kid0piate
Greenlighter
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2016
- Messages
- 10
Harm Reduction ⫸Personal Accounts of Addiction: What's YOUR Story?⫷
- Thread starter brutus
- Start date
wudbutcher
Bluelighter
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
- Messages
- 1,135
I wish I had the eloquence, let alone the typing skills to lay mine out here. Started casual, ended with binges, and at my age, that little voice( amazingly sane, calculated and final) says damage done, too late for a life even remotely satisfactory. 12 steps and the Program will keep you clean. That's ALL. The Promises are bullshit.
valiumdone
Greenlighter
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2013
- Messages
- 17
I had a job supervising felons, and 2 years into my job a felon snagged me, which was against the rules and moral expectations of my job, so I lost the job (which was well paying). So felon and I rode off into the sunset, me being in my 20’s and me, up until running off with felon only ever drank socially. Within the first 3 months, felon introduced me to cocaine (which I didn’t like due to the horrible 6am comedown). I was then intro’d to heroin, and OMG! It was MAGICAL! I was already in love, and mixing in heroin for the first times made everything feel magically awesome. We would lay in bed for days nodding in and out and being in love....fucking wonderful. That magic disappeared quickly as we became heroin addicts. Then it became the grind of him robbing houses and businesses, taking all day to travel around to buyers and fences for $ then finally repeat calling H dealers. So the whole thing became a grind quickly and we started fighting over paranoia that one or the other had more heroin and stealing it from eachother. then he would constantly get arrested and have to do 9 months each time, and when he was locked up, he would never give me his heroin contacts because he felt that if he can’t enjoy himself neither can I. So being inept at sniffing out dope to buy, I ended up on methadone While he was in. And when he got out, the whole cycle would start again. This went on for 4 years until I learned how to sniff out and score, then I moved and disappeared on him. Fuck it, by then my first love was opiates, then benzos, not him anymore.
I heard that 8 years after I disappeared on him that he had moved to Vancouver, Canada, the heroin Mecca, and OD’d and died.
I don’t really care because if I wasn’t such a dumb young girl, I would have never hooked up with him, and I wouldn’t have been introduced into hard core addiction. YA ya I know, I CHOSE to take the drug, it’s my own doing, but I didn’t know any drug users before him and may have never gone down this road if I kept on the straight and narrow.
So, there’s my story of how I became a hard core addict.
And please, no speeches about how I am to blame for my own addiction and not him. I have heard it before, to my face. I don’t care, he is half to blame for being a sociopath who obviously realized that I was young and naive and put his most charming arm out to lead me down the dark path instead of the proper well used path.
I heard that 8 years after I disappeared on him that he had moved to Vancouver, Canada, the heroin Mecca, and OD’d and died.
I don’t really care because if I wasn’t such a dumb young girl, I would have never hooked up with him, and I wouldn’t have been introduced into hard core addiction. YA ya I know, I CHOSE to take the drug, it’s my own doing, but I didn’t know any drug users before him and may have never gone down this road if I kept on the straight and narrow.
So, there’s my story of how I became a hard core addict.
And please, no speeches about how I am to blame for my own addiction and not him. I have heard it before, to my face. I don’t care, he is half to blame for being a sociopath who obviously realized that I was young and naive and put his most charming arm out to lead me down the dark path instead of the proper well used path.
tired of crap
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2009
- Messages
- 1,289
After being off on and alcohol for 10 years I was clean for over 18 months.
After recently being diagnosed with a hernia I started drinking again. Bought a pack of drum tobacco too.
In the middle of a bit of a binge before I Can hopefully pull outta this tailspin. We shall see
After recently being diagnosed with a hernia I started drinking again. Bought a pack of drum tobacco too.
In the middle of a bit of a binge before I Can hopefully pull outta this tailspin. We shall see
Mishmashed
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2019
- Messages
- 52
No speeches here mate, that's 1 of my rules n principles, never give anything above a bit a bud to any1 if they haven't got a history for it... If I'd of been him I'd of strongly advised and tried to not glorify the habit, but hell ye it is beautiful at the beginning and like a mother to you keeping all the problems at bay, fuck I lov3d it....
Not many will judge you for what you did or do in here as the community is too strong and wouldnt stand for it. imho
✌
Foerock
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2019
- Messages
- 85
My story would take a year to write. Poly abuser, started with cociane in 2003, switched to heroin in 2004, then got clean a couple of years later. Used THC exclusively for about a decade after that and that was the only time I was functional. Built a good career. Romantic and family fallings out caught up with me and I went back on the heroin but landed myself in prison for most of 2015. Then went to rehab in 2016, under the promise that it would be a "28 day program".
I've been in rehab for six years now, far, far away from home.. How many facilities I don't know and don't want to count. Because I'm in southeast Asia all my "relapses" after my last heroin shot (Nov. 5, 2016) have been on meth.
I've attempted suicide and failed last January and the March of the year before it. I'm a lot better now but I still carry around a large weight of resentment and lies. I am not currently suicidal but I would be a liar if I said the thought didn't cross my mind at least once a month.
I will try to vent here on these forums from time to time, if I'm not a bother... I feel like I have no one else to listen.
I've been in rehab for six years now, far, far away from home.. How many facilities I don't know and don't want to count. Because I'm in southeast Asia all my "relapses" after my last heroin shot (Nov. 5, 2016) have been on meth.
I've attempted suicide and failed last January and the March of the year before it. I'm a lot better now but I still carry around a large weight of resentment and lies. I am not currently suicidal but I would be a liar if I said the thought didn't cross my mind at least once a month.
I will try to vent here on these forums from time to time, if I'm not a bother... I feel like I have no one else to listen.
wudbutcher
Bluelighter
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
- Messages
- 1,135
I dont understand the phrase ‘ attempted suicide’. I’ve had days like that, just couldnt pull the trigger.
Foerock
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2019
- Messages
- 85
Som have pulled the trigger and survived. I haven't had access to firearms since I moved countries so both attempts were low suspension asphyxiation, and both times someone in the rehab found me and saved me. I thought myself unlucky, but it turns out I was just dumb. I did not know that the body would thrash violently while dying, and that's basically how I got caught both times. Thankfully suicide for me has receded into a thought rather than a plan. It just bothers me that the thought is there still.
TheToddmeister
Greenlighter
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
- Messages
- 8
Hey man I know all about it being an RN
Almost died 3 times from Duragesic fentanyl diluted with H20 then injected 'til I eventually ended up sooo incredibly addicted to. Nowadays Id discovered delta8thc sooo loving it!! Peace....Todd MKE WI.
wudbutcher
Bluelighter
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
- Messages
- 1,135
i wish i could type proficiently lol
sdxyln
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Aug 16, 2020
- Messages
- 731
I took my first drink by accident. Two friends who stayed on the other side of the block invited me to meet them outside a restaurant. A whole gang was heading to the pub for the first time. They asked if I wanted to join, I though nothing harmful could come out of that, and went along. There I had my first beer.
Within two months I was blacking out and getting embarrassed. Drinking was a preoccupation at first and became the only one not very long after. I managed to pass college in one piece. I was offered a number of jobs to write for a few good people but I was torn and lonely.
I stuck to education and then I was back to drinking full-time. I slowly began losing my mind. A year after I had an existential awakening or a breakdown if one prefers to call it that. I went back to college because I was desperate and though I found my calling. In truth I hit bottom again.
A year after that I experienced the jitters. I had degenerated quite horribly after repeated kindling in spite of staying off the bottle for about 3 months during that period. I survived by myself and weaned off till I went back home and was back getting drunk again. There I applied to move out of country but got denied entry at the last moment of everything.
I took sometime off determined to get sober but fell back after moving places and it was the worst time of my life. I got drunk repeatedly and hurt myself walking alone in treacherous mountainous territory with no lights late at night. I had realised I could not drink like before. I just kept at it.
