I Started Doing Drugs at 12—I Never Imagined Where I’d Be 26 Years Later
In my first year of high school, I was roped into taking heroin, and that opened the door to 26 years of addiction, criminality, institutions and jails.Growing up, I felt different to everyone. I believed that there was something missing, something wrong with me. That day I tried heroin for the first time in school toilets; I had been hiding because I didn't have the courage to go to class.
- ▪In my first year of high school, I was roped into taking heroin, and that opened the door to 26 years of addiction, criminality, institutions and jails.Growing up, I felt different to everyone.
- ▪I believed that there was something missing, something wrong with me.
- ▪That day I tried heroin for the first time in school toilets; I had been hiding because I didn't have the courage to go to class.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Newsweek |
| Canonical URL | https://www.newsweek.com/i-was-an-addict-for-26-years-after-trying-drugs-at-12-now-im-a-business-owner-12318333 |
| Publication time | Sun, 16 Aug 2026 16:00:00 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-16T20:01:37.254Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-16T20:01:37.254Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
By Melissa Fleur AfsharReporter0ShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberSee more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.Most 12-year-olds busy themselves with video games or sports, but when I was 12 in the late 1990s, I was introduced to a much darker pastime. In my first year of high school, I was roped into taking heroin, and that opened the door to 26 years of addiction, criminality, institutions and jails.Growing up, I felt different to everyone. I believed that there was something missing, something wrong with me. That day I tried heroin for the first time in school toilets; I had been hiding because I didn't have the courage to go to class.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Newsweek.
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