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!

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Story: Part 2

NOW BEAR IN MIND at this time everything about me screamed out "straight" or "square". Although you cannot, of course, tell whether somebody takes drugs merely from their appearance, first impressions are often correct. It's easier, actually, to tell who does not take drugs. And I did not back then. And it pretty much showed ...

My hair was short (and this was a good year or two before close cropped hair lurched into fashion). This was 1991, the era of the rave. Hair tied into stubby pony-tails. White gloves, whistles, fluorescent workmen's jackets. Sportswear. Hooded tops with fractals or puns on household products and foods. Especially "Coke". Cocaine at that time was often uttered in the same breath as "heroin"; "heroin and cocaine". Hardcore. Some of the posher students did do coke, but it was hush-0hush behind closed doors. Speed was way more popular. But the drug of choice at dance parties was a little white pill stamped with a little bird ("doves") or a love heart (because E was the love drug and the hug drug) and so on....

SO THEN - THIS SATRUDAY NIGHT PARTY was to be my kind of official introduction to drugs. I was to bring £15 and ask for "E". From a pitch-black strobe-flickering room emerged noises that sounded to me like aliens being slaughtered under a chainsaw. How anyone could actually enjoy this music was far beyond my comprehension. Anyway... the drug dealing seemed to be gonig on in a small side-room lit by a red light (how cliched can you get?) I asked for "E" - the man said he'd sold out. So I asked for "A" - acid, handed over £5 and received a torn-off piece of blotting paper the size of a postage stamp. I put the whole thing in my mouth and swallowd. Little did I realize how small (and cheap) an acid "trip" actually is. I had just swallowed four at once ...

My introduction to LSD wsa so mindblowingy intense that away from the party, during the peak of the trip in somebody's kitchen, I couldn't understand a word anybody was saying. Lips seemed to utter one thing; yet the most amazing fantstical remarks were over-dubbing everything with randomness about sausages, baked beans and gravy when actually people were supposedly asking me whether I was all right. (I was not.) At one point, crossing a grassy field between "blocks" of the student residences I came to believe I was in New York City. Yellow cabs drove past as plain as today as a crazed gnome juggled skittles in the middle of the street.

These are the amusing parts. It all went badly wrong when I returned to my room to look for something. Already by this stage - so I was told later - my eyes were about as wide as wide eyes can be. Glancing to the wall I realized the poster had turned into a gruesome long-fanged demon. I nearly jumpd out of my skin and for some reason ended up walking through bushes in pitch darkness with space aliens telling me they had been following me. I was running away because I believed they were coming from the sky to beam me up. At one point a lizard-like entity was actually riding my shoulders, laughing in my ear as long-clawed fingers tightened round my throat.

If you're tempted to say to me, "That never happened;" you're right. It didn't. As the Beatles sang in Strawberry Fields, nothing was real. But on such psychedelic drugs anything you imagine becomes "real". So I'd have to disagree because in subjective actuality it did indeed "happen" to me.

Thankfully, because I'd taken the drug in one single dose it did at least peak and taper off in fairly distinct stages and began to lose strength after three or four hours of this nonsense. I was then reduced to the more standard "trippiness" that most people associate with acid. I was still out of it: but the monsters had gone.

At the end of the night I found myself in a rom full of hippies skinning up spliffs as joss-sticks burned. This was the very first time in my life I'd been surrounded by such people. Up until this point they had been a total mystery to me. The room, I remember, was so crowded that there was literally no more leg room at all on the floor.

One girl, who had taken ecstasy, kept jumping up saying how happy she was and dancing to no music at all. She then took to turning the television on and off, to watch the white dot disappear exclaiming "ooo" and "aaa". (TVs with disappearing dots! Those were the days!)

Even though I was tripping, I found it sordid to watch someone so carried away by the experience of drugs.

When the music did come on it was a track specially for me and I still remember it to this day: Oceanic's Dream Tripper ...

So that was my introduction to drugs. Lost and depressed afterwards, I realized that none of the friends I'd met thus far had any experience of the drug I'd taken so I took to hanging out with the new crowd I'd met last weekend - more for the sense of solidarity than anything else. Also, in someone's room, somewhere, there was a big hash-smoking session every night which put me in my element. I quickly got a liking for being stoned, although it sometimes brought back the LSD experience. One night I was trying to run the tap: I remember standing transfixed as water droplets held still in mid-air like glittering spheres, then, as they hit the sink, burst into crown shapes ... Never before or since have I seen this phenomenon with my naked eyes.

