MY STORY — LIFE AFTER ADDICTION
From Opium Addiction to a New Life
This is the story of my life.
It is not a medical textbook, and I am not a doctor. What follows is my personal experience: how drugs entered my life, how addiction changed me and the people around me, and how I eventually began building a different life.
For about six years I used opium, including by injection. I went through addiction, prison, fear, loss, and years of trying to understand what had happened to me. I also experienced a gradual rebuilding of my life, a growing Christian faith, and a desire to help other people caught in addiction.
Some of the conclusions in this story are my personal beliefs and may differ from conventional medical or rehabilitation approaches. They should not be treated as medical advice or as a substitute for professional care. Recovery can take many forms, and what helped me may not be right for everyone.
I am telling my story because somewhere, right now, another person may be asking the questions I once asked myself:
Why me? How did this happen? Is this the end? Can I ever get out?
I cannot promise that another person’s road will be the same as mine. But I can tell you truthfully what happened to me.
This is my story.
Chapter 1 — Foreword
I remember a time when the society I lived in barely knew drug addiction as the widespread problem it would later become.
I grew up in the Soviet Union, during the period later often called the era of stagnation. For many ordinary people around me, illegal drugs were distant and unfamiliar. Many simply did not know what drug addiction really meant.
Then the world around us began to change. Perestroika arrived. The country changed, society changed, and everyday life changed with it. During those years drugs became increasingly visible. What had once seemed distant began entering ordinary families.
Addiction does not arrive politely. A person may spend years believing, “This could never happen to me.” Then one day it does.
When addiction enters a person’s life — or the life of a son, daughter, brother, sister, husband, wife or friend — the first reaction is often disbelief. How could this happen? What do we do now? Where do we go?
I would eventually have to face those questions myself.
I spent approximately six years using opium, including by injection. In the decades that followed I continued thinking about addiction, recovery, the mistakes I had made, and the changes that helped me build another life.
This story is not an argument that everyone must follow exactly the path I followed. It is the testimony of one man who became addicted, lived through the consequences, and found his own way forward.
There was a time when I could not imagine a life beyond addiction. Today I can look back and say that another life became possible for me.
This is how it happened.
— d.Sem
Chapter 2 — The Beginning
I was born in 1962 in Melitopol, a city in southern Ukraine. It was a relatively small city and, as I remember it, a pleasant place to live.
Some of my earliest memories are from kindergarten. Life seemed good. At that age I had no idea what extraordinary and sometimes terrible surprises were waiting for me. As a child, I somehow believed that life would simply continue forever.
Even then I had a tendency to think deeply about the world around me and about my own existence. I cannot remember all those childhood thoughts now, but one feeling has remained with me throughout my life: even as a small boy, I felt that my life was supposed to mean something.
Most of the time, however, I was a perfectly ordinary boy.
My father worked at a factory as an artist and decorator. In his spare time he repaired apartments and participated in amateur performances as a master of ceremonies. He was talented — an excellent artist, a good speaker, and a man with a remarkable singing voice. Unfortunately, he never fully developed those talents. He also enjoyed drinking and having a good time.
My mother was very different. She was a village girl who married and moved to the city. She was hardworking and kind, but she could also be strict when necessary.
Later my younger brother Sergey was born. Sergey and I were very different. I was quiet, shy and withdrawn. He was energetic, practical and sociable. He could talk to almost anyone about almost anything.
At school, even when I knew the answer, being called to the front of the classroom could leave me almost unable to speak. Talking to girls was even more difficult. At that age I did not think very highly of myself.
Sergey seemed taller, better-looking and much more confident. But I was not jealous of him. He was my brother, and despite our differences we had a close relationship throughout our lives.
While Sergey spent much of his time outside, I often stayed home. I became interested in photography, electronics and radio technology. In about the fifth grade I found a radio receiver circuit in a magazine called Young Technician and decided to build it. It did not work particularly well, but that little receiver opened a new world for me.
I began learning electronics. Many evenings I sat at my desk late into the night surrounded by diagrams and electronic components. Some of the things I built actually worked quite well.
At that point in my life, I was simply a quiet young man with a soldering iron. I had no idea how radically that picture was going to change.
