Rocks: One Man's Climb From Drugs to Dreams

By Marco Broccardo

Marco Broccardo was an ordinary boy from an ordinary family. He had parents who loved him and older sisters who doted on their little brother. He had friends and he played sport at school. Schoolboy experimentation with weed quickly turned to coke and ecstasy. Drugs made him feel great. What was the harm? The trouble came when supply and demand were out of balance and a harmless joint and a couple of pills no longer did the trick. Marco needed cash – more and more of it. He became a runner for the dealers who operated in the clubs where Joburg teenagers went to party. He had money and he had drugs. Life seemed good. Then he discovered crack cocaine. From that moment the ruthless pursuit of his next hit took his family to the brink of financial ruin and emotional despair. Marco lied his way through rehabs and halfway houses; he used every genuine offer of help as opportunities to plan his next spectacular relapse; and he dismissed several close calls with death as signs that he just needed to be more careful next time. He didn't care. Until the day he made the dramatic and life-altering decision to change. How he did it and what he has done with his life since then are nothing short of miraculous. Rocks – One Man's Climb From Drugs to Dreams is Marco's story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Release date: Sep 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780620601702

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Author’s Note

While I have made every effort to try and remember accurately the events I relate in this book, unfortunately the mind of a drugged-up teenager is not always the most ordered one! The events recounted here are all told from my perspective and from my memory as they happened, but the strong possibility exists that I may have missed some of the finer details.

Introduction

Society makes excuses for drug addicts and substance abusers.

Some people are under the impression that most or even all drug problems or major psychological issues are rooted in some form of trauma. Perhaps the person had a difficult childhood. They must have grown up under the hand of substance abusers or abusive parents. Maybe they resorted to drugs to escape the hardship of poverty or a broken home. They were victims of their own circumstances. This may often be the case – but not always.

The one thing we have in life is the gift of choice. No matter how challenging your circumstances may be, your decision to smoke that first joint, pop that first pill or even mainline for the first time is just that: your decision. Your choice. I say this because I, like many other people who turned to drugs, grew up in a very loving and safe environment. How could my circumstances possibly have ‘forced’ me into becoming what I became, a shell of a person, devoid of all humanity?

It has become all too easy to blame society, our environment and, worst of all, our families for the choices we make. It’s time for individuals to accept responsibility for their lives. Only then can change occur.

We make our own choices, good and bad. These choices shape our lives.

1

Boys Will Be Boys

The crackling static, interspersed with short, sharp shouts on the police scanners were what brought me round. I had no idea where I was or even who I was. I felt extreme fear. My eyes stung from the glare of lights shining on me from police cars and ambulances.

Despite my confusion, I instinctively knew that wherever I was, I was there because I’d done something I shouldn’t have been doing. As my vision cleared I realised where I was and it is an image that will forever be etched into my mind. I was in a gutter. I was lying on my back in a gutter at the side of a road.

One of the paramedics must have seen that I’d regained consciousness and he asked me what my name was. I couldn’t answer. In that moment, apart from really not being able to remember anything whatsoever, I actually had no idea who I was anymore. I had no identity. I was occupying a body but my soul, my mind, my emotions and certainly my conscience – those were all dead.

Gradually, the fog started to clear and I remembered my name. More importantly, I realised that I had crack cocaine in my pocket and remembered simultaneously, with some dismay, that my pipe and some rocks were on the passenger seat of my car. I also knew what my priorities were. Careful not to bring attention to myself, quietly and discreetly I eased the crack in its plastic wrapping, harvested from discarded shopping bags, out of my pocket and swallowed it. Sooner or later it would have to come out, at which point I knew I could put it to good use.

My name is Marco Broccardo. I am the youngest child and only boy born into a family of three children. My early childhood was normal. I wasn’t particularly rebellious. I respected my parents. Growing up, I was just an ordinary boy, an ordinary child. I laughed, played and ate just like most growing boys should. I told the occasional lie here and there – but I had fun, my life was good and I was content.

When I was about twelve years old and still in primary school, one day after first break we were told that we’d be going into the school hall instead of back to class. We had a guest speaker. I was excited. I thought it was a mobile zoo or a travelling circus! Sadly, it wasn’t either. It was a couple of officers from our local police station, come to give us a talk on drugs. Still – anything was better than going to class.