Three days before the new year's in 2017 I made my way into a club and got hammered out of my wits after scoring some hashish. I managed to get back to the guest house but slipped and fell on the sides with glass windows. There was a deep laceration through my face but my eye was miraculously spared. I vowed to not drink again, after having a glass of whisky the next morning.
I made my way into a retreat and participated with scholars of Buddhism, educating others on the nuances of Schopenhauer's philosophy. In those two weeks I gained some clarity by being around others for a change. I was exposed to the spiritual side of life for the first time. Sadly I had not stopped smoking tobacco. Once the retreat was over, everybody was invited to a farewell party, and I made my way there reluctantly.
The first hour or so everything was fine. I stood by my decision and felt rejuvenation at making a positive choice. But the night went on and the booze continued to flow. Eventually I was left with no resistance at all to a chilled beer can. I managed to make a couple of friends.
We decided to stick it out and travel the mountains together. I got back to smoking hashish. We would drink regularly and I, everyday. My friends left and I decided to stay back alone for some more time. Soon afterwards I was robbed and my wallet was gone. I took help of the hotel owner and stayed there for a couple of weeks longer. Only the booze could keep me company.
I managed to save enough to leave from there. I returned to the old haunt and found out my room had been given away. I took shelter in another house. It was time to enter the second retreat and I was happy again. This time things were worse for me. I could not resist the idea of entering drunk. Before the end of the day I managed to slip a can of beer into me.
Then we went out on a special occasion. There was an important talk being held outside and we all were invited. I was eager to go. I had no ID with me. I could not ask questions or comment during the talk because we ran out of time. I left the place on my own. Before going back to the retreat room I decided to fuck it all up by getting some gin and staying out at an isolated restaurant.
Enough time went by and I was hammered. I returned to the retreat very late at night but was more than exhausted and completely out of my head. I fell down the hill once. There was nothing to see. In the room I fell on my bed and was fully knocked out. Then I awoke with the librarian cleaning my puke. I was told to leave the next morning.
Another bottom at the least likely of places. For the next two months or so I kept at it afraid out of my wits and scared all the time. Essentially I had been on a six month long binge before entering a half-way house and institution. I dried myself up there, got rid of the cancer sticks, and on 12. June I hit two years off of everything (except psychedelics, which I returned to last year).
I moved cities to start afresh and attend meetings but the meetings were amiss and my partnership collapsed within months. I have got somewhat of a life going and things have been a big change for me. This is because I do not simply abstain, but have made my peace, or am trying to still, with knowing that the old lifestyle has seen a conscious letting-go. I have abandoned it and I need not return. I have no reason to contemplate, and thus complicate things further, because I do not react my way through life.
Within two months I was blacking out and getting embarrassed. Drinking was a preoccupation at first and became the only one not very long after. I managed to pass college in one piece. I was offered a number of jobs to write for a few good people but I was torn and lonely.
I stuck to education and then I was back to drinking full-time. I slowly began losing my mind. A year after I had an existential awakening or a breakdown if one prefers to call it that. I went back to college because I was desperate and though I found my calling. In truth I hit bottom again.
A year after that I experienced the jitters. I had degenerated quite horribly after repeated kindling in spite of staying off the bottle for about 3 months during that period. I survived by myself and weaned off till I went back home and was back getting drunk again. There I applied to move out of country but got denied entry at the last moment of everything.
I took sometime off determined to get sober but fell back after moving places and it was the worst time of my life. I got drunk repeatedly and hurt myself walking alone in treacherous mountainous territory with no lights late at night. I had realised I could not drink like before. I just kept at it.
Three days before the new year's in 2017 I made my way into a club and got hammered out of my wits after scoring some hashish. I managed to get back to the guest house but slipped and fell on the sides with glass windows. There was a deep laceration through my face but my eye was miraculously spared. I vowed to not drink again, after having a glass of whisky the next morning.
I made my way into a retreat and participated with scholars of Buddhism, educating others on the nuances of Schopenhauer's philosophy. In those two weeks I gained some clarity by being around others for a change. I was exposed to the spiritual side of life for the first time. Sadly I had not stopped smoking tobacco. Once the retreat was over, everybody was invited to a farewell party, and I made my way there reluctantly.
The first hour or so everything was fine. I stood by my decision and felt rejuvenation at making a positive choice. But the night went on and the booze continued to flow. Eventually I was left with no resistance at all to a chilled beer can. I managed to make a couple of friends.
We decided to stick it out and travel the mountains together. I got back to smoking hashish. We would drink regularly and I, everyday. My friends left and I decided to stay back alone for some more time. Soon afterwards I was robbed and my wallet was gone. I took help of the hotel owner and stayed there for a couple of weeks longer. Only the booze could keep me company.
I managed to save enough to leave from there. I returned to the old haunt and found out my room had been given away. I took shelter in another house. It was time to enter the second retreat and I was happy again. This time things were worse for me. I could not resist the idea of entering drunk. Before the end of the day I managed to slip a can of beer into me.
Then we went out on a special occasion. There was an important talk being held outside and we all were invited. I was eager to go. I had no ID with me. I could not ask questions or comment during the talk because we ran out of time. I left the place on my own. Before going back to the retreat room I decided to fuck it all up by getting some gin and staying out at an isolated restaurant.
Enough time went by and I was hammered. I returned to the retreat very late at night but was more than exhausted and completely out of my head. I fell down the hill once. There was nothing to see. In the room I fell on my bed and was fully knocked out. Then I awoke with the librarian cleaning my puke. I was told to leave the next morning.
Another bottom at the least likely of places. For the next two months or so I kept at it afraid out of my wits and scared all the time. Essentially I had been on a six month long binge before entering a half-way house and institution. I dried myself up there, got rid of the cancer sticks, and on 12. June I hit two years off of everything (except psychedelics, which I returned to last year).
I moved cities to start afresh and attend meetings but the meetings were amiss and my partnership collapsed within months. I have got somewhat of a life going and things have been a big change for me. This is because I do not simply abstain, but have made my peace, or am trying to still, with knowing that the old lifestyle has seen a conscious letting-go. I have abandoned it and I need not return. I have no reason to contemplate, and thus complicate things further, because I do not react my way through life.
cowboycurtis
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Dec 14, 2011
- Messages
- 187
Wow I can't believe how many memories being back on Bluelight brings. When I first started looking at Bluelight I hadn't even tried hard drugs yet. It's a truly perplexing yet somehow predictable path addiction tends to bring us down. I'm gonna try my best to follow the template, but I'm on my phone so I don't wanna switch from page to page. Anyway...
I'm 27 years old and today is the first day of the rest of my life, or so I'm told. As long as I keep thinking that way I might get through this in one piece. I'm at the tail end of my latest 3-year run. I'm currently living in a trailer out in the boonies with no vehicle, job, or place to be. Without this friend who's putting me up right now, I'd be back on the streets. I've been on suboxone for a little over a week now and I'm starting to feel a little less hopeless, but it's lightyears away from straight up wanting to die.
I started smoking weed when I was about 13. That quickly became a daily occurrence. Alcohol soon followed as did MDMA, psychedelics, cocaine, and eventually speed. I was always really into the Grateful Dead and acid and stuff like that, so I got really into the whole psychedelic hippie scene. Everything seemed so mind-expanding and new. Psychedelics still hold a special place in my heart, but I can seldom do them these days for fear of a bad trip due the shitty place my addiction has taken me. I had a real fascination with drugs ever since I first discovered them. I was fascinated with the chemistry and pharmacology behind them as well as the culture which has developed around them. I honestly don't believe that any of these drugs would have ever sent me down the path I currently find myself on. For me it took trying heroin to really fuck everything up.
