An honest,open, somewhat amusing, moving account of a recovering marijuana addict …

As Ssalamu Alaykum

This is a MUST READ article…

An honest,open, somewhat amusing, moving account of a recovering marijuana addict.The article describes her angst and guilt upon reflecting on the person she became due to her drug habit ( deceitful,restless, losing values instilled in her, and more importantly violating the laws of Allah) Instead of staying @ home and ‘rolling roti’s’, she spent her dayZe on campus ‘rolling joints’

-Read & Learn- ( NOT how to roll & smoke a joint or bake the perfect ‘muffinz’, but why we should never indulge in such fitnah, inshaAllah )

” As I was about to let out the smoke from one of my puffs I saw some cops just a few meters away waving down cars. I panicked and literally threw the stub just steps away from the cop who stopped our car, bent down, looked at me and said we can go. If you ask me I know without a doubt that on both these occasions the only reason I got away scott free was solely because of my scarf. “

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE “HIGH” KIND
Before I go on I ask you, the ardent reader to close your eyes and conjure up an image in your mind of a person that you perceive to be a drug addict. I ask this of you for my own observations has by now left me convinced that the mind of the average individual holds an utterly distorted image of a drug taker. Had someone asked me to do this a decade ago I would have said that I see a rebel like teenager with ripped pants, a creased white shirt, trendy takkies, and spiked/streaked hair. Naturally, such a narrowed angle of vision is bound to produce a distorted perspective. But should someone ask this of me today, I would simply close my eyes and see me. A conservatively dressed Muslim female, in her middle twenties, adorned in clothing similar to the likes of a hijab, with a strict upbringing in an old fashioned Muslim home. Shocked? Why? Is it because I say FEMALE or because I say a MUSLIM FEMALE IN HIJAB LIKE ATTIRE?

I am by no means shocked, for it was only once I had embraced this world of marijuana addiction that I realized exactly how protected most of us truly are in our home environments, oblivious to the mere fact the drug taking is not only an activity endured by non Muslim youth or Muslim males, but pretty much an activity indulged in even by young Muslim females such as myself.

At the outset it is important to emphasise that drug abuse knows no distinction between male and female or between the trendy teenager and the old fashioned girl. When I expounded this view to some close friends, they were somewhat skeptical at first, until of course they heard my story and till now they remain convinced that there is truth to what I say. I am a recovering marijuana addict who for months had convinced herself that she was never addicted. Will not six years of smoking pot be classed as addiction? I think it would, especially when in a period of 4 to 5 years you were averaging 7 to 8 joints a day, (without sharing ) possibly more. I do accept that I cannot go back and change what I have done but I can relate my addiction to the unknowing brothers/sisters out there to point out the importance of drug awareness. When I look back on my past, I realize that the overshadowing memories I have are those of joint rolling and intoxication. This is my personal story.I had never thought of writing it for it never occurred to me that my life with its rather unusual occurrences would ever be of particular interest to anyone except myself. There I was sometime during last year ( 2002 ) in the midst of my road to recovery, confiding in one of my closest friends, who remains shocked, possibly even up till today that someone like me had a weakness for an intoxicant like dagga. My burden had finally been lightened in sharing my story with her, but her curiosity had not been satisfied. As we spent hours on the phone, she continued to ply me with questions about how I finally shook off the habit, and while I tried to explain it to her, it struck me with astonishment how difficult it was to put into words my long way to discovery and recovery. A discovery of faith and a recovery from myaddiction.

After intense psycho analysis of every statement that night, I came to admit that no matter how I tried to convince myself otherwise, the honest truth was that dagga, like any other drug was in fact mind altering.Having had the upper hand in an endless conversation, her thirst was still not quenched and she asked if perhaps I could try my best to share my experiences with others in the hope of reducing if not eradicating the increasing statistics amongst our drug taking ummah. I laughed out loud at the time and remarked that I would think about it.In the following months I began to think seriously about setting down my story and this is what my once joking response has manifested into?”the story of my addiction.”

