By all appearances, Tiffany Jenkins enjoyed a charmed existence with her live-in police-officer boyfriend and their puppy, Tatum.
But beneath her high-functioning exterior, the restaurant manager was a desperate junkie. In 2012, she was spending an average of $200 a day on her opioid habit — and exchanging sexual favors for pills.
“I was a mess,” Jenkins, 33, told The Post. “All I cared about was my next fix.”
Things got so bad, she stole her boyfriend’s guns for drug money.
But that crime saved her life. Now clean for six years, the blogger — who has 3.5 million Facebook followers — has a new memoir, “High Achiever: The Incredible True Story of One Addict’s Double Life” (Harmony Books), chronicling her spiral into substance abuse.
Jenkins, from Sarasota, Fla., was an A-student and captain of her high-school cheerleading team when she began drinking at 18. Three months later, she dropped out of school. Although she had a happy life, she liked that “alcohol made me feel numb. I chased that.”
Then a friend offered her prescription painkillers.
“I stupidly believed they were fine because they were the sort given out by doctors,” Jenkins said. She quickly became addicted and describes the following years as a “blur” when she partied, held down a few waitress jobs and spent her money on drugs.
But in 2009, six years into her addiction, Jenkins inherited money from her mother. Rather than blow it on drugs, she spent it on rehab.
She began dating and moved in with a sheriff’s deputy and tried to be a model girlfriend. But after a difficult day at work, Jenkins couldn’t resist some pills that fell out of her coworker’s purse. Before she knew it, she was hooked on opioids again.
“I was desperate to hide my addiction [from my boyfriend],” she said.
She became adept at covering her tracks, while secretly living a shocking life. In one low moment, Jenkins agreed to perform a sex act for her dealer in exchange for Dilaudid, which she injected.
“That night, on my knees … I mourned the loss of the person I was supposed to be and accepted the fact that I was nothing more than a junkie whore,” Jenkins writes.
But still she couldn’t stop. She stole a wedding ring belonging to her boyfriend’s father and pawned it for drug money.
In November 2012, after being fired from her restaurant job, she stole her boyfriend’s guns — including an automatic rifle and the 9mm he used as his off-duty pistol — and gave them to her dealer to pay off her $7,000 drug debt.
“In my sick and twisted mind, I thought everything would be OK,” she recalled. “I thought I’d be able to buy the guns back before [my boyfriend] noticed they were gone.”
Her boyfriend realized the weapons were missing almost immediately, and Jenkins was arrested the following morning.
“[My boyfriend] was heartbroken,” she said, recalling his fellow deputies handcuffing her. “I had betrayed and humiliated him.”
In jail, Jenkins suffered from such extreme opiate withdrawal, she tried to hang herself from a bunk bed with a sheet. Mercifully, she was saved by a guard.
“I was so desperate to escape this world, I was devastated when I woke up alive,” she said. “That was my rock bottom.”
Jenkins pleaded guilty to 20 felony counts including fraud and grand theft of firearms. She was sentenced to 180 days in jail followed by six months’ rehab. She said she hasn’t touched drugs since her arrest.
Jenkins has no contact with her ex, but has written him an apology.
She has been wed to her husband, Drew, for five years, and the couple share their young son and daughter as well as Drew’s daughter from a previous relationship.
Jenkins launched her parenting blog, Juggling The Jenkins, in 2017, sharing tales of recovery and motherhood in a humorous way.
“I’m living proof that there is no such thing as a lost cause,” she said.
“There is a case for life after addiction — not just a life, but an incredible and amazing life.”
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