I gave up sleeping last week. It was easy at first when I kept myself busy with work and school.

But now I'm going through withdrawal.

Sleep is just another drug. It's just one you've been addicted to since birth and you've been fed to keep you alive.

I'm not expecting you'll follow me into the great clean unknown — it’s a hard way to go, especially cold turkey. The shakes, the hallucinations, the headaches, the involuntary twitches, the slurred speech — it's like the back-end of every party I've ever been to has just caught up to me.

Marijuana contains mood-altering substances, fights glaucoma and makes your eyes all red. Heroin makes you feel blissfully sleepy, is horribly addictive and encourages dirty intravenous use. Cocaine makes you stay awake all the time, sweat and become paranoid.

Sleep though, that’s the killer. Death, that’s the "Big Sleep." Sleep makes you lose consciousness, sustain 6- to 8- hour hallucinogenic states and slows your body processes to near comatose levels. Sleep makes the eyes crust over with eye boogers. Boogers just can't be a healthy side effect of day-to-day life.

That's just the beginning. Some sleep users involuntarily grind their jaws together until their teeth take turns chipping enamel off of each other. My dad is a sleep user and has been since I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are of him being passed out on the couch on a sleep high with a football game on television. He'd make these guttural roars as he tried not to suffocate on his own epiglottis.

I come from a long line of sleep addicts and users.

There are even sleep users in classrooms and lecture halls at Purdue. Your typical sleep junkie isn't able to cogitate in early morning classes without another hit of his drug of choice even right in front of his fellow students and professor.

Sleep is a downer, a downer that takes its user so low they can't get back up without help of an alarm. In order to make them able to function, heavy downer users have to hit an upper to get themselves going again.

Caffeine is usually the drug used to complement sleep. Referred to in street circles by things like "the wake-up call," "the brew" and "the best part of waking up."

Sleep is usually used and overused by the unemployed and lazy. Continuous sleep use permanently affects the hypothalamus of the brain, causing it to regulate the sleep supply in the body and force the body to get more when it's running low. When full-time Purdue students start using, though, it adversely affects their schoolwork.

Sleep needs to run its course in the sleepyhead's body. The typical high can range from as short as four hours to as long as eight in one stretch. When the high and its comedown are disrupted, as they usually are in busy Purdue schedules, they cause an adverse reaction in the body. From mild irritability to involuntary loss of consciousness, a "sleepyhead" on a comedown is a dangerous thing.

Sleep has so many users because sleep doesn't cost any money. This leads the average junkie to think that sleep doesn't cost anything. That's not quite true. Sleep costs you time. Time you could spend working. Let's say you've got a job where you make minimum wage and you sleep about an average of six hours a night.

That’s 6 X 5.25, and thanks to the calculator application on my iMac you can see that you just lost $31.50 before taxes by one hit.

With the typical sleep junkie throwing away a third of her life unconscious because of using, that's a lot of time and money wasted.

Employers who want productive and efficient workers need to start setting up programs to wean them off of sleep. It's rough going but is a dynamic way to cut costs. Why have midnight shifts if the morning shift can do the job?

It's hard to look in the mirror and see a clean me staring back — the real me after all this time. My eyes are all bleary and skin all pale and graying.

But I'm cleaning up and moving on. Choosing life.

There's more to that part but I'm too tired to remember.