After school I entered a vocational school and later worked at a motor factory. One worker there stayed in my memory. His name was Lyosha. I privately thought of him as “Lyosha the slave,” not out of cruelty, but because his movements around his machines seemed almost mechanical. He worked with extraordinary precision, moving from one machine to the next, day after day.
Years later I returned to that workshop and saw him still standing at the same workplace. That image stayed with me. Even then I was asking myself what kind of life I wanted to live.
After only a short time at the factory, I volunteered for service in the Soviet Army.
Chapter 3 — Army and Work
When I told my family I was going into the army, they accepted it calmly. My mother cried a little, my father prepared for the farewell gathering, and my brother probably did not yet understand how long we would be apart.
At my farewell party I drank alcohol for the first time. I did not like it. The next morning felt even worse, and I thought of drinking simply as something I had been expected to do with the company.
My military service took me to Azerbaijan. During the first days I regretted volunteering. Two years seemed endless.
Near the end of my first year, older soldiers sent me to get chacha, a strong alcoholic drink. When I returned, they persuaded me to drink with them. This time alcohol affected me differently. It felt attractive. After that, drinking became more frequent during the remainder of my service.
When I was finally demobilized, I looked back and was surprised by how quickly those two years seemed to have passed.
I returned to the same factory, but after several months an old feeling of discomfort returned. I felt that I was not doing what I was supposed to do with my life. I did not want to spend my years simply waiting for the next paycheck.
I left and found work connected with radio repair, something much closer to my interests. Yet even there I continued searching for something else.
In 1983 I saw a newspaper advertisement recruiting people for seasonal work. The possibility of earning good money attracted me. I joined the crew without understanding that this decision would lead me into a completely different world.
Chapter 4 — How Addiction Entered My Life
The seasonal crew was a mixed group. Some were older, some younger. We lived together in a collective-farm dormitory and worked during the day.
I became particularly friendly with four people: two younger men, Vitya and Seryozha, and a married couple, Tolya and Tanya. I gradually realized that drinking and partying were a major part of life for some people around me.
One day I saw poppy seeds being planted. At first it meant almost nothing to me. Later Tanya invited me to go out with her at night to collect material from poppy plants growing in private gardens. I agreed without understanding where this road was leading.
Soon afterward I watched Tolya and Tanya use an opium preparation by injection. Vitya and Seryozha joined them. Then they turned to me.
I was told that a man should try everything at least once. I did not want to look afraid in front of my new friends, especially Tanya.
So I agreed.
That injection became a dividing line in my life.
I quickly became attached to the drug. For a while I did not experience serious withdrawal and could pretend that I was still in control. Then one morning withdrawal arrived.
I understood what it meant. I was dependent.
I knew I was in trouble, but I did not yet understand how serious that trouble would become. Instead of resisting, I allowed life to carry me along.
The seasonal work fell apart. When I returned home I discovered that my brother Sergey had also begun using drugs. Soon we were using together.
My life changed gradually and then completely. There were trips to obtain poppy material, nights spent searching for it, attempts to sell some of what we found, and the constant reality that what was supposed to make money was consumed instead.
Then came prison.
After prison I returned to using.
Slowly, the quiet young man who had once spent evenings with a soldering iron became a man running through gardens at night in search of the next dose.
I could see what was happening to me.
But I could not seem to stop it.
Chapter 5 — Death
I will not try to describe every ordinary day of addiction. For me it was not really living. It was more like a pain that kept growing, slowly and relentlessly, without giving me a real rest.
Like many people in addiction, I sometimes felt deeply sorry for myself. I asked the same questions again and again:
Why me?
Why did this happen to me?
Is this the end?
How do I stop?
After one period in prison, I sincerely intended not to return to drugs. On my second day outside, however, I met Tanya by chance. Through her I met Rita, who had also recently been released. Within a week Rita and I were living together.
Rita drank alcohol but did not inject drugs. Eventually I suggested that she try opium. She agreed. Looking back, I understand how addiction spreads through relationships. A person trapped in it can pull other people into the same destructive circle.
At the same time, another part of me was still thinking and resisting. Somewhere inside I felt that my life was moving toward something terrible. My mind kept searching for a way out.
