I ONCE SAW A NEWBORN BABY IN ACUTE HEROIN WITHDRAWAL. The poor little mite was reaching out with one hand then the other, grasping for something that just wasn't there, never would be there ever again. Until this poor kid grew up and wondered why it liked heroin so much.In Britain, newborn opiate-addicted babies are titrated with IV morphine and the dose is dropped over a week or two to nothing. Because babies don't act or lie the signs they give out are more easily read by a doctor than those of a full-grown addict who has learned in the process of growing up not to show suffering, yet is suffering intensely and undermedicated. That's what they do to addicts. Undermedicate. Or as my friend Rebs said "they leave you right on the edge".
I won't go into this story more I only brought it up because like that baby, I'm grasping at nothing. Every straw I grasp at gives way.
I have food in the oven. I don't want to eat. A film is playing. I don't want to watch it. I took a Nytol pill (which I loathe) but I don't want to sleep. I have methadone which I also don't want.
I remember the day the doctor said, not entirely seriously (I hope) that he'd up my dose to 300mg a day if it helped me. That's like telling a starving man "I'll give you a tanker load of pigswill". Barking up the wrong tree entirely. I took heroin because I liked heroin and heroin made me OK. Methadone never made me any better than physically OK and when I had a habit going not even 150mg would do that on day one. I never found a dose I could get onto from constant heroin (no methadone) to just methadone where I didn't have periodic hot and cold sweats and no appetite.
In the end I gave up trying to do anything important on methadone. It was just undoable. I went to Windsor to see my Mum. Arrived 2 hours late. Felt intermittently ill despite a "huge" methadone dose. Had to take God knows how many trains to get there. Every time one whooshed past at the station I had this urge to jump... And that's what methadone does to me.
A life on methadone is no life at all. I need to get off it as quick as I can. Even if that involves going back to heroin I'd rather do that and pop filters every eight hours. A filter of good B is stronger than 50mg methadone. So three filters: one £10 bag, 0.2g heroin. That holds me way better than 150mg methadone. Which tells me that their equivalence tables are nonsense. 0.2g of good heroin could be 100mg diamorphine. And it's stronger than methadone. It works. Methadone doesn't work. Methadone drove me so crazy I could no longer think, let alone speak coherent English.
I'm taking the clinic to court. I'm fed up of this bullshit. I don't think I have any right to happiness or any right to morphine or diamorphine but surely I have a right to die, so why won't they kill me? You know what they're doing. They want me to kill myself. I will never kill myself for the sake of another person, so that one won't happen.
All our days are numbered. That's the best thing about life. Life ends.
SONYA: END OF THE WORLD
