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, May 31, 2011

No bouncing, loadsa sleep.

IT'S NOW NEARLY 3 in the morning. I slept properly for the first time in days on end. I spent all day fast asleep and got up at 1am. I couldn't sleep whenever it was before I went to bed. Every time I read something (especially written by me) I howled with laughter. Then laughed some more.

My "school report" (below) by the way, comes from a Victorian mental asylum. I just altered the words patient for pupil, hospital for school and physician for teacher and so on. The hilarious stuff is exactly as it was penned by Emil Kraepelin, the author.

So I didn't buy any bouncy balls yesterday. When the urge to bounce hit me full on it was still 5am.

O man I ended up on the streets yesterday didn't I. Running round in circles, bouncing bouncy balls and laughing hysterically. Every time I laughed I felt higher and higher. Then I laughed a bit more. I drank a can of cyder but only for the taste. People sometimes think I'm drunk when I'm like that, but alcohol has never made me behave the way an Elevated Mood might do. I felt Elevated and Paranoid last night. I'm still not depressed, so it's all good. I keep hearing words in my ears when I'm laughing. They make me laugh even more. I know that's probably not good but ~ well who gives a shyte.

I'm watching that film The Good Girl with Jennifer Anniston, Jake Gyllenhaal and the baked potato faced man who plays one of the porno stars in Boogie Nights. My favourite character in The Good Girl is Cheryl the PA system operator at Retail Rodeo superstore who declares: a special offer on drain cleaner, isle 3. "Ladies, shove something clean and new up your filthy pipes and turn it around," o how I laughed and laughed at that one.

Anna Grace is in a giant piss with me I'm sure. Her book is like food at a really posh restaurant. Very good but just not enough of it. Now she hates me for being frank with her. Or she's out of her head on Colombian heroin. Or she's gone too depressed to read or write. Or a million other things. But my head tells me it's GOT to be all about me me MEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

Not a lot else to talk about as I've only been awake for 3 hours or so. I've so far watched the Good Girl twice only today. Twice yesterday though I was too busy laughing at random things to follow it. And I've run out of cup a soups. The chicke and vegetable ones with croutons. O come back to me you crunchy croutons. I could go out and buy ONE packet for £1.29 from my local shop. Or 2 yummy packets for £1.50 when Morrisons opens tomorrow morning. O decisions decisions. Fuck it, I'll get the one NOW. Instant gratification. That's me.

Talking of which: no heroin!

Only had a £10 bag the other day when I was hanging round that bouncy ball shop. The bouncy ball shop is one minute from Heroin Corner you see. Actually what am I saying, there are two bouncy ball shops at two heroin corners. See bouncy balls and heroin must have some connection... what could it be?

Well I'll leave YOU to ponder that one as I can't be bothered. Night night all you boring night sleepers. See ya later. And good afternoon to everyone in Australia.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Giant Bouncy Balls... etc

THE CHIEF INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS' final report into goings-on at my former educational emporium continues. Here we come to vivid descriptions of psychedelic drug-taking amongst the students. Who, I must point out for the benefit of overseas readers, are called pupils in the UK...) The school was closed down shortly after this report was made public. Our acid-tripping headmaster was dragged off to prison. The games teacher was deported. Oh, and the tut-tutting in the village shop!

As for the pupils, most of them ended up mad and shipped off to the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Bloody bunch of tripheads!

Hallucinations usually appear very soon. The pupils
see figures, people with little red caps, black men, cows,
Christ, angels and saints at the altar, " little figures and little
souls," God, the Virgin Mary. The tripping headmaster saw a man in green
bathing-drawers, who was playing with his penis ; a female
pupil saw her supposed loved one lying on her bed at
night. By far the most frequent are auditory hallucinations,
whispering, signals from the air, exclamations, abusive names.
Voices are heard in the sound of the bell, in the chirping of
the birds, in the sounds which animals make ; people speak
about the headmaster and his wife ; there is whispering and
ringing in the walls ; at night there is loud talking in the
room. Sometimes the voices seem to have completely the
character of real perceptions ; the tripper can give their sub-
stance in words and also recognize their supposed author.
Thousands of people threaten and abuse him from the wall,
said a pupil ; another stated that he had got his hearing
from his father and mother ; a third said when he was
brought to the hospital, " The devils of fellows speak here
too!"

In other cases the illusions are more or less sharply dis-
tinguished from sense-impressions. The pupil hears the
voice of God, invisible beings speak, evil spirits let him have
no rest, grossly abuse him : he hears all sorts of things " in
thoughts," has voices for the whole of Europe by the appar-
atus or current ; " Nature speaks to me," said a pupil. The
voices are referred to different places. " There is something
in my ears," declared a pupil ; another heard " memorial "
all day long in her head. *' The words have come out of my
stomach," asserted a male pupil, while a female pupil
heard speaking in her genitals, and another thought she had
a telephone in her feet.

What the voices say is usually unpleasant ; " If I could
only get rid of my hearing ! " exclaimed a pupil on this
account. The pupil hears everything that one says or
thinks about him, that he is going to be executed, beheaded,
that he has committed lese-majeste ; " He is to be got rid of,"
it is said ; there is a war going on. A pupil heard " a mur-
muring," that his brother was dead. Female pupils hear
"immoral stuff"," sexual accusations; forest-whore, married
man's whore, strolling whore; they have committed abortion,
killed a child. Sometimes the voices forbid the pupils to
work. One pupil heard that he was God.

Frequently the pupils' own thoughts are perceived by
others. The people know by the voice-telegraph what the
pupil is thinking ; they speak of his thoughts ; what he
thinks and reads is repeated after him. The pupil answers
silently, speaks with the voices the whole day, converses with
Kaiser Wilhelm, with spirits, carries on dialogues " on the
thought-way through the nostrils." Sometimes also the
thoughts are made ; the pupils must think what others
think ; transference of thought takes place ; " These are
things, they flow to one, and one says them," said a pupil.

Occasionally also other kinds of hallucinations come under
observation, the smell of corpses, the taste .of sulphur in the
food, mephitic air, the feeling of being electrified, pulled at,
of being doubled. " Something wanders about in a wonder-
ful way in my body," said a pupil ; another felt a machine
in her teeth and in her breast ; the taking of the temperature
caused another one pains. A pupil had pain in- his heart
when the post drove by ; another complained, " The cover
smells so loud " ; a third felt " chinks of pain."

Sexual Influences usually play a large part in these
complaints, especially in female pupils. At night women
come ; the pupils feel themselves used sexually from
behind ; their nature is driven off, thrown in their faces.
Women are tormented by " seductive stories," violated at
night, turned into whores ; people wish to practise obscenity
with them. The games teacher has given them desire in their bath ;
they feel it sometimes in their back, sometimes in their head,
sometimes in their hands. At night there are seventeen or
eighteen teachers in their bed ; the school is a brothel ; a
female pupil declared that the obscene practices with the
three and four must now cease. The abdomen has no resist-
ance, is not right, the periods are hindered ; the motherly
feelings have been torn out, the maternal parts have been
turned outside ; the patients feel themselves " made nature-
less." The womb has never been loved, is rotting, sways
about in the hinder parts ; the ovary is to be operated on,
pepper is to be put into the mouth of the uterus...


Bloody hell! You'd almost suspect I'd gone to school with a bunch of paranoid schizophrenics in a Victorian lunatic asylum!

I was wondering why I felt tired just now and do you know, I just realized: I haven't actually been to bed for three or four days. I have slept. Slept in the armchair. Ain't been to bed though. My sleep cycle is so disrupted I decided to stay awake all last night and all today so I can sleep at a respectable hour tonight.

Hey talking of tripheads: I had a wonderful modern-art illusion this morning. I saw the most incredible stop-motion collection of fantasticated faces upon the wooden panels facing the high road. For several minutes I was entranced. Then I went down teh bouncy ball shop and spent £1.20 on a crappy tiny green one that barely bounces (20p) (you can't choose colours by the way; they tumble at random out of the machine) then a huge red one with coloured dots all over it for 50p that bounces so high I nearly lost it on somebody's roof. Then the urge to feed in just 50p more to get a really jazzy one overcame me and sure enough: TRANSPARENT WITH MULTICOLOURED SHINY STARS INSIDE! How amazing is that??!! I'm saving that one for the mental hospital.

