol Abuse Program." Weekly with each group (men and women separate), I spent a couple hours in the jail's multi-purpose chapel, coaxing them to write in every strategy and genre I could think of--fiction, poetry, drama, family histories, personal narratives, letters of release to Mr. Crack or King Heron.
We talked a lot, the sessions usually resembling a kind of group therapy. But I couldn't keep it all straight--Chore Boys and Dope Boys, geekers and fleecers, gank and yank--so one day I asked them to take me on a tour, on paper, of a crack house, and gradually the material for the article accumulated--written testimony, personal anecdote, question and answer, some of it taped, some even videotaped.
I patched and weaved the whole thing together, drawing from memory and tapes as well as the stack of blue books, unified it in one voice, theirs, and gave that voice a bit more of a singular personality than was possible from the polyphony of different informants and writing styles. When I read it now, I mostly hear one particular inmate, call him Jimmie. He's speaking for, or over, or alongside the maybe 30 other inmates who contributed to the article over the better part of a year.
These days, this approach is no longer acceptable journalism and a bit experimental yet for ethnography. My drug felon with a heart is not only a composite, but a composite in a first-person point of view; so where I made transitions between the inmates' testimonies, or bent a phrase toward a witticism I remembered from group, or just generally burned and dodged and grabbed to constitute my "voice" and its narrative, I'm engaged in a double fudge, two fictions making, I maintain, one general truth.
The new journalism criticism doesn't concern me--every portrait's a composite, of the writer and his subject just for starters. To the anthropologists, I would like to suggest, with Marjory Wolf (A Thrice Told Tale), that compressing "poly-vocality" into one voice is no more or less true than some other mode; it's just another perspective, like field notes on the one hand or fiction on another, sociology on a third--a Vishnu-like truth with eight or ten hands. The inmates were true, collectively, to what they know, but were they always accurate? I'm still skeptical about $2,000 per hour being a "conservative" estimate, and I've never interviewed a dopeboy (that I knew of); but people on the law enforcement side are inclined to believe those figures.
But even if this information isn't accurate, it's at least what those who live this life believe, and that's not just a handful of believers. This document as it now stands was edited, amended, and modified perhaps a dozen times over more than a year, by different generations of "natives" (an inmate's average incarceration is 90 days) who didn't even know the primary authors. It's a generalized portrait that more than a hundred crack addicts, independently, finally felt was accurate".
Read commentary:*Cracking Down by John J. Dilulio, Jr.*Ethnodrama and Reality by Mercer L. Sullivan
Kent Dixon Copyright © 1993 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Kent Dixon, "The House That Crack Built," The American Prospect vol. 4 no. 14, June 23, 1993

Crack-Head 101

2005-01-14T09:39:00.000-05:00

I need money for….

Request: Lunch
Answer: No you don’t here is your sack lunch

Request: Gas
Answer: No you don’t I filled your tank

Request: Cigarettes
Answer: No you don’t here is a pack

Request: I got to pay the dealer back or he’ll kill me
Answer: not if you don’t go back there

CrackCocaine

Is it the devils candy?
We believe it is.

Here are:

13 Beliefs For Living Life CrackCocaine Free

1. We believe in each success, not every failure.
2. We believe we have made mistakes, collectively and individually.
3. We believe we all experience the “crack-trap” both mentally and emotionally.
4. We believe that when we stumble and falter, we get back up again and again.
5. We believe we do not know everything about crack-cocaine, but we know enough.
6. We believe we do not have the answer or answers, but will constantly seek for them.
7. We believe this is not just your problem because it becomes everyone’s problem.
8. We believe true support will come from faith in a power greater than the evil from crack-cocaine: we shall call this power GOD.
9. We believe a safe residence, having proper clothes to wear and eating decent food does matter.
10. We believe it is ‘my program’ and however ‘my program’ gets me to a crack-cocaine free life, is all ‘my program’ needs to accomplish.
11. We believe once ‘my program’ gets me to a crack-cocaine free life again, we must continue to update ‘my program’ and never believe it is completely over because the devil’s candy bit us once, and now we do know the truth.
12. We believe this journey to living our without crack-cocaine could be the most difficult life long journey we will ever have to travel.
13. We believe divine intervention is there for all of us who were possessed or still are possessed by the devil’s candy and believe faith in GOD triggers the power over crack-cocaine possession.

Nothing gets in the way of crackcocaine once it has possession. Standard treatment does not address the extreme possession that does occur during crackcocaine use. From experiences and truths, we need to be careful if we treat crackcocaine just like any other drug. Crackcocaine does take you over and possess your body, soul and spirit. Crackcocaine goes as far as completely possessing and then destroying your body, mind and spirit.
Giving in to the urges to smoke crackcocaine is such a vicious cycle controlled by powers that want nothing more than to possess and destroy all life, even by flying planes filled with people into buildings filled with more people.