One day, on my way home, I met a neatly dressed young man and woman who spoke to me about God. I paid little attention, but I accepted a small book they offered me. It was the New Testament.
I took it home and forgot about it.
Not long afterward I used an opium preparation I had made from young poppy plants. I had done similar things before and did not expect anything unusual.
But this time something happened that changed me.
After the injection I felt a strange effect, followed by an overwhelming wave of panic and a terrifying certainty that I was dying. It felt as if something had exploded inside my head. Every part of my body seemed filled with fear.
A dog outside began howling, and in my frightened state I became convinced that even the animal could sense my death approaching.
I ran to a hospital. I was examined and told that physically I appeared to be all right. But inside, nothing felt all right. The feeling of death did not leave me.
I returned to the hospital again. Again I was told that the examinations did not show what I believed was happening.
At some point I stopped fighting the feeling. In my mind I saw myself sitting in a boat, desperately rowing toward safety. Then I imagined putting the oars down.
I had become convinced that there was nowhere left to row.
I waited for death.
And I was terrified.
Chapter 6 — Vishnevoye
I thought that if I survived another week, that would already be something.
The week passed. I was still alive, but I did not feel better. At times I could barely make myself walk to a shop. People noticed that I looked pale. I said little because I did not believe anyone would understand what was happening inside me.
One thing had changed immediately: my desire to inject drugs disappeared.
A month passed. Then several months. I was still alive.
My condition remained strange and frightening, but somewhere deep inside I kept hearing the same message: do something. Search.
One day I found myself standing across the road from an Orthodox church. In earlier years I had been near that church for completely different reasons connected with poppies. Now I stood there because I did not know where else to go.
I entered. I heard singing, smelled incense and listened to words I barely understood. I went back another time, but I did not feel immediate relief.
Still, my mind continued searching.
After about half a year I felt strongly that I needed to leave the city. Even though I was no longer injecting, almost every familiar place contained old traps.
I told Rita. To my surprise, she agreed.
I remembered a small village in a neighboring district where I had once seen empty houses. We found a modest house for sale. My mother gave me everything she had saved — 1,500 Soviet rubles — and Rita’s mother contributed the same amount.
We bought the house and moved.
While carrying in a sofa, some things fell out of it. Among them was the small New Testament I had been given months earlier.
Seeing that little book again felt significant to me. For the first time in a long while, I felt a small measure of relief.
Village life was unfamiliar, but I adapted quickly. I worked, kept a household, and tried to build a new routine. About half a year after our move, Rita and I had a son.
The frightening internal condition did not disappear quickly. It took years before I began to feel meaningful relief and to understand what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
I also began reading the New Testament. It gave me a new framework for thinking about life, death, responsibility and meaning.
The old life had not completely released me. At one point, even after I had stopped using, I considered growing poppies for sale. I made a homemade seeder and planted them among corn. But my conscience would not leave me alone: if drugs had nearly destroyed me, how could I make money by helping destroy someone else?
The crop never came up.
I was relieved.
Gradually, after several years, my life began moving in another direction.
Chapter 7 — From A to Z
Life in the village still required money. Remembering my old skills, I opened a radio repair workshop. It worked well for a while and I had plenty of customers.
Then another problem grew.
I began drinking. At first a little, then more. When the workshop closed and my income disappeared, alcohol remained. What had seemed manageable became another dependency.
I was devastated by the realization. I had escaped one form of bondage only to walk into another.
I remember wondering what it would feel like simply to go one week without drinking.
After one especially heavy period of drinking, something changed. Within about a week I realized that I was no longer drinking. I experienced this as another act of mercy in my life.
My attention increasingly returned to the New Testament. I read it, compared its ideas with my own experience, and analyzed my life more carefully. That habit of honest reflection became important to me.
At the same time I thought constantly about friends who were still using, and especially about my brother Sergey and his wife Olya.
From 1992 onward I repeatedly tried to interest officials and organizations in the problem of addiction and rehabilitation. I often felt ignored. Over the years I became deeply critical of institutions that, in my view, failed to give people the kind of help they needed. Those criticisms are my personal conclusions from my experience; I know other people have had different experiences with professional treatment and recovery programs.
