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!

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Another Yukky Siberian Sunday

I HATE SUNDAYS. I never have any money. They feel dragged-out and boring; all I want to do is use.

While I'm on that topic let me state clearly: I still don't think I'm ready to stop. The best I can hope for is to do what the old age pensioners I know still using do: to keep it to a bare minimum.

Once I was addicted to the heroin (and remember I was in my late 20s by the time it turned round and got me), I gravitated in general to people who were older than me. All of these had given up "grafting" (kiting (that is: cheque and card fraud) or bombing round shops "relieving" them of vast quantities of alcohol and other desirables... One of them, my now dead friend Lucky was dealing when I met her. I had phoned a massive Jamaican who had driven twice past me. So when I phoned him again he said "me friend comin' out for ya" and a tiny grey-haired woman appeared cooing "yoo-hoo!" That was Lucky and the beginning of a 10-year friendship. Though I was careful not to get too close. I noticed that over these years I was just about the ONLY person there at the beginning still there at the end. I don't know what it was: it certainly was nothing sexual, but she filled her flat with younger men who I suppose looked up to her. One actually called her "Ma" and she loved that. He died of a heart attack in her lift after running from a security guard. Of course the fact that he was high on crack didn't help save him...

Anyway the point I was making was, people who only told me crime "wasn't worth it" saved me from getting in far out of my depth.

I don't know I'd ever have made a good enough criminal anyway. I'd always be thinking fingerprints, DNA, cameras, focusing on what could go wrong. I'd never be able to relax into it...

I'm not trying to claim I have not been drawn into various indiscretions over the years because I have. But I hated stealing. I don't even like lying. I made my money by begging and when I wasn't begging (and am not begging) I find myself still a raging junkie but in semi-retirement...

Re: the illustrations: top L is probably from a "safer injecting room" bottom L shows a Middle-Eastern man "chasing" his gear. Our gear in Europe comes as (smokable) middle-eastern heroin base and this is how you smoke it... Top R appears to be a pretty good batch of "B" (Afghan brown heroin base)... Bottom R: no it's not Christmas cake mixture, that would be "Mexican black tar", a product every bit as bad for injection as our "B" and similarly smokable...

Incidentally if you're wondering about heroin smoking: brown or white powdery or solid with a bitter, musty "opium" smell that melts into a transparent blob and runs along tinfoil: that is smokable heroin. Heroin hydrochloride smells of vinegar. This is more readily water-soluble (without citric acid or vit C) and not good to smoke... The exception to this is Mexican tar, which, so I'm told does smell of vinegar and yet ~due perhaps to its high content of opium residues ~ can still be smoked...

I'm posting this here in the name of harm-reduction, kids. Smoking equals no needles equals reduced threat of catching anything...

PS Following yesterday, here's the best link on that most mysterious drug, ketamine...

I don't know what else I was going to say here ~ but here's three videos of note:

SPARKY THE SWEARING PARROT

The full-blown Scottish accent's subtitled for those Americans who might be otherwise confounded...




THE GRAVE

THIS is my second-favourite Don McLean song, here montaged to WW1 footage... Very depressing... look at the state of all those trees ...




EVERYTIME ~ BRITNEY SUICIDE VERSION

I WONDER WHAT POSSESSED her to make a video marking her own death like this?... And several years before all that drugs-and-coot-head trauma...


13 comments:

Akelamalu said...

Well giving me all this information is certainly putting me off ever trying heroin, not that I contemplated it, you know what I mean.

I keep hoping you will wake up one morning and find the will to give it up. :(

Anonymous said...

I really do too...
The will to stop means more than repeatedly entertaining the thought of quitting. That might be enough to stop taking sugar in tea or something, but is nowhere near enough for heroin

Why o why i was ever stupid enough to start taking that shit really is beyond me...

Baino said...

We have an injecting room in Sydney. By far the safest way to do smack with medical help on hand and clean needles. We have a needle exchange too. You need a Sunday distraction then you won't dwell on it as much and might even get through Monday's.

Melody Lee said...

You can smoke tar, I wouldn't reccomend it but it's pretty common in Cali. Every time I had to do it, it was the last resort and it felt like such a waste. Extenuating circumstances!

Gledwood said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Gledwood said...

BAINO: I hope so

MELODY: Thanks for telling me that. Surely you must lose a lot? Maybe it's the gummy opium remnant makes it worthwhile.... Chasing our kind of brown is about half as strong as skinpopping.

We still get white gear you can smoke occasionally ~ a few years ago it used to be more commonplace; but my friend Pascal went crazy when he dropped China white on the foil ~ unknowingly ~ and the entire lot frazzled up on him!!

Anonymous said...

I've never smoked Heroin. I went from snorting pills, such as Oxycontin 80mgs, to shooting Hydromorphone 8mgs, to shooting Mexican Black Tar Heroin. If you miss when shooting the black tar, you almost for sure going to get an abscess. So finding a good vein, which is hard to do on me, even when I was skinny, and had never shot dope before, my veins are deep, and small. I had to go in my hand, and now all the veins in my hand are fucked, and I can't use them, so now I have to go in my wrist, which is painful, but worth it...if it weren't for the methadone, I would get high, and have no abscess's.
I was always told that smoking H is a huge wast of money.