I remember all too well the very first times I had smoked dagga?.feeling dizzy and having trouble walking, being silly and giggling for no reason, having red bloodshot eyes and having a hard time remembering things that just happened. How did dagga make me feel? Well, sometimes it made me feel relaxed others high. Most times I felt thirsty and hungry- an effect called the “munchies.” On occasions I endured the negative effects of marijuana having suffered from feelings of anxiety to having paranoid thoughts (more likely to happen with the use of a more potent variety of marijuana). Marijuana definitely changes ones personality. It can make the shy feel outgoing, the weak feel strong and the boisterous seem mouse-like.Instead of developing these qualities, an addict relies on drugs to produce an illusion that they possess them.

I realize that I was definitely a marijuana addict because when using pot, it was the most important thing in my life, more important than anybody or anything. It helped to suppress all the inadequacies I felt. It helped me not to feel the pain of living up to expectations. It enabled me not to worry about anything. It helped me not to really care about the things I cared about. It enabled me to stay in my own world and not deal with emotional feelings that would continually come up when I wasn’t smoking. It would drive the fear away, but after a while the fear would return. Problems would come up and they would seem too huge to deal with. I would smoke weed and look for the answers after smoking, because then the problems seemed smaller.

Sometimes it seems to me that I can see the lives of two people when I look back on my life?the one person who wanted only to be a loving sister/child and the other that strived to be accepted by ALL friends. My days of smoking pot can be traced back to 1995, during my early years at campus where I was first rudely awakened to the harsh realities of the real world, with people from different diversities and a wide range of cultures, each with their own thoughts and perceptions. It was amazing to see people from different walks of life all conjured up at one institution and I embraced this change positively, knowing full well that I had a thing or two to learn from them all. Little did I know at the time that I would one day master the art of cleaning dagga and rolling perhaps the perfect spliff. Many of my new found friends at the time had spoken immensely of their personal experiences with the drug and how wonderful it was and kept on outlining the importance of experimenting with it just once in your lifetime.

I still remember the very first story that was related to me by one of my closest friends at the time during a so called night study session which often times was just an added session of bonding and socializing. My father, being as strict as he was, was totally against me leaving home at night to go to university until the early hours of morning but I somehow convinced him to trust me and to trust that I was going solely for the betterment of my future. My friend continued to explain this one time when he consumed both alcohol and dagga in large dosages in the same night at a very well known club in Durban. Moments later he was as high as anyone could possibly get and felt a little ill wanting to go home but of course he couldn’t find his lift so he decided to walk rather. All he remembers till this day was waking up on the footpath in West Street in his boxers. Apparently he slumped into this comatose sleep and was robbed of his belongings while he lay passed out. We were reduced to tears with the laughter as he related his story to us. It was then that he looked at me and warned me not to laugh at him for he was going to make sure that one day in the near future he would get me to try it. Who knew that a senseless remark he made in a joke would turn out to be my destiny in the years to follow.

As time surpassed, these nightly study sessions turned out to be a full time occupation with most of us sharing stories of our distant past in an attempt to strengthen these new found friendships. The more stories told the greater my urge to try at least one dagga joint. We were a group of about 8 to 10 people, out of which only two of us (including myself) hadn’t ever tried marijuana or as we normally called it, grass. A few days later we were sitting around at one of our friends houses and that night it was just four of us chatting away when one of them calmly pulled out a bank packet full of what to me looked like grass at the time. I asked what that was and he slowly and calmly explained that it was dagga and that he needed to have one immediately for he was feeling very uneasy. As they sat there smoking the stuff they asked me if I would like to try some. I half -heartedly declined twice even though I knew that deep down in my heart I did in fact want to see what the big deal was about this substance. All those stories I had heard in the previous weeks were so exciting that I too felt that I needed to one day look back and be able to say “been there done that”.As I sat there contemplating whether or not to take that first puff, a million thoughts ran through my mind?Fear for the unknown, guilt for knowing that I had lied to my parents and told them I was on campus studying, anxiousness for wanting to try it and uneasiness for not knowing what effect it was going to have on me. After much deliberation I did it, I took my first pull and I still remember all too clearly how they remarked that I was a natural. At the time I felt like a don knowing I handled the intake well,but now as I look back to that very moment my heart is filled with a deep sense of regret and sadness that I didn’t possess more faith to abstain from it. My friends questioned me a million times, asking me how I felt, what I felt, if I was okay. At first I didn’t feel anything and couldn’t understand the pleasure they derived from such a silly thing but seconds later I felt like I was literally walking on clouds.

