OXY Part Five

So here is the final installment of the Oxy series from the London Free Press.

I think for a "small" town paper that the series was fine but I think as a whole London needs to start realistically looking at this issue if the stats that they reported are actually accurate.

On a personal note, I don’t really have a lot to report. I am doing well both physically and mentally. Am thinking of dropping my methadone dose by 5ml next week as I’ve been on my current dose of 80ml for close to a year now and am able to go more than a day and a half without feeling badly. I think that it is time.

Part Four of Oxycontin Series

Here is the next part of the London Free Press’s series on oxycodone.

 

This is the clinic that I attend. The male in the photo is Dr Craven who was my first doctor when I initially started. I had to switch to another doctor though when I started my new job this past May as his hours of practice were not working well with my work hours. He was a fantastic doctor none the less, but believe it or not, my current doctor is even better! We’re lucky here in London as most of the doctors associated with the clinic are fantastic.

Part Three of Oxycontin Series

Here is the third part of the series that my local paper is running on oxycontin.

London Free Press – Local News – Oxycodone

Oxycodone

By RANDY RICHMOND

Early morning and a steady path of people make their way to the counter.

Each one stops and takes a sip from a small, plastic medicine cup.

In each cup is methadone, a narcotic you also can buy off the street.

In Clinic 528 on Dundas Street, the methadone is legal.

In here, fire is being used to fight fire, one opioid drug handed out to battle others –plastic cup after plastic cup after plastic cup.

“I remember us thinking maybe we would end up with 350 people here,” says Dr. John Craven, associate director of Clinic 528.

It opened on Dundas Street five years ago, after doctors running a smaller clinic and private methadone treatment practices realized the need was growing. Back then, in 2001, the doctors had 120 patients with 80 on a waiting list.

“About three years after opening, I thought things would plateau,” Craven says.

“But everybody coming in, still to this day, tells us they know half a dozen other people out there.”

About five to seven new people a week come in for treatment, he says. Now there’s about 850 in treatment in London and another 180 at Clinic 461 in Woodstock.

More than 80 per cent of clients are addicted to opiate drugs prescribed through doctor’s offices, Craven says. The most common are the oxycodone-based drugs, Percocet and OxyContin being the most popular brands.

Methadone replaces those drugs, but comes, supporters say, with a much lower price.

Methadone basically fools the brain into thinking it’s getting a far more interesting and powerful opioid than it is, Craven says.

“Methadone is the most boring drug on the face of the earth,” he says. “It is useful because it is a lousy drug. It fills up the brain receptors and doesn’t do much of anything else. It stops people from going into withdrawal.

By all accounts, the physical withdrawal from opioid painkillers is a nightmare.

That physical dependence starts when the brain becomes used to an opioid. The drug changes the brain’s chemistry so it demands more each day to obtain relief or euphoria.

When the drug is taken away, the brain and body rebel. “I would sneeze until I felt like my head would blow off,” one told the Free Press.

“You get the runs. You would be on the toilet forever. You feel nauseous. You feel like you want to throw up. You get achy.”

A factory worker named Steve, 39, says he tried twice to go through counseling at Addictions Services of Thames Valley, the central outpatient service for addicts in the region.

“I just couldn’t do it, cold turkey,” Steve says. “I felt like my feet and my hands were going to pop off my body.”

He has a good family that he neglected more and more during the two years he was addicted to OxyContin. He spent all his savings on the drugs, lost a girlfriend and gave up his social life. Of all things, it was the repo man that turned him around.

“I had bought a new car and they repossessed it. I woke up one day and my car was gone. I thought, what am I doing?”

His elderly mother drove him to his first appointment last year. Imagine, Steve says, making your mom take you to a methadone clinic because you are an addict. He got clean in 12 days. After a year, he has a new girlfriend and is playing sports again.

“I don’t want to say it saved my life. But if I wasn’t here, I don’t know where I’d be.”

Not everyone sees Clinic 528 in such a positive light.

Provincial Conservative Leader John Tory, accompanied by police Chief Murray Faulkner, took a law-and-order tour of London last year and called for the clinic to be moved because it is close to Beal secondary school.

That prompted several London leaders to criticize the clinic’s location and the work it does. But the city itself runs a coffeehouse two doors east at William Street that attracts a rough-edged crowd.

Dozens of dealers, users, those trying to kick and other down-and-outers mill on the sidewalk between the clinic and coffee house.

In the middle of the day, you can get several offers to purchase drugs on the sidewalk.

Homeless people make up about seven per cent of Clinic 528’s patients, Craven says. Another 15 per cent are “one pay cheque away” from homelessness. The rest are working or in school or homemakers.

In the downstairs waiting area, though, a constant flow of rougher-looking patients come in each day for their methadone.