Talking of mental hospitals I met a crackhead paranoid schizophrenic on Heroin Corner. He was trying to bed £3 off me and would I go in with him. No point taking £3 worth of heroin, specially not nowadays. Barely any point doing a tenner bag. I usually hit up £20 worth in one go now, even then I wish I'd put £40 worth in the works so I could really feel it. I'm on over 100 mg of methadone so my tolerance is high. The current standard of the street heroin does NOT impress me ~ hence my desire to detoxify. Also I have this recurring nightmare fantasy that one day I'll desperately need opiate pain relief and the evil nurses will leave me in agony because I'm a smackhead. And they'll lie and deceive and pretend that just because you have opiate tolerance you can't get effective analgesia. Diamorphine ~ the VAST majority of which goes to pain patients not to addicts in this country, comes in ampoules of 5, 30 and 100mg. Now the starting dose for pain relief is 5mg intravenously. If 5mg sufficed for all patients, why on earth are 100mg amps churned out by the hundred thousand? About 600,000 diamorphine amps ~ yes, little bottles of pharmaceutical heroin ~ are used by the British NHS annually. Yeah, there are thousands of patients out there with legitimate (or should I say respectible, because medically speaking addiction is just as legitimate a need for opiates as pain) need for painkillers in enormous doses, which is why there are diamorph amps containing 20 times the ordinary analgesic dose. That line they spin that "you're taking heroin, the strongest painkiller there is so there's nothing I can do for you so just shut up and suffer" is yet another medical lie. It's twinned with the one about your body getting all the sleep it needs. (So you don't need sleeping pills.) When any psychiatrist can tell you that acute mania, where you do not sleep at all for days on end, is the one psychiatric condition that can actually kill you. Maniacs drop dead from sheer exhaustion.

Anyway, back to the paranoid schizophrenic, I asked him if he's still on olanzopine (Zyprexa) (see ain't my memory retentive: I haven't been hospital with him in about 7 years and yet I still remember his antipsychotic. EVERYONE was on olanzopine in my ward. My boring old risperidone is highly passé in psychotic circles, I'll have you know. But I specifically asked for an antipsycho drug that didn't induce weight gain, which olanzopine is notorious for. Plus olanzopine can cause type II diabetes, which I really don't want. It's bad enough having type 1 bipolar differential diagnosis without type II diabetes on top.

Anyway, back to Paraboy "the most prang (paranoid) smoker I've ever met", in the words of one dealer... He was saying the Heroin Corner dealer won't meet him anymore because he introduced somebody who promptly attacked S**thead, the dealer and attempted to grab da man's stash baggie off him. O I'd so love to have seen that. I hope my dealer looked really undignified being robbed and I hope he fell over and grazed the tip of his nose. I also hope he suffered a catastrophic financial loss. Which is hardly likely, since Paraboy says his mate just grabbed 3 Bs and pinged off...

Well, Paraboy was doing no better or worse than when I last saw him. He seems less paranoid, but that's probably because he was just a crackhead when I first met him. Now he's hopelessly addicted to heroin, which soothes just about every psychiatric condition while crack inflames just about every psychiatric condition. I keep telling him he's a silly boy for taking gear and I did warn him ... but his eyes glaze over and he asks me if I can spare £2. So I drop the lecture now, and he asks for the money up front as he's more desperate these days.

This Mr Paraboy is the same one I once stayed up with all night in the midst of a psychotic paranoid episode on his part. I took him to the mental hospital, where a homeless man nearly poked out my eye with an umbrella (long story)... waited and waited and waited for hours and hours and finally when he got led off by a friendly nurse straight to the bright lights of the breakfast hall. And I went home to nothing but a collection of rubbish and no heroin because we'd spent all night in the nuthouse reception, instead of begging up money off drunk passers by, as we were supposed to. I have to admit I felt a faint twinge of envy as I watched him leave this mortal coil and depart into the light. Breakfast at the mental hospital is really yummy: you get loads of free toast.

Life is simple in the nuthouse. You never have to make any decision more consequential than what flavour jam to spread on your toast. Or whether to have soup or salad. You're woken up by an irritable Jamaican nurse with deceptively good kung fu skills, herded down to breakfast, packed back upstairs for a lovely morning of TV and cigarettes, back downstairs to a slap up free lunch... more cigarettes. Lots of talk about psychic powers and the spirit realm. Lots of talk about aliens and UFOs. Lots of talk about the Security Services, spy agencies and underground government departments. (I hung out with the paranoid posse and the bipolar maniacs ~ the depressives barely say anything, generalized anxiety is the worst thing to come in with as they probably won't medicate it. Personality disorders were the bunch I really couldn't figure out. They come across like nothing's wrong with them, then come over all weird at random opportunities. There was one guy, as chirpy as a bluetit at dawn, who slashed his wrists deeply with a samurai sword and professed to wanting to die, although he never seemed in the slightest bit depressed. I remember remarking on the very obvious and high anti-jump security stairguard on the route down to lunch and he cheerily chirped up that he hadn't even noticed it! A truely suicidal person will spend most of the day staring at ceilings looking for hooks, pipeworks/etc suitable to hang off, sharp objects to gash himself with... etc)... anyway. Yet judging by this heavily bandaged man's demeanour, you'd think it was Christmas. O yeah and there was a barking mad Chinese guy from the local takeaway whose only English was "Merry Christmas and a happy new year" which didn't half sound entertaining in early September. Yeah so it's not too bad in the nuthouse. It's very sociable in there. I got a crush on a black woman with purple lipstick who thought she was the Virgin Mary. Sometimes I think I'd quite like to go back, you know, instead of taking a City Break to Paris or Brussels. But when I'm severely over-excited or suicidal and the spectre of hospital looms up more seriously ~ suddenly I don't wanna go in. I get convinced I'll be made homeless for one thing. And the trauma of actually going into the place does my head in. Being in there doesn't bother me at all. Why do you think I've bought a sparkly bouncy ball specially for the occasion? (Because it's really boring, unless you have some mischief to get up to...)

Why am I talking about nuthouses? O yeah my sparkly bouncy ball paranoid schizophrenic experience. Yeah, poor guy. Still mad as a hatter. He's got a missing front tooth now. I'm sure it wasn't tooth decay that knocked that out! His last girlfriend looked like a psychotic petrol tanker with period pains. Her gold teeth made her reminiscent of Jaws from James Bond in drag. And they did glint pleasantly in the early morning sun as she and Paraboy trudged bleakly from crackhouse to crackhouse. And no I don't "want" to go in the nuthouse. Really I want to go to Paris. But that costs over £150 for three nights including Eurostar train travel and 3-star hotel. The nuthouse is nearer and free, and they do corned beef salads. And you don't get free Rapid Tranquillization with a needle when you misbehave in a Paris hotel. You just get arrested. Ho-hum... maybe Berlin would be a better idea.

On a more important note I'm seriously into this bouncy ball collection of mine. I'm half tempted to change my second last £5 note into 50ps and buy ten of the massive really boingy ones from the dispenser that spat out that amazing sparkly one. I could do with another one of those: one to keep pristine by my television; the other to bounce. I keep running through the procedure of balancing 50p on the turny-wheel in my mind... turn, turn, turning and ~~ byoiiiing! Out pops a giant new bouncy ball of fabulosity in amazing new hues.

The machine above the giant bouncy balls does 20p exploding fart bombs, which I sometimes let off in our hallway when the miserable git downstairs has his girlfriend round. She's one of those ultra-fastidious lower class people who can't stand the idea of even being near dirt, let alone ever touching it. Which is ever so declassé. The upper classes are always wallowing in horse shit and everyone knows they sleep in beds full of stinky old bloodhounds. An aversion to muck is considered very vulgar indeed in England.

Well on that note I've got to go. I'm not at all hugry but I'm going out of my head craving something to eat. Also this bouncy ball craving is eating into me. Next time I want a fluorescent green one. That's the ultimate in quality bouncy ball entertainment. Imagine giving that one a mega-boing down the park!!!

Right I'm off. Hope y'all had a pleasant day. ANNA GRACE, PEE PEE FACE, GET OUT OF BED AND GET IN TOUCH WI ME

Oh I've got to go: Antiques Roadshow is on and they've DROPPED THE BIT WHERE THEY TELL THE ANXIOUS OWNERS THE PRICES ~ absolutely defeating the entire ******* point of the show!!


Illustrated: I'd luurve a bouncy ball like this one...


NICOLE KIDMAN, MOULIN ROUGE: ONE DAY I'LL FLY AWAY
this is one of my favourite songs of all
"why live life from dream to dream...?"
why? it's all i know how to do



No, no, no!


THIS is from the Inspectors' Report of behaviour in the dining room at my old boarding school. Just before it got closed down:



Frequently the pupils [those are students to you Americans!]
simply thrust their hands into their plate, fall upon the
common dish, hurriedly stuff their mouths as full as possible
and swallow their food down almost without chewing, or
the spoon is grasped quite lightly with their finger-tips, often
at the extreme end and the handle is used for eating; their
food is invariably stirred about with their forks two or three
times before each mouthful, the vegetables are divided into a
row of equal little heaps, their hands are first wrapped up in
their coats, their nose is stuck into the soup, or there must be
a mouthful drunk between each two mouthfuls of food till
twelve are counted and so on. Others lap the soup like a
dog or pour it with profuse spilling into their mouth without
more ado, press the vegetable dish flat on to their face and
steadily lick it clean. One of the pupils took hold of the
spoon quite correctly with the right hand, but brought it
round her head by the left side to her mouth ; another crept
under the bed cover at meals.



TRAUMATIZED by these horrific schooltime memories, I've been reluctant to go back to instututional life, which is why Rehab has been out of the question.

