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