That’s because ‘downstairs’ is where beginners and long-time addicts who can’t get clean get their methadone.

Once someone tests clean for everything but methadone, they move ‘upstairs.’

That means they can get ‘carries’ — several days worth of methadone at once, and get individual counseling from one of three doctors.

“All I do is prescribe methadone, get them in the door, get their feet on ground, then try to educate them on how they got in this mess in the first place and how to get out of it,” Craven says.

A third of his patients are upstairs, a third downstairs trying to get upstairs. “And one third are determined to kill themselves through their addiction,” he says.

————

Upstairs and downstairs patients can meet twice a week in group recovery sessions. Mondays they talk about what they want. Thursdays they listen to a short recording by Craven and mostly stick to that subject.

There are rules here. No interruptions. First names only. A few veterans talk at a recent session about some other rules they’d like to see. No nodding off during session. No opening a bottle of pills for an aspirin.

“How do they know those aren’t my triggers,?” says one in exasperation.

At this session, they talk about honesty. A regular member, a woman in her 30s, fidgets in her chair. She tells the group she feels ashamed because she trusted a friend and the friend lied.

“Why do you feel ashamed? It’s your friend who should feel ashamed,” a group member says.

“I’m embarrassed because I want to help people but I can’t because I am not recovered yet,” the woman says.

“You can’t give what you don’t have,” Craven tells the group. “You have to help yourself first.”

Another group member tells them, “My conscience is working overtime now.”

That’s normal, because during addiction, you can’t get emotional about what you do, Craven tells them.

“Don’t beat yourself up,” a veteran of the clinic says.

————

After the meeting, the veteran says he’s been on methadone for seven years.

There are no deadlines to getting off, Craven says. Only after a year on a regular dosage should anyone even try to taper the amount, he says.

Opioids change the brain chemically and feed a growing hunger of fears, worries, past abuses and guilt.

That is one criticism of methadone treatment: It replaces one addiction with another.

Even those on it worry.

Tom, 34, an out-of-work furniture installer, used to drive by Clinic 528.

Why don’t these people just quit? he wondered.

He signed up in February 2006. Three years earlier he hurt his back at work, then spent years battling an addiction to OxyContin. “I tried to quit on my own. It was debilitating. I looked down on these people until it was me.”

His daughter saved him. Her grades were failing and she was getting into trouble at school. “I had to get the pills out of my life or I was going to lose my daughter. I think I just barely got away.”

It took him six months to move upstairs because he continues to smoke marijuana.

Ironically, the same thing that keeps some people away from the clinic was the thing that made him strong enough to get clean and move up.

“There are some pretty hard tales and some pretty hurting people downstairs,” Tom says. “It inspires me to get better.”

It took him a year to get his energy back and only now has he begun to call up old friends he left during the addiction years. He’s even thinking about going back to work.

“The past year I was content to have not much money. It helped me quit.”

It’s been a while since he had a craving for the drugs.

“I had a lot of dreams about it that are really where you are going and scoring and going home and doing it. Right now, I don’t think I will ever go back. I don’t want to ever go back to where I feel that low about myself.”

There’s just one worry.

“The methadone is a really good painkiller so I wonder how long I am going to be on it. When I am off, I don’t know how much of my pain will return.”

GLOSSARY

Opioid: Drug made from the opium in poppy. Commonly called narcotics or opiates. They are effective painkillers, but can also produce euphoria, making them prone to abuse.

Oxycodone: An opioid and key ingredient in prescription painkillers such as Percocet, Oxycet, Endocet and OxyContin. Oxycodone can create addiction and physical dependence.

Percocet: Contains 5 mg of oxycodone and gives about five hours pain relief. On the street, “percs” refers to both Percocet and generic forms of the drug.

OxyContin: Contains higher levels of oxycodone, usually 10 mg to 80 mg. It has a time-release coating offering pain relief for 12 hours. Chewed, crushed and snorted, or injected, the time release is bypassed and all the oxycodone is released at once.

Addiction: When a drug is so central to thoughts, emotions and activities the need to continue its use becomes a compulsion.

Physical dependence: The body has adapted to the presence of the drug, and withdrawal symptoms occur if use is reduced or stopped.

How they work: Opioids bind to brain receptors, and over time block those receptors. That forces the brain to require more opioid to produce the same euphoria.

What’s The Story, Morning Glory?

Remember in high school whenever you had to study for that all important exam? What was the first thing that you did in order to prepare yourself for this? If you were, and still are, anything like me then the first thing that you tended to do was anything but study. I’ll never, ever forget how suddenly even the most mundane of chores somehow managed to become mythical in proportion, waiting ever so patiently until they had my undivided attention. Over the years not much in regards to my procrastination skills have managed to change.

