“Drugs are a wonderful lover, but a terrible mistress”
I feel it might be appropriate to open this blog with a bit about myself and my history, so that readers understand the context from which I’m viewing the world. My name isn’t important, nor is the name of the place I grew up. What I can tell you is that I’m a 21 year-old male drug addict. To be more specific, an opiate/opioid addict. I grew up like a lot of kids in my generation, divorced parents, going from one household to other to see each parent. They divorced when I was eight. The divorce was so messy that to this day my parents refuse to talk to each other, much less be within 100-feet of one another. I grew up fast, my parents paid a lot of attention to my sister, because she was younger and needed more help transitioning through the tough period of the divorce. When I was 15, I smoked pot and drank for my first time. I used to love smoking weed – me and my good friends would all get together on the weekends and smoke copious amounts of it. Around the time when I was 16, my dad got a terrible case of strep-throat. It was so bad that they recommended surgery to get his tonsils out. After the surgery he came home with two bottles of codeine cough-syrup and a big bottle of 5/500 Vicodin tablets.
My father has always been the kind of “suck it up” character, so naturally he left almost all the medication he had untouched and in our medicine cabinet. It wasn’t until about a year later when I discovered that what was in the medicine cabinet could take away all my pain. Prior to trying anything in that cabinet though, I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder – not an uncommon diagnosis for someone in the so called “Rx Generation.” I can say fairly definitively that I did suffer from both conditions, in fact what finally pushed me into seeing a doctor was an extremely bad panic attack. I remember that panic attack very vividly, I literally thought I was going to die. Anyway, shortly after that I was given Celexa and a small amount of Ativan for both conditions. The first time I took .25mgs of Ativan I slept harder than I ever have before, and when I woke up, I couldn’t walk or see straight. The was the first time I realized that pharmaceuticals could make a person feel content, warm and happy.
My curiosity peaked a few months after my experience with Ativan, I was browsing all sorts of forums and drug related websites. I navigated to Erowid and started reading about opiates and various medications. Reading about codeine and hydrocodone got me incredibly excited about what was in the medicine cabinet. I finally worked up the muster to take a few spoonfuls of codeine one day after school. I didn’t notice much except this warm itchiness that came over me. I remember thinking “Wow, I feel amazing, I feel just right…perfect!” The drone of my antidepressant was gone, I was left with a high rather than a low for once in my life.
Fast forward about a year and a half.
I’m 17, I see a psychiatrist who prescribes me Lexapro (Celexa’s patented brother) and Klonopin for my anxiety. Benzodiazepines don’t really do much but take away my anxiety. I would define these days as the ones where I slipped and fell heavily into my opiate use. I stole all the hydrocodone from my dad’s cabinet, and all the Percocet my mom refused to take for her kidney stones. On a side note, my mom explained to me when she took the Percocet she thought she was seeing spiders crawling up her chair. Not full on hallucinating, but just in the corner of her eye. I can say that is something that has never happened to me. Anyway, the Vicodin and the Percocet fueled my rocketing drug lust to the point of no return: Oxycontin. As most drug users know, Oxycontin is time released oxycodone. Most drug addicts/users also know that Purdue Pharmaceuticals – the company that makes the brand name Oxycontin – failed, or just didn’t try, to protect the tablets from abuse. Simply cutting the tablet in half renders the time-release useless. Good for drug addicts, bad press for Purdue. My drug use continued until a sudden, unpredictable dry spell in supply caused me to discontinue my consumption.
Hello hell, I’m here for detox. The next week was one of the most painful of my entire life. Sweating, chills, vomiting, using the shitter every ten minutes, anxiety, and the peak where I was curled up in my bed praying for God to just take me now so the pain would stop. He didn’t, and the pain never stopped. The acute opiate withdrawals did of course, they subsided after about five or six days. What’s even worse than that is the reality I couldn’t stand in the first place was now directly in front of my face. Smearing dirt on me with it’s cold, dirty fingers. Depression set in, and the cravings where ever present. There were times where simple talk of opiates was enough to cause my to literally salivate. True to the title, they were a wonderful lover, but as soon as you tell them to start packing – she’ll show up at your door at 3AM and ask you to look through every drawer in your room and tear apart your closet because there might be a little OC in there. It’s damn depressing and damn futile. I managed to maintain sobriety for three months, but then I just happened to come into a rather large amount of Endocet and OC’s. I was back baby! For about a month and a half. The withdrawals came again, only this time I was determined to stay off opiates for good. I went to see a Suboxone doctor.
This doctor inducted me into Suboxone. I dissovled two tablets once daily under my tongue. Wal-la! No withdrawals, no nothing. Although it gave me a slight buzz it was nothing compared to the real thing. The buzz faded more and more everyday until I was left with as normal of a reality as I guess I can have. As of today I’ve been on Suboxone for approximately 1 year 6 months. I’ve educated myself about addiction, I’ve relapsed, I’ve fought for sobriety, I’ve dreamed of opiates every night since I left them. I’ll never forget the times when my eyelids would warmly shut and I would enter a world of narcotic dreams. No worries, no fears, just pure content and happiness. A little drop of heaven in existence that makes the cold reality of life and my own insignificance a moot point. None of that matters when you’re there.
Narcotic Dreams 