I was so light headed and slightly dizzy and went on talking away as if I wasn’t going to live to see the next day. There was a point where they asked me to shut up because they couldn’t understand what I was trying to say with all that slurring. We were two girls and two boys, each from differing lifestyles and backgrounds. Later in that evening one of the boys and the girl left to go looking for their partners as they apparently felt a heightened sexual desire and needed to go relieve the pressure. I was still buzzing away in my glory and oblivious to everyone around me. Instead I grabbed the remote and manifested into a couch potato. I was all alone in this three bedroomed house with a male. So, not only was I intoxicated, but to add insult to my wrong doing I allowed myself, a young Muslim female of sound family and Islamic values, to be alone with a non mahram man who was also in an altered state of mind. Anything could have happened that night. Had he been a man filled with lust I could have easily been tarnished for life by minutes of intoxication. For a few moments of pleasure I could have ruined my entire future but at the time none of these thoughts even got close to entering my mind. Most often I was in the dominance of men, sitting close to them, sometimes allowing them to wrap their arms around me,laughing, joking and for long hours forgetting that such behaviour was prohibited in Islam. In my ever increasing conditions of intoxication I forgot that just like men,woman too have to observe religious standards relating to personal conduct, social dealings and moral behaviour -like being truthful, fair, beneficent, righteous, well mannered and to promote the well being of their society. Allah (SWT) has proclaimed, “And the believers, men and women, are allies, of each other, enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong, establishing prayer, giving alms, and obeying God and his messenger. As for these, God will have mercy on them, God is Mighty and Wise”. (Tawba, 71)

The four of us got together on campus the following day and laughed away the jokes of the previous night, having already planned to meet again for yet another session of smoking. So here I was the very next night back at my friends house, the same routine as before, except this time I smoked one joint entirely on my own and was totally high after that. All I remembered from that night was watching the beginning of some James Bond movie and waking up at the end to ask my friend what happened. He remarked he didn’t know what movie he was watching and so couldn’t explain anything. It was then that I realized that even though the both of us appeared to be physically fine, we were mentally distorted that night. The ritual of this smoking pot and eating away carried on for weeks on end and before I knew it I was smoking between 3 to 4 joints a day. In no time word spread amongst the friends that I took to dagga and suddenly everyone wanted me to smoke with them. They were amazed that a girl in scarf, who dressed so conservatively,was so ultra cool that she even tried dagga. Our circle of dagga smoking friends grew and I started smoking it everyday.

The time came when I was told that I couldn’t just smoke it and let the boys do all the work in rolling and cleaning so they thought me how to clean and roll and in no time I rolled better cigarettes than those boys that had been doing it for years. Whilst the other normal Muslim females were at home with their parents or reading their salaah, here was I asking my friends whether they want me to mix the dagga with tobacco and roll it or whether they wanted to smoke clean green. Having learnt the art of rolling it meant that I could get my high at any time I wanted for I was no longer dependent on anyone to give me some. I would simply go get the green myself, clean, roll and smoke it at my liberty. I suddenly started itching for a fix all the time and pretty soon I realized that getting the drug was as easy as could be.

In no time I was like a mobile dagga machine, not only smoking the drug but also carrying large amounts of it very often in my handbag. The boys suddenly became my best friends and I was a part of their every plan for the day as I had come to be seen as the coolest “slum”chick around. When I started off on dagga it was with three other friends. Weeks later I had gotten myself a entire family of pot smokers who so passionately made sure that come hell or high water, we were to get our fix for the day at any cost. I befriended and got close to three different groups of boys who studied with me which meant that I was smoking nearly all day. I would walk into campus around 8, sit around for a bit saying hello to everyone, the first bunch of boys would arrive at around 9 and ask me to join them for drive and I would oblige. We would go to the nearby grounds and smoke at least two joints, after which we would return to campus and space out on the resting benches for a while. Around 12 or so another group of guys would come looking for me and usher me off to yet another session for the day where we would smoke 5 or 6 more between ourselves and chat away for hours. I would go home towards the evening, have supper,tell my parents I was going to study and instead we would lounge around on the isolated grass banks outside the library smoking yet another 5 or 6 more and giving in to the ever increasing hunger bursts.

