SO WHY ARE YOU POSTING? I hear you scream. Save us your whining self-pity. Well I won't.
I haven't done anything of note, except wend round the internet and listen to Flapper the woodpigeon's endless coos. I think the poor bird is lovesick.I found myself on some drug forums whittering away about heroin. I never thought I knew that much about the subject ~ only what I picked up along the way. Turns out there are people who know even less than I do.
IF you're going to use a dangerous drug, as they say: JUST SAY KNOW!
This is what got me about the drug-seminars I was persuaded along into by Maple Syrup my former druggieworker. I turned up expecting a room full of people just like me. What I actually found though was that my addiction was far longer-term and more severe than nearly everyone else's there. In other words I am a full-blown junkie. A lot of people in those rooms were just ordinary people whose using had escalated and swerved from weekend coke into crack and often heroin. Of course even I was an ordinary person... once...
Part of me still adores the drug heroin. Even though I have chucked crack cocaine, which I did really, really like, out of my life. Even though I have cut out the problem drinking. I do still drink alcohol, but not like I used to. I still love sleeping pills, which I only ever took because I had clinical need for them. Severe insomnia. And I do mean not sleeping at all without them... On the one hand I love all this stuff. One drug counsellor told me this showed I had some willpower ~ being able to say I loved certain drugs, and yet being a heroin addict and NOT taking them.
Incidentally this is one point where NA and I diverge. Most of what NA say I can relate to closely, but not on this point. Their definition of an addict is someone who cannot control mind-altering chemicals in any form. Well I can. I found a batch of ecstasy pills (smiley-faced and orange: what else were they? I tasted a bit of one and they were Es) at the bus stop some years ago. I had no desire to take them and so they remained in a cupboard for several months... (until someone stole them!!) So I am not and never have been a rampant drug-dustbin. I don't understand that mentality. I have had a very severe drug addiction, but that is a different thing. The human trashcan type person runs in every direction aimlessly and endlessly, not caring how/where/when/with whom they end up just as long as something chemical pushes them up, down or sideways. My life, by contrast, ran in constant circles. The same tracks. Round and round and round.I don't know if I ever can stop loving heroin the way I'm supposed to in order to stop it. I know I hate being a heroin addict. And I never intended to be a heroin addict. One of the worst bits of mis-information I encountered over and over (I think this originated in the Freudian-tinctured 1960s where cod-psychology prevailed), the "fact" was repeated over and over that "nobody gets addicted to heroin unless they want to be an addict".
Well that is nonsensical. I used and used, every day (and what got me into even that is a story in itself ~ the drugs came to me. I didn't have to go score. They were already there, enough to use every day for weeks on end (I didn't have a habit, remember, so we're only talking a few grams)... Every day dawned. I didn't particularly feel like using because the drug was in my system from the day before. Then afternoon... perhaps evening. And I had it there, so: oh go on then. I snorted it in little white lines. The drug was so clean I could barely feel it up my nose. Then the hot, sweet syrupy nodding opiated haze took me away into noman's land. And come the next day and the next day I wanted to do it again. As some tolerance built up I found it gave me a stimulant, confidence-boosting effect. I wanted to be golden and glowing and great. I did not ever want to be a dirty hopeless junkie. And that ~ no two ways about it ~ is what I became.
Now I can only see two possible ways forward. I either need a far better substitution therapy than methadone. Because methadone makes me feel horrible. Or I need to come away from these drugs all together. Learn to live drug-free (somehow).
And somehow learn to live at all.