The following example (Day 1) is set up to be a daily guide. To use a familiar phrase…we are going to look at this one day at a time. Each day will have one spiritual issue with a scripture to re-enforce along with a quip of the day. There will be more than one spiritual issue per day coming at you, but our focus is on how to accomplish one issue at a time. Each day away from crackcocaine brings us closer to being completely free from crack. With a true desire and the understanding of where this stuff is really coming from and its only mission to destroy; this understanding and desire will bring you the strength necessary for success. Our measure of success is in our 1st belief and to quote: We believe in each success, not every failure. Success is what you make of it. When contaminated, an hour can be great success.
I do suggest that when a fall, slip, relapse, or picking up again, or whatever term works for you…IMMEDIATELY get back up and go to where you LEFT off…and do it again and again and again until you get it right. Ultimately it always goes full circle…and remember…it took me 3 years AFTER I knew what I know now as my truth revealed to my soul as to what this stuff really is…it worked for me and will never penetrate me again…this is ONE thing I do know for sure about crack-cocaine… BUT do not worry…I am not ‘too’ confident…it is just when you do finally get how to do this…it is simple.

DAY
1

This day is the beginning of changing your current life. This is just the beginning.
RELAX.
Close your eyes and gently visualize the opposite of the madness that got you to try this method. Find the relax mode inside yourself. Breathe deep and slow and on one time of doing this hold it in for10 long seconds and force yourself to let it out VERY slow. Repeat this as often as necessary to keep as relaxed as possible under the circumstances.

~1 Corinthians 3:1,2~

And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. 2 I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able.

Quip of the day: Dear GOD, please help me become the person my dog thinks I am.

==================================================================

..there was a crack in my life, crackcocaine that is. www.crackcocainerecovery.com

==================================================================

Crack: Treating Cocaine Addiction...by George Medzerian PH.D. Treatment programs have attempted to deal with this, not expanding the cookie cutter to include users and abusers, but by trying to classify all clients as if they are latter-stage alcohol addicts, using standard treatment methods developed for this group. This has not worked well. Now the field faces a need to develop alternative strategies to work with diverse types of addicts and to go beyond the generic treatment methods used with classic gamma alcoholics. It is time to face the challenge of treating the crack addict...the person, not the addiction. A clients total abstinence from drugs does not necessarily mean that the chemical dependency treatment has been successful. Successful recovery involves adequate functioning in daily life. Abstinence is a precursor to functionality, not a substitute for it. Don't impose a treatment on the client. Offer a choice of options. This gives the client a sense of control, even while under direction. Practice and believe in empathy. It is still the leading factor in productive therapeutic relationships. Not long ago, a film entitled "Disease Concept of Alcoholism" was routinely shown in treatment programs in the United States. In this film, a strong argument for the disease concept was presented by a physician who alluded to biochemical research on alcoholism. It was claimed that the brain of an alcoholic is different from that of a nonalcoholic. The alcoholic brain allegedly generates THIQs, which increase a person's compulsion to drink beverage alcohol. Even rats who hate to have a drink will crave booze when injected with these THIQs and THQs, by-products of alcohol metabolism. A frequent interpretation of this film by counselors is that it proves that the etiology of alcoholism is strictly biochemical, hence, is an uncontrollable disease in which the victim or society plays no role in development. This can be a counterproductive assumption because it minimizes the interactive social, cultural, psychological and developmental factors that contribute to the prevalence of a disease. My optimism for controlling this addiction may seem to contradict the Twelve-Step program belief that crack addicts are powerless over crack and alcoholics are powerless over alcohol. It does not conflict. Crack addicts are powerful over crack, but not their addiction to crack. By controlling their drugging, by learned abstinence, the addicts do have power over the addiction. This is the Twelve-Step approach, a Zen paradox: The best way to become strong over crack addiction is to allow yourself to be weak. The best way to become addiction free is to allow yourself to be an addict.