Surprisingly enough, the stench from the dagga never quite got to my parents, in fact, I doubt they even knew what symptoms to look for in a child addicted to drugs. Besides, I was perfectly prepared all the time with eye drops if there was any redness and a bottle of perfume for that last minute spray before I made an appearance at home. In perfect contradiction of my life I sometimes even prayed salaah in a state of intoxication,thinking that by some miracle my duahs for passing an upcoming test etc would be answered. The boys would actually wait for me outside the Jamaat Khaana whilst I did my little bit to show that I was still a Muslim.

There were days when 7 or 8 of us (me being the only girl) would miss the days lectures, go down to the one of the boys flats close to campus and smoke away all day, fall asleep for a bit, wake up and go home to a concerned mother,pretending to have had a very long day of hard work and test stresses. On other days, we would just smoke, listen to either some rave music which normally went well with the perfect high or indulge in some music by the legendary Bob Marley who was pretty much the centerfold of marijuana addiction and whose lyrics could only most often be appreciated by a person in a state of pure intoxication.

Soon the habit became too costly to support and my normal allowance would barely cover my newfound passion of dagga smoking. Sure, the drugs normally came cheap at a price of R10 a bank packet but the money was needed for the eating madness the high brought along with it and the need to spoil all your friends by paying for them too. What was Ito do? Simple, lie to my parents that I had to do all these new photocopies or buy some new text book and what do you know, I actually got more money to support my habit. So by now, not only was I lying and deceiving my parents but I was stealing from them too. My father would slog to bring home that hard-earned salary at the end of the month,and his hippie daughter was smoking it all away while he thought he was merely contributing to her studies and future. If only he knew that my studies and future at the time involved a whole lot of grass and music.

After a few months I started going with the boys to actually buy the stuff; other times I would go alone or with another girlfriend and I still remember all too well the very few times anything could have gone wrong and yet I always managed to remain so calm about it and didn’t allow myself to think about the consequences.

This one time I went along with two other guys to a very popular street in Durban central around eight at night. We were in a car with tinted windows and the boys kept on explaining to me along the way there how I was to ask the dealer for a sloop(about enough to make 2 or 3 joints). When we got there we parked off for about two minutes and I watched this guy pacing the pavement anxiously and then making his way to the car when he realised we were there to buy some. As he approached the car I calmly unwound the window and smiled at him, but much to my surprise he started panicking as soon as he came near, accused me of being part of PAGAD(because of the scarf) and ran off. My friends ran after him to convince him that I was not from PAGAD and after much deliberation he returned to the car window and smiled at me when I took off my scarf. He took the money, handed me the goods as he sneakily called me “GOONDAAN” and we then drove off.

That wasn’t the first time something funny or bizarre happened. There were these other few times I can look back on now and laugh, yet at the same time make shukar that I never got caught for possession of marijuana.

On one Saturday night, just after 12 in the morning, five of us (two girls including myself) decided to take a drive to the beach and come back to campus to resume work.Ofcourse, we could never just take a drive and not smoke so we first went to buy some and ended up buying two bankies (bank packets). I was the safe keeper of all drugs so both packets were in my bag. We drove to Blue Lagoon,sat on the beach and smoked 5 to 6 joints between ourselves. On the way back to campus, somewhere near Kingspark Stadium the police had set up a roadblock for a routine check up and we were pulled over and asked to get off the car. Strangely enough, everybody except myself was searched by the police and all I remember doing was trying to recall ayatul kursi in that state of intoxication.

Why that surah? Well, honestly I don’t really know, its just that all my life I had been told that it had many virtues and was quite a powerful surah and at the time I was just hoping that one of its virtues was to rescue me from being arrested. I am sure that two bank packets of marijuana would have landed me straight into jail, no questions
asked.

I am also left with a recollection of this other time when one of my male friends came by one morning around 10 to take me to campus. He had already rolled a spliff and insisted we smoke it on the way and well, I was never one to say no at the time. We were driving on route to campus, windows open and smoking away in our glory. As I was about to let out the smoke from one of my puffs I saw some cops just a few meters away waving down cars. I panicked and literally threw the stub just steps away from the cop who stopped our car, bent down, looked at me and said we can go. If you ask me I know without a doubt that on both these occasions the only reason I got away scott free was solely because of my scarf. The scarf and my attire provided me with enough innocence to make a cop think he was mad if he thought me capable of even lighting a cigarette for a friend.

