A 26-year-old woman has highlighted the harrowing effects of drug addiction by sharing her before and after photos on social media.
Dejah Hall, from Arizona, shared the eye-opening images of herself online to celebrate four years of being clean from heroin and meth.
‘The top left is me in full blown addiction, I was a terrible iv user and like most, progressively got worse,’ she wrote on Facebook.
‘The bottom left is me the day I was arrested 12-6-12 and coincidentally the day I finally surrendered to God!’
Speaking to Daily Mail, Ms Hall said her addiction started with pain medication when she was just 17 years old.
‘I was partying with a friend and I took a pill for the first time and due to stress and issues at home it just went downhill from there,’ she said.
‘I was taking up to six prescription pills at a time every single day before I reached a point at 20 years old where I wanted to get off them.’
Ms Hall started attending a methadone clinic to assist her but missed three days due to the death of a friend’s mother.
‘I was very close to her and was struggling with that so I missed three days in a row – something you can’t do. I was kicked out of the clinic so I ended up deciding to quit cold turkey and thought it would be okay,’ she explained.
‘The withdrawals were horrendous and after eight days it became physically debilitating – I couldn’t move my hands and it was crippling. I was constantly throwing up.’
Ms Hall, who was becoming increasingly separated from her family, said everything became worse when a friend of friend convinced her to try heroin for the first time.
‘I was throwing up and I remember he was smoking heroin. I told him it was disgusting and to stop but he was telling me to take just one hit to stop the withdrawals,’ Ms Hall said.
‘The addict side of me came out and I said I would just take one but one wasn’t enough. By the second hit I fell in love with the high. It was numbing.
‘I couldn’t stop. All I wanted to do was numb myself. I wanted it so desperately that nothing else mattered. Every minute of the day I just wanted to get high.’
Ms Hall fell into the depths of heroin addiction before progressing to meth.
To numb herself from a number of painful memories, Ms Hall became increasingly reliant on drugs and surrounded herself with people who felt the same.
‘I was a monster in every way. I didn’t care who I hurt – I didn’t care about anything anymore. I didn’t have anyone else or family to look to at that point,’ Ms Hall said.
‘By the time I started injecting heroin I didn’t care whether I lived or died.
‘I knew it was dangerous and I had started selling drugs then as well but you just stop caring. I was doing heroin multiple times a day and would often sleep for days on end.’
From April to December, 2012, Ms Hall was injecting both meth and heroin.
‘I was killing myself. I was very skinny at around 95 pounds (43 kilograms) but I still felt like I looked beautiful. That is the deception of the drug… you are not beautiful on that stuff,’ Ms Hall said.
‘I was stuck in this cycle. I was so disgusting and skinny and when I look back at that person I just can’t connect with her.
Sassy Liberty