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 13, 2011

Chez Valium Marilyn

WE DID some shit where she was turning her house over TV burglar stylee trying to find this post office card for her and temazepam for me. At first I thought she was shamming the temazepam one but she did come up with a whole load of empty temazepam 20 strips which we had to check carefully in case she'd done a me and left one in there, but nothing

why the hell did I think I needed temazepam? I don't NEED to sleep. That's a human weakness, sleep. The more you sleep the lower you get. Also sleep repairs the body so the less you sleep the quicker you die and turn into a Proper Human Being ie an energy discarnate being. Which is what I want to be anyway I hate having a body. Why do you think I liked ketamine so much? Puts you out of body (out of mind for that matter) best drug ever for those interested in hanging off the edge of the universe not even knowing you are "a person" with "a name" and "a life"... it feels awful weird when you come back and realize you're you and who you are. That's the ketamine trip: WAY superior to acid where you have to deal with a million and one buzz killers like people you don't want to deal with, keys, money, going home etc. On ketamine you're lying on the floor in the dark in the recovery position and whether anybody else is there or not is immaterial as you're tripping right into outer space alone. FAR FAR FAR better than LSD ever could be.

How did I get on to ketamine? O yeah because it makes you forget your name which I do when I'm out of it. Or did last week the week before when people were talking about me and I kept going "who?" they were in the front seat I was in the back thankfully I kept my big mouth shut and didn't say "who?!" aloud. Or "are we going to a rave?" which i kept thinking all the time as I felt like I was off my tits on E. Hadn't taken anything, just a yummy manic thing going on as it is now.

Well I told Mar how to get her replacement PO card, complete with phone number 08457 22 33 44 wow I actually remember something. My mind has become dangerously seive-like lately I barely seem to recall anything of any technical nature at all. E.g. what people's names are. I don't know why as it's not like I'm senile is it. Or drunk. Or on drugs. Or in drug withdrawal. Just to spell it out to anyone STILL convinced I'm on drugs. I'M NOT ON DRUGS I only take methadone (prescribed) and the odd sleeper (not always prescribed). And no I don't take 8 at once at 3 in the afternoon. That's Valium Marilyn's style, not mine. And she complains that benzos make her depressed. No wonder. A benzo "high" is you FIGHTING AGAINST the effects of these fuckers which push you down, so you're struggling against them, otherwise you'd conk out unconscious. Not much of a high is it?

She gave me a whole load of food and £1.30 which is enough for the cherry flavour mandy cyder I drink now: 4.5% alcohol in half litre tins. It has to be flavoured like soft drinks to destroy the alcohol association otherwise it's going to be harder to stop altogether. Plus you can water flavoured stuff up with more soft drinks which is what I'll have to do in the very end.

I hope she does actually sort her card out. She thinks someone else has it complete with pin number and is terrified this bastard will take out all her money at 00:30 hours when it clears. (I know the exact time because I used to call my dealer at 00:31!)

I was on such a buzz when I left all the good things are happening now. Things sound weird, I have 2 voices in my head both me speaking out of sync, Valium Marilyn was talking in my head all the way down the road. My mood is peaking and my head racing like the clappers. This means I'm in a REALLY good mood now. No wonder I couldn't sleep. My crappy body might have wanted to but my mind needs no sleep whatsoever.

Walking home felt so good. Now I've drunk that cherry rubbish and it's brought me down. Alcohol is a depressant as they lie. Yes it is associated with depression but heroin is a CNS depressant too and that's ANTIdepressant in its action. The misery of heroin addiction might be exacerbated by heroin's mood-flattening effects too. I never felt much of a buzz off life when I was on heroin until the later years when I suddenly realized a few times that I was buzzing so much (on a coke-type high and this after I'd not had crack) I couldn't stop talking rubbish to my hamsters. I know I must have been buzzing now, because I kept talking to them when they were dead. Not that I thought they were alive, I mean the crap I used to say to them about being "furry and small" and "really tiny" with "poppy eyes" etc etc etc was totally ingrained in my head and I just wanted to say furry furry furry furry furry furry furry actually "furry swine" was my favourite one then I said that in German and it apparently means "furry bastard" and nearly caused an International Incident on my Deutscher Blog.

Well I can't explain my cuckoo clock life. I'm just really glad to be like this it's SO FAR BETTER than boring old normality I just cannot explain. Why do you think I keep saying I don't want to sleep? Because it will depress me and I've been depressed for years (so hopefully I'll be high for years now to make up for it!) and because a psychiatrist's idea of normality appears to be lying miserable in a bath of cold water feeling like shit but judged to be OK because you can still blink and breathe. It was psychiatrists who said methadone was a suitable treatment for heroin addiction so I don't trust them at all. Giving methadone to a heroin addict is like convincing a normal human being to take those science fiction food pills they always thought we'd pop in the 21st century. One tablet a day fulfills all your nutritional and calorific requirements. Tastes of nothing and leaves a growlingly empty stomach but you're not lacking energy. Well that's what methadone is to heroin. A very poor substitute. And the reason why we have such full prisons. Even the addicts think it "should" work and they "should" do better, not realizing they're treating an addiction to substance A with substance B and oral methadone has nothing to do with "NHS" and everything to do with puritanical governments who think addicts deserve misery. No other condition, medical or psychiatric is treated with one drug only (when literally any of scores of opiates or opioids could be used in substitution.) Imagine you're freezing cold and someone says to you here I've a raincoat it's 100% waterproof, try this. And it's paper thin. And you say "but it's not raining, it's freezing cold" and true you are slightly less exposed but it's nothing on the floor length fur jobbie you're used to. So they say OK try another layer and you're double waterproofed but it rides up at the sleeves and leaves your legs exposed. But it's a coat. And a fur coat is a coat. But they're not the same. Neither are heroin and methadone. It's unacceptable to be miserable and craving on a treatment that supposedly cures drug addiction. (Methadone has a success rate of 4% frankly I think that's an exaggeration I cannot believe it's that high. I've never known a single person I know stick to methadone without constantly using on top and I've never even heard of anyone I know reducing off it to nothing and staying off drugs. Ever.) They used to give out injectable methadone which would at least leave you miserable with needle marks and given you the buzz of injecting something. But injectable methadone is many times more dangerous than diamorphine so why not give the real thing? See: an utterly fucked up policy. I don't want injectable diamorphine for myself, but everyone else needs that or pharmaceutical smoking base or morphine tablets (which will make you feel like you've had heroin without the initial buzz of taking it) these 3 will do what electric cigarettes, patches and nicotine gum do for smokers. Replaces something tarry and dirty with the pure stuff. As it is, they're replacing a Rolls Royce with a rusty bicycle and wondering why people just will not ride in the rain.