Life for me at the time was a whole lot different when compared to present state. All I wanted at the time was to enjoy my campus friends and be the best friend to all those acquaintances. I never got bored then because I was so busy smoking one half of the day and then recovering in the next half. I was intoxicated almost twenty-four seven,including weekends. There were times I would pitch up high at family functions and no one would even suspect it, nor question my sudden increase in appetite. I not only tried marijuana rolled up in a rizzla, but also smoked it in a pipe and through a two liter bottle at times?.Ways that normally increase the intake and hence produce a greater high. I had even tried hashish once, after the normal marijuana suddenly failed to give me the high I once derived from it. There were times when we usually mixed it with a muffin mix and baked the perfect dagga muffins that had the same effect as smoking a joint.

There was always a way for everyone to consume dagga, even if it meant that I would take a puff and then blow it into my friend’s mouth (cause she couldn’t exactly pull it in herself too well).Another form of smoking we usually enjoyed as a group was called the HOTBOX, where we would cram up in someone’s car,make sure all the windows were closed and doors shut and then smoke as many as we could, until of course we could barely see the next person with all the smoke in the car. We were so crammed in these cars in such a manner that breaths and bodies are very close to each other, practically on top of each other at times. The only time we would open the door is to let someone out when they began having trouble breathing. As an unknowing person you would think that this could only be done at someone’s house out of fear of being caught but no, we did it on the campus soccer grounds, which were usually patrolled by campus security twice a day. If we ever did get caught, all we had to do was either hand security a few spliffs for him or make place in the car for him too. When the hotbox ritual was over, we’d get out the car and open up all doors and windows to air out the stench that would probably remain in the car over the next 3 days or so. In the meantime, we would lay on the grass outside, feast away on our bag of goodies and then look up into the skies and insist that the clouds and the birds are talking to us. All our senses were usually heightened and at times we would do silly things like admire the different shades of green in the tree tops or even pretend that we were on some Jamaican island, far away from everyone. A few of my friends would normally blow the smoke out onto their little puppies in the hope of getting the animals high too, and like that was not strange enough they would try to converse with the dog.

Women have an equal opportunity and incentive to share in every aspect of religious virtue: “God has got ready forgiveness and tremendous rewards for the Muslim men and women; the believing men and women; the devout men and women; the truthful men and women; the patiently suffering men and women; the humble men and women; the men and women who guard their chastity and the men and women who are exceedingly mindful to God”. (Al Azhab, 35)

There have been many cases, some of which I know of personally where intoxication has lead to heightened sexual pleasure, which reduces man to a situation of slavery to uncontrolled passions outside the bounds of marriage.Luckily for me, I had never fallen prey to such a situation. So often mention has been made in the Holy Quran and authentic Hadith of the dangers of intermingling of sexes. We are reminded that a man should not gaze at awoman nor a woman at a man so fixedly that temptation is stimulated, but I myself have experienced the ease within which such situations arise. Life in Islam is oriented towards Allah (SWT). If it allows men to come into contact with woman then that is indeed a test. But more often than normal, when youngsters of the opposite sex mingle in a state of intoxication they forget that they have a right to observe the limits of what is permissible in that association. They forget that there can be no legitimacy in exploiting the relations between persons of opposite sexes as an occasion for illicit sexual enjoyment in contravention of Allah’s commands and in deviation from the proper system for conjugal relationships.

There were times when dagga was hard to come by for seasonal purposes. Of course we had that covered too?one of our friends who had his own house decided he would grow it for us. That way he’d save us some money and the hassle of driving all those kilometers in sheer desperation for dagga. Our problem was solved and we didn’t even need any scientists to help us out, just a few desperate wannabe Rastapharians! One afternoon one of the guys girlfriends who had a flat of her own called and asked us to please bring her some greens (another name for dagga) for she wanted to make bong (dagga in milkshake) and didn’t have enough. Of course I was desperate to try this and convinced the boys to go over. We broke off three or four branches of dagga, set it under the car seat and drove from a house near campus to her flat not to far away. As soon we started driving I noticed a cop car behind us and because we were all already high, the paranoia levels were increased and in seconds we all believed the cops were onto us and started thinking of stories to tell them should we be pulled over.