I didn't actively seek it out, but because I was already using drugs, the opportunity to try heroin presented itself and I didn't refuse. That was the biggest mistake of my life. Heroin didn't seem as dirty when it was smoked off of foil. Without the needle heroin loses some of its allure. I remember my GF at the time puking her guts out and me just chillin' like a villain. Heroin had its hooks in me on that first try. It wasn't long before I was buying it every day and not much longer after that when I experienced withdrawals for the first time. Within less than a year my addiction had derailed a college career and sent me back to my mother's house. A few months later I would find myself on the streets at 18 years old and with a raging heroin habit. It didn't take long to jump on the needle train and IMHO, a needle fixation augments an already severe addiction to an entirely different level. I am as much addicted to the needle and the ritual that comes along with it as I am to the drug. It took countless trips to jail and one final chance before a hefty jail sentence to really clean up and rise above the streets.
I went to rehab for 6 months and when I got out I moved to another part of SoCal, got a job, and moved into a sober living. Before long, though, I was using again and I lost everything once again. It took a probation violation and a trip to jail to make me realize I needed to go back to treatment. That was hands-down the worst withdrawal I have ever suffered through: 100 mg of methadone/day habit plus using on top of it kicked while in jail in the top bunk of a 3-man cell. Absolutely horrid, no doubt about it. That truly inspired me to get clean. I went to rehab for another 6 months and stayed clean for almost 2 years after.
Again, after getting and staying clean I found that things tend to fall into place if you continue to do the next right thing. With minimal effort I acquired my old job back, got my car back, and moved back into the sober living after rehab. Things were good for a while, but there soon came this existential dread that I just couldn't shake. Who was I? Have I really ever lived outside addiction long enough to really know? Being a junky had become such an identity that it became difficult to separate from the image I had of my life as a whole. Once I became complacent and stopped working a program, along with the boredom and depression I was experiencing, when the opportunity to use heroin again presented itself, I would be completely and utterly helpless. And of course that opportunity did present itself one day when an old dealer called giving me his new number. I was powerless to say no at that point. I said yes long before I received that phone call. It was just too easy and it was the start of this latest 3-year run.
This last run, although not homeless, has definitely been the longest and worst run yet. I have never felt so hopeless, desperate, and alone. In the last 3 years I have let my addiction derail a very promising career in the construction field and various other relationships and opportunities. I was lucky enough to get a new job before I blew through all of my savings and a good one at that. I was earning decent money and able to get away fairly easily with continuing to use. With this last run also came many dangerous drug combos to supplement the heroin that was now just keeping me well. I started to eat alprazolam before I would shoot my dope. Usually 4 mg. Eventually I gained a tolerance to benzos as well so I started drinking with the benzos before I would do an issue of dope. I just wanted to be unconscious and there were days where I would literally drop right after doing my shot and find myself on the floor hours later. I had a death wish. I was a hope-to-die dope fiend. I also started doing speedballs (real speedballs, you know, Belushi's? Heroin and cocaine mixed together and pulled up into the same rig. I hate it when people call anything else a speedball.) pretty frequently during this time. Oftentimes I would question whether my heart was gonna stop after a shot. This latest run also saw the ultimate deterioration of my venous network and a resort to neck veins and the very occasional arm, hand, or foot vein. After all that I still couldn't stop despite how horribly I wanted to. It took a DUI in a company vehicle, the subsequent loss of employment, and the loss of my place to truly seek a better way again.
I went to rehab again for about 30 days this time about a month ago. They maintained me on 12 mg of suboxone, but I still had using again in the back of my mind. I felt like I'd heard it all before having been to rehab and 12-Step meetings so many times. I desperately wanted to hear something that would make it all click. I believe now that that has to come from within. Once you realize and accept the amount of effort required to walk down the long and arduous road to recovery, with the right mindset and desire you can put forth that effort without a second thought. Some might require some guidance at first, and there's plenty of resources out there, but you can't be afraid to go make things happen. I'm struggling with all this myself right now. After getting out of rehab, and honestly 30 days ain't shit, I had the hardest relapse of my life. I had intentionally tapered off the suboxone in order to get high shortly after discharging. Within 24 hours I would have a needle in my arm. I was planning to die this time. Death felt like the only way out. There was too much damage to repair. It was too overwhelming and I was as hopeless as ever. With my tolerance greatly reduced I jumped back in full throttle. I went straight to the connect and scored some Xanax and dope. I washed down those Xanax with a few beers and finished it off with a shot of heroin behind a dumpster since I had no place to go. The next thing I know I'm being narcaned by the police. I somehow avoided the hospital and was sent to this detox-type place where I had to lay on a cot for 4 hours before being able to leave. I lost the dope I had just bought and caught yet another possession charge. At least it's not a felony anymore. It's weird getting popped with dope and not going straight to jail. As soon as I got out I went straight to the needle exchange and back to the connect to score more dope. Having had my driver's license taken by the police after the DUI, I could not get a hotel room anywhere so I called a friend to get me one, but he invited me back to his place. On the condition that I didn't bring any dope he could put me up for a few nights. I broke that promise pretty quickly when I fell out shooting in his bathroom and had to get slapped awake narrowly missing the inevitable call to 911. He allowed me to stay one more night and I did the same thing the next night. I thought it had been long enough since I'd eaten any Xanax/ drank, so I figured it would be okay to do a shot. It was not and I fell out again, this time bad enough to get narcaned by my buddy and for his girl to actually call the ambulance. I was able to talk my way out of going to the hospital, but my ass was back out on the street. My friend agreed to use his ID to purchase the hotel room for me and I spent the next week getting fucked up on benzos, alcohol, and heroin and hoping to die. I spent the last of my savings and with nowhere to go, I called one last friend and that's where I'm at now.
I'm getting through it with suboxone, one day at a time. I truly feel ready this time. I feel like I'm really done this time. I am so sick of this life it either needs to end or undergo a drastic change, a paradigm shift unlike any other, a unique change in perspective. I'm ready to throw myself into whatever might work because I am so over the hurt and heartbreak, the desperation and the madness. I know if I go back out again I won't make it to 30. I'm ready to change, though. More than anything I hope someone somewhere gets something out of this. I hope some young person considering making the first steps down this dark path or someone trying to claw their way back above the surface reads this and is inspired to change their way of thinking. As stubborn as I was, I could've saved myself a lot of heartache listening to what people had told me about addiction before it was too late. Of course, that's just the way addiction works: insidious as ever until everything blows up in your face.
That's my story. Wish me luck!
I'm 27 years old and today is the first day of the rest of my life, or so I'm told. As long as I keep thinking that way I might get through this in one piece. I'm at the tail end of my latest 3-year run. I'm currently living in a trailer out in the boonies with no vehicle, job, or place to be. Without this friend who's putting me up right now, I'd be back on the streets. I've been on suboxone for a little over a week now and I'm starting to feel a little less hopeless, but it's lightyears away from straight up wanting to die.
I started smoking weed when I was about 13. That quickly became a daily occurrence. Alcohol soon followed as did MDMA, psychedelics, cocaine, and eventually speed. I was always really into the Grateful Dead and acid and stuff like that, so I got really into the whole psychedelic hippie scene. Everything seemed so mind-expanding and new. Psychedelics still hold a special place in my heart, but I can seldom do them these days for fear of a bad trip due the shitty place my addiction has taken me. I had a real fascination with drugs ever since I first discovered them. I was fascinated with the chemistry and pharmacology behind them as well as the culture which has developed around them. I honestly don't believe that any of these drugs would have ever sent me down the path I currently find myself on. For me it took trying heroin to really fuck everything up.
I didn't actively seek it out, but because I was already using drugs, the opportunity to try heroin presented itself and I didn't refuse. That was the biggest mistake of my life. Heroin didn't seem as dirty when it was smoked off of foil. Without the needle heroin loses some of its allure. I remember my GF at the time puking her guts out and me just chillin' like a villain. Heroin had its hooks in me on that first try. It wasn't long before I was buying it every day and not much longer after that when I experienced withdrawals for the first time. Within less than a year my addiction had derailed a college career and sent me back to my mother's house. A few months later I would find myself on the streets at 18 years old and with a raging heroin habit. It didn't take long to jump on the needle train and IMHO, a needle fixation augments an already severe addiction to an entirely different level. I am as much addicted to the needle and the ritual that comes along with it as I am to the drug. It took countless trips to jail and one final chance before a hefty jail sentence to really clean up and rise above the streets.