As soon as they threw another party I was back there. This time I did get my hands on ecstasy. And when the music came out of the speakers in a vector-pointed sphere I thought, "Wow! This tune really is 3D!" - not realizing it was actually a first effect of the drug. The full effects really hit me under the strobe light in the middle of the dancefloor when I suddenly realized I was experiencing a vivid, rushing feeling of happiness. I had never felt joy so intensely before. The music was suddenly wonderful, and far from being self-conscious I actually fond myself dancing. Hours seemed to pass in a delirious dream of flashing lights and music. I felt like I was shimmering with pixie-dust from the inside. Somehow, somewhere, I managed to catch hold of one thought because suddenly a lot of things made sense: "Ah - this is why people take drugs!" And a lot of mentholated people were hugging me. Which kind of throws on its head for me that NA phrase "hugs not drugs" because as the saying went "Everything starts with an E" - it certainly did for me - E for Ecstasy, the Hug Drug.

For months afterwards I found myself living in a netherworld split between starry-eyed fantasy of rainbows, cosmic nebulae and friends across the universe in unity and a bleak and grey reality of a university course that did nothing for me. Compounding this it took me a long time to make many real friends, though I always had people to take drugs with. Plus I was haunted with an overwhelming feeling of wanting to be somewhere else all the time.

The one philosophy I knew (or the excuse I went with) said that if you fall off a horse the only thing to do is get right back on it. Which is why despite such a bad trip I did take acid again and again and again ... Ecstasy gave me horrific comedowns but I persisted with that, too. Speed I discovered I could take during the day on no special occasion and a bland afternoon seemed suddenly exciting. The downside of all this came afterwards. Payback time. A chemical overdraft that had to be worked off. Lying in bed so badly drained I could barely get across the room for a glass of water, let alone make it to seminars on time.

Eventually, following weeks of non-attendance and an exam where I simply scribbled an obscentiy across the paper and walked out, it became clear that the only thing I could do with this course was drop out of it.

I spent months in an unemployable stupor of depression. When I smoked cannabis I got so paranoid I felt the world was coming to an end. I gave up the spliffs when I got an office job. And there was neither time nor the chance to take anything else. My head had got so messed up I didn't realize it was unusual to spontaneously see visions of flowers springing up from the kitchen floor...

For a time, with cannabis put to one side and ony very occasional ecstasy, I almost managed to put life on track. One autumn a friend and I taught ourselves the art of magic mushroom picking, and so a new diversion was discovered. Mushrooms were indeed fun. Way more fun than acid had ever been, and much much easier to control the dose (one piece of paper, less than a cm square imprinted with how much LSD? You didn't know until it was too late sometimes ...) I must say, however, that I did use these mushrooms infrequently and in moderation. My system should have been pretty clean ...

But I became increasingly run down and tired. Eventually I realized I was not merely tied but ill. The doctor diagnosed "post-viral fatigue syndrome" a diagnosis later amended to "chronic fatigue syndrome" (CFS). In despair I upped sticks and moved to London.

London, of course, is where I eventually found heroin.

To be continued ...

21 comments:

Inexplicable DeVice said...

I would have RSVPed but seeing as I'm already here...

Wow! So that's what happens. It makes me wonder, though, what would happen if someone with no imagination took something?

Right. Just off to read some of the back catalogue.

Anonymous said...

if you've got no imagination you look at the trees and say "oh they look a bit sparklier, a bit different" if you have got imagination you're too far 'cross the other side of the universe to be bothered by such talk

Nicole said...

This is such a fabulous read. You must write these memoirs and send a manuscript to a publisher.

Nicole said...

P.S. I really like how you've categorised the links section.

Audrey said...

I agree with Nicole, the way you write is very powerful, very moving, very real. It grabs interest and attention and educates in the process. You have a great gift as well as an addiction. I also believe it takes great courage to share at this level..Thank you x Auds

CG said...

You are incredibly honest and you have real talent for making people understand how things were for you. You write so well.