The car was behind us all the way and the more we looked back the worse the paranoia got and fears consumed us like never before. It was like a scene straight of the drug lord movies. The boys then took a mutual decision to drop me off at the flat and carry on driving for they didn’t want me to be brought to shame should anything have happened. This was always the way it had been. The boys had grown to be very caring and possessive of me for I was oftentimes the only female with them in all their adventures. Thankfully, it was only when we reached the flat that we realised how much truth there was to the saying “PARNOIA KILLS”. The cop car drove right past us and didn’t even give us the eye.

Remember oh brothers and sisters, the doctrine of ultimate accountability does not take the friends as a unit for collective responsibility; rather, each individual male or female, is an autonomous unit of reckoning in front of Allah (swt), and is held directly responsible for his or her actions or his or her share in joint acts. “The day a man will run away from his own brother, his own mother and father, his own wife and his children. On that day every one will be in a state which will engross his completely.”(Abasa, [35-38])

Over the months my chest started to sound like an old worn out engine and my parents related it to stress over exams etc. but I knew the truth and still allowed them to think they were right. One night, sometime close to my exams I had severe breathing problems and had to be rushed to a nearby hospital to be neabulised. For days I had complained of a feeling of lethargy. Unknowing to the fact that I had been oversmoking and sitting under the sun a lot, the doctor became concerned and requested a blood test. I remember thinking at the time how I would be doomed if he did a blood test, due to the dagga consumption in my body, having smoked that much up to a few hours before visiting the doctor. Somehow, after much conviction I managed to convince everyone, including the doctor that I was fine and that I just needed to sleep. Luckily for me I got away yet again.

I could never even begin to complain that my upbringing wasn’t as Islamic as they could come. I was raised in a respectable, averaged income home where my father was quite a pious man and always reminded us that his daughters were his family’s respect and that under no circumstances should we ever tarnish his reputation, one that took him a lifetime to build. Did I for once ever stop to consider this, NO, why? Simple, when we are consumed by drugs we tend to forget that we have responsibilities to people other than ourselves, and that our life also belongs to our family?we lose the essence and concept of family and become so absorbed in this new found world that we even begin to think that family means nothing in this world. We would risk even the family respect and dignity for that joint, that high, that fix for the day. I always maintained that I had the perfect cover (attire) and hence none of my misdemeanors ever reached anybody and I am sure that if anybody did in fact stumble upon news of my addiction that they brushed it off as baseless rumors for such activities could never be related to my character. My outward appearance of simplicity concealed my heart as uneasy as the sea, and as rich in moods and inner contradictions.

I usually shrugged off any visible sign of guilt from dagga smoking by saying it was a minor sin. I thought of my actions as being insignificant because I was harming only myself but as time passed me by I realized that was disobeying ALLAH. After years of smoking it I developed a “tolerance” for dagga. This meant that I needed larger doses of the drug to get the same desired results that I used to get in smaller amounts. Soon I began living without desire. I did not know who I was, or what I wanted, or even how I felt. I couldn’t remember anything anymore and didn’t have a life. My life had become confused and unhappy and I strayed far away from my creator. The effects of my sin was evident in my everyday life in the following ways:

· Loss of knowledge
· Absence of blessing
· Feelings of alienation in the heart
· Difficulty in all’s ones affairs
· Loss of the desire to obey ALLAH
· Not having duah’s answered
· Lack of self respect
· Loss of sense of shame

We are living in a time when many people have stayed far from the religion of ALLAH. Sin and immorality have become o widespread that no one remains free from the taint of evil, except for the one who is protected by ALLAH. As Muhammad Asad says in his book, “The Road To Mecca”, “it was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather their own failure to live up to it.”