Now instead of school, I generally have work related projects competing for my ever diminishing attention span. It seems that whenever I sit down to my computer to complete one of the many never ending stream of projects that the Property Manager keeps sending my way, I find myself very easily distracted away from the task at hand. Like some pathetic sort of sycophantic fan, each day I am compelled to check out one of the many entertainment type gossip blogs. My morning simply can’t start until I’ve managed to get a wee taste of celebrity dirt. I mean, I have to be looking good when held up against comparison, say, to Ms Spear’s current foibles, etc

Now, if I may take the time to wonder aloud how it is possible that she has found herself in this recent set of misdeeds and misadventures. I thought that these type of people generally paid good money to certain types of employees to ensure that this type of stuff stayed very much in the background not front and centre of the public stage. And seriously, how badly messed up are you to allow things to reach this point? I mean even Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, who in a strictly legal sense, lost custody of their newborn for her first three months and technically had to surrender their physical custody of her, all four of them – including Frances’ first nanny – managed to live under the same roof this entire time.

Come on Britney, give your head a very serious shake. If two of the most notorious heroin users were capable of successfully pulling this off, you at the very least could at least make a little bit of an effort to show up for your custody hearings and actually show up on time. My guess would be that this would strengthen your case significantly. Certainly passing a drug test here and there wouldn’t hurt either. Also, what kind of drugs is this chick on anyway that she has allowed herself to become this unglued?

I’ll be the first to admit that the entire drug landscape has most definitely change a lot over the past decade. No where do I find this very apparent then witnessing this change each and every day at my methadone clinic. The general demographic of the typical methadone patient has undergone quite the change here in London, Ontario, Canada from the first time that I started MMT in the summer of 1999 – in fact, in less than a ten year time period.

The number of patients actually at the clinic who are on MMT is 800 compared to the 162 patients back in 1999. Typically, the current wait time to start treatment works out to approx two and a half weeks, whereas the first time, I ended up having to wait almost three months. I ended up lucking out getting in at that time simply because there had been a cancellation on their waitlist. If not for that cancellation, I would have ended up waiting four months before I would have been able to even start MMT. From my experience, when a junkie finally reaches out and starts asking for help, being put on someone’s waitlist is not any kind of solution but rather, an additional problem.

In the years between each MMT, the opiate landscape in this city changed so that what I remember from a decade ago, no longer exists today. While talking to my doctor recently, he mentioned of the 800 patients currently on methadone at the clinic barely a handful had ever seen heroin. Or almost 780 patients – out of 800 – being treated with methadone, were not, by exact definition, heroin addicts. Yes, they were opiate addicts because each and every one of them had issues with narcotic analgesics, but they certainly could not be easily lumped into society’s usual perception of the dirty, disgusting junkie.

Of course, in the end, this is all just semantics. Obviously, the growth of the clinic here in London, Ontario these past tens years is a result of a number of factors occurring simultaneously. Obviously, there is a growing need for this type of facility and from the perspective of a business plan, a need which if operated properly, will also prove to be financially rewarding for any investors i.e. the doctors that decided to expand their much smaller clinic from the previous decade into a clinic requiring considerably more support staff, etc.

Now a clinic of its current size will definitely be much more noticed by John T Public because depending on its location, the influx of nearly 1000 individuals that for the most part walk to the beat of a different drummer would hardly be invisible. Not many would be thrilled to have this particular group doing not much more than loitering near their homes or business each and every day. If it were just the patients of the clinic that the neighborhood had to be concerned about then that would be one thing but inevitably, it is the baggage that accompanies each of these patients that ends up being the biggest concern as generally they have less to lose.

Now if most of the opiate addicts in London, Ontario are not addicted to heroin, what the heck are they doing then? Apparently the majority are hooked hardcore on oxycontin. Or at least so says the five part series that our local paper, the London Free Press, started running in yesterday’s paper. This special report plans on covering all aspects of this addiction and how it is affecting our community as well as what we as a community can and should do to help.

The article from today focused on how oxycontin was doing much more than killing pain for two men while yesterday the series shared the story of one young housewife and mother of two’s battle with this drug.

Following is the introduction article to the series which was written by London Free Press reporter, Randy Richmond, that you should be able to read in its original form here. There was a second article regarding pharmacists and how they feel caught in the middle.

Oxy, part 1
Oxy, Oxygen, M&Ms, 80s, Oxycotton.

Killer.

The drug sweeping London’s downtown streets, workplaces and suburbs goes by many nicknames.

But it has one effect on police, civic officials, social service and health-care workers, users and those dealing in drug subculture — alarm.

And it’s ravaging London like few other cities in the province, police say.