===================================================================

..there was a crack in my life, crackcocaine that is. www.crackcocainerecovery.com

===================================================================

Agape Love by Marilyn R. Lyon I baked cakes, cookies and fudge and left them on the dinning room table as if Better Homes and Garden were coming over for dinner. I actually thought that maybe from the sight of them might trigger some inner desire for the good life and this crack-crap would disappear. Like a testimony to us. Or a reminder we are just normal people here. We are OK people. I moved through my day job behind a wall. I no longer felt connected to the world. Or at the very least, felt that if I were to get connected I would first need to confess. And I began to. From day one I felt it was my failure not his. So I tried not to say it out loud for a long time. By then it became a way of life. How could I not say it? I have a crack-head son and I have become addicted too! I struck out angrily against the smallest injustice on my part time job. I had endless heated emotional discussions on the most controversial subjects on every break. I joined two writer's groups and forced myself out the door three times a month. I was vehemently critical of those who wrote stuff about isn't life just too wonderfully simple for everyone. At Christmas that year I ate peanut-butter sandwiches and soup for a month so I could over-buy for Todd. I cooked three ducks for Christmas dinner which required days of hanging and basting with two different sauces while doing separate rubs and basting while cooking. My other son Scott took us out as a surprise one evening and bought the largest and most expensive tree in the store. I put up lights everywhere in the house. I made satin ribbons for the tree and bought color-coordinated decorations. See, we are just like Family Circle. I got his two guitars out of the pawnshop, with his money I was keeping. Some other guitars too much was owed on to get out of hock. The one I prized was an electric Gibson that I had purchased when he was only eight years old and already showing a lot of ability as a musician. It was now a collector's item. Todd emerged from his room Christmas morning scrubbed, perfumed, best dressed and full of loud happy spirits as everyone was arriving. I invited a female friend of many years to the family and her children over for Christmas weekend. He sat pale and quiet in a rocking chair all day, responding with restrained sadness, but a tinge of warmth when spoken to. Everyone was having a great time around him. We were all having a great time for Todd. I could have cast him in bronze sitting there, and it would not have changed anything. It did not change anything this Christmas day. I do not think I was angry or bitter that such surface things did not make everything better. In my heart I knew it was for me that I did it for. Busy work for me, grounding for me. There was so little I could do that I was not already doing. None of which was producing magic. I was looking for that old Todd. But he did not appear that long fall and winter. We were on a mad schedule of meetings and the brief trip into the land of experts on crack-heads and still no Todd. The family floated in and out looking somewhat stunned and inept. I often called on them. Do something. Talk to him! But I could see they were floundering in ignorance as much as I. My oldest son Scott felt he should be Todd's friend during this period of my hard tough love. I wanted him to be angrier, more insistent, more threatening, more everything.

E-Mails, letters and real dialog about the DevilsCandy

2005-01-06T08:59:00.000-05:00

...When you read these remember that when you follow the program it works. When you think you can do whatever you want, the program will not work. Ultimately it is YOUR program, and YOUR program needs to work for YOU and ONLY YOU. When it does work for YOU, then it works for ALL those around YOU trying and wanting crackcocaine to disappear. We continue to suggest that no "other" substances be used while breaking free from the strangle-hold crack has you. This does not mean these current life patterns will be forever....they might be...but it does become YOUR decision as to how YOU will live YOUR life crackfree. For some, once the crack is gone from their soul and spirit, they live a fulfilling life with a social element that may include dinning with wine, or celebrating with spouses, or just plain having a beer with the boys during the SuperBowl or after the company softball game. This is in no way an endorsement for any drinking or drugging, it is just a way of saying YOU can have YOUR life back and have it to a point that YOU can make decisions that will be in-line with YOUR program for living YOUR life free from crackcocaine and make RATIONAL decisions based on YOUR crackfree life not based on the fear of either "relapsing" or never being free from the grip that crackcocaine gets on YOU.

#1...Hi Camille and Todd! First and foremost, I want to say thank you for all your help. Barry and I went through the 75 days successfully. Things were great! Barry and I started new hobbies. 1 in particular was going to the gym. It helped get through staying clean. He committed himself and stuck to all the rules.