The talk was very informative. The cops showed us pictures of a variety of different drugs, so that we’d be able to identify them should they ever be offered to us (in hindsight I’m not sure if that was the best idea) and of course they explained the pitfalls associated with drug abuse. For some reason they didn’t really expound on or tell us just how devastating those same drugs could be – probably because we were still relatively young. This was in 1992, more than twenty years ago now. Nowadays the age of kids who become addicted to drugs is getting lower, with children as young as ten getting hooked, and I think we need to be blunter at primary school level about where drugs lead and exactly what kids can expect to find once they start down the slippery slope that leads to addiction.

The officers ended off their talk with a short video about a girl who got involved with drugs and how she committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the family home.

After the talk, as we walked back to our classrooms some of my friends were talking about how exciting it would be to take acid and feel like Superman – so much for the warnings. Not me, though. I had already made a solemn promise to myself never to get involved in drugs. After that I even became an active member of the fight against drugs by using my breaktimes to try and spot the evil drug dealers around the school.

I hated the thought of drugs and I distanced myself from people who associated with addicts. I found it difficult to fathom why on earth anyone would want to take drugs. This sentiment was shared by many others in my class. I even remember going home and telling my sisters how bad drugs were and how ridiculous the thought of taking them was.

For most of my childhood, I associated with ‘good’ kids. Sometimes we broke rules and we were often caught, but really we were just being boys.

It’s been said that the most difficult thing any parent will have to do when raising a son is actually keeping him alive. I can bear testimony to that.

Grade 8, which is the first year in high school, is a stressful time for most children. Leaving the safety of primary school where you’ve been king of the castle is tough and to start all over in high school at the bottom of the proverbial food chain can be a challenge. Finding your place again isn’t easy. Naturally, we tend to stick to what we know, so we try our best to keep the same friends in our circle. Inevitably, though, things change. This is when we start to lose our innocence as children and we become aware that there is more to life than what we have always known. Different things become important. For some kids being noticed, belonging, or being popular becomes so important that everything else seems insignificant.

I clearly remember my first year of high school. I was torn between two worlds: the world I’d always known and the new and exciting world lurking in the shadows. My anti-drug resolve, however, remained strong. When my buddy Rich¹ became one of the ‘cool’ kids – the ones who went out on the weekends to shopping centres to smoke and drink – I said I wasn’t interested. I remembered the promise I’d made to myself in primary school and decided to stay away from those friends. I made new friends and sport became one of my top priorities. My new friends were great and we had fun. We weren’t angels and we got up to our fair share of naughtiness, but it was still relatively clean fun.

Towards the end of my Grade 9 year a new kid called Dwane Voster came to our school. Dwane had been living in Gaborone until then, where his dad worked on the mines. As with all new guys, he was regarded with a measure of suspicion. He seemed to be a very confident guy none the less. He was athletic and funny, so fitting in was never going to be a problem for him. He and I became friends from the first day he arrived. We just hit it off.

Being friends with Dwane was a huge adventure and our friendship marked a change in my outlook on life. Before Dwane, I was relatively naive. He, on the other hand, had already had some colourful life experiences, things that I could only imagine. His family background was in fact less than ideal but to me it was exotic. He had an older brother, Joe, who was about four years older than Dwane, and Joe was basically the dictionary definition of a degenerate – completely immoral and corrupt. They had a younger sister, who was okay but entirely focused on doing whatever she could to fit in. His parents were ‘different’. In fact, they were very, very different to what I considered normal. His father would come and go, moving from one job to the next. His mother had a personality that was loud and abrasive – and she was a major party animal. I was intrigued by and hugely attracted to Dwane’s family and, because our lives were so opposite, I think he felt the same way about mine.

The Vosters were completely easygoing; there were no rules in my new friend’s house. Dwane could go out whenever he wanted to and he didn’t even have a curfew. Parties at Dwane’s house became a regular thing. His parents’ friends would come over and they would all party it up, drinking and openly smoking dope. I was amazed – this seemed to be such a cool family and I loved being included in it. In most cases these evenings would end with his mom and some of the other adults jumping naked into the pool.

