In suburban Utah, appearances are everything. Perfect lawns, perfect church attendance, and the perfect family image are a way of life. But for Marci Slough, the pressure to maintain that illusion became unbearable—and nearly cost her everything.
“Keeping up with the Joneses and putting on that appearance that everything’s great—when inside the house, it’s really not that great,” Marci says. “You’re fighting with your husband, your child’s really sick, you don’t feel good about yourself… and masking it with the drug, I think that’s probably the shallow part of it.”
Her story begins like many others in Utah’s opioid epidemic: with a trip to the doctor and a prescription for antidepressants.
The Descent Begins
“It started with my second pregnancy. I got postpartum depression, and my husband said, ‘You’re not happy.’ I went to the doctor. They prescribed me antidepressants, which in turn, after a while of taking them, got me really anxious. So with that, he gave me another prescription—something to bring me down, which was a benzo. Xanax, right?”
Marci quickly found herself dependent. “Started using those, started feeling really good, and started abusing those. Then I found those weren’t working anymore. Maybe there’s a Vicodin in the cupboard for my husband’s dental surgery—I took that. That felt good.”
It spiraled from there. “It turned into, you know, Oxy, doctor shopping, buying them from friends, which then in turn turned into a heroin addiction.”
A Picture-Perfect Lie
Marci’s lifestyle on the outside didn’t reflect what was happening within. “I have a beautiful home. I have two beautiful healthy children,” she says. “But I started using more and more, and then I substituted it with something else to make me feel better. You’re always searching for that feel-good.”
As her daughter became seriously ill, the marriage deteriorated. “There was an attractive man next door. I got attention from him. I had an affair, and I lost my marriage.”
Guilt and shame set in. “With that shame and that guilt of letting this beautiful family go… I wanted something to numb the pain and numb the shame and make me feel good about myself.”
Stealing From Everyone She Loved
Her addiction became all-consuming. “If you had pills, I sniffed them out. If you had money, I stole from you,” she admits. “I just took advantage of so many people and hurt so many people along the way because I did not care. I did not care to be alive.”
Marci’s network of fellow users grew. “You can spot—if you’re a user, you know who else is using too. I worked in the mortgage industry for 20 years, and I’m outside having a break, and I could see this girl… I could tell that she had something. And that’s when she introduced me to doctor shopping.”
Eventually, the pills got too expensive. “I was mentioning that to a particular drug dealer… and he said to me, ‘Hey, I have this heroin. It’s much cheaper.’ The tagline for me that he sold me on was, ‘My grandma takes heroin and sells her pills so she can pay her rent.’ And that—I’m like, ‘Well, okay. If grandma’s doing it, that makes it okay for me too.’”
No Intent to Get Clean
At rock bottom, Marci was couch surfing, estranged from her family, and in deep denial. “I had no intention of getting clean. I didn’t want to feel anymore. I hurt a lot of people, and I just basically wanted to die from an overdose just to end it all.”
She was taken to Volunteers of America by her aunt and later referred to a rehab program. But she had a different plan: “I was to call Odyssey House at a certain time every day to get in there. I made it a point that I would make the call when I knew I wouldn’t get an answer.”
Her family stopped taking her calls. She was about to sleep behind a dumpster when her sister showed up. “She picked me up. She put me in the van, and she said, ‘We found a place for you.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ She goes, ‘Yeah. It’s two years long… and it’s free. And we’re going to drop you off right now.’”
The Bench
She was dropped off at The Other Side Academy, a peer-based residential recovery program. “I sat on the bench and waited for an interview, not knowing what I was getting into at all.”
That bench would become a turning point. “At the Academy, it’s about brutal honesty, and that’s what I needed. I needed somebody to tell me: you’re a liar, you’re manipulating me, you’re sneaky, you’re being mean to this person. It hurts in the moment, right? But after you get told that so many times, you’re like, I do not want to be this person anymore. I want to be good inside.”
But the addiction—and its behaviors—weren’t easy to shake.
Lies That Almost Ruined It All
“I lied about having an education,” she admits. “I did not graduate from high school, and I was really ashamed of that.”
Despite 19 months in the program, she couldn’t move past the guilt and continued to make mistakes. “And I walked away from the Academy… and I made the biggest mistake of my life.”
She wandered the streets of Salt Lake during the first weeks of COVID. “I was walking down to… this place, and the guy asked, ‘Do you have an ID?’ I answered, ‘No.’ He goes, ‘Do you have a job?’ I said, ‘No.’ Then he said, ‘Well, I can’t help you here.’”
Then, a miracle. A graduate from the Academy saw her on the street. “He pulled me aside and asked, ‘What are you doing?’ And I told him the whole story. And he said, ‘You need to go back to the Academy.’”
She returned—this time to the Academy’s Denver campus. “I restarted in Denver and did another two years.”
Real Recovery
Even then, she held on to the lie about her GED—until she couldn’t anymore.
“My sister called to ask me how my education was doing… and I lied to her face about it.” Finally, she broke. “I was just like, why am I carrying this anymore?”
She confessed and earned her GED. “That was the biggest, darkest secret for me… and once I let go of that, there was no stopping me.”
Marci completed the program, became a staff member, and has stayed clean.
The Lesson
“You can be in that lifestyle and have something—but you lose it for something else,” she says. “Now I’ve learned… I get to keep those things.”
Her story is a reminder that addiction doesn’t care about zip codes, square footage, or holiday decorations. In the end, it was truth—not image—that saved her.
“I used to think I was a good person because I looked good on the outside,” Marci says. “Now I want to be good inside. And when you’re good inside, you don’t have to prove anything to your neighbors.”