Nah. Real reason was I couldn't hack the detox. I was out that door quicker than you could say "Giro day!" That's right. Every time I knew more money I was in the bank, there I was in tears of euphoric disappointment, fleeing to the railway station and straight to my dealer, who happened to serve up right behind my local tube station. The celebratory hit was tiny: I divided half a gram in three. I only took 2/3 of my hit and even that knocked the living crap out of me. I remember my friends shaking me awake to say they were leaving me with the TV and purring black cats as they had to do something (probably buy some crack). Y'see contrary to the rumours and lies I tried to disseminate to myself I had actually made a big effort to cut down my using to 12x 30mg DF118s (dihydrocodeine) (4 pills every 4 hours) and one £10 bag of heroin (0.2g) daily. The gear I used that week wasn't the best, but it was my firm intention to cut down, so I saw weak gear as a blessing in disguise. Paid-for willpower, if you will... The morning I left to go to rehab, a friend wanted to see my dealer and gave me either £10 or £20 worth... I can't remember, but it was my Proper Dealer, who served up behind the tube station and his gear blew me away. I was so high on that train journey down to the South Coast, I almost got my head knocked off leaning out the window as we whooshed into various tunnels. I had an entire oldfashioned compartment to myself to smoke cigarettes in. It was a breezy summer's day (very breezy with the window wide open!) I felt wonderful.

I slept like a baby the first night through. I was still high the next day. The doctor said "sometimes the angels are with you" and I thought: wow!

Then, on the evening of my first full day, withdrawal kicked in. I slept barely at all. Or the next. I watched everybody else sprawled unconscious, mouths wide open as if to catch flies (everybody else, who claimed not to sleep a wink. Everybody else who did the best impression of snoring decrepitude I've ever seen!)

The night staff were in no state to talk to me, having worked all day. So I was left alone and tormented by constant suicidal urges in a kitchen full of knives and icepicks (we got through a lot of cold drinks in our tiny smoking area-cum-back yard) and temptingly breakable glasswear and crockery. I had the recurrent urge to gash my throat, cut my wrists, hang myself. And no sleep. Despite everything no, no sleep. It was awful.

Mornings with breakfast TV and then all the crap on BBC1 that reminded me being round my friend's house (where I used to show up like clockwork Monday to Friday waiting for the man)... Midmorning television without the faintest chance of a hit! Intolerable! It was like waiting for a dealer who never came. When eventually I got it, far too late for my ragged system, the meds (dihydrocodeine) did hold me. But by then my resolve was shattered. My mind was firmly tuned to the Using Channel. Would I have to live the entire rest of my life like this? Never feeling any better? Never plunging beautiful gear through a shiny new needle into my glorious veins ever ever again? I just couldn't live like that.

Can't live with gear; can't live without it. Except I could live with it. And for another seven years, I did. I had almost no semblance of a life to speak of, but I did have my glorious, wondrous heroin every single day of every week of every year, year after year. My attempts to stick to methadone during this period were halfhearted to say the least. If they could at least have prescribed it in an injectable form (which private doctors still do in the United Kingdom) it might have soothed the itch to inject at least. As it was, drinking 50 or 60mg (which is all my script was back then) of sticky gloop just didn't cut the mustard when the streets of London were flooded with the cheapest, best quality gear they'd ever seen. At that time a "sixteenth" (of an ounce, which actually weighed a gram and a half) could be had for as little as £45 (in fact, my hazy memory tells me it might have been as low as £40 from one particular bastard I gave thousands to...). That's $60 or so. And a gram was £30 ~ just over $45...

O how vivily I recall the soft aroma of Afghan fields, the golden glow of poppies washing over and through me, making me feel purified and clean. (Heroin doesn't feel rough or jagged or dirty at all, it feels like the softest and most benign of all drugs... until you try to sever relations. Only then does it truly show its ugly side!) The first kiss of the needle ~ and life itself came rushing into my veins. O, how I adored heroin! How could I ever stop it?

Well now I'm old and faded and wearied and grey. I'm looking for a new existence. I'm beginning to think the only way there might be via rehab... Trust me, this is far from a knee-jerk reaction. I have a plethora of issues surrounding rehabs. From the uncomfortable fact that most of them appear to be run to suit the convenience of staff more than "peers" (as they're called in there). To the long night hours of torment as the drugs drain inexorably out of you. No hope of anything exciting to take the pain away. Not now, not ever. I was as galvanized, and resolved; my mind was made up as firmly as it was possible to be when I went before, not once but TWICE. Yet at the first opportunity I ran away and thoroughly enjoyed "relapsing". Drug addiction is the only illness I know of where a relapse is undiluted fun. It certainly was for me. NA's mantra that "one meeting and you'll never be able to use the same way again" (their implication being that you'll be riddled with discomfort and guilt) never washed with me. I understood Recovery and the 12-step process as well as any using addict whose never been able to clean up long enough to actually put the philosophy into practice ever could. And yet I used with gusto. Heroin didn't just feel like life itself, it WAS my life. I've never loved anything or anyone the way I loved heroin. I absolutely adored it. As long as I had it, it never let me down. The problems were invariably caused by dealers, who charged too much, watered it down, didn't come when they said they would... etc etc etc. That's the way I saw it.

Somehow, heroin and I are falling out of love. To be honest, I'm bored of it. When you consider that in actuality the drug is giving you a pleasantly and very slightly comfortably exaggerated version of normality... you might as well learn to live without it and get your normality free of charge from life. Then at least you know your wellbeing is not being held in the hands of ruthless criminals who could snatch it away any time they please (as they did do, last Autumn, when they effectively droughted the entire UK heroin market. There was no good heroin on sale anywhere at all. Only people who had imported their own supply or were personal friends of people who had done, still had gear. The rest of us went without. I didn't even bother touching it for... I can't remember how many weeks. It felt more like a year. I learned to live without heroin. Even though I had the crutch of methadone, I never felt it did very much for me. I'm fed up of methadone more than I'm sick to death of heroin. I don't want either one. I want whatever comes next...

Which might have to be rehab.

I can't stomach a "normal" rehab, it would have to be a place geared to taking on dual diagnosis clients ~ that is, people with "mental health" "issues" alongside their addictions. Every single time I've attempted to come off opiates I've felt like the rug has been pulled from under me. Every single time I had some manner of "breakdown". Every time. No way could I handle losing my marbles in front of a bunch of hatchet-faced crack-addicted housebreakers and prostitutes. Not again. This time, they have to be my kind of addicts: yes, nutter junkies!

I emailed one place yesterday morning and got a reply back saying they could reduce me to 30mg methadone and switch me over from that to Subutex, so I detox from Subutex to nothing. Which is a far brighter move than methadone to nothing. Subutex is very easy to reduce. It's an agonist-antagonist to the brain's opiate receptors, meaning the body is already ready for being clean. Methadone is particularly "sticky", hanging around for far longer than heroin, meaning the withdrawals last considerably longer. In other words, it's harder to come off. Methadone is only prescribed because it's cheap and can be dosed orally once a day. Most opiates require at least twice-daily dosing. A one-a-day hydromorphone (Dilaudid) pill is available for heroin addiction, but it's not given in Britain ~probably on grounds of cost.

Subutex is a different story. You do the nasty suffering when you go ON Subutex. I felt desperately ill. But very rapidly it swooshes into the body, working its own peculiar magic. Best thing about Subutex is, it gave me a euphoric high that I now know was almost certainly a mild bipolar mood swing. It had all the same characteristics: 4 hours sleep a night. Mood most intense in the mid-morning. Constant excited feeling. Music sounding amazing. It only lasted a few days, but it got me through the awkward transition phase, when body and brain acclimatize to a radically different medication, with ease. Tapering off Subutex to nothing, so I'm told, is far easier than methadone discontinuation, so I wouldn't be worried about that.

My email warned me that methadone might be acting as a mood stabilizer, and I can grudgingly accept that it probably does. Heroin stabilizes my mood far more effectively, but methadone probably does do something. So my medication(s) might have to be reassessed prior to and during detox.

Here (really for my information, but I put the list up in case anyone else is looking) are some of the best rehabs I looked up. Castle Craig Hospital in Scotland even do Trotterdonkey Therapy (better known as Equine Therapy)..!

I would quite like to do beekeeping and hamster-keeping. Imagine window set into the wall, viewing right into the buzzing bee colony?! Imagine a big tank of robos pinging around on their wheels atop the rehab telly..? Well here's hoping...

And BTW I go back to Narcotics Anonymous on Monday. I'm still feeling VERY reticent about what I might and might not share. I really found the reaction to my Manic Self rather offputting. But ho-hum. You live and learn...


UK rehab directory
http://www.addictionhelper.com/what-to-expect/9/What-to-Expect:-Dual-Diagnosis-Treatment

Castle Craig Hospital, Scotland
http://www.castlecraig.co.uk

Promis, Kent
http://www.promis.co.uk/enquiries

ANA
http://www.anatreatmentcentres.com/index.html

St James Priory (Walsingham House) dual unit, Bristol
http://www.stjamesprioryproject.org.uk/13.html

Loudon House dual unit, Ayrshire, Scotland
http://www.piramhids.com/case-studies/view-casestudy?resid=674

List of rehabs in Scotland
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2004/11/20231/46408

Park View, Salford, Manchester resiential home (is this ia rehab?)
http://potensial.co.uk/locations/park-view-salford




CAFE DEL MAR: ENERGY 52
classic ibiza trance tune:~

first here's the original tune "3 in 1 version"



OUT OF OFFICE
moi, j'adore cette version; c'est la vraie signification de l'euphorie....