A $3.7-million, five-year plan to combat substance abuse will be unveiled at city hall Monday.

“It is the drug of this city right now,” said Sgt. David MacDonald, head of one of the police’s two street drug units.

The opioid called oxycodone is so powerful, so easy to get and so hard to kick, it’s fueling crime, ravaging the vulnerable, and turning ordinary middle-class citizens into sellers and buyers.

What makes it tough to tackle is the source. It’s not made in makeshift labs, grown in basements or shipped in from other countries. Most comes from London doctors’ offices, then gets ’diverted’ to the underworld.

Signs of its rise are everywhere:

• OxyContin, the most popular oxycodone based painkiller, is the most commonly injected drug among needle users in London, recently surpassing heroin.
• Opioid abuse is rising to one of the top three problems cited by people seeking help at Addiction Services of Thames Valley. In most areas, it is tied with or nearing crack, cocaine and cannabis.
• In Ingersoll, opioid abuse ranks behind only alcohol, traditionally the No. 1 cited problem among people getting outpatient counselling.
• The Children’s Aid Society of Middlesex London is seeing more and more parents hooked on OxyContin and other painkillers.
• In 2004, only 86 police occurrences, such as break-ins and thefts, could be identified as fueled mainly by oxycodone addiction.

By 2006, the number of police occurrences had jumped to 261.

- OxyContin is the drug of choice — supplanting crack –among sex-trade workers in London, police say, and 100 per cent of the about 80 women working in the sex trade use drugs.

The diversion and rising influence of oxycodone-based prescription drugs is one of the forces prompting the city’s community services boss, Ross Fair, to present a plan to politicians to attack substance abuse in London. The five-year plan rests on four foundations — improvements in prevention, harm reduction, treatment and enforcement.

Only a large-scale co-ordinated effort will work, Ross says. “Addiction is a big hairy beast.”

The city would pay a third of the $3.7-million price tag, the rest coming from Ottawa and Queen’s Park.

The plan would target the most vulnerable first: the homeless, sex-trade workers, street youth.

Key points include:

• Create a downtown street outreach initiative, with nurses and addiction workers.
• Expand existing safe haven drop-in programs, such as Mission Services, My Sisters Place, Centre of Hope and AtLohsa, so full day and evening service is available
• Push senior levels of government for more treatment, and wait-time standards.
• Increase London police so the force can focus on illegal activities associated with drug dealing and prostitution.

The strategy also has clear targets:

• Reduce the number of sex- trade workers 50 per cent in three years
• Cut to zero the number of overdose deaths among homeless.
• Increase the number of homeless in addiction programs by 200 over five years

Check This Site Out! NOW!

I found this amazing site this evening while testing out a new search extension that I had just downloaded and installed to Firefox. I was randomly inputting various searches regarding the topic heroin. The site that I found is entitled mereggie, a.k.a. me, reggie macdonald a true story and its description reads mereggie, the sad true story of reggie macdonald of souris, pei, canada who lived life in the fast lane, involvement with / drug addiction, and subsequent disappearance.

His family is still searching for him or at the very least, hoping for his safe return to them. What he left behind is an unbelievable amount of his personal writings and what we have apparently lost is an incredible talent and voice that for now has been silenced. I’ve barely touched the surface of this site myself. The only thing preventing me from reading further is my desperate need for sleep at the moment. I dare anyone who visits this site to willingly look away.

 

mereggie is the true story of Reggie Macdonald.

In early December 2005, Reggie left home, while under the apparent effect of crystal meth and disappeared, and despite a country wide search could not be found.

Reggie led a troubled life dealing with drug addiction and the lingering effects on his personal and professional life. Shortly after he disappeared, his family found hundreds of pages of his writings which shed light on his struggles. Reggie had hoped to become a writer and that his life story would have a positive impact on someone, and so with this site, we present his writings.

Read the writing called Methadone, which describes the awful existence of a heroin addict on methadone. If this doesn’t want to make you avoid drugs, then I am surprised. For more harrowing tales that might lead one to avoid drugs, read the Iceland, Kidnapped! and other readings.

If you are intrigued, read on – you can start with Reg’s intro to his story …. more details will be added over the next few months …

NOTE:
While Reg was very articulate and a very good writer, at times his perspective is very harsh, most likely affected by his addiction. We hope that his writings are viewed in that context, as the views Reg often expressed are not the views of his family.

These Boots Were Made For Walking.