Have you ever shot up morphine, you know how it gets all gooey, and its hard to get the liquid out, and you have to take one shot, and then boil up the goo again, and do that shot, and keep doing it until you have gotten all the Morphine out of it?
Well I have, and first of all i hate shoot Morphine, first and foremost, I hate that pins and needles feeling, it hurts and burns, and it makes my head throb. its almost like cotton fever, so I think I'm allergic to Morphine, but if take the pill orally I get high. It takes a bit longer to get high, but I don't get pins and needles, burning, head throbbing pain,
So I wonder, if you smash up a 200mg morphine pill...time released, and put water on it, and let it get to its gooey substance, could you smoke it, and get high off it?
I never tried it, because I didn't want to wast the Morphine pill, in case I got sick, and if I smoked and it didn't work, I'd be fucked.

Why can't I ask a question in a simple, shot manner? My questions are always long drawn out, pointless nonsense, and take forever to get to the actual question.
I'm sorry glendwood.
You did a good thing, keeping at least one person off the needle is a good thing. You may have saved a life with this post.

Puss-in-Boots said...

Well, I always thought heroin was what powder and I often wondered how it was injected. Now I know.

As for that budgie...goodness me. Obviously he gets it from his owner...

Gledwood said...

PUSS IN BOOTS: in Australia, so I hear the heroin was traditionally such high-grade "China white" you just stirred it cold into water, filtered through something as thin as the corner of an alcohol swab and that's that... with "brown" you add about half as much vitamin C, about half to 2/3 of a 1ml syringe of water and cook by bringing briefly to the boil under a cig lighter. The result will be usually a deep brown liquid which you filter through a cotton-bud end or a cut off half-cm cigarette filter halved again... it's not of course "injection quality" so the acid burns veins and prickles a lot if you skinpopped it or missed...

BUDGIE?? Come on it would be a bloody huge budgerigar!!... that's a parrot!... (African grey? surely ?? come on you're the Aussie the parrot experts. You have them flying abour your back gardens. OK not "African" ones but y'know what I mean...

Gledwood said...

ANNA GRACE: I'm thankful for nice long comments bc for 1 thing at least I'm not the only one leaving them...

that pins and needles we get from "morphiney gear"... it's a sign of a good hit on "B" when you get that. i had it this morning... all across my forehead and temples though it dan strike anywhere... backs of my ears... my back...

1st time I injected myself IV I bought a good £5 worth of white rock heroin. this guy had bought a "sixteenth" (of an ounce) so he did me a good deal as he got beer & cig money/etc back from me I thought "this is too small to skinpop" (as I used to do at the time) so with pounding heart I held still and pushed it into the crook of my arm... bingo! it blood rushed in as I pulled back... I pushed in and the felt like I was running through stinging nettles naked ~ a feeling of course that fades within 2 mins and the heroin cushions it out...

those "Dilaudid" and morphine 200mg pills don't go around the junkie scene seemingly anything like as much here as they do in America. When we want "opes" we buy v readily available heroin.

The 2 alternatives were "DFs" (dihydrocodeine) that nobody bothered shooting up bc it was 30mg per pill and you need 4 every 4 hours typically they say each pill is equiv 4mg methadone... or methadone itself as a 1mg/1ml green linctus NOT worth injecting in that weak a solution though of course it holds you nicely round the clock

I was wondering about smoking "tar" I'm not a chemist but our heroin NEVER smells of vinegar ~ which is supposed to be a sign it's heroin salts not base. Being as we nearly always get base here we're used to its properties: these being as described yesterday, it rolls down foil and you inhale vapours.

This is about 50% as strong as skinpopping and so well worth doing. Lots of people never get beyond smoking it.

You can also smoke off a crack bottle not with ashes but with squiggly washing-up gauze on top. THIS I think really is weak and for people who cannot even coordinate hand-eye to "run" gear along foil. I've never except ONCE seen anybody look really intoxicated from smoking this way...

I would suspect, from what I hear, that "black tar" smokers are getting less off it than we get off brown which is MEANT to be smoked ~ that's why it's washed 3 times rather than 4 (hence the name "number 4" China white) which is straight injection quality gear...

I don't think you could smoke a morphine pill...

If you click my sidebar (top) you'll get the info I base my current knowledge on... but at the beginning of heroin manufacture you get a product called "brown morphine base" which you CAN smoke... medicinal morphine is sulphate or sulfate this is water soluble and if the normal rule applies base=smokable, salts = injectable and not good for smoking

Liz Hinds said...

I did - I thought it was Christmas pudding!

Did I tell you - i don't think I did about a man in Zac's? He was trying to get into rehab but he said, 'I have no problem stopping. I can stop at any time. But then I start again. That's my problem.' Which seems to me to be saying he's not ready to give up because he hasn't recognised that he's not stopping when he thinks he is. If that makes any sense.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the comment on my blog. I think it's great you are documenting your addiction, I just hope the people who need to read it find it.

Good luck :o)

PS as for t'moors, aye we go for a ramble bar t'at every now and again!

Syd said...

I hope that you get off the stuff. I guess that I just don't have the "addictive" personality. Thank God for 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