PAUL OAKENFOLD


MICHAEL WOODS
this is the meaning of U4EA



Saturday, May 28, 2011

HARES!


FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY



Hares are much larger than rabbits.

Longer limbs give them a far faster "bound".

And unlike rabbits they have never been domesticated...

Not even the really cute Arctic Hare!




European Hares.



Arctic Hares.



PS: I've found a rehab where you're even allowed pinging hamsters in a tank!



Friday, May 27, 2011

Roobarb and Rhubarb

THIS IS FOR 2 PEOPLE: SPINDRIFT, who was born the year before me, and lives in Melbourne, Australia (very near Valerie, the multi-hudred-kilo housewife heroin importer complete with Margaret Thatcher helmet hairdo)...

and LIZZY-D, who is a psychiatric social worker from the wilds of London who has fond memories of Roobarb and Custard and Spiral Tribe...





Rhubarb is a sweet vegetable that looks something like pink celery. It grows at the bottom of English* gardens. To make rhubarb crumble you boil up the rhubarb until it goes soft and not at all sour or bitter. Then it's perfectly lovely. And Mr Kipling makes pretty wondrous Rhubarb and Custard pies...

"ROOBARB" was the name of the original TV series which ran 30 5-minute episodes i 1974. It was never, according to Wikipedia, known as "Roobarb and Custard"








ROOBARB
original opening sequence and theme tune ~ very catchy!



In 1991 the catchy theme tune came back as a source of triphead entertainment for the "Rave Generation". Roobarb and Custard was also the name of a type of pill, reportedly containing MDMA and phenobarbitone....

ROOBARB AND CUSTARD
A mishmash of old tunes remixed with a donk thing. Which I quite like....



ROOBARB & CUSTARD 10 min mix
one of the commenters on Youtube said it sounded like a 3 y/o mixed this...
but still, i like the tunes



URBAN HYPE: TRIP TO TRUMPTON



*Do they have rhubarb in America, or not? I thought it was a very English thing. Now, having clicked my rhubarb link, I'm not so sure....

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Rhubarb and custard pie..!




I WENT TO NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS YESTERDAY... at long last! I arrived there late
(as per usual). I found myself having to sit right at the front with people behind me (as per usual). People in the meeting were making me paranoid (as usual). And I missed the chair (as usual) ~ that is my favourite bit, when somebody tells their life story about getting on drugs, getting off them, what happened and why. I love the chairs. I didn't say anything but the guy next to me piped up in newcomers time to say he'd just come outof the lunatic asylum with depression and was being treated by the Nutters At Home psyche team. I was really glad to hear that.

Then a woman spoke up about taking her friend's mother into hospital. Her friend's mother was seriously ill with... schizophrenia. I'm keeping my mouth shut about being schizo. It was quite a revelation to realize it's not a crime to be mentally ill at NA. That's certainly how it felt when I had prominent "issues" of my own. They all thought I was on drugs and more than one told me so. They never listened to anything I had to say, eg if I told somebody afterwards, "I can't take any drugs now" they'd interrupt "of course you can't" probably meaning "because you're like me, and taking drugs will set you off back on the road of addiction". But that isn't why I can't take most drugs. They make such an obvious mess of my head I'm averse to touching them again. Addiction doesn't come into it. Nauseated loathing and aversion very much does.

It's day 2 of my pill-popping escapade. Even though I posted about going back on them last week, I held off, hoping for a hypomanic miracle that might lift me on my own.

I still have distracting thoughts around the exterior of my mind ~ mostly on the right hand side. They're not as loud as the voices even yesterday, so maybe the pills are working. I bought some Valium to wash them down. Why Valium? Well you try taking heavy antispychotics without it. Having to stay awake while your brains are chemically coshed really isn't pleasant and 4mg risperidone from nothing really does feel like concussion ~ minus the headache, but all the brain-whirling dizziness, confusion et cetera all the same. It's not the pleasant wooziness some smackheads seem to enjoy, it's an overpowering feeling of being bashed on the brainbox. I wish the Nutter Club was still going so I had a forum to complain about this to people who understand. I only took 3mg risperidone yesterday, thinking it might make me a little less wuzzy. Tonight I'm thinking of taking all 4 again, but I'm scared of being out of action tomorrow. On Monday I felt done in for the first half of the day. Almost too unsteady to want to risk walking up the street. With time all these side effects diminish, except for the effect risperidone has on sleep. It doesn't make you go to sleep, so it's no good for initial insomnia. But it does keep you under once you get TO sleep.

My friend Buggerlugz has EIGHTEEN tiny roborovski hamsters pinging in all directions in tiny hammy lairs. They keep breeding and having trotterdonkey babies. One is named Reggie, another is named Anchovy. I think Anchovy was meant to be a boy but she's a girl. I thought my "Baby" Itchy Roborovski was a boy at first and persuaded her to walk around on a CD case so I could check this. She was most offended at being examined in this manner and bunnyhopped on the floor and would have pinged away if I hadn't chucked a towel upon her.

And did you know baby hamsters are called Pups. They look like baked beans with paws?...?





Here's Bashful, Itchy and Spherical in one of their old nests before they died. They had about five or six nests on the go at once. Itchy is the drowsy one who looks like she's been nibbling at the risperidone... She used to hear voices saying "Have you been trotting on your wheel?" and "come here you furry swine!" but they weren't schizophrenia; they were me!

I've been scoffing Mr Kipling's rhubarb and custard pies with Cornish Dairy ice cream. They're really nice. Yes I decided to break my diet a bit. There's something really miserable about depriving yourself of food. I lost about 11 pounds but Valium Marilyn's scales aren't very good. You have to bang them twice then clamber upon them. Marilyn has lost a lot of weight, having been in hospital; she looks like a little old lady now. She's depressed because her Mum and Dad both died a few years ago and their house was her refuge from Nasty Old Life... and it's not there any more. Her son stole 3 or 4 strips of temazepam 20s off her. We had to go right through everything looking for them. He's in his late 20s and still smokes cannabis ~ hashish would you believe. Why on earth anybody would voluntarily smoke that psychosis-causing gunk is anybody's guess. Marilyn rants about how harmless it is, yet she never smokes it. There's even a "Cannabis is Food of the Gods" type movement that believes spliffs should be used in mental healthcare instead of stuff like Valium. The sort of people who believe this have never tried Valium and never had a mental health problem. If they had, they'd know cannabis is the LAST thing any psychotic person with half a brain would want to smoke... though having said that I do recall clearly how the 2 favourite drugs in the mental hospital were 1: cannabis (by a long way) and 2: CRACK COCAINE... the 2 street drugs most liable to bring on extreme paranoia are used recreationally by paranoiacs themselves! But not all these people get full-on symptoms in every conceivable way. I once asked one whether something had ever happened to him that happened to me when I went mad ~~ and he looked at me like I really had a screw loose! His symptoms were probably more extreme than mine in many ways... but just different.

Yesterday's NA really helped me focus on WHY I want off these drugs I'm so hooked on. People remind me why I want to stop them, by telling how their lives were messed up.

I pingpong between believing heroin should be legalized and on sale from vending machines and thinking that all addicts ought to be executed by lethal injection (of heroin).

I still have a huge mark at the top of my thigh like a cigar burn. Originally it had a pussing head, but now it's scabbed over. I picked the first scab off but a beautiful second scab has appeared. There's a huge volcanic lump under it that I keep squeezing in the hope some pus might ooze. But it's totally dry. It's not disappointing not to have an abscess, but when I do have one, I most certainly get value for money out of it, with all the kneeding and squeezing and pus-milking.

This song was going round my head as I walked home from the chemists in a thunderstorm:



MADONNA: WHO'S THAT GIRL


Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Back on the pills and still confused...

ON MONDAY NIGHT I didn't sleep for a very long time. Tonkie Ears the mouse was pinging about the kitchen like crazy. I eventually went to bed after it had got light. Then I was up before midday.

On Tuesday night I finally caved in and took my antischizophrenia pills. My head has been going increasingly crazed ~ in the literal sense of cracked into zigzaggy shards, like crazy paving. I don't "hear" many "voices" nowadays in the way you might expect: that someone is talking when nobody is there. These days I hear random syllables, and they push and pull through my brains shaking them up as they go in a pneumatic kind of way. They feel sometimes distract me quite a lot. Sometimes I hear my name over and over. Sometimes they say "doo-doo-daa-be-do"; or random things like "trotter donkey". Sometimes they sound like something muttered, and I only catch the last word or two. I also heard my own thoughts spoken by strange voices in my head. Sometimes they echo around, as if I think them and somebody else repeats the last. The "hallucinations" if I can call them that, are much lower grade than they used to be. It took a few weeks off the antipsychotic pills to get as loud and as distinct as they are now. The longer I continued not taking them the more the voices came back. Which is depressing when I think about it in my rational self as it means I'm still mad and I don't like being crazy. I don't like having to take pills just to be more sane than mad (they never worked 100%). And I don't know when I would ever get a life back; on them or off them.

