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!

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Dank

I CANNOT SLEEP PROPERLY. Last night I thought I'd take a sleeping pill (temazepam 20mg), to set my sleep cycle earlier. So much for good intentions: it only made me high. As good a high as heroin. (And very much an acquired taste. Nobody but a junkie could ever feel the blurry, rubbery feeling of benzodiazepines as a "high".)

Still I didn't sleep. I found myself online in a blur. Eventually I got pill number two. I felt rubbery and dizzy and hazy ("high") as I stumbled up to get it. So I decided to be all responsible and bit it in half. The extra 10mg only took over as the previous 20 peaked and faded. An hour or two later I took the other half. Still wide awake, but in bed. If I'd have slept I'd have slept with the computer in my arms, like an electronic baby. At some point I took a third pill, a whole 20mg. My thought process had gone haywire by this time as I left a garbled comment on my own blog (yesterday). At least in my jumbled-up state I had sanity enough to clarify this is what part of me thinks...

Last thing I remember was realizing it was 6am and being distinctly displeased about that. Then I slept through past 4:30. Got up at 5. Ran down the chemist with an hour to spare.

People kept calling me this morning on withheld numbers. I suspect 2 different callers as the pattern of rings before hangup was different. The dealer usually rings a long long time, leaves it then rings an hour later. This person rang and rang a few rings over and over. I wish people wouldn't withhold. When I find out who it was (if it was my friend) I have to explain NOT to do that. The dealer will ask me to jump through a hoop, expecting me to wag my tail and enthusiastically woof "how high, master?!" He wants me to test a piteously small amount of free gear, knowing this would (ordinarily) prompt a phone call within 30 mins asking for a £20 bag if not a gram. This one charges £40 on the gram (too much). A weighed gram always used to be £30. Or £35 tops as 2x0.5g £20s. (2x20=no more than 35 in addict maths!)

In the last few years I noticed the price sneaking higher. I had only one dealer who did giant bags, weighing 0.6 or 0.7g for £20. These were full of B (brown heroin) and packed with lovely benzos as well. It was a £10 hit on one of these that made me miss my friend's funeral. I woke 2 hours later realizing I'd missed it. Then I slept for 12 hours straight. This gear was beige but went midnight black in the works. I tested benzo-positive on a test-card I obtained, hadn't been at the Valium or any other pills. So I knew it was dodgy B setting this off.

Checking my text messages set off the craving that inspired all this junkie information you just read. I got 2 offering 4 bags for £25. Another one saying great new stuff. All this from "Mr 0.6". He's just round the corner. He's also the one who sold me the very last lot of gear I ever took, 3 weeks ago yesterday. £15 bought what looked like 0.4g of crushed paracetamol, cooked up without any vit C and contained a yellowy heroin solution full of mindblowingly potent downers. These downers wiped more than a week, maybe 2 weeks from my memory.

So I could have run round the corner and scored. Instead I glugged my methadone, which was due anyhow (strange how a due methadone dose and heroin-craving coincide, even though methadone's not on my mind). I also popped a temazepam. Well it is Xmas!

What is this? Yet another day without the Killer B? I can't believe it.

I don't exactly feel marvellous, but I am surviving. Just. In a blank, disengaged, not happy way. I'm still here. I only wonder how I will ever move from here somewhere better.

Now the drugs are climbing on I don't want gear so much. Drink, temazepam, methadone. I'm still an addict to my core. An addict who doesn't use Heroin is like a bird that can't fly. I think I'll turn into a furry animal instead. A tubby great hamster, curled in a ball down its burrow, sleeping, slumbering, drowsing all day long.

7 comments:

the guy in the silk taffeta dress said...

Hi Gleds,
This all sounds rough. Craving vs. determination.
I gotta say you must be pretty tough to go through this.
I've been dreaming of finding Xanax's on the street in places I'd tuck them away and gone collecting them, last night I dreamed my sister was on 2000mg of Xanax a day and remember feeling envious in that dream, but honestly, if any of those dreams were true or possible, I'd have to turn away cause I really hate how the psyche docs took me off so fast & let me have seizures and amnesia. When I think of that it makes me never want to depend on high doses again.
Wishing you all the best.
Have a merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year ahead,
always,
j.

Baino said...

Three weeks! Awesome. Have a good Christmas Gleds I'm so, so proud of you even if you do need a little sleeping pill now and then to make things bearable.

Jeannie said...

Think about it after the holidays - these are not times to make major changes - Jan 2 is.

Yes, we have mince pies in Canada but not so much now as when I was little. My mom used to bake up a huge number of them. They weren't my favourite as a child but later I learned to enjoy them. I think, like fruitcake and Christmas pudding, they are an acquired taste. Personally, I'll take the fruitcake first.

Have a Merry Christmas!

Gledwood said...

Hi, THANKS Jeannie! Your comment came through after those other 2. Mince pies I realized I'd never heard an American mention them so I googled them and Wikipedia declared them British. There's even German and Japanese articles on mince pies. Christmas pudding I heard was also British. I once read a Madonna interview and the interviewer said she was quizzed by American customs on what this weird hat-shaped pudding was!

Christmas cake isn't that popular here, probably because it's so heavy and people gorge on heavy food anyway. I remember it as being almost identical to wedding cake. Very nice though.

Mince pies are my favourite. They go with posh custard (room temperature, from a carton, in my opiinion) or thick whipped double cream or best of all vanila or cornish dairy ice cream. Do you have cornish dairy ice cream? It's buttermilk flavour so very similar to vanilla but actually nicer in my view. Yumyumyumyumyummmmmm!!

So are you still in Mehhiko..?

Vincent said...

Hey Gleds, how's it going?

I just read "I also popped a temazepam. Well it is Xmas!" and I had to laugh out loud. You have a good sense of humor that I like :-)

You seem to be doing OK without the heroin. I'm impressed and proud of you mate!

I wanna wish you a wonderful Christmas with love and peace and good sleep.

Take care buddy!

V.

the guy in the silk taffeta dress said...

Gleds,
I don't know.I have some Valium, but I don't use it. I don't get anything out of it, I mean it doesn't sedate me. Maybe the effect takes longer than Xanax.With Xanax, I'm calmed within 20 mins.
I have more issues with the psyche docs than the seizures & amnesia. They put me on a drug that made me diabetic.(until long after I got off it)When I complained, I was told losing weight would lower my blood sugar. I weighed 130 lbs. How much more skeletal did they want me?
What's more is I go out of state for my scripts, because there's an accidental od on my records and they won't give me anything.
I could rant about those docs to no end...
Oh well, sorry for all this complaining in your comments space.
All the best,
j.

Gledwood said...

Vincent: well I did "wobble" yesterday re the heroin. I scored and it was crap. So I barely "used" at all. But use I did. And wiped 3 weeks clean. Aaaakkkkhhhhhhh!!!!!!! But thanks for the wishes.

Taffeta: Doctors are bastards. It took me a long time to realize this, to really grasp it and see that it's true, as I thought I was being grown-up, telling myself that was the addict in me talking. Well it's true. They are bastards. When THEY can't sleep they shluck down sleeping pills. When THEY are in pain they prescribe themselves something really nice. That's why the medical profession is so massively over-represented in the field of addiction. So they're not only Bastards but Raving HYPOCRITES.

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

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