This was very far removed from my perspective of how a family operated. In our home there was structure and there were rules. Don’t get me wrong – my parents had a big circle of friends and they had dinners and parties too. I just don’t ever recall them ending up naked in the pool. I was totally drawn into this other lifestyle. The flipside was that Dwane loved spending time at my place. I realise now how the normality of my family life was, perhaps just by its contrast, extremely appealing to him. Anyway, Dwane and I became really close. He was my best friend. In fact he was over at our house so often that he basically lived with us.

Together Dwane and I and our group of friends got into some bad habits. Drinking quickly started to be one of the things we did on a regular basis when we went out with our friends. I provided the alcohol most of the time, as my parents had a bar in the house that was always more than well stocked. It wasn’t really an individual decision to drink. We made it as a group or, more accurately, some individuals made the decision for the collective. You could say it was typical peer pressure. As a teenager, the need to be accepted by one’s peer group can be all consuming. More often than not it’s the most important thing in your life at the time.

Before long going out on the weekends and not drinking seemed like an absurd idea to me. I was managing at school. I still loved sport, and society in general seemed to be drinking so I assumed it was okay. The fact that we were all well under age didn’t matter. We just made friends with older people and we used them to buy alcohol for us. My sister Laura was one of them. Had I known then that the behaviour I was dabbling in was setting in motion a roller coaster ride of destruction, perhaps I would have reconsidered my actions. Hindsight is always an exact science and unfortunately the road to destruction is never very clearly signposted. At the time I was just a kid having fun. Drinking made life seem exciting and daring. I was living an adventure.

Most of our group of friends were not only drinking but also smoking. Dwane and I weren’t too keen on the whole smoking thing, both of us having grown up with parents who smoked. Our friends weren’t just smoking cigarettes, though. They also started to smoke a bit of dope. Initially, I was completely against it. Then the justifications from my friends would start rolling in.

‘It’s not a drug, it’s natural.’

‘It’s legal in Holland, so it can’t be all that bad.’

Blah, blah, blah.

The shift happens slowly but surely and I was not immune. You relent, you concede, and before you know it you’ve become the clichéd ‘victim of peer pressure’. So Dwane and I started smoking a bit of dope here and there. Actually, it was more ‘here’ than ‘there’ and in no time at all we were drinking and smoking dope whenever we went out. At that stage I still made a clear distinction between dope and drugs. My previous conviction was still firmly in place. I was still totally against drugs. Dope was not a drug and smoking it wasn’t bad for you. This is a justifying myth that gets perpetuated over and over again, from one generation of kids to the next.

In fact smoking dope was a whole lot of fun: we laughed until our stomachs hurt, we got the munchies and we could talk forever. The world also seemed a clearer place. We could understand the problems society faced and, what was more, we had the solutions to fix them.

In December Dwane came with us when we went away on a family holiday. When we got back to Joburg he asked me if I wanted to go to Sun City with him for a New Year’s Eve party. I was keen so I asked my mother if it was okay. ‘No way!’ she said. It was our annual family tradition to go to my uncle’s restaurant on New Year’s Eve where he always hosted a big party. Naturally, I started moaning and whining but to no avail. Then Dwane’s mom got on the phone and pleaded with my mother on his behalf. Of course my parents had no idea what Dwane’s folks got up to and his mom promised that she’d look after us and not let us out of her sight for a moment.

Satisfied that not much could go wrong with Dwane’s mom around, my mother finally capitulated and said I could go. They picked me up in the afternoon. Dwane, his mom and his brother Joe were in the car. I thought we were going to be heading out to Sun City until Dwane’s mom stopped at one of the local pool halls. To my complete surprise she hopped out of the car, said goodbye and went inside. She was letting us go to Sun City on our own and, what was more, she was letting Joe drive us there! Dwane’s brother didn’t even have a driver’s licence. I was a bit worried, but the excitement of going on this road trip without adult supervision soon overrode my anxiety.

First we went to fetch Joe’s girlfriend and then we stopped to buy some booze, but after that we were on our way. Dwane and I were fourteen year olds on a mission! It was during the drive to Sun City that I was given the opportunity to take drugs for the first time. Joe was a seasoned user and he told us he had a friend who had just organised some LSD and he was going to get us some. My stomach knotted up. To be brutally honest, I didn’t want to do this at all, but Dwane and the girlfriend were all for it.

