HAMSTERS & HEROIN: Not all junkies are purse-snatching grandmother-killing psychos. I'm keeping this blog to bear witness to that fact.

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DIARY OF A SLOWLY RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICT

I used to take heroin at every opportunity, for over 10 years, now I just take methadone which supposedly "stabilizes" me though I feel more destabilized than ever before despite having been relatively well behaved since late November/early December 2010... and VERY ANGRY about this when I let it get to me so I try not to.

I was told by a mental health nurse that my heroin addiction was "self medication" for a mood disorder that has recently become severe enough to cause psychotic episodes. As well as methadone I take antipsychotics daily. Despite my problems I consider myself a very sane person. My priority is to attain stability. I go to Narcotics Anonymous because I "want what they have" ~ Serenity.

My old blog used to say "candid confessions of a heroin and crack cocaine addict" how come that one comes up when I google "heroin blog" and not this one. THIS IS MY BLOG. I don't flatter myself that every reader knows everything about me and follows closely every single word every day which is why I repeat myself. Most of that is for your benefit not mine.

This is my own private diary, my journal. It is aimed at impressing no-one. It is kept for my own benefit to show where I have been and hopefully to put off somebody somewhere from ever getting into the awful mess I did and still cannot crawl out of. Despite no drugs. I still drink, I'm currently working on reducing my alcohol intake to zero.

If you have something to say you are welcome to comment. Frankness I can handle. Timewasters should try their own suggestions on themselves before wasting time thinking of ME.

PS After years of waxing and waning "mental" symptoms that made me think I had depression and possibly mild bipolar I now have found out I'm schizoaffective. My mood has been constantly "cycling" since December 2010. Mostly towards mania (an excited non-druggy "high"). For me, schizoaffective means bipolar with (sometimes severe)
mania and flashes of depression (occasionally severe) with bits of schizophrenia chucked on top. You could see it as bipolar manic-depression with sparkly knobs on ... I'm on antipsychotic pills but currently no mood stabilizer. I quite enjoy being a bit manic it gives the feelings of confidence and excitement people say they use cocaine for. But this is natural and it's free, so I don't see my "illness" as a downer. It does, however, make life exceedingly hard to engage with...

PPS The "elevated mood" is long gone. Now I'm depressed. Forget any ideas of "happiness" I have given up heroin and want OFF methadone as quick as humanly possible. I'm fed up of being a drug addict. Sick to death of it. I wanna be CLEAN!!!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Have a Break?

HI I KNOW I'VE NOT BEEN ABOUT FOR A COUPLE OF DAYS... was so overwhelmed by my National Gallery experience... what am I saying? In actuality I've been lost in thought, making a plan. I'm good at making plans -- and I do actually do them sometimes ... this one involves other people's co-operation. I was going to say "help" but that isn't it at all. But I need other people's co-operation. So I'm looking into what precisely I have to do to put this plan into operation. Then I'll get back to you. I won't bother saying what it is till I'm actually some way to doing it as so much of this blog has been hot air, I feel. I know most of my readers are nonaddicts: but the addict among you will know only too well the dreadful prevaracation of which we're all guilty. Being addicted to hard drugs puts your will in a balance, so however much you say (and mean it) that you might want to give it a rest or a break or stop doing it or come off or quit; the brain and body's instinctive urge to use (and this is how the drugs have hijacked one's system) out-pulls any rational "reasoning" we might do and the drugs win (yet again ...) Which is why stopping opiates or heavy drugs like crystal meth or cocaine, especially when one has been hooked for several years, is very often something that benefits from professional help ... or else supremely good planning and extraordinary willpower plus ideally (if not essentially) huge amounts of support from those around you. Which is why, though I have got very tired of my situation, I'm loath to say "I want to quit" because I got into "treatment" twice in one year a few years back, for all what I believed to be the right reason (to cease tormenting my family, as much as anything ...) and I daily was hitting the so-called "rock bottom" at one point, telling myself "I can't go on, I can't go on like this" ... and every day, between my morning hit and the afternoon dose I always took, however hopeless things looked by mid-evening that I was never going to make enough money to get any more to solve the crisis to hold me throughout the night and into the next morning I always somehow did (and I always had a hopeless attitude to it all. Nothing ever seemed easy, straightforward, all systems go. Even when I did have the money I went through a mental routine ... "the dealer's never going to come" (that IS how most of them make you feel, driving round delivering all over the place, lying constantly about how long they're going to be and where they actually are. Anyone who's ridden round in a car with a London dealer can vouch that this is true. (Though I hear in the United States it's not so bad.)) ... then the dealer DID come and it wasn't as if I didn't know a half dozen others I'd met that week plus ten more who for various reasons I kept only for emergencies; but it always seemed to be getting late or I was out of my normal area and would have to travel miles to meet the other guy ... which brings me to the next point, my "gear" has always been sacred to me; I WILL NOT accept tiny bags or rubbish. Nearly every time I've allowed someone else to talk me into using their "man" I've been disappointed ... once the gear had actually came my mind flipped into a new stew: "it's gonna be small, it's gonna be weak" something had to be wrong. The journey home to Nutnut's house where I was staying during the most intense period of all this, when I couldn't get up, eat, sleep or function really without having a "hit" first seemed to take forever. I'd ride the bus up to near her beautiful home (no bus ever went direct) mentally cursing the driver not to bother stopping for anybody else, ignore the traffic lights, step on it, come ON drive full-on ... finally to get there, straight to the bathroom, cursing the water now for not filling the works quickly enough, the lighter for not heating my spoon fast enough, the hit for not cooling quick enough, my veins for misbehaving ... then finally ... at long last as dark blood rushed into brown gear then brown gear was plugged back into veins ... finally, a thirty-second wait and at last, at long, long last everything was okay and I'd think to myself:--