The tragedy in my own family became much worse.
Sergey and Olya returned to drugs after prison. There were periods of relative stability and then relapses. They had children. Eventually they told me that they had AIDS.
Their three-month-old daughter died first.
Then Olya died.
About six months later, Sergey died too.
Losing them strengthened my conviction that people caught in addiction needed more than condemnation.
Over the years, people I knew sometimes came to my village asking if they could stay for a while and stop using. I helped where I could. Often the immediate change went well, but when a person returned to the same environment, the old cycle could begin again.
I dreamed of creating a rehabilitation center where people could stay long enough to build a genuinely different way of life.
I never stopped collecting lessons from my own experience and from the people around me.
This website is one way of sharing those lessons.
Chapter 8 — Addiction and the Drug Trade
My view of addiction was shaped by the world I personally lived through.
I watched drugs become easier to obtain and saw an illegal market grow around them. I saw how money, desperation, crime and dependency could become connected.
To me, the drug trade looked like a machine that consumed people and converted suffering into money.
In my original writing I sometimes described this system in very absolute terms. Today I want to make an important distinction: some of those conclusions were my interpretation of what I witnessed, not facts I can prove about every institution, every country or every person involved.
What I do know from experience is simpler.
Once a person becomes dependent, obtaining and using the drug can begin to organize almost everything: money, relationships, time, decisions and risk. A person may genuinely want to stop and still discover that wanting is not enough.
For me, the desire to stop was only the beginning.
I needed an environment and a way of life that supported the person I wanted to become.
That is what I mean in this story when I use the word rehabilitation: not merely stopping a substance, but rebuilding a life.
There are established approaches to addiction treatment, including medical care, counseling, peer-support programs and 12-step fellowships. Different approaches help different people. My own path was different in important ways, and the rest of this story describes what I personally learned from it.
Chapter 9 — Rehabilitation
When a person decides to stop using drugs, the old way of life often has to change as well.
That was certainly true for me.
I came to think of rehabilitation as the construction of a new life. It involved where I lived, who surrounded me, what I did each day, how I earned money, what I believed, and how honestly I looked at myself.
Large changes can sound frightening when you are already exhausted. But when I began my own journey, the life behind me was already so painful that the difficult road ahead no longer seemed like the worst possibility.
If you are reading this while struggling with addiction, do not treat my story as an order or a guaranteed formula. Your circumstances may require medical care, professional support, harm-reduction services, counseling, medication, peer support or other forms of help.
But whatever path you choose, I believe one decision matters enormously: take your life seriously.
Do not keep postponing the decision to seek a better way.
Chapter 10 — Priority Number One
When I began building a new life, recovery had to become my first priority.
For me, recovery and life could no longer be separated. Every decision mattered because each decision either strengthened the new life or pulled me toward the old one.
When I moved to the village, many things did not work the first time. I tried again. I repaired what I could. I learned ordinary household work and began to feel a new kind of responsibility.
I had held an axe before, but now it felt different in my hand. It was no longer just a tool. It represented a home that depended on me.
That may sound like a small thing, but those small things helped rebuild my identity.
The old life had been organized around obtaining and using drugs.
The new life needed to be organized around living.
Chapter 11 — Moving Upward
A new life often begins from almost zero.
Do not expect everything to change in a single day. In my experience, rebuilding took years, not weeks.
Every person is different. The timing, stages, setbacks and victories will not be identical.
There will be mistakes. I made many.
What mattered was the direction.
When the direction of my life changed, the results appeared slowly. At first they were easy to miss. Later they became visible not only to me but also to people around me.
Progress did not always feel dramatic.
Often it simply meant that today I lived a little more responsibly than yesterday.
Chapter 12 — Difficulties
Rebuilding a life is difficult.
There were many things I did not want to do, many tasks that required effort, and many days that were not pleasant.
But I discovered something interesting: overcoming useful difficulties could bring real satisfaction.
Physical work became especially important to me. Working with my hands, caring for a home, repairing things and seeing concrete results helped give structure to my days.
I would not call physical labor a medical treatment for addiction. But in my own life, purposeful work became one of the healthiest parts of rebuilding myself.
