I think the first time I became interested in inebriates was when I was a kid. I grew up on a farm, and worked around the horses a lot. Now many people don't know it, but horse urine contains many strange chemicals, and is often used in medicines (for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1246465). What the wiki article doesn't mention is the dark side of this drug. I would often get a slight buzz just working around them. Eventually my father found me kneeling down in a piss puddle, stuck me across the face, and told me to go pick cotton from then on.
Years passed. I finished high school, went to college, got a degree in agricultural business and chicken hygiene, married my college sweetheart, and had a kid of my own. Meanwhile, my father has been drinking himself to death, and finally completes that a few years after my mother died. My siblings get together to decide the state of affairs, and I decide to take over the farm.
I mostly forgot about the horse piss until I'm cleaning up the barn one day and get that familiar buzz. It became a nice little reward for my hard work. But I eventually found myself finding reasons to work in the barn with the animals. Before I knew it, I was hooked on the stuff. I let Mexicans work in the fields will I only worked the barn. I loved it. Every night I would go inside, reeking of horse piss. It was getting so bad that my clothes weren't even coming clean anymore.
Things were getting out of hand already, when my wife divorced me. One day, I blacked out in a pool of horse piss. When I didn't come in by 10PM, my wife went to find me. I had a huge gash on my head from falling on concrete, and my mouth was full of horse piss. She made me promise her that I wouldn't do it again. I promised her. I not only didn't stop, but I accelerated it. Getting a mouth full of piss had opened my eyes. It was much more intense than just smelling the stuff. It's night and day, really. It's the difference between mainlining heroin and merely snorting it. I collected the horse piss in buckets and installed automatic watering systems in the barn.
It was obvious to my wife that I had started drinking the stuff. I would black out at times and injure myself, other times I would stumble in the house nonsensically and scare the children. My breath was so bad that my wife and kids couldn't kiss or hug me without gagging. I had also started growing breast. My wife begged me to stop, then demanded, then threatened to leave, then begged me to stop once more. One day, I was so high, that I left my youngest daughter, then 6 months old, alone outside all day while I was passed out on the porch. My wife had had enough. She took the kids and left, and I was hit with a divorce notice a week later.
The night I received the notice, I went to get a glass, but the bucket was empty. I was already pretty fucked up, but I was already beginning to feel withdrawal symptoms. So, with a shaky body, I reached below the horse to try to coax out some piss and.... fall over. This scares the horse, and she starts bucking and crushes my chest and breaks my jaw. I'm covered in blood and bone fragments as I drag myself out of the barn. I honestly thought that I was going to die. And why? Because I was too addicted to horse piss that I couldn't wait until morning? Where did I go so wrong. This was absurd. And now my kids would remember me as a piss drinker, if they remembered me at all. My thoughts as a faded away were total despair.
But I did not die, as you may have gathered. One of my workers found me that morning and called the police, since it looked like a pretty brutal murder. When I woke up, my wife and children were there, and I remembered my regret that I had had while I lay bloodied the night before. They all told me that they loved me and I told them that I was sorry, and we all cried. By the time I could be released from the hospital, I was mostly over the withdrawal symptoms. I had cried and screamed and cursed in the hospital, but I weathered through it. I completely swore off ever doing horse piss again. When we got home though, it was the only thing in my mind. It was a hard night, but I passed it by discussing things with my wife. We agreed to sell the farm and move back to the city, and for me to go to rehab to learn new habits, so that I wouldn't just find a new drug.
It's been six months since that night and I'm happy to say that I haven't even whiffed any piss since. It's still hard though. I still want it, despite the damage that I did to my life with it. But I love my family and my life more than I love horse piss, so I'll do the best to be strong. Wish me strength please, Anonymous, and don't make the same mistakes I did.