I realised at that point that my life had come to an all time low and I had to wake myself up if I wanted to make a difference to my existence. After some time I took interest in other people and got close to them. I began to see who was really there instead of my delusions. Thinking back on the days when my life was gifted with such wonderful friends, who have become an important part of my life, I can say without any doubt that it was only since I had met them that Islam began to occupy my mind in all earnest. It was the positive influence of these treasured sisters, who constantly spoke of Islam that has knocked some sense into me and brought forth the need to render some sort of account to myself: the need to comprehend, more fully than I ever have ever done before, the course of my own life. This was the real beginning of our friendship. I awakened everyday to new impressions; every day new questions arose from within and new answers came from without. Their continued support and influence forced me to become and remain more conscious of my creator; and as I progressed in my knowledge of Islam through their guidance, I felt time and time again, that a truth I had always known was gradually being uncovered?the truth that I was to abstain from this intoxicant under any circumstances. I became more and more Islamically conscious through their shared knowledge and suddenly started asking myself what were to happen to me should I perhaps die one day in a state of intoxication. Would I want to be raised on the day of Qiyamat in such a state, would I want to answer for such misdeeds in this state as well? NO, I had to shake off this addiction, and I had to embrace Islam whole -heartedly, for it seemed that for many months, in fact for years, I was Muslim only by name. ” Say: “if I am astray, I only stray to the loss of my own soul: but if I receive guidance, it is because of the inspiration of my lord to me: it is He who hears all things, and is (ever) near.” ( Surah Saba, 50)

It is through the continued positive influences of these newfound friends that I became aware of my failure to fulfill my duties towards ALLAH (SWT). I came to regret my wrongdoing and sin and started to move towards the beacon of repentance. “Say: ‘O my slaves who have transgressed against themselves (by committing evil deeds and sins)! Despair not of the Mercy of Allah (swt), verily Allah forgives all sins. Truly, He is oft forgiving, Most Merciful. And turn in repentance and in obedience with true faith to your Lord and submit to Him before the torment comes to you, then you will not be helped (Al Zumar, 53-54)

Many a time I used to find it difficult falling asleep,would twist and turn for hours thinking back to the many occasions I had fallen prey to dagga, wanting to repent but wondering how Allah (swt) would ever forgive me. I came across the Quranic ayah above and realized that most of us lack faith in the vastness of the mercy of Allah (swt) or is it that perhaps we feel that we are undeserving of this Mercy. I then repented in the best possible way I knew how and since gave up on the sin of dagga intoxication and in turn made a sincere intention never to return to the sin insha-allah. Allah says in the Quran, “?Seek theforgiveness of your Lord, and turn to Him in repentance?”(Hud, 3)

Following my repentance I began to see my past sins as repulsive and harmful, a view I never took prior to this, when dagga was more important to me than my very own family. Often at times I stopped myself from even thinking about the past. Since my decision to give up on dagga I have had definite withdrawal symptoms (the most common amongst any of us being insomnia), coupled with emotional and mental changes. Another symptom that has seemed to have affected me is depression and nightmares. For me more especially I would say the most common symptom of detoxingis anger, ranging from slow burning rage to constant irritability to sudden bursts of anger when least expected: anger at the world, anger at loved ones, anger at ones self, anger at being an addict and having to get clean.Memory impairment is also very often experienced, where temporary amnesia has seemed to have made home in place of the memories I sometimes battle to remember.

I still face many obstacles that stand between my repentance and myself. Some of these obstacles exist within myself and others in the world around me. Its been a little over two years since I have graduated from university and almost two year since I last met many of my friends who recently seemed to have made a re-entry into my life, but somehow it is not so easy to take up the threads of my former relations at the point where they had been left dangling when we went our separate ways. We had grown estranged and no longer spoke the same intellectual language. In particular, none of my previous friends could fully understand my newfound continued pre-occupation with Islam, but I had decided that that was their problem to get over. I was not going to turn back nor let go of theknowledge I gained through my experiences in the past year and so I became aware that if I were to progress further into my journey of discovery, I would have to cut myself off from the world in which I treaded in for the four years before this. As they say, “the hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which bridges to burn.”

Now as I look back on my past, I derive no feelings of pleasure and enjoyment at an activity I once thought to be the best thing ever and neither do I wish to repeat them in future. It’s hard to put into words how my life has changed and how happy I truly am. My self esteem and self-confidence has improved tenfold. I trust ALLAH in a way I never thought possible. He gives me strength and grants me serenity at times when it seems almost impossible. I make shukar everyday for the gift of recovery and the wonderful supportive and loving friends who have shared in reliving my memories and yet constantly remind and urge me that I need to move on and turn over a new leaf. I continue to make recovery the most important focus of my life and remain hopeful about my future today regardless of many uncertainties. My relationship with my higher power continues to grow now that I have the honesty that was missing from my life for a little over twenty years. I have never been more proud of anything I had ever done. These sober moments are very precious to me and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, not even a joint.

May Allah Taala save us all from all types of evils.(Aameen)