Jamee Valet, from Oregon, USA, has shared her battle with meth and heroin addiction to show others recovery is possible
A 25-year-old woman has shared shocking before and after photos after overcoming a meth and heroin addiciton.
The pictures, taken just two years apart, capture Jamee Valet’s recovery journey in a transformation so dramatic she is barely recognisable as the same woman.
Pictures of her bruised, blemished and addiction-ravaged face captured when she was at the height of her illness contrast starkly with the glowing, young woman smiling happily in a graduation cap.
Her story was featured on ‘The Addict’s Diary’ Facebook page where she shared intimate details of a difficult life riddled with drugs, crime and heartbreak, to raise awareness that recovery is possible against the odds.
The woman, from Oregon, US, revealed publicly she is a recovering heroin and meth addict.
She wrote: “My name is Jamee and I am a recovering heroin and meth addict,’ the post reads. ‘These pictures are 2 years apart. The better looking version of me being just a few months ago when I got my GED! Recovery is possible!”
She wrote that the first picture was taken in 2017 at the peak of her drug addiction battle, and the second was taken this July for her graduation ceremony.
In an interview with the Mail Online, Jamee said she took the photo two years ago to push herself to get her life back on track.
She told the site: “I had been sitting all night in my car in a parking lot to meet up with someone for drugs.
“I stayed there afterwards and was using the rearview mirror to pick at my face. It was morning time and I realized I’d been sitting there all this time.”
She told how drugs, sex and alcohol had become a means of escaping a harsh reality, and she had become hooked on prescription pills by the time she was 15.
Her claimed at boyfriend at the time got her hooked on opiates, including Vicodin, Morphine, Oxycodone, Dilaudid and Percocets.
The US is currently in the grip of an opiates crisis, as health authorities and pharma giants face pressure to address the scale of the tragedy caused by killer prescription meds addictions.
Jamee opened up about a tough life that fuelled her substance abuse.
She said she was raped at age 17 by two men in one night.
Just months after that traumatising ordeal, she eagerly accepted her first hits of heroin and meth in a bid to escape her pain.
The young woman admitted living a life of crime to pay for her addiction – even robbing a house and stealing from a grandmother’s purse.
Those were the crimes that finally landed her in jail. Once she was behind bars she began suffering the effects of drug withdrawal and tried to hang herself.
The desperately unwell young woman was in a coma for two days after the suicide attempt.
She swore off drugs, but quickly slipped back into a dangerous pattern including trading sex for drugs.
Jamee told how she managed to stay clean at age 19 for about nine months, but continued to slip back into the grip of addiction over the years that followed.
After one relapse she spent a year in rehab – and that’s where she met her current boyfriend, Jake, at age 20.
But she credited her boyfriend and an inpatient recovery program with helping her finally turn her life around.
Now, Jamee has been clean for a year and was able to celebrate finishing her high school qualifications in July.Jamee, who currently works in construction, said she is making progress on rebuilding her relationships and trust with her family, who she stole from during her illness.
She hopes of achieving her dream of becoming an aesthetician and going to college.
She shared her message with other people struggling with addiction: “No matter how low how you’re feeling or how your life is, it does get better. It is up to you to make it better, you can’t be like ‘my life sucks’ and not do anything to change it
