Helplessness to hope: my war with chemical, and other, weapons of destruction.

• Position: First Person - From a recovering addict and alcoholic

I was born in a small city in upstate New York and became a teenager in the expanded ether of suburban America in the mid-1970s. I got willfully, deliberately drunk for the first time when I was 14. I smoked marijuana soon after. The leftover lethargy of the previous decade's hippie ethic permeated the social fabric, and drugs were everywhere. Prevailing teenage wisdom suggested hard drugs (we called them "chemicals") should be avoided, and a common authority-figure theme maintained that marijuana led to the se of these harder drugs. I mocked this theory with the arrogance that only a 14-year-old can have, then lived to prove it out just as soon as I could.

The notions of mind expansion and enlightenment were laughable Aquarian shibboleths, and my sole purpose in using drugs was to get as high as I could possibly manage.

I dropped my first hit of acid shortly after enrolling in high school. I loved it. Then I took my first barbiturates. I loved them, too. I smoked pot incessantly. I smoked hashish when it was available. I discovered the joys of distilled spirits.

I loved them all.

My unusually keen interest in sports waned. I watched a minimum of six hours of television a day. Always a bright student, my performance in school became anemic. I couldn't be bothered with homework. Doing well in school was for nerds (or as we called them: "glugs"). My friends were juvenile delinquents, hoodlums and dropouts. I admired them.

I was arrested for burglary before my 15th birthday.

I was hanging around in bars long before I reached the legal age, at the time, of 18. These places were lax about obtaining proper identification (and why would they? They would have eliminated half their patrons). This was how I developed the habit of drinking whiskey.

The world I associated with the barroom was right out of an adman's fantasy: glamour, sophistication, charm and personal attractiveness. I drank only the finest scotch because that's what my father drank, and also because I wanted to appear more experienced, more legitimate to anyone who was suspicious about my age.

I became quite the bon vivant in my late teens and early twenties, bustling around this upstate podunk, drinking expensive whiskey and making trips to the parking lot to smoke marijuana and sniff cocaine.

My life continued on this track for the next 13 years or so. I went to college. I lived in Paris for nearly a year. I moved to New York City. Things happened: I worked a succession of jobs; I...