After it was over, he decided he was going to celebrate his birthday. Sadly with booze and weed. Sigh.... I couldn't do much about that. So, now I'm scared it's going to start all over again. A week went by and after searching for jobs, he found one. Yeah, good right? Well, the environment there was, well, not favorable for him to stay clean and sober. They treated him to lunch and gave him money. So off he went to buy booze and weed again. We discussed that he was going to have to quit. Today he was to go there and resign, which he did (I scouted his E-Mail). Unfortunately they have probably paid him out and my guess is he won't be coming home tonight. I ordered the Devils candy Book and it will be here soon.
This is tough because after he few slips, he is seriously contemplating moving away. If he does, it's probably for the best because it will be because he still wants to party. There is no other reason for me to fathom. He also does not want to put us through any more headaches. My friend has denied me her place to escape to when he's wasted and that's probably for the best too. I don't know what when or how, but that's what's happening now. I can't help but think this will happen again. It's hard for me to keep tabs on his comings and goings because of my responsibilities with work and my daughter. I'm not going to always be able to prevent him from slipping and I know it. I'm really just fed up with it all and don't want to deal with it anymore. He doesn't want me to be his "mother" nor do I want to be. I just can't believe after things went so well that he would go back to his addictions so easily. I'm sad for him. I love him and want him to be well. Not much else to say. This might be the end of the line. But, most of us say that and keep going through it. I'm trying to be strong, but my daughter is tired of seeing him drunk and messed up too. Today she asked if we have to go home after I picked her up. She was worried and it made me really really upset to hear how it's affected her. I have to seriously look into counseling for us and will do so weather he stays and continues to clean up again or leaves. It's so much to bear. I don't know how you held it all together Camille. You have so much more responsibility with 3 kids and a home. I admire your strength. Anyways, I'll go now. I just wanted to update you guys. Take care. Hope all is well and will talk to you soon.
Love, Savoia (Savoy...lol, that's for you Todd)

#2...Todd,
In the quest to conquer cocaine addiction, is it ok for a crack addict to
drink? My boyfriend who is trying to conquer crack addiction seems to think
anytime he chooses since he is 45 years old is ok, he didn't hurt anyone or
anything. He just gave me a check the other day he cashed last week of $750
because he had cashed it and had temptations. He still holds the atm card
and has access to his money, because he doesn't want to be controlled. I so
much long to help, but am very hurt tonight because he gets upset everytime
I question him when he decides to drink. I am seriously considering giving
up on this relationship of three years. I have waited two years for him to
stop and even tells me how he can't drink when I'm not here and how he
messed up over the last month almost every weekend for a month. I was gone
to Florida with a job, and he used every Saturday night or Sunday evening.
Made it to work everytime he did it on a Sunday evening, but does that make
it ok, does that mean he is getting better?
Any advice would help!
Thank you,
Vivian

#3...Hi Camille, I have a question Hope u or Todd can answer for me, can someone on crack change drug- like go to snorting crank or cocaine and get the same effect, or will they still have to seak out crack because of the buzz? Please Reply, Just Curious, Karen Zepeda

#4... Just a note to let you know that your Web Site is very much appreciated.
My financee is determined to get away from his demons. I have been researching and came across your site. While I already knew a lot of the information you had, your site has reinforced what I am going to have to do.
Thank you so much!

Betty Ensor Thomas

#5...Camille,
Tell Todd I said, he's awesome.
I really appreciated his program last night.
He said some things last night that I needed to hear.
I guess my love for Ben has sometimes clouded over in my mind his addiction to crack.
I have an email out to his lawyer, and I'm trying to get the facts of his case and the charges up against him.
I suppose Hope told you about Stone Hawk.
Unless the State of Tennesee decides to pay for it, I won't be sending him there.
If you or Todd know of any program that can be suggested, let me know.
I'm not gonna do anything but point the DA or Judge to the fact my son has a problem and needs help.
I'm not gonna hand carry Ben, he needs to step out on his own where this is concerned.
Love you guys and thanks for everything.
As soon as I can get some things settled financially, I want that CD Todd played last night. It was great. Maybe someday he and I can jam together. I'm a drummer. I love jazz.

Tom

THE FOLLOWING EMAIL IS A WEIRD ONE...FIRST HE IS SCREAMING FOR HELP, NEXT HE CLAIMS HIS LIFE IS IN DANGER IF WE HELP OR WRITE HIM BACK...OF COURSE I DID WRITE HIM BACK...I TRULY HOPE HE IS OK..AND WHEN HE REALLY NEEDS HELP...WE WILL BE HERE WAITING FOR HIS RETURN. CRACK IS CRACK...SAD BUT TRUE!

#6...From: steven cherry Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2004 11:14 AMTo: todd@devilscandy.comSubject: I NEED HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!

my name is steve.i am addicted to crack real bad.i don't need to go into all the things i've done to get high.but lately i just get high when i get paid. yes i still have a job.when i don't have any money i won't get high probally because i dont want to go back to jail.this is why this thing is driving me so crazy.if there is anything you can tell me to help please help me! please!

RESPONSE: Todd Gibson wrote:
Hello this is todd,
Sorry I took so long to replya little more info will help us formulate a plan 4 u 2 start your journey
How long
Married
What HAS worked
Any jail or treatment
Do u no safe people
Where are u located
What I CAN tell you is crack can be conquered and u can be free forever from the possession of crackis it easy NOis it possible YES
Have u looked thru our web sites http://www.devilscandy.com/ and http://www.crackcocainerecovery.com/ u need to go ALL the way thru them...then we have common ground to start at...hope is here now BUT I do need more info to help u...ALSO we do a live radio show on Thursday night 930pm eastern time zone...come listen and start the journey...PEACE...Todd

AND THEN HIS RESPONSE: From: steven cherry Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 11:15 AMTo: todd@devilscandy.comSubject: RE: I NEED HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!