One of the habits or traits or characteristics that I’ve acquired since cleaning up and getting out of debt is a newfound love of shopping for myself. Sometimes I can be insatiable but not in I’ve maxed my credit cards to the limit and am hiding from their reminder phone calls way, just in the sheer thrill of being able to afford something nice and new kind of way. I spent so long depriving myself of these simple pleasures because any of my available funds were being channeled elsewhere and that elsewhere was certainly not for the latest pair of low rise jeans. In hindsight, I am appalled at myself. At no other time of my life would I have allowed myself to wear the same solitary shoes for three yeas straight except during my years of heavy and active addiction.

I think part of the reason that I’ve managed to buy twelve new pairs of shoes since I started my new job this past May has been a reminder of where I am now in relation to where I was then. It is a form of validation for me for some reason, and something very concrete and tangible that is necessary currently. To be honest, I’ve never actually had this many shoes since I was at university and certainly not since I became a parent but still…While I’m on the subject, I’ve also managed to buy eight new pairs of pants, seven pairs of jeans, six blouses, three sweaters, eight t shirts and seven tank tops. Quite a lot.

Kind of like a completely new wardrobe.Which in a way it is…a completely new wardrobe. I haven’t been entirely frivolous. Many of these purchases were made out of necessity. As many MMT patients can confirm, one of the many possible side effects of methadone can be an increase in weight. I most certainly started to notice a change in my body about five months into the program and since that initial weight gain of about twenty pounds, nothing has managed to make this extra weight budge. I’ve tried carefully watching what I eat because I know it is easy to increase your junk food intake on methadone and still nothing changes. I’m certainly more active now since going back to work. I know breaking my arm last year resulted in me becoming way more sedentary than I would have liked and it seems that I am still paying the price of this.

In my entire life, I’ve never actually been on a diet and even with this added weight I still don’t feel too inclined to start now. I mean its not as if I am some huge beached whale either. I am a size ten which admittedly is not a size one but then I’ve never been that size in my entire life either. It’s just that I’ve also never been a size ten which meant that I didn’t have any clothes that would fit me at this size, hence, another valid reason for satisfying my new urge to shop!

I must take this time to clarify a few things about my shopping also. Anything I have bought has been on sale and I mean reduced at least 75% on sale. Today I purchased six items and except for one of the sweaters which originally retailed for $39.99, the other five originally cost $49.99 each but I only payed a total of $31.80 tax included for these six items. So I am also a savvy shopped. Most of the thrill so far has been getting a killer, can’t beat it anywhere else deal.

Plus I’m not the only one benefiting from all of this either. Both of the girls have had their bedroom entirely redecorated with new curtains, new comforters, new bedding, etc. as well as having their bathroom redone entirely!

More than anything else this is a reminder of where I never, ever want to find myself or my family again. Back then it was so easy to rationalize and convince myself that having a dozen pairs of shoes was positively wasteful and nothing more than empty, conspicuous consumption when in reality it simply illustrated how badly this addiction had actually gotten.

Prohibition: a crippling habit

Nick Davies

December 14, 2006 12:00 PM

Everybody knows, of course, why those women sell themselves out on the streets of Ipswich – because they are heroin addicts. As the front page of the Guardian put it yesterday: “Pock-marked and painfully thin, they all bore the obvious signs of heroin and crack addiction … selling their bodies to feed their crippling habit.”All of that happens to be untrue. Neither of those drugs makes you pock-marked or thin, nor is a drug habit crippling. Nor does it require you to sell your body. All of those things become true only if addicts have the misfortune to live in a society which insists on prohibiting those drugs.

In the case of heroin, all of the side effects which are associated with the drug – all of the disease and death and misery and depravity are the effects not of the drug itself but of the black market on which the government insists that it is sold. So, we have dirty heroin polluted with all kinds of dangerous crap; dirty needles which spread hepatitis and HIV; desperate users who can’t afford to eat or look after themselves; and a never-ending tidal wave of property crime and prostitution.

Pure heroin properly used is a benign drug. It’s worst physical side-effect is constipation. Other drugs, like cannabis and cocaine do have some bad side-effects, but always and everywhere it is true that no drug becomes safer when its production and distribution are handed over to criminals. Water would become dangerous if we banned it and were forced to drink ditch water from black market dealers. Alcohol did become far more dangerous, when it was prohibited in the United States and brewed with methylated spirits which attacks the optical nerve (which is why so many of the old blues singers were blind.)

In Holland and Switzerland, where they have been supplying their most prolific addicts with clean heroin, they have proved the virtues of legalization. The average age of addicts in Holland has been rising for years, because they have taken away the black market which sucks in new users as each user deals to his or friends to find funds for
their own habit. The Swiss have published detailed results about the addicts on their scheme, which show them improving in health, employment, family relations, housing, crime – and abstention.

