There is this apartment complex at 44th St and McDowell (just down the street from TERROS) called Ocotillo Village. This is the first place where I was ever arrested, and definitely not the last. According to the police report, it was around 12:30am on September 17, 2017. I had just had a friend take me to her "open all night" connect in these apartments and we were told we had to leave after getting the stuff. Being a highly policed area, we didn't want to just smoke outside, so she said she knew a spot we could go to where she got high all the time with no issues. It was in the laundry room at the Ocotillos. We went in and locked the door behind us. I've gotten high with a lot of super paranoid people before, and it was always very frustrating...so when this girl said "hey, I think I just heard a cop" I was livid and just before I could finish saying "please don't start with all that"...the door was busted through with a makeshift battering ram by the security officer patrolling the complex who had evidently seen us getting high. There I was sitting indian-style literally mid-hit rolling a pipe, with a security officer standing about 6 feet in front of me, with a 1/16th of meth sitting in a coffee filter on the ground directly in front of me. All kinds of thoughts raced through my head and ideas about trying to cover up my behavior, but my time was up, I was caught red (or clear, pun intended) handed. I remember the officer vividly, he asked "what's up, guys?". My friend denied knowing me and I played along with it because she didn't have anything on her and I figured it would be (given the circumstance) the right thing to do to take the charge. Other than that, I was entirely honest with the police when they showed up. One hilarious note is that when I told the officer how much meth I had, I said it was 1/16th oz, which is 1.75 grams. On the police report he wrote 175 grams. Funny how a little decimal point can drastically alter things.
So the state of Arizona has a program called TASC, where you go take random UAs and pay them lots of money, and I was offered the TASC diversion program for my class 4 and 6 felony charges I *would* have got immediately from this arrest. The idea is the charges do not get filed unless you stop complying with the TASC program. If you complete the first year of the program, the charges disappear. I waited about half a year after this happened to enroll in TASC, and after doing about 2 months of it I stopped going. TASC uses McKesson brand drug tests that can be overridden for ALL substances by drinking baking soda in water, so I was constantly getting high and testing clean with them for those 2 months. I just decided getting, using, and finding ways and means to use more was more important than going. The baking soda trick is not secret information. In fact, it is completely spelled out on the multi-panel test product datasheet on McKesson's website. I always wondered why they would publish that.
Today I'm grateful that I don't have to get arrested in shady apartment complex laundry rooms anymore. I'm grateful that I ended up getting these charges which extended my probation time and is providing quite a bit of additional motivation and acountibility. I'm grateful that I don't buy and use drugs anymore.
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