I went to rehab for 6 months and when I got out I moved to another part of SoCal, got a job, and moved into a sober living. Before long, though, I was using again and I lost everything once again. It took a probation violation and a trip to jail to make me realize I needed to go back to treatment. That was hands-down the worst withdrawal I have ever suffered through: 100 mg of methadone/day habit plus using on top of it kicked while in jail in the top bunk of a 3-man cell. Absolutely horrid, no doubt about it. That truly inspired me to get clean. I went to rehab for another 6 months and stayed clean for almost 2 years after.
Again, after getting and staying clean I found that things tend to fall into place if you continue to do the next right thing. With minimal effort I acquired my old job back, got my car back, and moved back into the sober living after rehab. Things were good for a while, but there soon came this existential dread that I just couldn't shake. Who was I? Have I really ever lived outside addiction long enough to really know? Being a junky had become such an identity that it became difficult to separate from the image I had of my life as a whole. Once I became complacent and stopped working a program, along with the boredom and depression I was experiencing, when the opportunity to use heroin again presented itself, I would be completely and utterly helpless. And of course that opportunity did present itself one day when an old dealer called giving me his new number. I was powerless to say no at that point. I said yes long before I received that phone call. It was just too easy and it was the start of this latest 3-year run.
This last run, although not homeless, has definitely been the longest and worst run yet. I have never felt so hopeless, desperate, and alone. In the last 3 years I have let my addiction derail a very promising career in the construction field and various other relationships and opportunities. I was lucky enough to get a new job before I blew through all of my savings and a good one at that. I was earning decent money and able to get away fairly easily with continuing to use. With this last run also came many dangerous drug combos to supplement the heroin that was now just keeping me well. I started to eat alprazolam before I would shoot my dope. Usually 4 mg. Eventually I gained a tolerance to benzos as well so I started drinking with the benzos before I would do an issue of dope. I just wanted to be unconscious and there were days where I would literally drop right after doing my shot and find myself on the floor hours later. I had a death wish. I was a hope-to-die dope fiend. I also started doing speedballs (real speedballs, you know, Belushi's? Heroin and cocaine mixed together and pulled up into the same rig. I hate it when people call anything else a speedball.) pretty frequently during this time. Oftentimes I would question whether my heart was gonna stop after a shot. This latest run also saw the ultimate deterioration of my venous network and a resort to neck veins and the very occasional arm, hand, or foot vein. After all that I still couldn't stop despite how horribly I wanted to. It took a DUI in a company vehicle, the subsequent loss of employment, and the loss of my place to truly seek a better way again.
I went to rehab again for about 30 days this time about a month ago. They maintained me on 12 mg of suboxone, but I still had using again in the back of my mind. I felt like I'd heard it all before having been to rehab and 12-Step meetings so many times. I desperately wanted to hear something that would make it all click. I believe now that that has to come from within. Once you realize and accept the amount of effort required to walk down the long and arduous road to recovery, with the right mindset and desire you can put forth that effort without a second thought. Some might require some guidance at first, and there's plenty of resources out there, but you can't be afraid to go make things happen. I'm struggling with all this myself right now. After getting out of rehab, and honestly 30 days ain't shit, I had the hardest relapse of my life. I had intentionally tapered off the suboxone in order to get high shortly after discharging. Within 24 hours I would have a needle in my arm. I was planning to die this time. Death felt like the only way out. There was too much damage to repair. It was too overwhelming and I was as hopeless as ever. With my tolerance greatly reduced I jumped back in full throttle. I went straight to the connect and scored some Xanax and dope. I washed down those Xanax with a few beers and finished it off with a shot of heroin behind a dumpster since I had no place to go. The next thing I know I'm being narcaned by the police. I somehow avoided the hospital and was sent to this detox-type place where I had to lay on a cot for 4 hours before being able to leave. I lost the dope I had just bought and caught yet another possession charge. At least it's not a felony anymore. It's weird getting popped with dope and not going straight to jail. As soon as I got out I went straight to the needle exchange and back to the connect to score more dope. Having had my driver's license taken by the police after the DUI, I could not get a hotel room anywhere so I called a friend to get me one, but he invited me back to his place. On the condition that I didn't bring any dope he could put me up for a few nights. I broke that promise pretty quickly when I fell out shooting in his bathroom and had to get slapped awake narrowly missing the inevitable call to 911. He allowed me to stay one more night and I did the same thing the next night. I thought it had been long enough since I'd eaten any Xanax/ drank, so I figured it would be okay to do a shot. It was not and I fell out again, this time bad enough to get narcaned by my buddy and for his girl to actually call the ambulance. I was able to talk my way out of going to the hospital, but my ass was back out on the street. My friend agreed to use his ID to purchase the hotel room for me and I spent the next week getting fucked up on benzos, alcohol, and heroin and hoping to die. I spent the last of my savings and with nowhere to go, I called one last friend and that's where I'm at now.
I'm getting through it with suboxone, one day at a time. I truly feel ready this time. I feel like I'm really done this time. I am so sick of this life it either needs to end or undergo a drastic change, a paradigm shift unlike any other, a unique change in perspective. I'm ready to throw myself into whatever might work because I am so over the hurt and heartbreak, the desperation and the madness. I know if I go back out again I won't make it to 30. I'm ready to change, though. More than anything I hope someone somewhere gets something out of this. I hope some young person considering making the first steps down this dark path or someone trying to claw their way back above the surface reads this and is inspired to change their way of thinking. As stubborn as I was, I could've saved myself a lot of heartache listening to what people had told me about addiction before it was too late. Of course, that's just the way addiction works: insidious as ever until everything blows up in your face.
That's my story. Wish me luck!
Pinkbeam
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2020
- Messages
- 296
I started drinking and smoking pot at age 15. My best friend committed suicide and I ended up getting court ordered to go to a 45 day impatient rehab, because I got caught drinking as a minor. I got my shit together for a little while.
In my 20s I started drinking and smoking pot again. Was doing it just for fun. Worked full time as a manager, got married, got pregnant so i stopped everything. Took time off to be a stay at home mom.
When I turned 30 I started using meth and oxycontin. Meth really turned my life upside down. I tried to be a functional user but that didnt last long. I eventually lost my job, my house, my electricity and my kid.
I got moved in a new house, and got my kid back after 15 months of jumping through hoops for dfs. I have been sober the whole time. Sept 15 I started using meth again and to this day I havent stopped.
I've tried other drugs on my journey like mushrooms, coke, ecstacy. Meth is the one that really got its meat hooks in me. I lost so much on it, yet I'm doing it again.
My advice to everyone is if you havent tried it, dont. Please. I did some really stupid things when using, and I'm lucky to still be married. It really lowers my inhibitions. Its sad.
Right now my meth use is alot more functional bc I'm on a couple antidepressants and can barely get any high at all.
I tried to keep this short and sweet, I know some of the longer ones are hard to read and keep focused on.
In my 20s I started drinking and smoking pot again. Was doing it just for fun. Worked full time as a manager, got married, got pregnant so i stopped everything. Took time off to be a stay at home mom.
When I turned 30 I started using meth and oxycontin. Meth really turned my life upside down. I tried to be a functional user but that didnt last long. I eventually lost my job, my house, my electricity and my kid.
I got moved in a new house, and got my kid back after 15 months of jumping through hoops for dfs. I have been sober the whole time. Sept 15 I started using meth again and to this day I havent stopped.
I've tried other drugs on my journey like mushrooms, coke, ecstacy. Meth is the one that really got its meat hooks in me. I lost so much on it, yet I'm doing it again.