There are really only two kinds of people who support the prohibition of drugs: those who know the truth and, for some political reason, refuse to admit it; and those who genuinely have no idea what they are talking about. Both of them should look at the lives of those women on the pavements of Ipswich and of every other major town in this country; they should look at the lives of the estimated 300,000 chaotic drug users in this country; they should look at the crime boom around them and consider the misery for the drug users themselves and for the communities around them; and they should get on and support legalization of all black market drugs.

Mommy Dearest

I managed to get through Thanksgiving dinner at my mother’s, an event that pretty much had filled me with an amount of dread that defies description. I did this only for my daughter and for no one else. If it wasn’t so important to her, then I would have extended my best and offered some reasonably plausible excuse to explain my absence.

I managed to avoid my mother for near eighteen months – until eleven months ago – but no longer. My daughter was too upset by this and I felt that I wasn’t being fair to her so last November, I did my best to bury the proverbial hatchet. I don’t want to go into great detail right now about how we managed to get to where we are today but I very briefly let me tell you a story which I feel perfectly illustrates my mother’s character as well as helping you to understand what has pretty much been her life long treatment of me, her only daughter.

In 2002, my father was diagnosed with cancer and after his first month of radiation and chemo, he found that he could no longer drive himself to the hospital so he asked me if I could. Now this meant taking him five days a week there and back for approx five months. I didn’t mind doing it although obviously it greatly impacted my life as well as my family’s. Just before Christmas, my father finished with all of his radiation and chemo treatments.

Christmas that year was nice although we knew that my father wasn’t going to get any better regardless of his treatments. By the third week of January I had returned to work full time and tried to settle into a new routine. Less than a week after I was back at work, my father was admitted to the hospital for what ultimately turned out to be the rest of his life. I visited every day which was hard.

I was juggling a new job, my family’s needs plus the demands of my mother. I knew that this was incredibly hard on her. Here was her life partner, a man that had looked after her now since 1956 and she the same. The were truly a magnificent couple and loved each other until the very end. It has always been sad though that my mother was incapable of bringing this beautiful and precious piece over into other areas of her life, her treatment of me in particular. This has always been very much a mystery to me.

To illustrate, when my father finally passed away the second week of March I was overwhelmed with so many different emotions but more than anything else, I felt so very, very tired. The last week of his life, I had spent every night sleeping beside my father in a bed that his nurses had put together for me. The one thing that I wanted to be excused from was having to take my mother to the funeral home the day after his death. Jim and I had taken her there prior to make all the arrangements. I figured as my brother had only visited him twice the whole time he was in hospital, that he and his wife could look after this.

At the time, I didn’t think too much about making this request but for months after, every place that I happened to take my mother whenever she was offered condolences, she told everyone what a rock my brother had been to her and how she wouldn’t have known what to do had he not looked after everything the day after my father’s passing.

No mention of what I had done for five months nor the three months he spent in the hospital, nothing at all, and all of this in front of me, and not just on one occasion, but multiple times.

That pretty much says it all. I could easily go on but I’m not of the mind right now to rehash feelings of bitterness no matter how much she manages to annoy.

Stomach Aches

I’ve no idea what has been bothering my stomach for the past ten days but I am very much growing weary of it. About two weeks ago, the girls came home from school with what appeared to be fall colds. They were sneezing and coughing and generally feeling kind of icky. Of course, I presumed that I would soon follow as I always seem to catch whatever it is that they bring home. I wasn’t wrong. I had this cold about a week and a half ago and I was generally miserable and whiney about the whole thing.

While the cold itself seems to have disappeared, my stomach has not recovered and in fact, seems to be getting worse. Jim says that it is the methadone causing my discomfort and he is probably correct as anytime he is on methadone, he has a terrible battle with the way it affects his stomach. Me, I’ve been oh so lucky so far. Not this time I guess. I doubt that I need to go into graphic detail as I’m sure that anyone remotely familiar with methadone and its potential side affects will know exactly what I am talking about.

I feel yuck though, so there. The only up side to any of this is that it is the Thanksgiving weekend in Canada and Jim and I actually have the whole weekend off, which means that neither one of us is due back to work until Tuesday at 8am!

Beth Alvarado – How I Quit Heroin and Other Toxic Substances

Beth Alvarado - How I Quit Heroin and Other Toxic Substances

I found this article while I was surfing the internet the other day. I think that I did a search for “heroin addiction” at LookSmart’s FURL site. This was just one of the many links my search produced. Normally before reprinting an article, especially an article of such personal and sensitive nature, I attempt to contact the website that the article originated from. Unfortunately when I got to the web site that stores this piece of writing, I could not find any sort of contact info. I’m hoping that perhaps someone from sporkpress might stumble across this entry and contact me. Until I am told otherwise, I plan on keeping the link and this portion of her article online for others to read as I think that it is an important one as well as one that many of us most definitely will be able to relate.