No longer need your help. Please don't write me again my life depends on it. I swear-DON'T EVER WRITE OR CONTACT ME AGAIN!!!!!!!!

HERE WE HAVE AN INTERESTING ONE....WANTS TO STOP SMOKING CRACKCOCAINE WITHOUT THE POWER OF GOD OVER CRACKCOCAINE....GOOD LUCK!!

#7...From: Duke Swan
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 3:02 AM
To: todd@devilscandy.com
Subject: but im an atheist todd
wtf i dont believe in god i dont accept god but i want to quit using

THIS ONE IS FROM SOMEONE WE HAVE NOT HEARD FROM IN 8 WEEKS AS OF 1-6-05...THE LAST CONVERSATION I HAD WITH HIM WAS WHEN HE TOLD ME HE WENT TO THE STORE FOR "A PACK OF MATCHES" TO LIGHT HIS CIGARETTES BECAUSE HIS WIFE WOULD KILL HIM IF HE LIT THEM ON THE STOVE....ONCE HE ARRIVED AT THE STORE-HE "RAN" INTO A PUNK CRACKDEALER WHO HE OWED $800 OR SO HE SAID AND THAT IF HE DID NOT GIVE THE PUNK CRACKDEALER HIS CAR...HE WOULD GET BEAT UP REAL BAD AND HE HAS BEEN BEAT UP REAL BAD BEFORE AND DID NOT WANT TO HAVE THAT HAPPEN. I CALLED HIM ON HIS "STORY" WHICH WAS BULL...AND HAVE NOT HEARD FROM HIM SINCE! HOPE YOU ARE OK...WILLIAM. CRACK IS CRACK...SAD BUT TRUE! THE CRACKLIES AT THEIR BEST!!

#8...Hey Todd, I just wanted to say how much I appreciate you and your willingness to share your experiences. I received the CDs and am truly grateful. My mother brought your books down to me this weekend and with them reality is starting to set in. Last night 10/23 I had several dreams about crack with one so realistic I awoke only to find myself plotting a way to leave the house and get fired up. I used your 3 minute rule and talked myself into going back to sleep, it really felt good waking up this morning in my bed and not stumbling in as I know that would have happened. I relate to your book and have a new outlook on life although I know times will be tougher. It's an ongoing battle that is happening even as I sleep. Anyway, thanks a lot. I'll talk to you again soon.
William Morgan

#9...I am not absolutely sure. What can I do to be sure? All the signs and symptons are there. But no concrete evidence.

My son was mentally abused by his father, he went through a divorce a father who committed suicide all in one year. He has no life now. He lives with me, he cannot keep a job, I cannot keep a dollar, he steals my checks, money, anything he can get his hands on. His room looks like a pig sty. It reaps of marijuana. He smokes weed with cigars, every trash can in the house is full of it every day.

He is 28. Where do I go for help. Where do I start. How do I begin.

#10...Camille,
Last week was awesome. The 75 day program is sooo spot on. On Friday, I had a big blow. I thought I had made my sales quota and over for the week. At 5:00pm I found out they were not all new sales. Half were renewals. Which meant after all my efforts, I would still get minimum wage vs 3.00 an hour increase for the week!
Then Saturday Lynn took me into work. The traffic tried to keep us from getting there. So we took another route. Oh Boy! There was a RR crossing stopping us. There was NO TRAIN! We looked at each other, identified the problem, & started laughing. Right then, I mean Right then,.... the crossing guard arms of the RR track raised. AMAZING ! ! Also, Saturday I made my quota for the week in sales to raise my hourly & receive great commission.
There was more to last week. This was the most amazing.
I apologize for the delay in getting back to yall. Today is 21 days!! Yahoo!!
I need to get to work now. Talk to yall soon. Thanks again. Have a wonderful & prosperous day. CLEAN ! ! Our number is 281-xxx-xxxx, for future reference.
Trish

This email came from someone who just cut into our site...started blabbing really bad remarks about our site and how we go about this ministry...even though everything is right there for all to see...this person felt compelled to cut us down while stating words right from our site...like DUH lady if you do not like us then go somewhere else...her first letter is not here...it is not worthy of printing in this blog...the response and the "other" letters I will post here.