My advice to everyone is if you havent tried it, dont. Please. I did some really stupid things when using, and I'm lucky to still be married. It really lowers my inhibitions. Its sad.
Right now my meth use is alot more functional bc I'm on a couple antidepressants and can barely get any high at all.
I tried to keep this short and sweet, I know some of the longer ones are hard to read and keep focused on.
Iceman1216
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2019
- Messages
- 1,064
TheToddmeister
Greenlighter
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
- Messages
- 8
There are good drugs and there are BAD drugs , Meth is obviously bad . I tried the shit once(smoked) and my lungs felt like they were lined with varnish . Meth is so rediculously toxic anyway . I personally stay away from ay shit that makes my heart race and blood pressure skyrocket . You sound super intelligent and I wish you the best !
Kind Regards ,
Todd G.
Kind Regards ,
Todd G.
wudbutcher
Bluelighter
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
- Messages
- 1,135
You avoid hot strippers and sex too?There are good drugs and there are BAD drugs , Meth is obviously bad . I tried the shit once(smoked) and my lungs felt like they were lined with varnish . Meth is so rediculously toxic anyway . I personally stay away from ay shit that makes my heart race and blood pressure skyrocket . You sound super intelligent and I wish you the best !
Kind Regards ,
Todd G.
F.U.B.A.R.
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- May 12, 2010
- Messages
- 24,656
Addiction is shit. Dont do it...
kevinlxf
Greenlighter
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2020
- Messages
- 1
Brief Background
I went to a very recreational city when I was in college and met a friend at the time who had been smoking ice since he was 15. He would also smoke in his dorm at his vocational high school. Five of the seven people in the same dorm learned to smoke ice later. I asked him to teach me how to smoke ice. I had a boyfriend at the time and he found out I was smoking ice and broke up with me. From that time on, I decided that when I look for a boyfriend again, I must find one who will allow me to smoke ice or who will smoke it himself. Then I met a boy who was studying for his PhD at school, and he smoked almost every day, so I stayed with him via webcam. From the time I got together with him, I smoked more and more. Now I smoke almost every day, probably close to a gram
Substance(s)
meth
Duration of Addiction/Dependence
8 years
I went to a very recreational city when I was in college and met a friend at the time who had been smoking ice since he was 15. He would also smoke in his dorm at his vocational high school. Five of the seven people in the same dorm learned to smoke ice later. I asked him to teach me how to smoke ice. I had a boyfriend at the time and he found out I was smoking ice and broke up with me. From that time on, I decided that when I look for a boyfriend again, I must find one who will allow me to smoke ice or who will smoke it himself. Then I met a boy who was studying for his PhD at school, and he smoked almost every day, so I stayed with him via webcam. From the time I got together with him, I smoked more and more. Now I smoke almost every day, probably close to a gram
Substance(s)
meth
Duration of Addiction/Dependence
8 years
This was my experience of heroin addiction and recovery - I found it helpful to write about it and I hope someone might find it helpful to read about it. The title is a play on the old expression 'the University of Life' - for anyone reading who is not from the UK a polytechnic was a sort of second-rate learning institution, accredited to award degrees but with little of the academic or reputational merit attached to universities themselves.
I moved to London from the country in the autumn of 1999 with little more than the rucksack on my back, a place at university and £50 in my pocket - and a vague ambition to become a heroin addict. My student loan - a much less complicated affair in those days - was pending, and £50 back then went a lot further than it does now so I wasn’t worried about my reduced circumstances. I felt like a latter-day Dick Whittington, and as the titular character in my own rags-to-riches drama I was prepared for a few privations on my journey.
Like so many travellers before me, accommodation was my first concern. I had some family and friends dotted about the capital, but nowhere and with no one I wanted to linger. The struggle to find accommodation in London on a budget is well-documented so I won’t linger on my own experience, except to say that the situation then was not anywhere near as bad as it seems to be now - all things being relative though, and still with the proverbial provincial grass in my hair, the cost of renting a flat (or even a room) and the speed at which the rental market operated were daunting.
It was a mild October - an Indian summer, I suppose - and I had a sleeping bag with me so I gathered some cardboard for a makeshift mattress and found a spot to sleep in a stairwell behind the university. The entrance to the stairs was locked with a gate which I could hop over, and the stairs themselves were covered by a CCTV camera. In the stairwell I couldn’t be seen from the street and the gate and the camera (which may have been inoperable, for all I know) seemed enough of a deterrent to anyone wanting to join me down there. It was dry under the stairs in everything but very heavy rain, although the weather remained mostly warm and the evenings light until the first student loan payment landed in my account at the end of the month.
I found a room in an unfashionable area without a tube station, not far from the university. It was a bedsit in a boarding house where I was the youngest resident by far - the others were all much older men with depressing backstories who seemed to have fallen on hard times, for surely they would not have been in such a place at their time of life if things had gone better for them. The landlord lived in the basement and was fastidious about collecting the rent money - something of a Rigsby character. The water in the communal bath and shower rooms was heated by a coin-operated meter in the hallway, the operation of which evidently triggered something in his basement rooms because every time someone turned the immersion heater on he would appear upstairs to make sure it had been switched on intentionally and electricity wasn’t being wasted.
Despite his obsession with these details, however, he had missed the bigger picture which was the tremendous inflation of rental costs all over the capital, even in his obscure and ungentrified district. The cost of one of his rooms was far less than people would have been paying in the area five or even ten years earlier and as his tenants we entered into a tacit conspiracy to shield him from this knowledge, lest our fragile utopia be shattered.
My degree course was interesting without being too demanding and I was able to continue my routine of heavy drinking and hash smoking with little interruption. I spent a lot of time trying to find a reliable source of hash or weed and inevitably I gravitated towards Camden Town - the Amsterdam of London. While I invariably found something to keep my pipe warm I rarely got what I paid for - as the new kid in town I was always going to get ripped off, and I was scoring off the street where everyone selling cannabis seemed to be doing so to finance their heroin and crack habits. I considered myself experienced in the ways that drugs were bought and sold but this was a new world to me, and the stakes were much higher for the people doing the buying and the selling than in my home town. Of course I had long been aware of the influence of hard drugs but my provincial upbringing had shielded me from the worst of their effects, and my nocturnal wanderings around these less desirable parts of London forced me to confront the realities of the situation.
The capital had exposed its seedy underbelly and everywhere I went I started noticing disenchanted youths and embittered men and women gathering on street corners or huddling in bus shelters, waiting for their dealers to show up. Yet as much as this appalled and horrified me, I found myself in equal and opposite measure intrigued and fascinated. I had read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting some years before and the ‘anti-glamour’ of it had enticed me - I thought that hard drugs must have something going for them if people were prepared to endure such hardship in their name. I told myself that these hardships were the very privations I had steeled myself to expect during my London adventure, and resolved to take heroin at the earliest opportunity.
Back at Camden Town I approached the shifty-looking individuals who gathered around the tube station. Rather like my earlier attempts to buy cannabis from them, my attempts to buy heroin were also unsuccessful - much as I had predicted they would be. I was not so naive that I imagined a middle-class white kid with a provincial accent could approach a perfect stranger on the street and negotiate a successful heroin deal without complication. Even armed with this knowledge, however, I still fell victim to my inexperience. Those I approached who offered to help me quickly revealed themselves to be untrustworthy, departing with my money and promises to return - I was on a number of occasions left in a stairwell at a block of flats, or on the corner of a back street, with instructions to wait while the ‘deal’ was put together. I am ashamed to recall that I would sometimes wait for an hour or more before concluding that I had been scammed - hope really does spring eternal in such circumstances. Others who I thought were genuine would not take my money or even speak to me - they muttered darkly about undercover policemen, and one even pulled my white-boy dreadlocks in an attempt to dislodge what he believed to be a wig.