Imagine turning your head and holding your arm out, as if for a blood test. You feel a slight prick, you loosen the tie, and then suddenly this warmth floods up, you feel a rush that begins at the base of your spine and surges up until it explodes in your head, like light. Then, for hours, you float in a bubble of warmth and well-being; dreams as vivid as movies drift before your eyes. This is why people like heroin.

Imagine you no longer feel like an ordinary girl, bland and vulnerable, but like a girl who is daring, an outsider, a risk-taker, one of the guys. This is why I tried it in the first place.

But why is a question junkies never ask. They know why. The question for a junkie, is why not? You have to have a very good reason to give up that rush. After all, you’ve come to love the ritual, even the smell of sulfur, the flame beneath the spoon. You love the liquid lightning that fills your veins and blossoms in your head. You love the dreams, more brilliant with color than anything you’ve seen in life: a car so red its edges are silver in the sunlight, poppies exploding into color, again and again and again, orange, purple, vermilion, the dark velvety center. And then the psychic numbness that envelops you for hours, where you have no worries, no fears, no anxieties, no guilt, no other desires.

So why is not the question. You may as well ask why people have sex—which, as we all know, can have as deadly side-effects as heroin.

I was sixteen when I started. Thin, thin, always dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt, hair long and wild, I imagined I was a bohemian. The rules didn’t apply to me. I didn’t have to attend school to get A’s and B’s. The year was 1970. Janis was still alive, I think, maybe even Morrison and Hendrix. The Civil Rights Bill was six years old. Watts had burned, so had Newark. John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy had all been killed. Vietnam was old news. The Cold War was simply a part of the landscape. We wanted out. Sometimes it seemed as if the world were falling apart. The center was not holding. We were kids, living in the borderlands of Arizona, in a town ringed by missiles. We couldn’t imagine a future. Instead, we shot dope. We ran it across the border. We were falling from idealism to despair. I’d fallen. Needle to the vein. My blond boyfriend from West Texas was threatening suicide and planes like dark predators were circling overhead.

By May of my twentieth year, I had not only grown up, I felt old. I had quit using every toxic substance I’d ever tried. This includes pot, hallucinogens, cocaine, speed and alcohol, none of which required any effort at all to quit, as well as the two that caused me difficulty, heroin and tobacco. I could claim that this makes me an expert, not only on addiction but on recovery, but I am ambivalent about everything: what constitutes addiction, whether physical addiction leads to psychological or visa versa, and whether or not people can be “cured.” Whether addiction is a disease—or a symptom. Part of me believes I was never addicted to anything—and that may be true. I started smoking at fourteen, for instance. Can I really say, that at twenty, I was addicted to nicotine? Likewise, even though I started using heroin at sixteen, I abstained for my entire senior year in high school—instead popping several Percodan every few hours. (My boyfriend, true to his Texan roots, was a Cowboy, but of the Drugstore variety.) Since I used opiates daily for only a few years of my life, was I truly an addict? Perhaps I was on the road to addiction and mercifully waylaid.

I have proof, at least, of physical need: I was cranky as hell whenever I tried to give up smoking and felt withdrawals whenever I tried to quit heroin. Yet physical withdrawals are simply the most obvious manifestation. Addiction is the absence of choice. To illustrate, when I was sixteen, I was sitting in a park when I realized I was out of cigarettes. Upon discovering that fact, I really wanted one—which meant I would have to stand up, walk a block home, scrounge for thirty-five cents (yes, thirty-five), walk two blocks to the discount store, and buy the cigarettes. (This not only gives you an idea of how lazy—or stoned—I was but of the oppressiveness of summer heat in Tucson.) At any rate, I realized that if I quit smoking, I could choose not to take the walk. What liberation! Ever since then, addiction, for me, has meant that a substance compels me to consume it. If I feel like I have to have it—even if, physically, I don’t—then I am addicted.

In some fundamental way, then, it makes little difference if the precious amber liquid is scotch in a glass or heroin in a syringe, if escape comes in a vial of cocaine or is provided by little pills in a prescription bottle. The underlying desire is the same. Perhaps each of us, given the right (or wrong) substance and the right (or wrong) set of circumstances, is a potential addict. After all, you don’t have to be an asthmatic to suffer an asthma attack; you simply have to be exposed to something that will trigger the reaction. And you never know what that something might be.

For this reason, I’ve never blamed my family. My parents were as typical of their WWII generation, with its alcohol use and repression, as I am of the Vietnam generation, with our drug use and penchant for openness. To be fair, my father would never have considered a few highballs a “problem” and my mother would insist that a stiff upper lip is an admirable quality. When I was coming of age, we thought psychedelics would liberate our minds. It never occurred to us that cocaine was dangerous; it certainly wasn’t thought to be addictive. And heroin? Well, they had lied to us about the dangers of every other drug, why should we believe them about this one?