#11...From: lesley cohen
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2004 9:29 AM
To: camille@crackcocainerecovery.com
Subject: RE: group post

Just because I have an opinion,does not mean that I am a fool. You have no
love to give. I feel so sorry for you. You have nazi like tendencies. You
BAN people from expressing themselves? How dare you. Good luck to YOU.

From: "Camille Gibson"
To: "'lesley cohen'"
Subject: RE: group post
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 23:07:18 -0400

..you are an opiniated fool...take your "opinions" elsewhere...your
banned good-bye...good-luck

From: lesley cohen
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 10:37 PM
To: camille@crackcocainerecovery.com
Subject: RE: group post

Oh my goodness...someone has anger issues! I will pray for you...a
release from your anger. How dare you say that 12 step programs are a
"cult" . I was not "putting you down" I was expressing an opinion. The fact that you
"block" people from free expression, makes me wonder who is in the
"cult"...get a hold of your ego! I wish you another 24 hrs...if you
cannot achieve serenity at least you can be sober. Please do not send
me any more information...I am no longer interested in a group that has
people governing over what can and cannot be read. It frightens me that this is
happening. Your anger is alarming. Why don't you try allowing people to
form their own opinions....your "rejection"of my ideas makes me feel
sad. I will talk about this in my group. I hope that you can get over your anger.

***Hello this is todd,
While I do respect ALL forms of "recovery" and "treatment" I do not
and will not allow a direct "put-down" of our web-site. If you would
like to post your opinion of how a person should "recover" fine and
dandy, but leave your "personal" jabs out, if you do not like our approach then do not come
to this group if all you can do is jab. Meetings help a lot of people
BUT not everyone, even if they "do not work it" as it should be. Not
that it is any of your business or obvious concern we are currently helping and have
hundreds of people COMPLETELY free from crackcocaine, and that is
what we do, that is all. If you have noticed when you are not jabbing
at our "completely damaging" web site we direct those who suffer from
alcohol or "other" drug abuse to other people and places to deal with
those substances first. We deal with crackcocaine and that is all and if it offends
you that we do separate crack as being "more" evil than other drugs, then there
is nothing more that I can say to you. All of who and what we
are, is in our web-sites. And from the sound of it, it does not go along with
how YOU are staying clean. Not everyone needs the same way..oh yeah if you
are into the 12 step cult as that being THE ONLY WAY, then I feel sorry for you
on that level..as far as you being clean, that is great. That is the
mission, it is just that God has put my path to connect with those who do not,
will not or cannot respond in the traditional ways. Of course all of that is in
our "completely damaging" web site that you probably just quickly
glanced over. THIS WILL BE THE LAST POST TO YOU ON THIS
SUBJECT. Further disrespect for our site, methods and hundreds of people who HAVE found THEIR freedom from crackcocaine...your posts will not
go through and you will be banned from group. I somehow imagine that
will be OK with you since you have the ONLY WAY to get and stay clean
from crackcocaine, or as we say conquer crackcocaine forever
and be completely free from crackcocaine possession
forever...PERIOD..Todd

#12...From: Linda Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2004 8:07 AMTo: camille@devilscandy.comSubject: Hello again

Todd and Camille,
Just a note to say Good Morning and Marie just called me early, and told me that she sure did enjoy talking to you last night. She appreciated so much you taking the time to call and talk to her. William did not come home last night, but walked in the door about 6:30 am this morning, but was straight. It shocked her to see that he was not all high, she ask him about last night, he said that he went looking for stuff, but could not find it, so he slept in his truck and was going to work this morning, she said he looked able to work today. She also told me that you were praying that he did not find anything, and as we know God is good, and he couldn't find alot last night. He may have got hold of a little, but not much. Anyway we were both pleased to hear that. She will do what you said as far as getting the guns to my house or his dads. I am not married to his dad anymore, but my husband Terry, his step dad, is a very compassionate person and wants to see him clean also. She was feeling much better after talking to you. We both agreed that you and Camille are heaven-sent to our family. She ask me how I found you, and I can't even remember the details, except that I went to the Lord and ask for someone to be put in his path and our path that understood what he is going through, what Marie is going through, and what I am going through. I did not feel comfortable going to my pastor, or even close friends, who has not been through all of this.
So I have kept this to myself, and tried to deal with it, and Marie also. But I know that God put you in our path, and I know that for a fact.
I can now say that as I begin to understand things better, that I can see a ray of hope. I am looking at this addiction differently now, I am not mad at William, but I am getting furious at the monster that is inside of him, at first I didn't see it as a monster, but only as his bad habit, but now I look at it different. And I can say NO to monsters, and not let them control my life. As Camille told me in an e-mail, I will not live the crack-cocaine life, I will not let it control my house. I take control of its contents.
Thanks again for taking the time to call Marie. I love her very much, and my grandbaby. I guess also I am afraid that I won't see my grandson as much, but she is moving here close to me. At first she was talking about staying there in Richmond, 100 miles away, and told me that I would not see my grandbaby as much if her and William split up, I was heart broke, but now she has changed her mind and is coming my way. Please write if you have time.
Linda

