Editor's note: this is part one of a four-part series about drugs and the issues surrounding them in Baldwin County.

“I don’t know where my next meal is coming from. I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tonight — but I know I’m going to use again. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

These words are the sad but actual life of Brandon, a lifelong Baldwin County resident who is currently addicted to several illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine and meth.

But Brandon’s life wasn’t always that way.

Brandon said he grew up in a fairly typical middle class family in South Baldwin.

“I never wanted for anything. I did well in school, played some sports — typical kid stuff,” Brandon said. “We were just a normal family, and up until late in my high school career, I was a normal kid.”

Brandon said he started drinking socially at parties in high school and smoked the occasional cigarette, but he did not start using illegal drugs until after he graduated.

“I hate to sound like one of those public service announcements, but I started with marijuana,” Brandon said. “With the group I hung out with at the time, it was always there and they looked like they were having fun, so I thought ‘why not join them?’”

Brandon said his occasional indulgence in weed quickly turned into a daily habit.

“It became that thing I needed to start and end every day with,” Brandon said. “I didn’t like feeling like I wasn’t high — high became normal for me, and when I wasn’t high, I wasn’t happy.”

Brandon said he never had any intention of moving to any other drugs, but his dealer almost always had other things available and eventually decided to give other drugs a try.

“I would be over there to buy weed two or three times a week, and there would always be something else available — pain pills, coke, even a little meth every now and then,” Brandon said. “There’s only so many times you can say ‘No’ before you want to see what else is out there.”

Brandon began transitioning to pain pills, which he said gave him a feeling he could never have felt with just marijuana.

“Those pills just made me completely numb, both physically and emotionally,” Brandon said. “Whatever I was going through, it kept from having to feel anything. Girlfriend breaks up with you, snort a pill. Mom busts you for stealing her jewelry, (pulverize and) snort another pill. Fail a class, snort a pill. You never have to deal with life as long as you had pills.”

Brandon couldn’t keep a job because of his chronic pill habit, and at $25 to $30 per pill, he soon found himself in debt to several local drug dealers. He did what he could to find money, stealing from friends and family members, though he did have his limits.

“I swore I’d never sell sex to get high,” Brandon said. “I’m an addict, but I have some standards.”

It was around this time that Brandon went to jail for the first time, on possession and trafficking charges. He said his parents refused to bail him out of jail, so he was forced to stay in the county facility in Bay Minette until his trial — what he called a very dark time in his life.

“Having to quit everything just cold was bad enough, but to have to do it in jail was pure torture,” Brandon said. “Jail is already scary enough without having to go through withdrawal problems and feeling sick all of the time.”

The judge was lenient with Brandon for his first offense, allowing him to take drug classes and do community service instead of serving jail time.

Brandon’s parents were hopeful this would be exactly what he needed to turn his life around, but he had other plans.

“Those drug classes were an absolute joke,” Brandon said. “If anything, it put a group of addicts in the same room together and a lot of folks would leave after those meetings to go find a dealer and just get high.”

Brandon could no longer afford the pills he loved before his jail stay, but he found a lower-cost alternative that provided the same high he longed for — heroin.

“What I would spend on 10 or 20 pills that might last me a few days, I could spend on heroin that would last me a week or sometimes two,” Brandon said.

Brandon would spend the next few years in and out of various rehabs and correctional facilities, as his family and the justice system gave him numerous chances to try to correct his path.

“It’s not that I didn’t want to stay off drugs — when I left those places, I really wanted to do better,” Brandon said. “But, every time I’d come back home, I’d fall into the same old routines with the same old people, and I be hooked again in no time flat.”

Brandon has almost overdosed several times. He laughed about a night early in his addiction when he nearly died after ingesting alcohol, a pot brownie, several lines of cocaine, several syringes of heroin, and he smoked some meth.

“I had no earthly idea where I was or what I was doing,” Brandon said. “I shouldn’t have survived that night and, at that time, I knew I could die but really didn’t care if I did or not. I was so far removed from feeling anything that I wouldn’t have cared either way.”

Brandon is estranged from his family now, but he doesn’t blame them for not wanting to have anything to do with them.

“I lied to them constantly; I’ve stolen God knows how much in money and jewelry and precious family heirlooms,” Brandon said, “and I know it can’t be easy to watch their son kill himself with drugs. I miss them a lot, but I don’t want to make their lives any worse than I already have.”

Brandon currently moves from place to place, staying on friends’ sofas or sleeping in boats at unguarded piers and marinas. Some nights, he sleeps outside and prays that the weather stays warm with no storms.

Brandon said he takes odd jobs and still bums money from some friends in order to get his fix. He now usually mixes heroin and meth in order to achieve a sort of balance — smoking meth when the heroin brings him down too far and shooting up when the meth has him too “tweaked.”

“It’s a dangerous game, and I know I’m taking my life in my hands every time I do this,” Brandon said. “But, at this point, I’m too far gone to care. Death was always going to be how this ends — at this point, it’s just a matter of when.”