Welshcakes Limoncello said...

Gledwood, I am amazed and impressed by your honesty. Your writing could do more to dissuade people from taking "drugs" [I use the term loosely because of course alcohol and other "legal" substances are also drugs] than anything else I have read - and, as a child of the 60s, I have read, and seen, a lot! You pull no punches - you say it was good where it was good - and I admire you, Gledwood.

robkroese said...

Wow, this was fascinating.

Sharon Brumfield said...

Stopping by to see how you are doing.

Oceanshaman said...

Gled,

Keep this up . . .

Get it out . . .

Keep on sharing . . .

We're with you . . .

Kao said...

wow!!! and again: wow!!!!


man this is just amazing, the way you explained everthing.. i keep this phrase "everything starts with E" that just defines what happende i guess... this is kind of a catch phrase, or the tittle of a book (mybe it is and I don't know)

but... I do hope you can go out of this addcition... I hope the phrase "noone ever really quits" don't fullfil on your experience...

and... well ]i had another dose of my own drug: anger... read my blog to figure out what an ass I've been...

c ya!

The one said...

Hi Gledwood

Hows it going? I am having a rough time so sorry I haven't replied to your blog recently.

I agree with others. Your writing is wonderful! A book of your experiences would be very fine indeed. Why not go on a detox and start your book there?

all the best
sadgirl x

Puss-in-Boots said...

That is a very sad experience, Gleds. It's the happiness that's so addictive and of course the drug is the only way to get that feeling.

A lot of things you have written about I could relate to as far as my brother is concerned.

Oh, hell...drugs are a curse, aren't they?

Take care, Gleds.

Akelamalu said...

I find this very frightening.

Gledwood said...

Nicole: if they took it I would get it published, yeah

Audrey: gotta get over the addiction for the gift to flourish. That is the truth, though

CG: thanks!

Welshcakes: they say the early 90s was the "second summer of love" ~ haha!

Diesel, Sharon, Shaman many thanxx

Kao: "Everything starts with an E" was the title of a record I think at the time... certainly the phrase was banded about alot, but I don't remember the specific record (though I guess I ought to, it was probably from the year before I started ....)

Sadgirl: That is a good idea. Did you realize I started writing the story because of you? You asked for it

Puss: yes the happiness is addictive. You're dead right. Nobody would get addicted to anything that made them feel horrible

Akelamalu: I found drugs frightening until I really got used to them. That's the truth! I specially hated scoring heroin. The people involved were like baby gangstas ... know what I mean ...

Audrey said...

Perhaps, Gleds to its full potential, but its there and it belongs with you, that gift, right now, alive and well in spite of the addiction. Warmest wishes x Auds

The one said...

Hi again Gledwood.

Me encouraging you! Blushes! Do I get a percentage when you're published?LOL!Seriously Gledwood its not just me admiring your writing. And theres a big market for confessional lit. There is a book called the Writers Directory 2007 which would help you. You might get it from your local library. You know your rehab could be part of your book! Also when you're clean you could get some income in being a drugs expert and be paid to talk to young people about it all to dissuade them from starting stuff. Just afew ideas. Oh and i did a degree in English and read all sorts of stuff. Theres a bit of magic in your style Gledwood so don't stop writing whatever!

all the best
sad x

Anonymous said...

Audrey: Yeah you're right actually I suppose there are people who have done pretty creative things whilst on the 'eroin ...

Sadgirl: I know the Writers and Artists ... have to get an agent, don't I ... also type up a complete and proper "MS" as they like to call it ... don't I? Unless they'll take it handwritten on bogroll haha!!

Anonymous said...

holy moly gled...I've missed some great stuff here. Don't know how that happened but will be back after work to get "caught up". I got a little distracted with "Facebook", a new place that I've entered. Will tell you about it later.

Anonymous said...

I look forward to hearing these mysterious things, Debs.....

Andree said...

People without addictions find it difficult to understand how easily one slips into it. In the eighties I went to a party where there was cocaine. I was invited to try some. But I had been lectured my whole life on the evils of alcohol because of an alcoholic mother. And I knew how easily and how strongly I became hooked on cigarettes. So cocaine scared me. I felt I would be an addict after one dose.

I will continue reading tomorrow. It is very late here.

You are a brave man.

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