#13...We live in Toronto Canada Todd
Our phone number is 416 xxx-xxxx and his email is whitegary@.......
I appreciate any information you have as we have been through all the treatments centres and he has been in AA NA off and on for 15yrs.
I have been in Alanon for 5yrs off an on but have been working my program consistantly for the last 6months I also have my 12yr old daughter in Alateen.
I know what you mean about some alanons though about leaving and i dont want to but im near the end of my rope thats why i signed on to your show.
Our address is
Toronto Ontario
M4E 3C6

Thank you so much for responding back so soon
Have a good day
sherry

#14...Camille,
Thanks to you and Todd for taking time to speak with me last night, I am very grateful for your guidance and support. And I'm sure Shannon will be as well in the long run. In your email you had asked for his jail address. I would greatly appreciate it if you would send him an encouraging card or letter, I think he's really like that. His address is:

Michael
Knoxville, TN 37918

I'll be in touch again soon, after my next visit with him. Talk to you then.
Crystal

This is an interesting one...we did a phone intervention with this family, and for the most part they did not feel they should do a whole lot about Roger...they said "well he is not smoking as much"...well now the update on Roger is he is living at Mom's house...has a 4 month "layoff" from a very good job....and apparently the family STILL is not convinced Roger has a crack problem....time will tell!

#15...From: Br51stew@.... Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 1:46 PMTo: camille@crackcocainerecovery.comSubject: (no subject)

Thank you and Todd for your concern about my son, Roger. I have followed the suggestions that Todd gave to me when we last talked in August. We have made excellent progress with Roger and feel that it has not been necessary for professional intervension over the telephone.Again you have my thanks for all your help.Betty Stewart

This is from Chris Farley's brother...Chris died from cocaine and alcohol.

#16...From: Thinklaughlive@aol.com [mailto:Thinklaughlive@aol.com] Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 12:53 PMTo: camille@devilscandy.comSubject: The Chris Farley Foundation

Camille,
Certainly, add our website link to your sites. It looks like you and Todd have done some wonderful work.

Our philosophy is to use the power of humor to resist and heal. So I'm sure it can be a value to your work as well. All the best.

Keep it up and we wish you well.

Tom Farley
The Chris Farley Foundation
Think. Laugh. Live.

#17...From: Denise Hutton Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2004 1:15 PMTo: todd@devilscandy.comSubject: RE: I am at a roadblockImportance: High

Camille,

Thank you again for all of your help and words of wisdom. I am just so hurt and sad and tired, I have been trying to help him for the past 6 months out of our one year relationship. He is so sweet and charming and kind when he is not high and I truly love him alot, but I just do not want to continue to be abused by his addiction anymore. I do not mean physically...I mean mentally...he has and would never hurt me or my son. He cries and says he wants to quit...he by his own discord went to a rehab recently for 30+ days and was clean for 40 days and whenever he left their facility despite their advice to stay, it only took one week...not even and there he was at it again. I just am so confused I know that alot of the reason he is like that is because he never had anyone to guide him even as a child, I think that he can be better and since we began dating he has become a much nicer and better person,but what if I continue to try and try only to bring myself and my son more and more disappointment. How can you tell if someone really wants to quit or if they are just saying that to keep you around?

Denise L. Hutton

#18...From: Karla Stroman
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2004 4:48 PM
To: camille@devilscandy.com
Subject: RE: "Jerry's story"
Hi Camille and Todd!
I needed to drop you a note to say that things were going quite well with Jerry until last night when I asked him who was text messaging him and he blew up at me and said he doesn't feel comfortable in this house. I think that he wants to leave again. I know that this process cannot be easy and I surely am a rookie at dealing with someone stopping using crack just as I was a rookie at ever experiencing crack in my life in any way. What is the best thing for me to do? He's angry at me for making him leave for those five weeks and he only wants to talk to people who have "been there", where he is. What do I do now? Karla

Update:
Thank you for the "blog". I listened to it this morning at my office.
I'm going to send it to my home e-mail and ask Jerry to listen to it. I messed up. I thought I was strong enough to not be manipulated by him anymore but I messed up. I don't know what to say about the situation other than I broke down and it was so wonderful the first few days. I would like him to tell you what he has been doing. I hope that he'll call you very soon.
I know it's not a joke. I just didn't do it right.
I'm so sorry that I was weak.
Karla