The pills are so powerful I was in bed before 11pm. I slept right through and woke up feeling like it was 6 or 7am; but it was half past eleven. But I did't feel any saner than normal. Random syllables were echoing around and I sat in my blue velvet armchair and pondered where on earth my life is going.

I don't feel so terribly depressed now (or manic). I feel a kind of scattered distraction. If my dr hadn't told me I had a schizophrenic sort of thing going on I'm not sure I'd have been able to match what he told me with what I've read with what I've experienced. I don't think I'd be able to explain. I was never quite sure that what happens doesn't happen to everyone. I don't remember it ever happening to me before some point in my mid 20s, when Prozac originally set it off. A psychiatric person told me that one of the phenomena is a common symptom in certain mental states; it's called "thought echo".

No illicit drugs have ever caused anything like that, by the way. I only "heard voices" on drugs three times that I know of (you can only know that happeed by reviewing your experience and realizing that something you took to be real at the time could only have been a hallucination, which takes quite some concentration and insight to achieve).

So this is what's been happening. I've given in and taken psychiatric meds again. I know at least one person in NA would consider that "using" if I told them. NA can take a hike. In their collective experience hallucinations only occur when you're on drugs but in the past years I've hallucinated much more off drugs than on them, and the hallucinations have a different quality. LSD, for example, typically evokes intricate geometric designs, not voices. It makes you see abstract things, not actual objects, as I did in my manic swings. It's mania that made me hallucinate floridly. Mania lights up the brain like a christmas tree ~ brain scans have shown this. In that state just about anything that happens happens to you more vividly. I say "just about" because in that state I was impervious to cold. I never noticed my windows were wide open in January until my hands seized up enough to cause difficulties typing.

I got up too late to go to NA last night. I got to my methadone chemist just minutes before they closed. The post office was shut already so I couldn't have withdrawn "B money" (gear money) even if I'd wanted to.

Those antipsychotic tablets have really done me in. I feel heavy-limbed and unsteady and I very nearly got the bus 2 stops to my methadone chemists because I couldn't handle the thought of walking there.

So that's today for ya. I just want to go to bed again. I hate being on pills. It's bad enough being on methadone which keeps me physically OK, without having to take something else to be mentally OK. Most people are mentally fine on methadone ~ so why I shouldn't be too..? Does anybody know enough about this to comment? I don't get why I of all people should be more sane on heroin than off it.

I've got to go now. That awful game show where people pick boxes with random amounts of money inside is on and I've got to change channels. Cheery-bye now...

;-)


THE ROYLE FAMILY: Baby David's Christening Party
This is my favourite Royle FAmily episode of all. Everyone is drunk:





PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY OF RISPERIDONE
by a risperidone-prescriber



RISPERIDONE
by a risperidone-taker; she describes 4mg as far too much ~ 4mg is my dose!
also she does look a bit manic, despite all those meds she talks about...

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Clean Clothes


I WENT TO THE LAUNDRETTE TODAY ~ at long last. The trip was over 2 months overdue. I've been handwashing and wearing out my dwindling supply of clean clothes for the longest possible time. I trudged my huge tartan bag all the way there, loaded it in the £3 machine quick enough to avoid the uptight assistant who seems to take great joy in telling me I'm overloading the machine. Piled the stuff in. Door shut money in and... It wouldn't start. The surly assistant had to shimmy over and press the door in for ten seconds. With my clothes safely whirlig round I went outside for a cyder and a fag.

Instead of taking my clothes home wet, like I used to when I spent every spare penny on heroin, I actually paid £2.50 to dry them.

I've been in a much better mood since yesterday's outing and encounter with the tiny tits and sparrows down the park.

I had a psychic interlude yesterday that made my head go a peculiar. I felt ill when I posted last night. As I said, I felt like I'd been abusing crack (though I haven't touched crack in a long time). When I did eventually get to sleep, I had vivid dreams about bursting through think ice at the top of the world and falling down from my old school through a crack in reality to the North Pole. I had incredibly vivid dreams until I woke up four hours later at 8am. I didn't want to get up that early. It's Money Monday. I used to get up first thing when I got paid, so I could take my money straight to the heroin dealer. I don't want to be on heroin anymore...

... But I screwed that one up by hitting up £20 in the morning and then another £15 this afternoon. I decided I really need Narcotics Anonymous.

My travels through the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book have taught me that I'm full of what they call "Resentment". In my recent bad mood I've felt resentment regarding just about every aspect of life. I think NA would say this is the bitterness of the addict who's unwilling to live life on life's terms. My thoughts have been full of anger that the one substance that makes me feel OK is not freely on sale from every corner pharmacy. I'm angry at having given in and opted to stick to prescribed oral methadone therapy. As I just might have mentioned before, I loathe being on methadone.

I feel I have cause to feel unhappy about this: medical officials like to say that methadone brings stability to the chaotic lives of addicts. Far from bringing stability, methadone brought me insanity. I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder when I was on methadone. Surely you need to be pretty UNstable and far gone to warrant that label..?

Here's another point where my experience is at odds with NA's philosophy. NA call active addiction "insanity". But I found madness on methadone therapy, trying to go clean! Though I was unwilling to admit it at the time, my heroin use was a type of self-medication. To me, my drug of choice was a mood stabilizer and antipsychotic ~ and it worked. Opiates do have recognized antipsychotic effects; it's just taboo for the mainstream medical establishment to recognize this fact.

So anyway I've been drowning in this bitterness, which you could label a symptom of depression, or a feature of my drug-addiction. Or both.

Tonight I don't feel bitter at all. Tonight I feel pretty much OK... then I remember I'm stoked up on £35 worth of gear. Maybe I won't feel as good as this tomorrow... who knows? Tomorrow I've decided to go back to NA.

I could have gone to NA tonight, but I found myself trudging back from the carpark where I met my second dealer and hanging outside the venue for tonight's meeting in the rain half an hour before opening, thinking "I've got gear on me, and the meeting won't be over for two hours..." So I took the bus home and decided to leave NA until tomorrow when I'm clean. Tuesday night's meeting is the one I ran out of last time because the room was too crowded with people smelling of bodily secretions.

My life has to hit a turning point sooner or later; only I can do the manoevring to turn it around. I decided I wanted a better life, if I can have one. Problem was, I was depressed enough not to see any future at all. I've decided endless times to push through, "doing the right thing" no matter how bad I feel... But these resolutions were invariably made when I was high on gear. Once the gear had faded and I had only methadone holding me, depression had me powerless in its grip once more and I was too weak, too paralysed, to move on anywhere further than my drug dealer's.

I had a lot of Resentment against NA for having been treated as if I was high on drugs, when I was high on my manic episode. Of course anybody who turns up at an antidrugs meeting hyped up, agitated and very wiry is going to make people think they've been using. That was not the issue. I'm upset with NA because I made it abundantly clear that I was NOT using, yet I still got a slew of comments about "once you drop the drugs..." etc etc.

I hadn't been listened to, hadn't been believed.

I came to NA expecting to find understanding and acceptance. But I don't feel understood, and I feel rejected by them, because THEY could not accept the truth. I brought up NA at a dual diagnosis Nutter Club meeting I used to go to (before it got closed down). Nobody else from Nutter Club ever went to NA. There was one woman who was so depressed the first time I met her that she'd been sitting down the park at midnight thinking it was midday. She had been told she felt that way because she "wasn't working the steps". Another person had been advised to stop taking his schizophrenia medication as it was "using". I caused uproarious laughter by declaring if anyone from NA told me to stop taking my meds, I'd retort "yeah: as long as I come off it in your house". Naomi thought that was hilarious.

NA have definite shortcomings around the mental health issue and the more I pondered them, the angrier I got. In the end I told myself you just have to accept a group like NA for what they are and what they do. They do Recovery very well. Recovery and "learning to live life on life's terms". NA members describe themselves as "clean and serene" and it's their serenity I'm after. They say "if you want what we have..." and I do want it. So I decided I would be wise not to chuck out the baby with the bathwater. And besides, I don't like harbouring resentments.

I'm just annoyed that a "normal" person is allowed to come in and describe their depression or their anxiety, their mood swings or their anger at life. But my mood swings are too "psychiatric", too extreme, to be acceptable to a group like NA. If I were to talk about them in any detail I know I'll be labelled a nutter and subtly pushed away.

If I can't be accepted for who I am, I don't know that I could ever be happy there...

Well I'm still going tomorrow... so I'll let ya know how I get on...


HEROIN AND PSYCHOSIS
Severe dependence on cannabis and psychostimulants is associated with a higher risk of psychosis and is in contrast to severe dependence on heroin, which has a negative relationship with psychosis.
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/181/5/393




illustrated: a tiny tit like the ones in my local park ~~~~~~~~ this one's a blue tit; great tits are slightly bigger (like colourful tubby sparrows)


Monday, May 23, 2011

Black coffee

IT'S 1:57AM. Some coffee I drank went straight to my head. I only drank 2 cups, several hours apart. I thought it was meant to be good to drink coffee, because it's not alcohol. How come it has to disagree with me so..?? I felt more energized than euphoric and my mood plunged down. I found myself posting in somebody's comments about female drug addicts who have babies and the whole issue is too depressing for words. And I wish I hadn't posted up my thoughts about death and dying here. It all seems incredibly childish, I know. I don't know what else I would have posted though.

