Letter 5.

Dear Mr. Backagain, 

It is not often that I see a young white man in the inmate reception center but, I do see patients who frequent the jail and you are one that I can’t seem to forget.  As a star high school football player in Louisiana with aspirations to go pro like many of your friends, your story of how you got stuck in southern California was memorable.  A football injury changed the trajectory of your life.   It still is unclear why, but I guess I assumed that it was because you only dreamt of going pro and had not imagined anything else.  I suppose if that was the case, that not achieving that dream would cause you to feel depressed but maybe it was something else that drove you to abuse marijuana.  As a native Californian, the way you described how problematic your marijuana abuse was for your conservative southern Christian family didn’t seem to make much sense to me.  Your family was so concerned that they sent you to Florida to rid you of your marijuana addiction where you initially cleaned up but then went back to using. 

I had to clarify several times that you were just using marijuana and you insisted that was all it was.  After being sent to multiple other rehab facilities, you found yourself in a rehab facility in Los Angeles and later moved into sober living.  I couldn’t help but think that it was pretty spectacular to have so much support from your family.  You sort of skipped over what happened after sober living and described how you were homeless and using again but had moved on to smoking meth.  You described being stuck in Los Angeles with thoughts of heading back home but didn’t have a means.  I didn’t delve deeper but, I knew from my conversations with other inmates that living on the streets meant that you were around lots of different drugs and would continue to use, police would frequently stop you and find drugs so you would end up right back in jail for a few days. 

You had no medical issues outside of your substance abuse.  You were not withdrawing so I had no medications to offer you for symptomatic relief.    There was nothing I could do to even prevent you from coming back so before you left the exam room, as you were walking out of the door, I asked you a question that I am not sure if you have ever been asked before, “If football is out of the question, in your wildest dreams- what do you want to do with your life?”

Hoping you find the answer one day,

Dr. A