Addicted, by Andrew Chisolm

August 19, 2011 - Jim MacDonald can’t help but feel sorry for the people he often watches on television who stage interventions for their loved ones.

From pill junkies to meth heads — names used to describe a person and their drug of choice, or chain for life — the shows highlight the emotional struggle drug addicts face as they justify their dangerous lifestyles.

Jim knows first hand what the families are going through.

“My God, there’s a rough road ahead for them,” said the Souris man. “It’s a rough road we’ve been down.”

His late son, Reggie, battled with drug addiction, got mixed up in organized crime and spent time behind bars.

It was a lifestyle he attempted to escape but ultimately loved right to the end, alone in a swamp where a December chill took his life.

Along for his wild ride were his two brothers, mother and father and his two children and their mother.

“You don’t have to go to New York, Chicago or Los Angeles,” said Jim, adding his family is just one of many affected by drugs on P.E.I. “It’s here, it’s right at our backdoor.”

Jim was referring to his son being kidnapped in 2001 by the Hells Angels in Souris’ Co-op parking lot, a trip that had him hauled into a van where he was beaten over a $1,000 drug debt.

Read more ...

Reggie MacDonald – the true story

The Eastern Graphic, October 3, 2007

Beverley Roach, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Reggie MacDonald’s cycle of drug abuse began when he was in grade seven at Souris Consolidated School and ended 22 years later when he drove his car into the woods off the Northside Road and died. Months after he went missing, parts of his body surfaced after the winter’s snow resided and his family began the painful healing process.

“You can never know the hell inside the walls,” his father Jim (Reg) MacDonald said. “We thought we went through hell while he was living but after he went missing, well that is when hell really began.”

After Reggie’s remains were found and identified five months later, in May 2006, his family also found reams of pages that he had written about his life, his addiction and more to the point, his anguished attempts at ‘going straight’.

“It just goes to show you that it doesn’t have to be Chicago or Detroit, this can happen here in Souris too,” Mr MacDonald said about his son’s involvement with the brutal and the never-ending cycle of drugs, drug abuse, drug dealers and the often-time futile attempt at recovery.

Reggie MacDonald began his fatal attraction to drugs as a young boy in a small town in rural Prince Edward Island and no one knew how hopeless and helpless he felt until it was too late. His oldest brother, Mike, is hoping that Reggie’s own words will help someone else in ways that they didn’t help Reggie.

“Reggie was a really smart kid, brilliant in fact. He had a really high IQ but was pegged as a ‘devious troublemaker’ in high school and it just never got better,” Mike MacDonald said.

Mike, who lives in Los Angeles, California, is working on putting Reggie’s writings on-line at the web page www.mereggie.com (me, a.k.a. Reggie MacDonald – a true story) with the hope that someday the entire work will become a book with the hope that it will help someone else, either in the throws of addiction or a family member dealing with addiction from the outside.

“Reggie loved practical jokes but always took them too far, way too far!” Mike said. “Imagine being on the other end of Reggie’s jokes. He was brutal and he didn’t give up. But in his own mind, it was a joke. Nothing more. Just a joke.”

There was no joking around when Reggie lost his long battle with drugs. With only a few hundred dollars in his pocket and a plane ticket he went to a city in western Canada that promised a methadone clinic for addicts, and to his relief, finally got the treatment he sought.

In his own words, Reggie says, “It worked out. Before 48 hours were up, I was in a doctor’s office getting a prescription for methadone. It was such a relief, such a good feeling. No more days spent looking for drug dealers, no more searching for a private place to inject my drugs, and no more waking up sick – I was human again. I got a job, an apartment and a normal life.”

But Reggie wanted to come home, back to Prince Edward Island. He had family here. He had children here. Unfortunately for everyone in this story, Reggie did not get the same treatment here as he did in western Canada.

After five years on methadone he decided to ‘come home’.

“It seemed to good to be true,” he wrote. “It was. Sure, I could get methadone and I felt good physically, but mentally? When I go to the pharmacy, I don’t go the counter like anyone else, I go around to the back, into the office, where no one can see me. I don’t feel different, but I am. The pharmacists are ashamed of me, or ashamed for me. Does it make a difference?”

For Reggie, it did make a difference. In a few short months he went from a normal human being back to a despised drug addict who owed thousands of dollars to the drug dealers and one day they came to collect. He was kidnapped by the Hells Angels and was brutally beaten and threatened with death. But even then he struggled to quit the drugs, but to no avail.

His father tells the final story.

“We didn’t know how bad it was for him until the crunch came,” Mr MacDonald said. “He always got his methadone on Friday. They told him the day was changed to Tuesday but he didn’t remember, or didn’t hear them. When he went on Friday they told him there was no methadone until Tuesday. Well, that was the end for him. He came back home stoned.

“I didn’t believe in methadone. I thought it was just water – fake! You have no idea how hard it is for me to say that now. For the sake of a few days, Reggie could be alive today.”

www.mereggie.com is the true story of Reggie MacDonald. In early December 2005, Reggie left home under the apparent effects of crystal meth and disappeared. Despite a countywide search, he was not found until body parts turned up within miles from his home in May 2006. They were identified as Reggie MacDonald. The MacDonald family has placed a cross on the crown property where their son’s remains were found and it has been designated as a perpetual memorial site in his memory.

Reggie had hoped that his life story would have a positive impact on someone else, and his family, despite their anguish, shares this desire.