Chapter 13 — A Warning and an Invitation to Help
Addiction can be difficult for people who have never experienced it to understand. The same is true of recovery.
Some of the choices that helped me may look unusual from the outside.
Over the years, people struggling with addiction sometimes came to me and asked whether they could stay and try to stop using. I was glad when I could help.
That experience taught me something important: a person who has survived addiction can sometimes become a valuable source of understanding for another person.
But experience alone does not make someone a doctor, therapist or qualified treatment provider. Serious withdrawal and other complications can require professional medical care.
If your heart is drawn to helping people with addiction, learn, listen, act responsibly, and understand the limits of what you can safely do.
Helping another human being is not about becoming a hero.
It is about being present and useful.
Chapter 14 — Honesty
One principle became central to my new life: honesty.
It is easy to see a situation the way we want it to be rather than the way it really is. Addiction gave me many opportunities to lie — to other people and to myself.
So I began trying to do the opposite.
I tried to look at my situation objectively. I tried to tell myself the truth even when it was uncomfortable.
In my personal experience, deception had been deeply woven into the addicted life. Honesty became part of leaving that life behind.
Do not misunderstand me: I am not claiming that dishonesty is the medical cause of addiction.
I am saying something more personal.
For me, learning to live truthfully was essential.
And I discovered that the truth, although sometimes painful, was not nearly as terrible as the life I had built around avoiding it.
Chapter 15 — Clear the Space Around You
When beginning a new life, I believe it is worth examining what surrounds you.
What do you watch?
What do you read?
Who influences you?
What repeatedly pulls your thoughts back toward the old life?
In my original writing I was very harsh about television, the press and much of the internet. Today I would put it more simply: reduce the things that repeatedly feed destructive habits, anger, temptation or hopelessness.
Create space for what strengthens the life you are trying to build.
The environment around us is not everything.
But it matters.
Chapter 16 — Change
Human beings can change.
That belief stands at the center of my story.
People often tell someone with addiction, “You need to start a new life.” The difficult question is: how?
For me, a new life was not a slogan. It required concrete changes.
I changed my environment.
I changed my daily work.
I changed the people and places around me.
I changed how I thought about responsibility.
I began examining my decisions more honestly.
And gradually my spiritual life changed as well.
In my earlier writing I sometimes spoke as though there were only one valid method of recovery. I would not state it that way today. People recover through different combinations of support, treatment, faith, community, medication, therapy, personal decisions and changes in circumstances.
What I can say with confidence is that my old life could not simply continue unchanged.
Something had to die so that something new could be built.
It also helped enormously to have spiritually and emotionally strong people nearby — people who could support without humiliating, preach less and listen more, and help me think clearly when life became difficult.
Chapter 17 — Everything Has a First Time
Everything in life happens for the first time once.
The first day at school.
The first love.
The first child.
The first great loss.
In my twenties I encountered drugs for the first time. Later came withdrawal, prison and experiences in psychiatric care.
Then, for the first time, I discovered that a different life might be possible.
New things are frightening because we do not yet know them. Recovery can feel that way too.
I developed a simple habit for evaluating decisions.
First, I tried to use reason. Is this choice useful? Is it honest? Where is it likely to lead?
Second, I listened to what I called my heart — my conscience, my deepest sense of right and wrong, and eventually my faith.
I do not claim that human intuition is infallible. Mine certainly was not.
But combining careful thought, honesty, conscience and faith helped me make better decisions than I had made in the years when addiction ruled my life.
A new life contains many first steps.
Do not be ashamed of being a beginner.
Chapter 18 — How We See a Person with Addiction
Throughout my life I have watched the way society looks at people with addiction.
Too often they are treated as garbage, failures or people without a future.
I cannot accept that.
A person in addiction may lie, steal, manipulate, hurt loved ones and make terrible decisions. I know this because I lived inside that world.
But behind the behavior there is still a human being.
Learning to see that human being matters.
I have seen exhausted parents reach the point where they could no longer cope. I have seen families damaged beyond what words can describe.
Compassion does not mean accepting every behavior or removing every consequence.
It means refusing to believe that a human life has become worthless.