But we should have. And perhaps because we didn’t, the Vietnam War helped spawn a heroin epidemic—at least that’s what they called it when use crossed the border from the ghettos and the barrios into the suburbs. Ironically, my husband, who is Mexican-American, didn’t use when he lived in the barrio; it was only later, after his parents moved the family into a white neighborhood, that he hung out with anyone who was doing drugs heavier than marijuana. All the guys we knew coming back from Nam were strung-out on China white. In the four years I was shooting dope, sixteen people I knew died of drug overdoses. Sixteen people just like me. Middle-class, white. Children of doctors, lawyers, and restaurant owners.

Heroin is pernicious, but whether that’s due to inherent properties of the drug or to the black market lifestyle, we may never know. I don’t suppose there are enough independently wealthy junkies for an accurate survey; I do suppose that bootleggers during Prohibition led equally unhealthy lives. At any rate, according to my brother-in-law, who has been in prison on drug charges three times and who is still on methadone maintenance, many of the (mostly white, middle-class) addicts we knew frequent the same clinic he does, still addicted nearly thirty years later. Only four of us, my husband and myself included, were able to quit in time to make “normal” lives for ourselves. Statistics are equally frightening: only one out of thirty-five addicts will stay clean and sober; some relapse after ten or fifteen years; most become alcoholics; in one study, of the 10% who had “recovered,” half were counted as not relapsing only because they had died. Death as a cure—imagine that! I fit the profile of the addict most likely to stay clean: young, female, addicted for under five years.

This suggests that the longer one uses, the more fierce the psychological addiction, yet we also assume that psychological factors—childhood trauma, history of family dependency, unhealthy living situations, poverty, etc.—make some of us more vulnerable in the first place. A chicken or the egg sort of cycle. Some research indicates that people who get addicted to opiates may already have a deficiency of dopamine in their brains, which predisposes them to addiction to substances like heroin. But whether you’re predisposed or not, if you use heroin with any regularity, you will get addicted because heroin takes over a natural function of brain chemistry: it replaces dopamine. When the heroin stops, no dopamine, your nerves are screaming. Physical addiction is simple. If you don’t do it, you experience pain; since you did it in the first place to alleviate or avoid pain, you just do it again. Basic Pavlovian theory. You know what cures you.

On the other hand, people who have abused drugs like metham-phetamine or cocaine, which stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain, are always left with a need to have that center stimulated. (Ecstasy, as I understand it, like Prozac, increases the amounts of serotonin in the brain and thus causes changes in brain chemistry, at least temporarily.) In other words, even when there is no physiological predisposition to addiction and no physical dependency, because the drug itself causes changes in the brain, those changes can create a strong psychological addiction—in the case of cocaine, to anything that will stimulate the pleasure center. Even sex. So far as I know, cocaine is not physically addictive, only psychologically, but, hey, monkeys will give up food, water, and sex for cocaine. Monkeys will die for cocaine.

No big surprise there. People die for cocaine. I once met a real estate developer who had lost everything, and he had quite a bit to lose, to that white powder. He said, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you you make too much money.”

But back to the monkeys with monkeys on their backs: monkeys who have unlimited access to heroin gradually level out their use. They still eat, they still sleep, they still have sex. They simply do enough heroin to keep from going through withdrawals. This experiment, which I read about in the Stanford Alumna Magazine, was published in the mid-eighties, when cocaine was thought of as nose candy, something one might indulge in at cocktail parties. (Please pause for a moment to consider what that target audience might have been doing in its spare time.) Whatever else the experiment’s purpose, it did prove that there is no “just” to psychological addiction.

Physical addiction, no matter to what substance, seems to be the least of an addict’s problems. There’s methadone for the junkie, Nicorette gum for the smoker. Drunks, speed freaks, crack heads and their brethren coke heads have no choice but to go cold, I guess—although researchers are experimenting with new drugs which affect serotonin levels and seem to reduce the addict’s cravings. But even if you have to take the old-fashioned route and go cold, your body gets over it. People do kick. Some stay clean for years before going back. It’s the psychological pull, the craving, that’s so hard to overcome.

For some people, of course, addiction is a symptom of an underlying disease, clinically known as a dual disorder. For example, many schizophrenics or manic-depressives are addicts; prior to being diagnosed, they used (and became addicted to) illicit drugs in an attempt to balance out a brain chemistry that was naturally out of whack or had been thrown out by trauma. For the rest of us, though, the question is how do you liberate yourself from desire so intense it rules your life? I can answer only for myself.

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