Eventually I was approached by an older black man in a leather trench coat - ’The Matrix’ had only recently been released and he did not yet look absurd. ‘JJ’ had witnessed my clumsy attempts to score and took pity on me, taking me to a phone box where he produced a ‘stem’ - a tubular pipe - and some crack, which we smoked together. I’d taken cocaine before but experienced nothing quite like this, and in our reverie we formed a brief fellowship for which I have never understood his motivation - months later he was to disappear forever with £10 I had given him to get me some weed, but this amount was nowhere near the value of what we consumed that evening in the red telephone box. Later that night we found some heroin and in a serious breach of etiquette I took off without repaying the favour - perhaps this was why he had no compunction about his later disappearance with my weed money.
The heroin itself was a disappointment: I smoked it on foil but was unfamiliar with the technique and consequently wasted more than I smoked, carbonising the powder before the fumes had been released. It would be some time before I learned to take the drug effectively and economically, and it was only after several months of sporadic use that I decided to embark on a serious habit. I returned to Camden Town where I had befriended a homeless Scottish heroin addict called Mark, who had a large black dog called Heather. Although I had initiated this relationship as a means to an end I had genuine affection for Mark and Heather and to this day I wonder what happened to them - although Heather, I’m sure, will have died in the intervening years, and unfortunately for Mark I don’t imagine his life expectancy could really have been much greater. I briefly practiced Mark’s lifestyle with him, and funded some of it, and for my part I was grateful to have a partner in crime - this being a phrase which is much overused these days for people who are no such thing to each other, although in our case this is pretty much what we were.
I remember Mark saying to me one evening that ‘crack had ruined the heroin scene’, which seemed a strange observation at the time, for what on earth could there have been to ruin? However I think now, looking back, that he may have had a point - crack had really exploded onto the (relatively) sedate heroin scene and meant that many users now had (at least) two competing addictions to manage side by side. From what little I could tell, having only just arrived on the scene myself, the way crack was aggressively marketed and supplied (alongside heroin) by mostly young, black guys who didn't get high on their own supply and worked for businessmen and gangsters who shared none of the risk had really changed the game. But that's a whole other story.
My bedsit was only a short bus ride away but may as well have been on the moon after one of our Camden nights, and I often slept in the back of abandoned vans or in tower block bin sheds (the trick is to block the chute before settling down for the night) next to Mark and Heather. The difference of course was that when the fun was over and the hard times loomed I could repair to my room and the relative normality of university life, while Mark had no such option. I had no wish to take him back to my place - he was an alcoholic and told me that he would wake up vomiting and in withdrawal, leaving him no option but to swallow his vomit in the hope that its alcohol content would recover him sufficiently to stumble to the off licence to get his first can of the day. Special Brew was his drink of choice and he maintained that Brew drinkers were a better class of alcoholic than those who drunk Kestrel or Tennents Super. I did take him home once and he immediately placed himself down directly in front of the TV, where he remained all night. He looked around occasionally to grab a can or chase some heroin, but after so long on the streets it was the TV that held his attention.
I see now that addiction had put Mark on the street and that living like that was in turn preventing his recovery from addiction - the twin problems of his homelessness and drug and alcohol use were inextricably linked, but at the time such an observation would have escaped me entirely: we were just drug users, that was all, and I had a place to stay and he didn’t. The following morning he waited impatiently for me to get up - I doubt he slept - so that we could continue the session, or ‘get back on it’ as we didn’t say then. I wasn’t feeling good and wanted only to sleep more - I didn’t have his appetite for self-destruction - and he left in a huff with Heather, who he had to carry down the stairs because her back legs were going by then. Like JJ, I never saw Mark again - a theme was developing.
I next visited a hospital in North London that operated a drug treatment centre: they provided me with needles and literature about harm reduction, safer injecting techniques and related injuries and diseases. I no longer needed to travel to Camden at this time, having met another homeless addict outside the supermarket near my home who introduced me to two much older, seasoned heroin users - Kathy and Allan. Also from Scotland, they were a double act who lived on my road and took me under their wing - they would often see me making my way up our road, coming back from university (they were never awake to see me on my way there) and would call me up to their top-floor flat for a smoke. They introduced me to a local network of dealers which was to be the next stage of my downfall - the distance between the place I lived and the place I scored (notwithstanding the odd night in a bin shed) had been the greatest protective factor against the steadily increasing frequency of my drug use, but now I could score virtually on my doorstep.
I started buying my heroin from Kathy and Allan and injecting at home - I never did it around them, for fear of contaminating a needle or an injection site in the unhygienic and unsafe chaos of their flat. I initially injected tiny amounts, so concerned was I of overdosing; a seasoned addict would have laughed at the measures I cooked in my spoon, but had I overdosed in my bedsit it could conceivably have been many days before someone found me: probably it would have been my landlord after his rent. Nevertheless I got myself incredibly high - although probably ‘low’ would be more accurate - even to to the point of having to walk myself around the room like a sick horse being trotted around its stable in order to prevent my eyes rolling back into my head and the drug taking me from consciousness. I didn’t realise at the time that ‘gouching out’ can be one of the more pleasurable side effects of heroin use, but it speaks volumes for my naivety and ignorance that I believed if I passed out following an injection I wouldn’t wake up.
My life became a ritualised sequence of waiting, scoring, injecting and sleeping. I stopped attending university, I lost contact with my friends, I blew my student loan and my arms and the backs of my hands became dotted with puncture marks and grew bruises the size of eggs. Despite the many fresh veins I had to choose from I was not adept at injecting and I eventually missed a vein, accidentally shooting my fix into the soft tissue of my upper arm: a large lump appeared and on visiting the GP I was told to keep my arm elevated above my head for forty-eight hours or risk amputation. It occurs to me now that the doctor was perhaps playing a trick on me in order that I might take some time to reflect on my situation - certainly this period triggered in me what I believe alcoholics refer to as a ‘moment of clarity’, wherein one is compelled to question the wisdom of one’s actions. I stopped injecting heroin but continued smoking it for several more months until my student loan ran out.
There was no question of committing acquisitive crime to fund my addiction, so once the money was gone that was that. Again this was something that separated me from the few people I knew on the scene - I had been playing at it, really, flirting with it, and when all was said and done I would head home and resume my old life. This was not an option for the people I met during this time - this was not a diversion from their life, but the actual life that they were living every day. This was a sobering reflection and the thought that accompanied me as I drifted away from them and out of their lives.
I managed the withdrawal symptoms with codeine linctus, a preparation that used to be available from pharmacies as a cough syrup and is now enjoying a resurgence as a recreational drug in America where it is a key ingredient - along with Promethazine - of the cocktail known as ‘lean’ or ‘drank’. It’s much harder to get hold of in the UK these days, largely because most of the people buying it from pharmacies were heroin users trying to avoid withdrawal, so chemists became wise to their game and stopped supplying it. Alternatively I would buy kaolin and morphine, another over-the-counter preparation intended for the prevention of diarrhoea but equally effective at managing withdrawal symptoms. The morphine is separated from the kaolin suspension by refrigerating the bottle until the morphine separates and rises to the surface, where it can be drawn off and drunk or - with some preparation - smoked (I had read about this in Will Self’s short story Scale). As a last resort I would take codeine tablets from my parents’ medicine cabinet at their home, the downside being that many brands contain high doses of paracetamol/acetaminophen preventing the user from ingesting large numbers of tablets at once. My heroin use didn’t stop entirely at this time, but I learned to only use it intermittently and never for more than three days at any time - my body never forgot the old days, and punished me heinously every time I slipped up. For all I know it still would today.