Tomorrow there is a Narcotics Anonymous meeting I can get to easily. So I'm probably going. I can't see any future in using heroin. Why on earth I ever started it, I'm not sure. That is a stupid thing to do.

I wish I would sleep, but it probably won't happen for a while. I feel like I've got a crack comedown: depressed and wiry at the same time. I never was a big crackhead. The effects of that stuff are so negative it was never something I wanted to have a big part in my life. I only say I was "addicted" to it in that I found it hard to kick it completely. For a long time I only bought one £10 rock a week ~ that's the smallest rock you can usually buy. I have barely any good memories of heroin and none at all of crack.

I lived in a crackhouse for a few years and saw what it does to heavy users. Even when it doesn't send people clinically psychotic it leaves lives in far worse tatters than heroin does. In fact I'd say that in the short time that I speedballed and smoked it heavily, it erased the small amount of joy that was left in the life of a heroin addict. It's nasty, nasty stuff; I wish I had never gone near it.

O well: tomorrow is another day.

PS: I just realized ~ methadone dose overdue. Dur. Hey I might sleep now...

Sunday, May 22, 2011

£10.20

I SPENT £10.20 on a pink and yellow bouncy ball and a bag of heroin. I got far more value out of the bouncy ball, which is fluorescent and bounces at least 20 feet high if you really slam it into the ground.

I was sat so still on the bench that the little birdies came up to me. A tiny flock of sparrows went for a sway in the bushes. Then one thrummed across the road and sat in the eves of a house.

A blackbird with a beakfull of worms ran right to my feet, then scurried off. A pair of bluetits came too.

Then my drug dealer phoned to say he was outside the local pub. I met him quickly and pinged home. The gear went cloudy in the works and I had to inject in the side of my right hand, just down from the little finger. My hand hurts a bit, but I got something of a high, so who cares.

I think the 20p bouncy ball and the birdies cheered me up more than the heroin ever could. Before them, my mind was fixated on the usual theme of these days: euthanasia, death penalty for heroin addicts, and suicide.

Anna Grace has gone straight back on the gear, right after spending four days of torment detoxing cold off the last lot. I know why she went back to it. Life seems terrifyingly bleak and empty without opiates. You wish you had never been born. The only remedy that seems viable is suicide ~ or to go back on opiates until death takes you anyhow.

I'm thinking of reaffirming my old "till death do us part~" commitment to heroin. Narcotics Anonymous say you must be willing to make any sacrifice in order to stay clean. Even if it means losing an arm, you must do it. I've been willing to commit everything to heroin in the past. If I could turn it around and commit everything to sobriety, I might succeed. And seeing as I break every resolution I've ever made (especially regarding my drug addiction) I think I should resolve most definitely to go on using until I die. Then I might break it by cleaning up. That's the only positive way I can phrase the actions of today.

Well I've got to go. I'm out of money now, so no cup a soup, no croutons, no corned beef. Just Greek pasty-shaped baps with cheese baked in the inside (2 at 50p each). And Mr Dippy 59p hummous. So I got dinner today for £1.59.

My weight has gone down to 13 stone 7 and 3/4lbs. Which works out at 190 lbs, meaning I've only lost 11 lbs in over a month! I'm going to really have to make this diet of mine more drastic still. And those antipsychotics are going to make me put on EVEN MORE weight. I keep getting Radio GaGa. Eg when I came home at midday my head was tuned into the Nonsense Channel. It was starting to irritate me.

I'm not happy with all the death talk in my recent blog; but that's what I've been thinking about.

I did get advised to go down the park, and I did go and got entertained by the tiny birdies trotting around the bushes. So that's one good thing.

I hope you all had a passable weekend XXXXXXX



Saturday, May 21, 2011

White Tigers



FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY

White tigers aren't albinos; they're a naturally occurring variation from the ordinary orange and black coloration....

White tigers are usually slightly bigger than orange tigers

They're very well camouflaged against one another

Aren't the cubs cute..?





This tiger isn't white, but it looks very entertaining playing with a bear

WISHING Y'ALL A FURRY WEEKEND!!

No gear and barely any booze

IT'S QUARTER TO FOUR IN THE MORNING. I've been up since 1:30. I went to bed at three in the afternoon because I was so tired but my body refused to sleep through. I woke up feeling like a block of ice.
Drank that nasty poisonous methadone syrup as soon as I got up. It still took a good 90 minutes to actually work. I absolutely loathe methadone. Whenever I think about it I wish I was dead. I'm not joking either. I think junkies should be shot through the brains. It would probably take a specialist marksman to actually have the accuracy to hit what scant brains most addicts have got. That would be a far better treatment than methadone prescription (not to mention cheaper).

If you think that's drastic, then make death by firing squad voluntary. Loads of addicts would volunteer. Once you've got addicted to heroin you see how useless life actually is and the only thing to look forward to apart from another dose of heroin, is death.

I don't know why I'm giving up heroin, I can't explain it to anyone. Heroin was the only thing that ever made life seem worth living. Take it away and you see things for what they actually are. Unspeakably bleak and worthless. Dark and empty. And unbearable.

Well I'm having another chicken and veg cup a soup with croutons. It's no substitute for heroin, but it's better than methadone as far as getting a high goes. I can't drink coffee because that has yet more drugs in it and I'm trying to go drugs free. One day, when I was having a nervous breakdown, I drank a few cups of coffee in a row. This made me go so out of it I felt like a television when the aerial falls out the back. My brains were full of racing black and white dots, pinging so quickly, hissing so loud that all I felt and all I was was utter insanity. That happened to me every day for five days in a row. Now I keep having flashbacks about it. It was one of the most traumatic things that has ever happened to me.

I really wish I had killed myself when I was deranged enough to actually do it. I can't believe I'm actually living on methadone, the ultimate in mediocre compromise. Why do they give IV drug addicts an ORAL medication? That's just a way of torturing the sick. I hate doctors for doing this.

I'm like those old ladies addicted to Valium. The Valium is doing them no harm, except that they know they're addicted to it. Because they don't like the feeling of depending on something chemical, they decide they must stop taking it. That's me and heroin. I don't like relying on anything outside myself. I don't even like eating. When those idiotic halfbrained criminals droughted the UK heroin market last autumn it really rubbed into me how much I relied on those bastards for my peace of mind. Now I don't ever want to rely on those people again.

I don't think I'll ever have any wellbeing without heroin, or that there will ever be any point to being alive. But I'm trying not to think about that. It's supposed to be better not to be on heroin than to be on it. I'm not actually sure that's true. But I do know I want to be off heroin for good. But I want to do it for me. I don't care what anyone else thinks.

Well I've got to go; I can't think up anything positive or informative to say. The only good thing that's happening to me is I keep getting "mental health" symptoms back. I quite like my brainbox going all bizarre on me. It's like free entertainment. I mean, there's nothing I can do about that anyway, if it happens it happens. So I might as well have some fun out of it.

I've been reading the AA Big Book. It makes me want to go to AA. I relate to about 50% of what I read in there. Although I drink every day I never got confidence from alcohol. It never felt like the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle called me. That missing piece is called Heroin. Alcohol was only ever something cheap and easy to get hold of that potentiated heroin's effects and gave Dutch Courage for begging up cash on the streets. I don't take one drink and have to take endless more until I pass out. I have binged on alcohol ~ I went up to 4 litres 7.5% cyder last autumn when there was no decent heroin to buy. That's slightly more than one bottle of whisky per day. I only drank that heavily for a very short while. But I do relate to the AA stories about blackouts. I lost days on end. I literally could not remember anything I'd done. Probably nothing worth remembering anyhow.

So that's my life: I'm off heroin, I'm going off alcohol ~ I'm down to one can of cyder a day now. And I don't even like drinking that. The taste is absolutely foul.

None of this feels at all worthwhile. The idea of not taking drugs and not drinking just makes me want to go to bed for ever.

Well that's that. I hope you're either stoned on hard drugs or really happy, wherever you are. Take care :-)

Friday, May 20, 2011

Asparagus Cup A Soup



IT'S nearly half past seven in the morning. I got up at 5. Drank the methadone which came on about half an hour ago. I don't feel freezing cold anymore. I'm trying to hold out for another hour when Morrisons will be open for 8x Asparagus Cup A Soups for £1.50 (with croutons). You have to be so careful when selecting Cup A Soup varieties. Not every single one has croutons in it, which could spell tragedy if you're planning to watch lots of television that night.

Well I went to bed at 3pm yesterday. I don't remember much about yesterday because I was stone cold sober and not taking drugs (nothing to remember, you could argue). I remember talking to the mental nurse about insomnia and she says "yeah it makes you feel wiry and hyped up" and I thought WHAT?? Not sleeping used to just make me irritable and drowsy. Ever since I went nuts in December, it does make my mind race, which is really good fun. I was humming tunes all up and down the High Road yesterday.