WHAT NOW??!?

5 comments:

RUTH said...

Keeping us in suspense are you re: your plan...is it a "Baldric" type "cunning" plan?
Rx

Anonymous said...

Yeah but hopefully it will WORK!!!

Deb said...

to be cont'd...... ;) Hey Gled.

Women on the Verge said...

I hope everything pans out exactly the way you hope!!!

ethel

Edyta said...

"and extraordinary willpower plus ideally (if not essentially) huge amounts of support from those around you."
Hope you didnt mind me quoting you. I SO AGREE with that.

I WANT OFF METHADONE AS QUICK AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE!

METHADONE ~ A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH







Heroin Shortage: News

If you are looking for the British Heroin Drought post, click here; the latest word is in the comments.







Christiane F

"Wir, Kinder vom Bahnhoff Zoo" by "Christiane F", memoir of a teenage heroin addict and prostitute, was a massive bestseller in Europe and is now a set text in German schools. Bahnhoff Zoo was, until recently, Berlin's central railway station. A kind of equivalent (in more ways than one) to London's King's Cross... Of course my local library doesn't have it. So I'm going to have to order it through a bookshop and plough through the text in German. I asked my druggieworker Maple Syrup, who is Italiana how she learned English and she said reading books is the best way. CHRISTIANE F: TRAILER You can watch the entire 120-min movie in 12 parts at my Random blog. Every section EXCEPT part one is subtitled in English (sorry: but if you skip past you still get the gist) ~ to watch it all click HERE.

To See Gledwood's Entire Blog...

DID you find my blog via a Google or other search? Are you stuck on a post dated some time ago? Do you want to read Gledwood Volume 2 right from "the top" ~ ie from today?
If so click here and you'll get to the most recent post immediately!

Drugs Videos

Most of these come from my Random blog, which is an electronic scrapbook of stuff I thought I might like to view at some time or other. For those who want to view stuff on drugs I've collected the very best links here. Unless otherwise stated these are full-length features, usually an hour or more.

If you have a slow connexion and are unused to viewing multiscreen films on Youtube here's what to do: click the first one and play on mute, stopping and starting as it does. Then, when it's done, click on Repeat Play and you get the full entertainment without interruption. While you watch screen one, do the same to screens 2, 3 and so on. So as each bit finishes, the next part's ready and waiting.

Mexican Black Tar Heroin: "Dark End"

Khun Sa, whose name meant Prince Prosperous, had been, before his death in the mid 2000s, the world's biggest dealer in China White Heroin: "Lord of the Golden Triangle"

In-depth portrait of the Afghan heroin trade at its very height. Includes heroin-lab bust. "Afghanistan's Fateful Harvest"

Classic miniseries whose title became a catchphrase for the misery of life in East Asian prison. Nicole Kidman plays a privileged middle-class girl set up to mule heroin through Thai customs with the inevitable consequences. This is so long it had to be posted in two parts. "Bangkok Hilton 1" (first 2 hours or so); "Bangkok Hilton 2" (last couple of hours).

Short film: from tapwater-clear H4 in the USA to murky black Afghan brown in Norway: "Heroin Addicts Speak"

Before his untimely death this guy kept a video diary. Here's the hour-long highlights as broadcast on BBC TV: "Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict". Thanks to Noah for the original link.

Some of the most entertaining scenes from Britain's top soap (as much for the poor research as anything else). Not even Phil Mitchell would go from nought to multi-hundred pound binges this fast: "Phil Mitchell on Crack" (just over 5 minutes).

Scientist lady shows us how to cook up gear: "How Much Citric?" Lucky cow: her brown is 70% purity! Oddly we never see her actually do her hit... maybe she got camera shy...

And lastly:

German documentary following a life from teenage addiction to untimely death before the age of 30. The decline in this girl's appearance is truly shocking. "Süchtig: Protokoll einer Hilflosigkeit". Sorry no subtitles; this is here for anyone learning German who's after practice material a little more gripping than Lindenstraße!































Nosey Quiz! Have you ever heard voices when you weren't high on drugs?

Manic Magic

Manic Magic

Gledwood Volume 2: A Heroin Addict's Blog

Copyright 2011 by Gledwood