In the end I finished my degree - a lot later, and at considerably more expense than I would have liked - and left London. I always intended to return, perhaps to resume where I had left off, but life gets in the way and probably just as well that it does, sometimes. However for many years afterwards I remained acutely aware of the presence of heroin wherever I went. I had developed a sort of spidey-sense that would tingle whenever I saw a rat-faced youth lurking furtively in an alleyway, or a teenage cyclist with bulging cheeks pedalling frantically along a canal towpath. It seemed to be everywhere I looked and I would have given anything not to notice - I never used to, and it got in the way of my recovery. It was a long and lonely path to find my way back from addiction and I didn’t feel that I was entitled to any sympathy or congratulations during the journey or on reaching my destination, because I knew that I never should have been on that path in the first place.
Despite everything I don’t really have any regrets - heroin addiction was not the worst thing that has happened to me, and if I could do it all again knowing what I know now, I really don’t think that I would have done it much differently. A little more education on the pitfalls of injecting and better preparation for withdrawal episodes, maybe. I had a lucky escape - a series of lucky escapes - which really were down to luck rather than judgment, but the experience illuminated a dark side of the street that I otherwise never would have noticed, and I really can’t say that I would have wanted to miss out on that.
These days I have a professional career and even worked in a substance misuse service for a while, but my personal experiences did not stand me in such good stead in the profession as I'd hoped - I had the habit of seeing people's experiences in terms of my own, and struggled to understand how people who had clearly long ago arrived at the conclusion that drug use was ruining their lives could not stop repeating this harmful behaviour. I think the difference for me was in having a strong 'first world' - supportive family, secure housing, good education, employment and relationship prospects - that drugs took me away from, but which I always knew was there to return to when I'd finished fooling around on that dark side of the street. If that hadn't been the case and drugs were helping me to shelter from a cruel, hard world that I had no desire to return to I don't know how I would have found the emotional resources to stop using.
I moved to London from the country in the autumn of 1999 with little more than the rucksack on my back, a place at university and £50 in my pocket - and a vague ambition to become a heroin addict. My student loan - a much less complicated affair in those days - was pending, and £50 back then went a lot further than it does now so I wasn’t worried about my reduced circumstances. I felt like a latter-day Dick Whittington, and as the titular character in my own rags-to-riches drama I was prepared for a few privations on my journey.
Like so many travellers before me, accommodation was my first concern. I had some family and friends dotted about the capital, but nowhere and with no one I wanted to linger. The struggle to find accommodation in London on a budget is well-documented so I won’t linger on my own experience, except to say that the situation then was not anywhere near as bad as it seems to be now - all things being relative though, and still with the proverbial provincial grass in my hair, the cost of renting a flat (or even a room) and the speed at which the rental market operated were daunting.
It was a mild October - an Indian summer, I suppose - and I had a sleeping bag with me so I gathered some cardboard for a makeshift mattress and found a spot to sleep in a stairwell behind the university. The entrance to the stairs was locked with a gate which I could hop over, and the stairs themselves were covered by a CCTV camera. In the stairwell I couldn’t be seen from the street and the gate and the camera (which may have been inoperable, for all I know) seemed enough of a deterrent to anyone wanting to join me down there. It was dry under the stairs in everything but very heavy rain, although the weather remained mostly warm and the evenings light until the first student loan payment landed in my account at the end of the month.
I found a room in an unfashionable area without a tube station, not far from the university. It was a bedsit in a boarding house where I was the youngest resident by far - the others were all much older men with depressing backstories who seemed to have fallen on hard times, for surely they would not have been in such a place at their time of life if things had gone better for them. The landlord lived in the basement and was fastidious about collecting the rent money - something of a Rigsby character. The water in the communal bath and shower rooms was heated by a coin-operated meter in the hallway, the operation of which evidently triggered something in his basement rooms because every time someone turned the immersion heater on he would appear upstairs to make sure it had been switched on intentionally and electricity wasn’t being wasted.
Despite his obsession with these details, however, he had missed the bigger picture which was the tremendous inflation of rental costs all over the capital, even in his obscure and ungentrified district. The cost of one of his rooms was far less than people would have been paying in the area five or even ten years earlier and as his tenants we entered into a tacit conspiracy to shield him from this knowledge, lest our fragile utopia be shattered.
My degree course was interesting without being too demanding and I was able to continue my routine of heavy drinking and hash smoking with little interruption. I spent a lot of time trying to find a reliable source of hash or weed and inevitably I gravitated towards Camden Town - the Amsterdam of London. While I invariably found something to keep my pipe warm I rarely got what I paid for - as the new kid in town I was always going to get ripped off, and I was scoring off the street where everyone selling cannabis seemed to be doing so to finance their heroin and crack habits. I considered myself experienced in the ways that drugs were bought and sold but this was a new world to me, and the stakes were much higher for the people doing the buying and the selling than in my home town. Of course I had long been aware of the influence of hard drugs but my provincial upbringing had shielded me from the worst of their effects, and my nocturnal wanderings around these less desirable parts of London forced me to confront the realities of the situation.
The capital had exposed its seedy underbelly and everywhere I went I started noticing disenchanted youths and embittered men and women gathering on street corners or huddling in bus shelters, waiting for their dealers to show up. Yet as much as this appalled and horrified me, I found myself in equal and opposite measure intrigued and fascinated. I had read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting some years before and the ‘anti-glamour’ of it had enticed me - I thought that hard drugs must have something going for them if people were prepared to endure such hardship in their name. I told myself that these hardships were the very privations I had steeled myself to expect during my London adventure, and resolved to take heroin at the earliest opportunity.
Back at Camden Town I approached the shifty-looking individuals who gathered around the tube station. Rather like my earlier attempts to buy cannabis from them, my attempts to buy heroin were also unsuccessful - much as I had predicted they would be. I was not so naive that I imagined a middle-class white kid with a provincial accent could approach a perfect stranger on the street and negotiate a successful heroin deal without complication. Even armed with this knowledge, however, I still fell victim to my inexperience. Those I approached who offered to help me quickly revealed themselves to be untrustworthy, departing with my money and promises to return - I was on a number of occasions left in a stairwell at a block of flats, or on the corner of a back street, with instructions to wait while the ‘deal’ was put together. I am ashamed to recall that I would sometimes wait for an hour or more before concluding that I had been scammed - hope really does spring eternal in such circumstances. Others who I thought were genuine would not take my money or even speak to me - they muttered darkly about undercover policemen, and one even pulled my white-boy dreadlocks in an attempt to dislodge what he believed to be a wig.
Eventually I was approached by an older black man in a leather trench coat - ’The Matrix’ had only recently been released and he did not yet look absurd. ‘JJ’ had witnessed my clumsy attempts to score and took pity on me, taking me to a phone box where he produced a ‘stem’ - a tubular pipe - and some crack, which we smoked together. I’d taken cocaine before but experienced nothing quite like this, and in our reverie we formed a brief fellowship for which I have never understood his motivation - months later he was to disappear forever with £10 I had given him to get me some weed, but this amount was nowhere near the value of what we consumed that evening in the red telephone box. Later that night we found some heroin and in a serious breach of etiquette I took off without repaying the favour - perhaps this was why he had no compunction about his later disappearance with my weed money.
The heroin itself was a disappointment: I smoked it on foil but was unfamiliar with the technique and consequently wasted more than I smoked, carbonising the powder before the fumes had been released. It would be some time before I learned to take the drug effectively and economically, and it was only after several months of sporadic use that I decided to embark on a serious habit. I returned to Camden Town where I had befriended a homeless Scottish heroin addict called Mark, who had a large black dog called Heather. Although I had initiated this relationship as a means to an end I had genuine affection for Mark and Heather and to this day I wonder what happened to them - although Heather, I’m sure, will have died in the intervening years, and unfortunately for Mark I don’t imagine his life expectancy could really have been much greater. I briefly practiced Mark’s lifestyle with him, and funded some of it, and for my part I was grateful to have a partner in crime - this being a phrase which is much overused these days for people who are no such thing to each other, although in our case this is pretty much what we were.