MY RESPONSE: 1-6-05

Hello this is todd,
I know that YOU know it is not a joke...I just needed to WAKE u up...and it sounds like it worked...glad u wrote...we love you and care about you and understand how difficult this is...we are here for you in whatever way we can be...our 1st belief...we believe in each success...not every failure! Pick yourself up...dust yourself off...go forward where you left off...AND ATTACK CRACK...you CAN do this without attacking Jerry...PEACE...Todd

PS come to the show tonite 930pm EST...I will be addressing how to follow the program and what to do when we fall....Todd

Karla's Response: Thanks for your love and encouragement. I will listen tonight and I will ask Jerry to listen with me if he is home from his meeting. God Bless! Karla

So there you go. Just a small taste of some of the emails we get and how we respond. Hope you enjoyed the truth....Todd

CrackCocaine...Addiction? Disease? Possession?

2005-01-04T11:31:00.000-05:00

Agape Love. Unconditional love, a perfect feat of balance. Not just a state of mind, but a state of doing. One we often dream of obtaining. One, we can easily assume we live in naturally. Seems most us do not get the opportunity to practice it.
I stumbled unaware into it. At the time I was so absorbed in the terror and desperation of events, about my crackhead son. Agape Love as a motivation or end result, it was not even on my mind. Long after the experience, one day while deep into a discussion about my hairdresser's relationship with his alcoholic father, and my past six years with my crackhead son, he remarked with a tinge of envy, "You have Agape Love for your son!"
"It doesn't matter what the bond is", I told her, and "He does not have it". None of us were going to pay it, and I started to cry. "He's a crackhead. We are all standing by him but he is a hopeless crackhead. We have tried everything. He has tried and failed so many times. He used to be a completely different person".

Crackcocaine has found its way into the family structure. It is now arrived in kindergarten. The killing of a first grade child in Flint, Michigan on February 29, 2000 from a gun found in a crackhouse by her six year old classmate ought to wake us up. All the news stories and crimes associated with crackcocaine are so dark and at times so unbelievable it makes me cringe to think about the horrible things I've done just to smoke crackcocaine. Unless we confront this hideous substance (we call the DevilsCandy and goes by the name "Rock"), it will devour more souls. Once possessed by this horrible force, it is only by the grace of God that we find complete freedom from the possession and contamination of crackcocaine.

Developing a program to living your life crackfree is a process of finding ways that will help you. We need to not worry about making mistakes. We will have to learn from those mistakes. A strong support team and developing your relationship with God has to be. We have a belief that there is a better life than the pathetic one that crackcocaine brings you to. Crackcocaine can be conquered! You can live your life without it. We are here to bring you our truths about crackcocaine.
Addiction, disease or possession? Or all three?! First we need to understand what crackcocaine is. Addiction is the habitual use and feeling of need of a substance. Disease is a pathological condition of a part, organ, or system of an organism resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress, and characterized by an identifiable group of signs or symptoms. Possession is to take into control. Crackcocaine takes a person's soul into control, even changing their character (attributes, traits, or abilities) and rapes them of their moral values, and keeps them from having a valuable life. This is true for both the person using and those involved with the user. It is our belief that when a person uses crackcocaine it possesses their body, soul and spirit.

We visualize that the smoke of crackcocaine is the very breath of Lucifer. We believe crackcocaine is an actual evil force out to destroy those that are possessed by the breath of Lucifer and the sweetness of the devil's candy. In a disease, the affects are to the individual; an addiction affects first the individual. Crackcocaine immediately effects everyone involved with the user, including the user. So forever possessed? No, crackcocaine can only possess you as long as you let it.

Expose crackcocaine! Tell everyone you know that your loved one is possessed by crackcocaine. It does not matter who knows. The more you expose crackcocaine the less power it has on you or your loved one. Camille even told the grocery clerks about it and gave the manager a picture and told them Todd is possessed by crackcocaine and may try to cash a bad check here. You know what? They did call when Todd tried to do this. Camille would tell local police, neighbors, all family members, pastor and EVERYONE she came in contact with and it worked! CrackTodd started to lose power and my Todd is the man we knew he is! CrackTodd could not go anywhere in the area we lived in without Camille finding out. So SPEAK! This is your life and your loved ones soul you are fighting for. Embarrassment never gets you to a crackfree life, but taking control does. Tom Petty has a song that has a line in it that goes, “I'm taking control of my life, right now!”. So can you. So can your loved one.