By Ryan Broderick, Editor in Chief
Matt, a University sophomore who requested his last name be omitted for privacy concerns, spent the last year in and out of rehabilitation programs for an addiction to keyboard cleaner.
Inhalant abuse might seem like a strange idea, taking something like a keyboard cleaner and inhaling it for recreational purposes, but it’s a very real and serious problem. According to a 2008 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association (SAMHSA) survey, 2 million Americans over the age of 12 have abused inhalants. A drug that if improperly done or done by the wrong person could be instantly fatal.
The first time Matt got high was in junior high school. He found his mother’s marijuana and smoked as much of it as he could. The next day he came to school and told everyone.
“This was seventh grade, so everyone thought I was just the coolest,” Matt says. “I was probably the first one out of my friends to smoke weed. After that I was a pothead for most of high school and would smoke whenever I could.”
Matt says that smoking weed in high school was what he would look forward to the most. “I really hated school and usually throughout the day me and my friends would just make plans about how to get money and where to smoke when the day was out.”
Matt’s road towards inhalant abuse though, started a year ago, oddly enough when he got an after school job at a local Rite-Aid in East Meadow. His co-worker Nick introduced him to a world of over-the-counter, technically legal highs that ended in his first can of keyboard cleaner.
“We were stocking out the medicine aisle and he showed me a Robitussin and he said ‘hey, you can get high off this’ and back then I was pretty open-minded so I stole a bottle and brought it home and tried it,” Matt says of his first exposure to over-the-counter drug use. “It was the best high of my life. I fell in love instantly,” he says with a bit of a sad laugh.
Matt drank the whole bottle after his parents fell asleep, grimacing through it and waited around for it kick in. After that night he eventually ended up getting two bottles at a time, three to four times a week, after every shift at work.
“If you take a little bit it’s like being really drunk and really stoned,” he says of the high. “The more you take though, it’s kind like if your head became a balloon and detached itself and was floating along the ceiling and you feel really warm and fuzzy.”
Robitussin lost its fun, though. The smell started to make him sick and he switched to the pill form of cough medicine before that too started to nauseate him. By the end of it all, of it he couldn’t even swallow pills without gagging.
Nick showed him Unisom, a sleeping aid with the same ingredient as Benadryl, which would replace cough medicine, but with a much darker edge. “That was a really dark time because that drug is just horrible,” Matt says. He says the drug gives you restless leg syndrome and makes your skin hurt.
“It pretty scary thinking back because all I would do was sit by myself for hours in my basement at my computer having a good idea to do something fun and then completely forgetting about it,” he says.
At that point the only attraction to the high was a thoughtless feeling of amnesia that came over him when he took it.
“And then by the end of the night with that drug it was me sitting in the dark and I would have taken so much that I would just sit there and listen to voices and footsteps that I thought I could hear,” Matt remembers.
He says at that point his addictive personality was flourishing because even though the high wasn’t enjoyable, he couldn’t stop. During his Unisom phase it was the first time he distinctly remembers the need to get high.
Inhalants originally weren’t his first choice, but quickly became his main drug. During the time he was experimenting with Robitussin and Unisom, Matt went into his job on his day off hoping to pick up some cough medicine or some sleeping pills, but found neither were in stock. Rite-Aid was out. But he still had the urge to get high and remembered taking a hit from keyboard cleaner once or twice when he was younger.
“I tried it and just the sensation it gave me was just the perfect high I was looking for at the time, just the complete…,” Matt trails off talking about the first time he tried duster.
He explains the timeline of being high on inhalants. “At first I would take it and I just kind of feel dizzy and lightheaded. I would inhale it for a good 20 seconds and then I would stop and then I continuously inhale it over and over again until I hallucinated or blacked out.” Matt says it’s hard to put an exact timeline of the feeling because of how frequently he would black out or brown out.
He says one can lasts for about a half hour.
The first time he went to rehab he says he was a full-blown drug addict. He was doing two to four, sometimes up to six cans of Dust-Off a day in his car in random parking lots around town. He’d say he was at school.
“One day I was caught, I think I was in a supermarket parking lot and one of my family members found me in my car so they made me go to an outpatient rehab and I was going there for a week. I was using duster everyday still because Dust-off doesn’t show up in any tests they can do in an outpatient rehab,” Matt says.
After his week there, he was caught again and they sent him to his first rehabilitation program for 28 days. He was scared, but he says the atmosphere was nice and supportive. Everyone was there to improve themselves and Matt felt pretty good about his handle on inhalants.
“I got out of [rehab] in the morning and that night I relapsed back on duster,” he says.
He figured he’d just cut down, but it became a problem again bringing him to another rehab facility. In total he’s gone to rehab four times at three different facilities. His addiction also brought him to the psychiatric ward at Nassau University Medical Center (NUMC).
“In the back of my mind I was never ready to stop getting high,” Matt admits. “I’d just be sitting at home and be like ‘I want to get high.'”
The last time he used inhalants was in August. “I did it at that point because I didn’t have the balls to kill myself and I was hoping that it would finally kill me,” he says.
Matt says the idea of using again has crossed his mind but he says he’s reached the point where he won’t relapse again.
Matt describes his family’s reaction as mix between shock and disgust. “My mother even told me ‘why don’t you smoke some weed,’ which looking back now is pretty funny to say to a kid,” Matt says with a quiet chuckle.
As the rehabilitation attempts continued unsuccessfully his parents started a zero tolerance policy, kicking him out into the street if there was even a hint of Matt being on drugs.
“I’ve been homeless multiple times, the longest one for about a month last winter,” he says. The zero tolerance policy in the household though only made him a better drug addict, he says.
One of the most important things Matt’s learned about everything is that inhalant abuse is something that needs more attention. He was in a branch of Narcotics Anonymous for Inhalants Abuse, which was called “the poor man’s weed” in the program.
“For kids around the ages of 13 to 15, one out of three die their first time trying it so it is a very big problem. I’ve seen some stores that have started to lock off the Dust-Off and you have to be 18 to purchase. But I personally think they should just get rid of it,” Matt says matter-of-factly.
“I mean, it’s for cleaning your keyboard with air, do you really need that in the office world? It’s like a novelty item almost,” he jokes. “I have never really met anyone that needs Dust-Off for their computer.”
(Sean M. Gates/The Chronicle)
