The Story Of My Dads Lifelong Drug Addiction & How I Learned To Support Him

My dad has always drank, smoked, and done drugs. It left him jobless, homeless and now powerless to crack — I finally figured out how to best be there for him.

My dad grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon. In his late teens and 20’s, he worked as a heavy-duty mechanic. He worked in treacherous conditions on the Beaufort sea for many years – He is what you’d call a “Tough Cookie”. He was only 17 years old when his father died — It’s a topic he doesn’t like to talk about, but it clearly had a massive impact on his life.

His drug use started in his teens and 20s when he was still living up North. The summer days were long — daylight lasted almost 24 hours and there wasn’t much to do, so apparently, he and his buddies would go water skiing at 3 am high on mescaline or eat shrooms and go hunting. Gotta fill the time somehow, I guess. His stories are endlessly entertaining, despite them being almost always including drug use.

As he grew older, something shifted in him and it prompted him to shift to the city life in Vancouver — probably triggered by his first wife — but he moved to the city and became a stockbroker. Pretty big change going from the boonies doing psychedelics with your buddies to moving to the big city to work in the corporate world.