I wasn’t ready to take that step. To me, drinking alcohol and smoking a bit of weed were all right but taking drugs was an entirely different story. I was so distressed by the idea that I even started praying and maybe someone was listening to me that day because the guy who had the LSD couldn’t be reached. While all the others in the car were peeved, I was secretly relieved. We’d all been drinking quite a lot by that stage so even the fact that we made it to Sun City alive was a bit of a miracle on its own.

When we finally arrived at the resort it was about nine o’clock at night and we were all pretty wasted. From then on it was a completely crazy evening. We drank ourselves into a stupor. The place was packed and midnight consisted of running around and kissing as many girls as we could. It was at this stage that Dwane got horribly sick. He started hurling all over the place, including on some poor girl. When she freaked out he told her to stop whining like a baby. The problem was she had a really, really big boyfriend who had lots of other large friends and we soon realised we needed to get out of there fast.

Joe decided that we should drive to Rustenburg a few kilometres away because he knew some people there. From what Dwane’s mom had told mine, I’d been under the impression that we’d be staying the night at Sun City. This was clearly not the case – in fact we had nowhere to stay. I hate being in situations where I’m not in control and this one was so out of control now it was scary. When we got to Rustenburg we went straight to the town square where all the festivities were happening. When we pulled up to it I thought I was either really drunk or that I was in a Mad Max movie. It was crazy. The entire square was cordoned off with barbed wire and surrounded by police riot vehicles.

‘Dudes, we better get out of here. It looks like something’s going on,’ I slurred.

Joe just grinned at me. ‘Bro,’ he said, ‘this is what it looks like every New Year’s Eve.’

The rest of the evening was a blur – in fact it still is. All I remember was waking up in some strange house in Rustenburg with Dwane lying next to me in a pool of his own vomit.

My family had no idea what I was getting up to when I went out with Dwane and my other friends. I was still functioning well at school and excelling in sport. I suppose this also contributed to my own naivety. I was under the false impression that my life was one hundred per cent on track. My convictions about what I termed ‘drugs’ were still firmly there.

It was in Grade 10 that things started to change, when our circle of friends began to disintegrate. There was a growing perception among parents and students alike that the quality of tuition in our school was dropping, and as a result many of us decided that we needed to move to other schools. Inevitably, we all made different choices. If I’m honest, I think that my main reason for wanting to leave the school had nothing to do with the standard of education there. Being in an all-boys school just wasn’t fun anymore.

Our close-knit group became polarised. I wanted to go to one school and Dwane wanted to go to another. I was completely outraged. How could this could be happening? Why would Dwane not do what I wanted to do? I never questioned my right to be calling the shots. Sides were chosen and our once happy group split into two. Dwane moved to one school and I went to another. I took his decision as a betrayal of our friendship.

I settled easily enough into my new school and the first couple of terms in Grade 11 were much the same as my other school years, apart from the fact that there were now girls around to focus my attention on as well. I didn’t forget about Dwane, but when you are a teenager you can be so stubborn. I was waiting for him to contact me and he was waiting for me to contact him. Towards the end of the year I heard that he was experimenting with drugs like ecstasy and acid. This completely floored me. I was hurt beyond imagination. How could he be doing this and, more importantly, why? I told myself that ending our friendship had been a good decision and I decided to avoid him. He knew what I was doing and he knew why I further distanced myself.

I did my own thing. I continued to drink and smoke dope and generally have fun. My new circle of friends had the same ideas I did. I really felt like I belonged. Inevitably, Dwane and I bumped into one another on a night out. We tried our best to avoid each other but eventually we couldn’t. To tell the truth, I was a bit surprised by his appearance. Dwane looked the way he’d always looked. He looked fine, in fact, not like I imagined someone on drugs would look. If anything, he seemed livelier. I don’t really know what I was expecting, maybe a washed out, beggar-like person, but Dwane looked perfectly normal. After we had broken the ice, I decided to get to the point. I asked him straight out how he could be doing drugs but instead of a direct answer, Dwane started telling me about these parties he was going to called ‘raves’ and all the crazy things that happened at them. He described the drugs he had tried and how fantastic they were, and the more he talked the more amazing it all sounded.

This wasn’t what I expected. It definitely didn’t line up with my mental picture of what happened when you took drugs. I was enthralled but I wasn’t sold yet. It sounded great – don’t get me wrong – but still I felt uneasy and hesitant. I wasn’t inclined to take such a big leap. But after that evening, once we had said goodbye, I was left with a churning curiosity unlike anything