I got some new pills. The chemist was quibbling that the address on the anti-psycho pills is different from the one on my methadone. That is because the antipsycho pills come from my GP. I live outside the GP's catchment area now. So I can't inform them, otherwise I'll get chucked off their books and have no doctor (yet again). The trainee girl at my chemists really hates doling out methadone. It's a class A drug, same as diamorphine (though nowhere near as exciting, at least diamorphine comes in injectable amps; these days methadone is nearly always a nasty thick syrup).... Methadone either comes pre-mixed, or else the pharmacist must sully a gram of beautiful shiny white powder by tipping it into a litre bottle of nasty gloop. I heard in the olden days some chemists would just give you your methadone dry so you could inject it at home. That doesn't happen now. (I wish I had an old-fashioned chemist though.) The younger generation hate even handling it. The slightest spillages must be written up. Every dose must be signed and countersigned. It's a real pain. She keeps checking my address and date of birth even though I've been coming in for over 2 years.

Well I used no heroin yesterday and drank so little alcohol it was nearly all sat on the side untouched this morning. The yearning for gear is diminishing as we speak. I wish they'd at least prescribe injectable methadone amps at my clinic. If they did, I might have had a chance to give up years ago. The clinic don't really care how anyone's doing. As long as their jobs are safe, that's all they care about.

Once I'm stabilized back on the crappy gunk I need to get off it as fast as possible. It's still my goal to go on to Suboxone, but I wouldn't trust the clinic to handle the switchover. I'd rather do it myself, using Suboxone I've bought on the street. You can cut down buprenorphine at a rate of 1mg per day without feeling any untoward effects. But the changeover from methadone to Suboxone is traumatic. They should really switch you to something short acting like dihydrocodeine for a week first. But they don't. They tell you to stop taking methadone for 2 or 3 days and get really ill. So what people actually do is go on to heroin for a few days without telling the clinic. Then you let the heroin start to detox out of you and take the Suboxone somewhere between 12 and 18 hours after your last dose. With methadone you have to go 48 hours which is too long to feel ill. And you have an inept titration nurse supervising the torture. I'd rather be shot through the head than go through that.

Well there's no news. It's 10 to 8. Morrisons will be opening in about half an hour so I'll be sorted for Asparagus soup before we know it. I could do with one of their cheese and red peppers breads to dip in it.

I wonder if they do currant flavour Club biscuits? Those are really nice with a cup of tea. The Royle family eat Club biscuits, you know. They also eat Waggon Wheels, which are yucky. And Kit Kats which I was never that into. A health food nutter once told me Kit Kats contain blood from pigs' brains. I'm sure they had a source high up in the factory keeping them informed.

There's nothing else to write so I've got to go. More bloody methadone to collect. I hate that stuff. See ya later.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Cup a soup day

I COULD have waited till this evening to post. But you'd just get a longer rant on a miserable day; so you might as well get it now.

I got up at nine. Took methadone. Drank a chicken vegetable Cup A Soup with croutons and watched the Royle Family Xmas Special while I waited for it to come on. By ten o'clock I didn't feel like a block of ice any more.

Went up the methadone chemist. I'm too paranoid these days to bother doing anything much outside my house. I got the hell out as quick as possible. Nothing at all to eat in Morrisons. I'm strictening up my diet again. I'd gone in there for coleslaw but had gone off the idea by the time I got near the shelf.

My drugs worker seems to have totally the wrong idea. He thinks I'm on a level because I'm not cycling up and down any more. Yeah a level. A level of misery. I could ring Naomi but her Nutter Club, the one good thing in life, has been cancelled. And if I phone her I'll be asking for help. I don't want to ask for help. I have this horrible feeling that anything I do say could be used against me in some way. I know it's probably "paranoia", but I can't help feeling this way.

I don't even know whether to take my pills again. They're not antidepressants and my problem is that I'm a miserable bastard. I'm not psychotic anymore. In fact I'm not even sure that "schizoaffective" isn't a misdiagnosis. Risperidone is a psychic blocker. I don't even know wether my psyche should be blocked out. I could have got a job as a medium some years ago, but didn't want to get possessed. It's this psychic function that antipsychotic meds block out. So I don't even know that they're a good thing. What risperidone did was put breaks on my mania and stop me hearing voices. I hardly ever hear voices now, despite no risperidone. The voices I do get are in my head. True, my head is more and more confused. But I'm too confused to tell anyone. Like I say they would probably find some way of using my own words against me.

I don't feel my drugs worker understands much of what I say to him. I'm too scared to admit how I really feel (that drug addicts, especially me, should be lined up and shot by firing squad). It's probably good to put it in a comedy way like that.

And by the way those bastards in Switzerland are holding a public vote on whether foreigners should be able to travel in and make use of the country's liberal euthanasia laws. Cut off my last hope why don't you.

Anna Grace sicked out her small opiate relapse and was clean last I heard. I don't know what happened to her elevated manic mood but it probably helped her through the worst of the cold turkey. The worst thing about being opiate-sick is that it makes you see how harrowingly bleak and worthless an existence this life is. That's why most detoxing addicts want to kill themselves.

I would say I hope Anna stays clean but she would say that's hypocrisy as I am the ultimate limp handshake as far as any determination to stay drug-free goes. I've decided to give my life 2 days from now, to see how it goes. Then I don't know what I'm going to do. There's no point being on heroin. I'm shocked by the local junkies' low standards. The guy they say whose gear is best is selling utter shite. It's like a gear version of crack. You can only feel it going in, a little whoosh as you IV it. Then nothing. The whole point of gear in the olden days was that it made you feel way better ~ all day ~ than crappy methadone ever did. Unless you're willing to dose yourself somewhere towards 200mg, which the dr offered me, but I never wanted. The drugs clinic's equivalence tables were ridiculously skewed, advising mizzling small methadone doses that never compensated for street gear of decent quality.

Well that's it for today. I'm nagging myself to clean up my house. That's why I got up early to begin with: to turn on Vanessa Feltz on BBC London radio and do the kitchen whilst the populace of this great metropolis ring in to have a good moan.

I just checked yesterday's comments. Too para to open up anything earlier. Don't know who I thought had got in touch with me but ... whatever. Yes Jeannie if I'd been born in earlier generations there would have been no psychiatric treatment bar glorified prison. Least I can take those pills. I wish my head wasn't so confused about all this. I don't know why I am confused. Or how. I just know that I go round and round in circles about it all.

Well I have to go. Cup A Soup is powdered soup Taffeta. You add boiling water, stir and eat the croutons off the top. Anyone who buys Cup A Soup without croutons, in my humble view, deserves to be shot between the eyes.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Drugs worker Tuesday Blues

I HAD A HORRIBLE MEETING with my drugs worker this morning. The meeting itself was OK. I kept saying nothing was that terrible. Maybe I'm not "depressed" at all; maybe this is just how I feel and I'll never feel any better. I walked out feeling very miserable. Had a horrible paranoid bus ride. Felt nauseated and sick. Nearly had a panic attack outside Morrisons. Went and got my methadone. Then went home and to bed where I had nightmares.

Tomorrow I've decided to get up early and put on talk radio like my Mum does when she does the cleaning.

Only cleaning I've done today was handwashing a bowlful of clothes.

I put in a repeat of my repeat prescription today. The old one was sent by email and it never get through. For some reason they won't take repeat prescription requests over the phone. I thought this had something to do with my signing my name. No I just had to tick a box next to the word "risperidone".

As soon as I get these pills I'm going back on them. I'm very depressed about this. Having to take pills because I'm mad.

Well I'm going out down the local shop now for some Cup-A-Soup (only the type with croutons). My favourite flavour is asparagus, because I'm posh. But only Morrisons do that. And they sell 2 packets for the same price as my local shop does one. Stingy bastards.

Well I have to go to find this soup and try and think on positive things.

O there's a really good documentary on called The Lock Up. About the detention officers in Hull Police Station. I love stuff to do with police and prisons.

The police doctor is on screen. He looks characteristically gone-out. Well I've got to go.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Just another manic-depressive Monday

IT'S HALF PAST ELEVEN. I got up dead early this morning and drank methadone. Watched the Royle Family and met a friend who owed me money. I got paid in gear which ****ed my resolve up not to use. The gear was crap anyway. Then I went up the chemists, got methadone. This methadone is for the early hours when I'm knocking back the lot so I can face the day with no cravings at all. I'm hoping the huge dose will put me in a good mood. Fat chance of that probably but you can but try.

I've been doing a spot of cleaning every single day. The full sacks are piled on a chair. I daren't put them out until the binmen come round. Otherwise some wild animal or scavenging human will tear them open revealing my cyder-drinking and other sins to the world.

Our local charity shop sold me a hardback copy of the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book for £1. It's the fourth edition. Like the NA book, the second half is packed with personal stories how I took up and gave up drinking. Surprisingly I found the stories more informative than the Narcotics Anonymous ones. When I read the NA ones I keep wondering how white the heroin was, how much they paid for it, what type of needle they used, and which vein. Junkie questions. In the AA book I focus more on the point.