I remember Mark saying to me one evening that ‘crack had ruined the heroin scene’, which seemed a strange observation at the time, for what on earth could there have been to ruin? However I think now, looking back, that he may have had a point - crack had really exploded onto the (relatively) sedate heroin scene and meant that many users now had (at least) two competing addictions to manage side by side. From what little I could tell, having only just arrived on the scene myself, the way crack was aggressively marketed and supplied (alongside heroin) by mostly young, black guys who didn't get high on their own supply and worked for businessmen and gangsters who shared none of the risk had really changed the game. But that's a whole other story.
My bedsit was only a short bus ride away but may as well have been on the moon after one of our Camden nights, and I often slept in the back of abandoned vans or in tower block bin sheds (the trick is to block the chute before settling down for the night) next to Mark and Heather. The difference of course was that when the fun was over and the hard times loomed I could repair to my room and the relative normality of university life, while Mark had no such option. I had no wish to take him back to my place - he was an alcoholic and told me that he would wake up vomiting and in withdrawal, leaving him no option but to swallow his vomit in the hope that its alcohol content would recover him sufficiently to stumble to the off licence to get his first can of the day. Special Brew was his drink of choice and he maintained that Brew drinkers were a better class of alcoholic than those who drunk Kestrel or Tennents Super. I did take him home once and he immediately placed himself down directly in front of the TV, where he remained all night. He looked around occasionally to grab a can or chase some heroin, but after so long on the streets it was the TV that held his attention.
I see now that addiction had put Mark on the street and that living like that was in turn preventing his recovery from addiction - the twin problems of his homelessness and drug and alcohol use were inextricably linked, but at the time such an observation would have escaped me entirely: we were just drug users, that was all, and I had a place to stay and he didn’t. The following morning he waited impatiently for me to get up - I doubt he slept - so that we could continue the session, or ‘get back on it’ as we didn’t say then. I wasn’t feeling good and wanted only to sleep more - I didn’t have his appetite for self-destruction - and he left in a huff with Heather, who he had to carry down the stairs because her back legs were going by then. Like JJ, I never saw Mark again - a theme was developing.
I next visited a hospital in North London that operated a drug treatment centre: they provided me with needles and literature about harm reduction, safer injecting techniques and related injuries and diseases. I no longer needed to travel to Camden at this time, having met another homeless addict outside the supermarket near my home who introduced me to two much older, seasoned heroin users - Kathy and Allan. Also from Scotland, they were a double act who lived on my road and took me under their wing - they would often see me making my way up our road, coming back from university (they were never awake to see me on my way there) and would call me up to their top-floor flat for a smoke. They introduced me to a local network of dealers which was to be the next stage of my downfall - the distance between the place I lived and the place I scored (notwithstanding the odd night in a bin shed) had been the greatest protective factor against the steadily increasing frequency of my drug use, but now I could score virtually on my doorstep.
I started buying my heroin from Kathy and Allan and injecting at home - I never did it around them, for fear of contaminating a needle or an injection site in the unhygienic and unsafe chaos of their flat. I initially injected tiny amounts, so concerned was I of overdosing; a seasoned addict would have laughed at the measures I cooked in my spoon, but had I overdosed in my bedsit it could conceivably have been many days before someone found me: probably it would have been my landlord after his rent. Nevertheless I got myself incredibly high - although probably ‘low’ would be more accurate - even to to the point of having to walk myself around the room like a sick horse being trotted around its stable in order to prevent my eyes rolling back into my head and the drug taking me from consciousness. I didn’t realise at the time that ‘gouching out’ can be one of the more pleasurable side effects of heroin use, but it speaks volumes for my naivety and ignorance that I believed if I passed out following an injection I wouldn’t wake up.
My life became a ritualised sequence of waiting, scoring, injecting and sleeping. I stopped attending university, I lost contact with my friends, I blew my student loan and my arms and the backs of my hands became dotted with puncture marks and grew bruises the size of eggs. Despite the many fresh veins I had to choose from I was not adept at injecting and I eventually missed a vein, accidentally shooting my fix into the soft tissue of my upper arm: a large lump appeared and on visiting the GP I was told to keep my arm elevated above my head for forty-eight hours or risk amputation. It occurs to me now that the doctor was perhaps playing a trick on me in order that I might take some time to reflect on my situation - certainly this period triggered in me what I believe alcoholics refer to as a ‘moment of clarity’, wherein one is compelled to question the wisdom of one’s actions. I stopped injecting heroin but continued smoking it for several more months until my student loan ran out.
There was no question of committing acquisitive crime to fund my addiction, so once the money was gone that was that. Again this was something that separated me from the few people I knew on the scene - I had been playing at it, really, flirting with it, and when all was said and done I would head home and resume my old life. This was not an option for the people I met during this time - this was not a diversion from their life, but the actual life that they were living every day. This was a sobering reflection and the thought that accompanied me as I drifted away from them and out of their lives.
I managed the withdrawal symptoms with codeine linctus, a preparation that used to be available from pharmacies as a cough syrup and is now enjoying a resurgence as a recreational drug in America where it is a key ingredient - along with Promethazine - of the cocktail known as ‘lean’ or ‘drank’. It’s much harder to get hold of in the UK these days, largely because most of the people buying it from pharmacies were heroin users trying to avoid withdrawal, so chemists became wise to their game and stopped supplying it. Alternatively I would buy kaolin and morphine, another over-the-counter preparation intended for the prevention of diarrhoea but equally effective at managing withdrawal symptoms. The morphine is separated from the kaolin suspension by refrigerating the bottle until the morphine separates and rises to the surface, where it can be drawn off and drunk or - with some preparation - smoked (I had read about this in Will Self’s short story Scale). As a last resort I would take codeine tablets from my parents’ medicine cabinet at their home, the downside being that many brands contain high doses of paracetamol/acetaminophen preventing the user from ingesting large numbers of tablets at once. My heroin use didn’t stop entirely at this time, but I learned to only use it intermittently and never for more than three days at any time - my body never forgot the old days, and punished me heinously every time I slipped up. For all I know it still would today.
In the end I finished my degree - a lot later, and at considerably more expense than I would have liked - and left London. I always intended to return, perhaps to resume where I had left off, but life gets in the way and probably just as well that it does, sometimes. However for many years afterwards I remained acutely aware of the presence of heroin wherever I went. I had developed a sort of spidey-sense that would tingle whenever I saw a rat-faced youth lurking furtively in an alleyway, or a teenage cyclist with bulging cheeks pedalling frantically along a canal towpath. It seemed to be everywhere I looked and I would have given anything not to notice - I never used to, and it got in the way of my recovery. It was a long and lonely path to find my way back from addiction and I didn’t feel that I was entitled to any sympathy or congratulations during the journey or on reaching my destination, because I knew that I never should have been on that path in the first place.
Despite everything I don’t really have any regrets - heroin addiction was not the worst thing that has happened to me, and if I could do it all again knowing what I know now, I really don’t think that I would have done it much differently. A little more education on the pitfalls of injecting and better preparation for withdrawal episodes, maybe. I had a lucky escape - a series of lucky escapes - which really were down to luck rather than judgment, but the experience illuminated a dark side of the street that I otherwise never would have noticed, and I really can’t say that I would have wanted to miss out on that.
These days I have a professional career and even worked in a substance misuse service for a while, but my personal experiences did not stand me in such good stead in the profession as I'd hoped - I had the habit of seeing people's experiences in terms of my own, and struggled to understand how people who had clearly long ago arrived at the conclusion that drug use was ruining their lives could not stop repeating this harmful behaviour. I think the difference for me was in having a strong 'first world' - supportive family, secure housing, good education, employment and relationship prospects - that drugs took me away from, but which I always knew was there to return to when I'd finished fooling around on that dark side of the street. If that hadn't been the case and drugs were helping me to shelter from a cruel, hard world that I had no desire to return to I don't know how I would have found the emotional resources to stop using.
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