Be Here Now

WE'RE HAVING FULL-ON SUMMER HERE. It's been sweltering. I have behaved myself most of this week (haven't stabbed myself in the foot for a few days and am not intending to stab myself anywhere ever again).

I have switched to drinking my methadone in the morning rather than at night. This seems to prevent excessive sweating. I'm less "peeved" with methadone than I was a few days ago. That was depression talking. I find it hard to accept that it's supposedly "better" to drink a sticky gloop to get off street heroin, when the gloop's a lot more addictive than the heroin.

Knowing that heroin is used extensively in British hospitals as a first-line treatment for serious pain and that a small number of addicts (and a larger number in central Europe; Switzerland being the only country prescribing heroin to addicts as a matter of course) muddies the waters. It would be far easier to convince myself that heroin is pure evil and I'm better off without it. I console myself that I'm better off without it, and whether or not heroin is evil, or how evil it is, doesn't matter. Because I don't want it any more.

I believe it's better to be off heroin than on it and I want to get off it. The practicalities of heroin involve placing your wellbeing in the hands of ruthless criminals and being treated as a social pariah ~ especially by the medical profession. It's true that most of the damage caused by heroin is a direct result of "prohibition"; but as I say, I'm moving on from wanting anything to do with heroin at all. So the ins and outs of legalization and heroin prescription to addicts concern me no longer.

As Shane of MemoiresOfAHeroinHead fame pointed out, methadone clinics are no more "caring" (or reliable, for that matter) than your friendly neighbourhood drug dealer. They're often little more supportive. Shuttling "clients" at whom from worker to worker. Motivated more by box-ticking than any true measure of your personal welfare. My fellow blogger Sid has run up against the NHS's predictable "one size fits all" mentality in drug treatment clinics. He's worked for years and feels the system is set up for "junkies". I would say it's worse even than this. I shambled into my old clinic for years with pretty obvious "mental health" symptoms that were never, ever addressed. Nobody ever asked how I was. They were totally obsessed with drugs. Only interested in what drugs I had and hadn't been using. Never asked about me or my history. One was surprised to learn I'd "only" been a heroin addict since 2000. I'd had depression for many, many years before I ever got involved in heroin.

I used to marvel at the fables some of my friends told down the drug clinic. About how little they were drinking. About how little they used. People on the gear and crack constantly, who the clinic appeared to believe were doing ever so well. Until the Heroin Drought last year, in fact, everybody I knew used heroin at every opportunity. Most of my own circle had given up on crack or never really been into it. That drought gave a lot of us the option, at long last, of putting our weariness into practice and finally giving gear a miss. I know at least three people who are still clean to this day. One is in her fifties. The other two are in their sixties.

I was always pretty frank down the clinic about my using. I wanted a bad record so when diamorphine prescription got brought in I'd be first in line.

Now I see things the way everyone else always did. You help your worker out by saying all the right things. Then they can tick the right boxes and look like a successful worker. You take your methadone scipt and go. You sort out your own life yourself. The tedious group therapy they costantly try and bully you into is yet another cosmetic exercise. Sounds good on paper. In reality I found selected fellow "service users" too exasperating for words. Parroting what they knew was expected of them. I don't remember ever going to such a meeting without drinking heavily first and hitting up smack afterwards. That's what drug-talk does to you. Makes you wanna use.

I'm fortunate in that my new worker is Africian. I'm hoping she'll be to teach me whatever mysterious language she speaks. That's the best use of our time as far as I'm concerned. Considering I'm not intending to be ON any drugs, there won't be any drugs to talk about. And I'm not considering group therapy yet again. I've had enough therapy to last a lifetime..

I think the standard of personnel these clinics take on has actually gone DOWN in recent years. When I first got scripted methadone nearly ten years ago I got the distinct impression most people working down the clinic were ex-junkies themselves. That does not seem to be the case now. My new worker didn't even know what schizoaffective disorder WAS. I wouldn't expect a normal person to know this, but I would expect it of a drugs worker. Also, they seemed obsessed by the suspicion that I must surely be using something else apart from tiny bits of heroin on top of my script, which just isn't true and which irritates me, because I'm so over cannabis, crack et al that the mere thought of them offends me. Both the doctor and the new worker pushed this point. They seem to have this expectation that the more drugs you take the less together you will be. When in actuality most opiate users (in contrast to stimulant users) take their drug to hold themselves together. So of course, when they stop taking it, they crack up big time.

I gave up on Intuitive Recovery when the course leader talked about "self-medicating" on crack. Self-medicating, as I understand it, means gaining a very real symptomatic improvement through taking an illicit drug. Not getting high or losing yourself in an excitingly new criminal lifestyle. I only accepted I had been self-medicating after I stopped doing it! The whole issue makes me angry. If they knew I was self-medicating, why the hell didn't THEY medicate me properly?! I suppose I always had low expectations of the methadone clinic. It's just that now and then I get these little flashes of what is supposed to be. And a methadone clinic is supposed to offer psychosocial therapies. Which they never did.

Anyway I'm beyond all that. And trying to STAY beyond it. And never again allow depression to mire me in such a morass of bitterness. I was getting to the state where I couldn't distract myself with anything at all. Whatever it was my mind chose to occupy itself with, something about it would irritate the hell out of me.

I have tried to focus on finding out all I can about methadone therapy ~ something I never bothered about before because I had so little enthusiasm for it. I'm going to have to wait and see whether it agrees with me in the longterm. I found it so extremely difficult to stick to the stuff before because the moods I experienced on methadone were so intensely nasty I continued to use heroin at every opportunity. Even tiny doses on top of my script produced marked "improvement".

My mood was exaggeratedly good earlier on, which is why today I'm able to view the situation with some detachment. The more I think about the whole situation the more motivated I am to just get OFF opiates of all varieties. I know heroin made me miserable. However you want to argue it, whether I was or was not self-medicating and whether or not I was successful it's a simple law of life that whatever you do, you'll get used to it. You can develop "tolerance" to rollercoasters if you ride one every day. If you marinade your brains in hard drugs, your brains come to accept such pickling as "normal".

I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't gone on heroin for over ten years. I suspect I would be a lot less messed up. To be fair, the drug gave me something I'd never really experienced before. It killed the multifarious discomforts I'd entirely got used to living with because they were parts of me. For a brief while I had the luxury of not being me. But I still don't think heroin made me happy. What I really wanted was to kill myself off ~ both literally and metaphorically. In a metaphorical sense I think I've achieved my object, because I'm a different person now to who I was then. Totally different. I'm very glad of that.

So now the truly mysterious part begins: I have to start from here, not knowing where I am. I've somehow to learn Mastery of Life. That's my goal.

I never set my sights low, except when I don't want to be doing something anyway.

I do want to live and be alive, because I have chosen life. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here now.

I'm reminded of one of NA's sayings about accepting life on life's terms and living in the moment.

It's all about being here now ...

Just Be Here Now ...


Link of the day ~ Drug Abuse: UK Guidelines for Clinical Management