My concentration span is going downhill (again). But it means I get more value from the book. I can read the best bits over again and it's all new every time.

I went to bed at 4pm from sheer exhaustion and slept till 8. That means I've slept 12 hours today. I woke up with my head going everywhere. 12 people have voted in my hearing voices poll so far and most people say they have heard them at some point. Which doesn't surprise me. According to the Voice Hearers Movement 2/3 of those who regularly hear voices have no psychiatric diagnosis. I was crossing the road today when I heard Jim Royle say "bloody hell!". I nearly got hit by a VW Beetle. A red one. Now that I know that I'm not mad I'm much happier about it.

I've had corned beef and a bag of chips. Couldn't finish the chips. I don't know why I'm still so fat. It was only one tin. I did give up corned beef for a few days but the craving gets so intense it's too much to bear. Far worse than the craving for heroin.

Anna Grace has posted nothing since Friday. She might be sicking out her habit. I hope she does get clean. She said she was going all manic. Having an elevated mood is really helpful for coming off drugs, well I think so. Why on earth would you want drugs when you feel fantastic anyhow? Only drugs I was glad of when I went hyper were zopiclone sleeping pills. I got some sleep every single night. Even though it was only 2 and a half hours, it's better than nothing. That line drs like to spin about your body getting the sleep it needs is a lie by the way. I've gone 4 days on no sleep at all and I've heard stories of people going 7 days. All that happens is you go more mad and hallucinate floridly. And when you do sleep after all that time, it's usually only for a few hours. And then you're awake for days on end again. This is in mania by the way. So all that stuff spouted by doctors is just crap. I hope Anna isn't too manic, it really melts the brains does mania. She might be in hospital. I hope she's OK.

I need to do some voluntary work, but who would have me? Need to finish clearing my house first. What shall I do work-wise? I don't know...

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Back on the (legal) drugs ...(!)

I DECIDED to go back on antipsychotics tonight.

I keep hearing voices in my head jabbering in Northern accents. Jim Royle saying "my arse!" over and over. They're not hallucinations, they're kind of really loud thoughts from outside. But they didn't happen when I was sane. And I know they're supposed to mean I'm mentally deranged. The pills can block them out.

Also the risperidone has some sort of blockading effect on the heroin hit. It doesn't stop the nasty stuff working but it somehow makes taking it not seem worthwhile. So that's a good thing for me.

The reason I stopped taking it was that I was feeling incredibly flat and I thought risperidone was responsible. Then I began feeling depressed on top of that and risperidone is not a mood stabilizer as such. It did make me feel a lot less manic, but I'm not manic any more. So I wasn't sure whether or not to continue with risperidone. So I stopped it. And slumped into a pit of depression.

I was remembering what happened in full-on mania. My brain did everything bar melt on me and drip out of my ears down my neck, hissing, popping and fizzing as it drooled in luminous fingers down my back! Not good. The in-between hypomanic stage was good. That went on for several weeks and prompted my doctor to write to my GP telling of my "elevated mood". The only other detail I remember from that letter was "paranoid ideation".

My Mum wrote to me threatening that I'd get chucked out on the streets. My head was confused enough that I kept thinking she wanted me out on the streets. Or thought I was supposed to go and live there. She thinks that because my doctor mentioned schizophrenia I must have at least 2 personalities. She says some course she went on many years ago taught her this. Whoever taught that course needs shooting between the eyes. I only have one personality. That person might be quite warped and I don't like it very much. But it's only one person. If I could turn myself into somebody else I'd be overjoyed.

Originally I wanted a manic episode back. This had as much to do with being depressed and despairing of ever being "normal" as actually wanting to be so-called "ill". I didn't see much choice in the matter. So I wished the mania would hurry up and come back.

But now I'm feeling out some dimly-lit middle way that might somehow lead to happiness.

I woke up this morning with my head still dreaming. The Royle Family were having a loud conversation in between my ears as I wondered what on earth I was supposed to do. Life seemed so overwhelming. Then I told myself I just had to keep clearing and cleaning my house. Every day. Do a bit, every day. Don't think. Don't think too much. Don't think about it. I only think when I'm unhappy. Unhappy thoughts. So don't think. Just do it. Then when it's done you can think up something else.

So that's my plan. I've been spending hours asleep. Yes the sleep pattern has come back. I slept all afternoon, then went to bed around ten at night and slept through till nine in the morning.

So here's my plan for today. I'm still fighting unhappiness (if the truth be told). And if the truth be told further, I could do with some of that hypomania back: heightened mood and energy. Trust me to get it back only for one bloody day! That has happened before. I costed out how much it would've cost me to go that long on cocaine: £2-300. So that's a good coupleof hundred pounds worth of free high. You've got to look on the bright side.

I'm wondering how Anna Grace is. She was detoxing off heroin in her parents' empty home last I heard. Only her tiny terrier Elle for company. Then she started going manic. But her mood cycles quickly so she's either stuck to the ceiling or feeling a bit down or very down by now. Being as no post has appeared since Friday I'd assume she's down rather than up.

She's taking all these meds for bipolar disorder and they still don't seem to sort her out. Taking an Addreall (dexamphetamine) prescription from another doctor might have somethig to do with this. My own doctor said taking speed on top of bipolar was highly unadvisable. (I only asked this purely for Anna's sake; I haven't bought any speed since 1993). O yeah apart from Dexedrines purchased on the street in 1999. But I'm not into speed. It never agreed with me. Sent a clinically depressed me into comedowns so bad I could barely function at all, at the worst of it. Then the last time I did it, having found a great lump of it at a bus stop, a few lines taken on Monday evening had me speeding away into Wednesday and beyond! That was several years ago when I was still living in a crackhouse. Drugs like that and me don't mix so I stay away from them. So I don't know why Anna takes it. Something to do with an attention-deficit diagnosis as a child. ADHD and bipolar are said to present fairly similarly in children, with bipolar being more severe. She was taking uppers in her childhood (amphetamine and ritalin are supposed to calm down hyperactive children)... then surprise surprise had severe mood swings in adulthood. In fact 50% of bipolar 1s have a known history of substance use disorders. As do 50% of schizophrenics. So drug-use and mental illness are inextricably intertwined. You're only diagnosed after several weeks of symptoms while drug-free.

Well it's my goal to break away from all of this. I'm fed up of being arguably mentally unwell. And unarguably a drug addict. I'm trying to focus my head on more positive things. I'm pondering how I might make a book out of Valerie, the China White Heroin Queen of Australia. She has plenty to say for herself. If I can get a 300 page manuscript out of her, I'm sure Harper Collins would be delighted... wish me and Valerie luck with the inspiration..!

PS I just read this back and it looks like I don't know what the hell I want. I want to be OK and I want to write some amazing books that make me a fortune. And I don't want to be addicted to any substance at all. So those are my goals in life.

PPS I just went down Morrisons for corned beef and cheese coleslaw. It’s my first tin of corned beef in three or four days so I’m doing really well on that score. I was hoping for the Royle Family to accompany me down in my head. But they didn’t. Deserted me just when I wanted them most? Does anyone else get that? Voices in their head repeating catchphrases, telling jokes? I only remember it happening to me after I’d been in the nuthouse at least once. The first 2 times I only stayed in a week, then they chucked me out. I’m scared if I ever go in again they won’t want to let me go. But I could do with a little holiday sometimes. “A retreat” as Bipolar Becky once called it. I don’t want to go in the nuthouse now, but if I get offered it again I think I’m going back in. My head is too confused about what I’m doing with my life. That “breakdown”, if you want to call it that, really threw me on my head. I only use phrases like “mental illness” because it sounds so insightful and grown-up. Really I didn’t feel ill at all. I felt like finally I was in touch with my real self. I was in a really good mood. And the world felt unreal. Which is all, if you think about it, a pretty idyllic state to be in. You could argue that medication has ruined my life and brought me back to a sallow reality. Like waking up in the bath of near-freezing cold water you tried to drown yourself in, floating in a white haze, miserable and still alive. That’s how I see reality. And I want a better life than that.

SO COME ON you nutters! (Or normal people. I heard normal people hear voices too, there's even an international Voice Hearers movement for those who do; link given below...) I want to know whether you get voices in your heads? Or outside your heads? Or both? If so where and how loud? Do they come in from outside? Or do they hover in the air floating? What do they say? What do they sound like? When did they start? How often do they come to you? And is it supposed to be to do with any sort of so-called illness? If so what label? And do you wear the label round your neck like a Jim’ll Fix It medal? Someone I knew with a borderline personality disorder used to do that and I saw other people seemingly confusing diagnosis with identity. Put me off divulging anything of note to a psychiatrist for years, did that.
ANSWERS PLEASE!! + Y'ALL CAN TAKE PART IN MY NOSEY SURVEY (ABOVE)...


LINKS:~~~~~~~
Hearing voices movement: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement ~ with links to national orgaizations
Hearing Voices Network (UK) http://www.hearing-voices.org
Interational Movement: http://www.intervoiceonline.org

01:01 hrs. I hope Anna Grace is all right. Not a peep from her since Friday....

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