One of the things I tried to learn in my new life was to give good to other people.
Not because I expected repayment.
Because I wanted to become a different kind of man.
Chapter 19 — When the System Does Not Feel Like Enough
For many years I visited organizations and officials connected with addiction prevention and rehabilitation. I tried to explain what I had seen and what I believed people needed.
Often I felt that I was not being heard.
That experience made me angry and deeply skeptical of institutions. In my original text I made sweeping accusations about doctors, rehabilitation centers and government structures.
I still believe systems can fail people, and I still believe money and bureaucracy can sometimes become more important than the person needing help.
But I also recognize that many doctors, counselors, peer workers, rehabilitation programs and families sincerely help people every day.
My personal disappointment should not be turned into a claim that all professional treatment is useless or dishonest.
The lesson I keep from those years is this:
Do not wait passively for a perfect system.
Use every responsible source of help available to you, and at the same time take an active role in rebuilding your own life.
Chapter 20 — Beginning the Work
When I began building my new life, one rule became especially important:
Create conditions that make returning to the old life more difficult.
For me, that meant leaving the city.
In the city, the people, places and habits connected with drugs were always nearby. Moving to a village created distance between me and those triggers.
I do not believe everyone must move to the countryside. Many people cannot, and for some it would be the wrong decision.
The principle is more important than the geography.
Reduce access to the people, places and routines that repeatedly pull you toward using. Build an environment that supports recovery.
For me, faith also became increasingly important.
I kept a Bible in my home and began reading the New Testament seriously — not as a ritual, but as something to think about and compare with my own life.
The idea of being “born again,” described in John 3:3, became especially meaningful to me. I began to see recovery not only as stopping drugs but as becoming a new person.
That is my Christian understanding of what happened in my life. I do not demand that every reader interpret recovery in the same way.
I only want to tell the truth about what became important to me.
Recovery was slow.
But once the new life began to take root, I could feel the difference.
Chapter 21 — A New Life
Another lesson was learning how to use the little I had responsibly.
When Rita and I moved to the village, nearly all our available money went into buying the house and completing the paperwork. After that, the money was gone.
I had to work.
Village life taught me to think about resources differently. Money, tools, land, time and labor all had to be used carefully.
The point was not to become rich.
The point was to build something stable.
A stable home.
Useful work.
Food.
Responsibility.
A future.
My own recovery did not end with one dramatic day. In a sense, the process of building my life has continued ever since.
I lived long enough to have a son and to see grandchildren.
When I first wrote the original version of this story in 2016, I looked back at everything that had happened and understood how improbable that once seemed.
I had spent years believing I was about to die.
Instead, I was given more life.
And I am grateful for it.
Chapter 22 — Why I Am Sharing This Today
The original version of this text was written in 2016. At that time I imagined it as part of a larger rehabilitation project and as material that could be distributed through an app.
Much has changed in my life since then.
Technology has changed.
The world has changed.
The drug situation has changed.
I have changed.
But the central question has not disappeared:
How does a person whose life has been captured by addiction begin building a new life?
This website and my Life After Addiction project are my way of continuing that conversation.
I am not presenting myself as a doctor and I am not offering a guaranteed cure.
I am offering my story.
I used opium for years.
I experienced dependency.
I went to prison.
I lost people I loved.
I lived through a period when I was convinced I was dying.
I left my old environment.
I rebuilt ordinary daily life.
Faith became important to me.
I learned to value honesty, work, responsibility and service to others.
And I remained alive long enough to tell you about it.
If you are in addiction now, please understand that stopping some substances suddenly can be medically dangerous. Seek qualified medical help when needed. My personal story should never be used as a reason to avoid emergency or professional care.
If you love someone who is struggling, remember that you are dealing with a human being, not merely a diagnosis or a problem.
And if you have already begun your own recovery, keep building.
A new life is not created in one day.
It is built decision by decision.
I once believed my story was almost over.
It wasn’t.
Perhaps that is the most important reason I am sharing it.
Everything you truly need to build must eventually become part of your own life. For me, reason, conscience, faith and the grace of God became companions on that road.
I did what little I could.
The rest of the journey is still being written.
With respect,
d.Sem
Life After Addiction