REALITY CHECK: GIVE ADDICTS HEROIN.

OK I'm off. Sorry not to tell you anything gynacological. If you want to talk about any shit you like, just leave a comment. I'm open to anything today.

I don't know what this says by the way. Just ignore it if it's rubbish. If I edit I'll never post anything at all.

5 comments:

Gattina said...

I don't follow anymore I get the impression that you are a walking drugstore.It's about time that spring arrives you are completely upside down.
BTW I don't know if your email is still the hammy thing but I send you an answer on your comment about my cat Arthur

"Don't treat my Arthur as Schwein ! you can say "Schweinchen" ! Schwein is an insult ! Pelziges Schwein doesn't exist in German and means nothing "

I never comment in my own comments and never come back to a post I have read already to read comments on comments !

Merle said...

Hi Gleds ~~Thanks for your visit and hopes that Australia has seen the last of the floods, fires and cyclones for quite some time. And your wish for peace and quiet for Australia.
I wish you could find some peace and quiet in your life my friend. And I don't consider sleep a waste of time. Our bodies regenerate while we sleep and we are better able to face the world.
Take care my friend, Love & Best wishes Merle.

bugerlugs63 said...

hi. my dad speaks german , he used to say schwein hund. apparently that was an insult years an yonks ago(is it pig-dog or somut)
i like the furry swine thing, that made me laf. they r just tiny and furry though aren't they? theres not much more u can say abut them.
i was thinking re; val mar's card. do you have 24hr pst office? as she was concerned someone would cash her money as it went in. we can only do that when post office open?
maybe its different where u r.
o my word i just went downstairs 2 front door as there was a noise and found n my doorstep a huge 14" sq valentine card. on the front there are 2 robo hampers with googly eyes and the eiffel tower in background and loads of hearts and stuff. also huge box lindt chox
all from the hamsters!!!! bless their furry little souls. (their writing is suspiciously like my brothers) bless his soul 2.
anyway sorry i always go off the point, but had 2 tell someone
hope u slept some last night and r buzzing slightly
re; ther anti-psychotics. the only few people i know on them all seem a bit concussed- maybe thats how they stabilize u. yuk!
ther thing was i used to live in france and they dnt run their words together anymore than we do. i uased t come back once a year with a friend who had learnt a bit of english.
i.e. do you want to go out saturday night?
then he would hear
"jer wanna goo wout sa'dy ni ?
all said as one word. and it meant nothing to him.
i think unless u r fluent its hard to understand the spoken, unless they making an effort 2 b understood.
i did have some thing else 2 say but i have prb taken enough of yur time. other peoples comments seem so short, prb cus they follow heaps of blogs. i get carried away. sorry.
really was just 2 say hope u ok today. my "O" key is going, have to really hammer it.
right im ff, catch yer later
have a good un
x

Gledwood said...

Gattina I'm off drugs that's the point! I only took heroin to even me out. Methadone does absolutely nothing to help my mood which is why it shoots high and/or low so much. I don't take heroin. I want everyone else who's addicted to get it free so they won't go through the methadone misery I did. Methadone obviously isn't miserable when you've gone higher than crack on nothing, which is what I did a few weeks ago. That's why that word "bipolar" has reared it's lovely head so many times over the years. Mood swings!

Merle: I think I'm coming down and when I do go down I sleep a LONG time usually so if this down continues: plenty of sleep on the way! I took Valium tonight to chill out so maybe that will help. I took most in the evening as a 2nd rate sleeper (it's nowhere near as good as proper sleeping pills; really it's for anxiety)

Buggerlugz: there's one we know with a hole in the wall where you can withdraw 24-7 you know you can put that card in now and withdraw from a cashpoint. Double check online if you don't believe me (I did, too paranoid about losing the card!) but it definitely works but ONLY in post office cash machines.

languages: I find French really really hard to follow they speak so fast and I learned it longer than anything else they use a HELL of a lot of slang, way way more than English people. English is quite standardized because it's so international whereas French is spoken in Europe, Canada and Africa... kind of more scattered, I suppose. I really would like to speak fluent French properly. Some of my DVDs have French soundtrack so I can practise with them

diazepam said...

I used to get severe panic attacks quite often. I started taking 10mg of Valium three times daily as prescribed by my psychiatrist, and after a year my dose has decreased to 5mg and I have never had another panic attack. Anxiety attack(or panic attacks) are very scary. I had made many trips to the emergency room thinking I was having a heart attack. I had symptoms like sweating, tingling in arms and legs, cold chills in face and a rapid heartbeat, feeling of hysteria, and wishing I would just die and get it over with. Valium saved my life. It is very effective, and I am greatful it works.

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