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, November 10, 2010

NA and more drugs...

LAST NIGHT I went to an NA meeting. Two people I know from outside where in there. One was the crackhead who lived downstairs in the madhouse I was in when I started this blog (as opposed to the crackheads and B-smokers Matran the ratman + Laundretta, prostitute extraordinaire, his girlf. (Matran eventually got busted for crack dealing and got our house raided, which I was NOT pleased about and something told me NOT to mention dealing going on in my own home (even though it was a different locked room). But that was a good 3 or more years ago. And I think Matran got deported back to Jamaica. The last thing I remember about this guy was him turning his room upside down. I stepped outside, found the missing rock on our doorstep and ran upstairs to pipe it myself!

The other guy was on gear and crack. The last time I saw him he was in our (dead) friend Lucky's bathroom, sticking a needle in his neck. He is now 18 months clean.

He said one thing that prompted him to give up was dealing with kids on mountain bikes (all over 18, thank God. We did have a big dealer who was FOURTEEN, about 10 years ago. I remember watching my friend score her crack from him. Couldn't help but notice he was being shadowed by someone much older.


When I scored off this individual, which I didn't really want to do but it was after I'd found and consumed 10.5 grams of heroin (3.5g China White, the rest "brown" ~ I weighed the brown on post office scales, it came in at 7g!) over about 5 weeks and got myself (mildly) addicted. When I scored, I noticed a young black boy of about seven come round the corner and eye me up in an obvious way. The drugs are coming! I thought, and I was right. (It was Shamps, the actual dealer who served me, not this little boy.) At this point I had dabbled in heroin, mostly to be "naughty". Nothing to do with rebelling against my parents, who had a horror of drugs, but against my peers, so many of whom thought they were so cool snorting cocaine. And yet crack, which is basically the most efficient way of delivering coke to the brain (feels indistinguishable from cocaine injection) ~ and even more so heroin were utterly taboo. I was informed several times when I broached the subject (admitting nothing) that they didn't want anything to do with anyone who dabbled in heroin. Much less a heroin addict.


I befriended local street addicts who sold cut-price Travelcards each evening at the local tube stop. These cards got you all over London. A zone 1-4 card cost about £4 at the time and the going touted rate was £2 before 8 or 9pm, £1.50 thereafter and £10 £1! after 10.30 or so.

As I say I got to know these people well and found them surprisingly nonjudgemental and more accepting than any other group I had ever met. If I felt miserable I could talk about my woes without being called a buzz-killer, or being thought of as a loser. Because most of my life up to then I had been unhappy. Note I say most, not all. All these people were heroin addicts. One day, I was standing there shivering, because it was cold and someone I knew thought I must be sick. I had £10 on me and they offered to score for me.

I smoked the heroin off tinfoil, which is called running it, or chasing it, or "booting". If you've no habit, you get high within about 2 mins in this way, and you only need about £2.50 worth of top quality gear to put you into dreamland. London street heroin is ordinarily 20-60% pure. A £10 bag weighed 0.2g or a bit more if you're lucky. So £2.50 worth of B would be about 40mg 30mg diamorphine. The bioavailability of smoking from foil is said to be 60% (as opposed to 100% from injecting). So I was taking in about 24mg 18mg at a time. {My maths!} Considering a heart attack patient is ordinarily given 5mg (diamorphine, not morphine, which is weaker) that £2.50 was going a long way. This is one of the seductive things about heroin. Initially it seems to offer fantastic value, Especially compared to crack. And the high goes on for a good 4 hours. If you're "opiate-naive" you feel different even the next day.

I smoked my heroin alone and in secret. None of my "normal" friends knew anything about what I was doing. I was into heroin to get high. It wasn't an image thing and certainly had nothing to do with being "cool". I had two groups of "normal" friends. One lot liked party drugs, the other didn't. Ironically (or perhaps not) it was the straighter people with whom the friendships ran deepest. It was a long time before I used heroin with other heroin users. I did know a mad French girl who injected prescribed methadone amps and crack ~ £15, £20 worth in one hit. The crack at that time was 70-80% pure, so that's 200-300mg neat cocaine in one dose. No wonder she looked like a rabbit in the headlights afterwards. I smoked my crack with her. Because she didn't smoke, I learned the techniques on my own, myself.


When I eventually asked her to inject me with heroin, she insisted I cook it up myself.

Right from the word go I was scoring my own gear when I wanted it. Which was only occasionally. Heroin dealers expect calls every few days at least. So when I rang back a month or so later, I usually had to explain who I was.

The point to all this is that by the time I found that 10.5g stash ~ lying right on the high street in a shop doorway. I thought it was a bag of sweets! ~ everything was already in place. I was already an adept heroin smoker (though I had to snort the China white, it's heroin hydrochloride and doesn't smoke well). I already had a collection of dealers' numbers. I knew at least 6 or 7 heroin addicts who would score for me if I needed them to ~ not just one. So everything was set up for what happened next to seem rather inevitable.

My only reservation in all of this was that I utterly hated the process of scoring. Didn't like dealers. And was unjaded enough to feel the bad vibes that emanated from most of them.

And then I fell in luurve with a junkie. Who was like my twin. Like Kurt and Courtney were twins. And I fell in love with heroin ~ the only drug strong enough to make me genuinely not care about anything ~ more. And the rest is history.

And now I'm drinking cyder, shlucking down chill-pills on top of methadone (methadone has no buzz). And knowing that I probably will throw away at least £10 on the lousy gear that's been around, because I know who's coming to see me today. And this person always wants to score when he sees me...

It's not as bad as it was. But it certainly ain't over yet...

SONIQUE: FEELS SO GOOD

8 comments:

Akelamalu said...

Why are you inviting someone to see you who you know will encourage you to take heroin? That's not the way to give it up is it?

Jeannie said...

You have quite the romance going with heroin. I'm rather glad I'm not so much the adventurous and obsessive type. My life is boring but relatively safer.

Gledwood said...

AKELAMALU: no invitation was issued. It never is. I know I should tell them to get lost but when they are buying that is hard to do. A lot harder than me saying to myself "I can't be bothered and I don't want it".

JEANNIE: curiosity killed the cat. Well 8/9 lives have surely gone!

Syd said...

I hope that you will continue to go to NA meetings and actually have a desire to stay clean. It can be done. I wish that you would really put your intelligence towards staying clean.

Gledwood said...

It ain't intelligence you need to stay clean. It's the will to live ...

Sarah said...

Gledwood, you probably heard about it... if not, it might be interesting for you:
NHS confirmed ALPRAZOLAM sold as heroin in London area.
Let me know if you want more information.
All the best
Sarah

Shorty said...

Jeannie is so right,it does comes across like You have quite the romance going with heroin.But I know it probably doesn't feel like that to you.But thats how it comes across in post.

Gledwood said...

SARAH thanks for the alprazolam tip

SHORTY heroin is the only thing that makes life bearable. Not methadone. Heroin. The sooner the govt realize long term addicts would benefit from what they're addicted TO (not methadone, something completely different) the less we will see pensioners blowing their money on gear, young kids shoplifting etc etc. And the dealers will be out of business. What's so bad about all that.

I didn't used to think this. I used to think it was the junkie in me wanting to use.

But on reflection this is 100% true. Like it or not. And I'm sure most don't like it

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