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!

Monday, July 18, 2011

Weekend Ramblings


IT’S FIVE MINUTES to midnight. (Saturday night.) Awful music is playing on TV. I have chicken jalfrezi and “tricoloured rice” (800 cals the lot) but I can’t eat it till tomorrow. Else I’ll be out of money and out of food to boot.

I’m not looking forward to tomorrow. I hate Sundays. And what use is a Sunday without drugs to kill the misery. I don’t think I will ever be OK ever again after that psychiatrist gave me bipolar disorder. My family pointed out that a psychiatric titles are mere descriptions. Life is not a Chinese restaurant menu. As my old counsellor said, you don’t get to pick what cross you bear. But I do feel the psychiatrists have made me mad. I was fine before I went to any shrink. Interesting I supposedly had depression for years and yet my depression doesn’t match the extremes described in Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, the alltime classic text on the subject. My overexcitement is exactly as described in the book, but the depression isn’t. So by Victorian standards I’m a maniac with a moody temperament. Which means I don’t need medication. I’m not taking medication anyway. Medication is a way of keeping people subjugated and compliant.

I think most people who feel depressed have reason to be depressed. I feel evil and full of death. I think I’m going to have to dig out a baseball cap. They don’t suit me at all. But together with dark glasses, they hide the eyes. I cannot handle people looking me in the eye. And I really cannot stomach this nauseating drug clinic I have to go to. The absolute falseness between me and my worker. All she wants is a show of positivity so that’s what I show. On Tuesday I was feeling a bit amped up so the energy I gave out was real. By Friday I wasn’t happy at all and the effort required to bullshit through my encounters is just too much. I am not looking forward to going there on Tuesday. Fucking group therapy. What I find intrusive and offensive is that you have to say your name. Not like NA where you can skulk in and out saying nothing.

My only goal left in life is to become rich. I want money because I know it will never bring happiness, but like heroin, money is tangible. I want money so I can isolate myself. I want to be unconscious and unremembered. I am too tired to go on.

On a positive note I am planning to go to NA this Monday. I would like to say life on drugs was miserable but that wasn’t the core problem. Drug addiction is disempowering and drug addicts are slaves. That’s what’s bad about addiction. All this crap about how much better I’ll feel. I know of many many cases who left behind drugs ~ and I mean opiate drugs that kill pain and stabilize mood ~ and these people all have bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or depressive psychosis. We all knew that the drugs were holding these people together. Without exception they broke down AFTER the addiction ended.

My problem is that if I am not weak then I am powerless. Money gives power of a fashion. I can’t think of a single person I admire who was poor. Only exceptions are the New Testament Bible characters, but they somehow had means to pay passage all across the road. One of the apostles went as far as Japan. As for the old testament: Abraham had audiences with kings. Joseph and Daniel both reached the status of Prime Minister.

Ugh. And talking about money there’s a nauseating miniseries about the Kennedys playing on BBC2. What people find fascinating about Jackie Kennedy I do not understand. I have a paperback about her and only read the bits about Aristotle Onassis ~ a far more interesting personality.

I have drunk cokehead neighbours. Yelling and bawling across the street. Least it’s not quiet I suppose. I despise cocaine. It’s powdered excitement for people too dull and drab to make entertainment of their own. O shit it’s 0041 hours. I’ve gotta sleep.

IT’S 10PM (Sunday night) NOW. I stayed awake most of the night, thinking I was doing a good thing depriving myself of sleep, as sleep is supposedly the fuel of depression. By about five a.m. I couldn’t decide whether or not to stay up the whole day through, but eventually went to bed. I was woken up just before 2pm by the most terrible nightmares. So I woke up in a bad mood and stayed in a bad mood all day until I eventually gave in and scored heroin.

The drug had some effect because suddenly I was depressed no more, or depressed a lot less. This effect lasted a mere three hours and as I write the bad mood is creeping back on me, making £10 seem a very dear price for a couple of hours’ normality. Now if only methadone had this remarkable effect I might find sticking to my script a lot easier. As it is, I had been about ten days without using. I knew I was going to be tested by the doctor next Tuesday and I refuse to remain clean merely to impress another person. I never have and never will avoid drugs due to external pressures. I am only detoxing (or at least reducing my metha-dose) because I have lived the junkie life. Nothing came of it bar a handful of experiences an ordinary person wouldn’t want to experience anyhow. As an addict, there was never any tomorrow. Just one constant mono-day. Same, same, same every day. Nothing new ever happened, except when some crisis came to a head. There was nothing to look forward to, except more of the same drug. And for a long, long time the main pleasure of heroin was that a day on it was a hundred times more tolerable than a day without. No amount of methadone did very much to inhibit my desire for heroin. And unless I took a dose many times larger than the one I was accustomed to I never felt any euphoriant effect at all from methadone. Any progress I have made was despite, not because of methadone. Some ill-informed people appear to believe that this substance possesses some special property that makes it especially suitable for addicts who wish to give up heroin. It does not.
The only reason methadone was selected as a treatment for addicts was that it could be dosed orally once daily under supervision whereas nearly every other opiate required two or more doses a day. This is no longer the case. There is a sustained-release preparation of hydromorphone (Jurnista) that can be dosed once daily. As far as I know there’s a similar preparation of morphine.

Methadone is preferred because methadone is cheap and in the words of the medical manuals “produces less euphoria than heroin and other opiates”. To a miserable junkie, the so-called “euphoria” of heroin, which is no more intense than the intoxicant effect of a double Scotch, becomes the only tolerable reality they know. On methadone, addicts tend to feel flat and listless. In my darkest days I did so badly on methadone because I simply could not bear the intensity of depression that resulted after taking it. It’s no coincidence in my mind that I also became psychotically manic while taking no other drug but methadone. If I were a doctor I could in no good conscience prescribe a drug which I knew to have effects this extreme on my patient. I believe I am in fact the victim of medical negligence. I’m only willing to endure the intensely malign effects of this substance in an effort to get off all opiates as quickly as humanly possible. The more depressed I feel the more my craving for heroin increases. But strangely the desire to get off opiates does not diminish at all. Bear in mind that a methadone addict is in every way as much of an addict as a heroin addict. Methadone is known to affect more receptor sites in the brain than heroin, including ones that are known to promote dysphoria. Milligram for milligram the methadone withdrawal syndrome is far harsher than that of heroin and it goes on for weeks, not days. I consider methadone a poison and I want it out of my body as swiftly as humanly possible.

There’s nothing good to write because I see no future until I am free of this rubbishy drug the government insist I take. If I won the lottery I would gladly leave this awful new drug clinic I have been saddled with and take my custom to a private doctor who would prescribe morphine continus tablets. I’ve experimented with Oromorph solution. It feels the same as heroin without the so-called rush of injecting. In other words it does everything methadone is supposed to do but doesn’t. Gets an addict away from illicit heroin and needles, allows them to stabilize. And keeps them feeling OK. I don’t think I have ever known anyone stick to methadone without either using heroin on top at every opportunity, or else swapping heroin for alcohol or benzodiazepines. True, methadone is better than nothing. But this is the year 2011. Surely it is time for the Powers That Be to start looking at something a little more effectual than oral methadone with its 4% success rate?
Until that day comes, expect the opiate problem to continue to grow. Expect more crime. More lives wasted. More overdoses. More suicides. An ever more crowded criminal justice system and fuller prisons. If methadone worked as well as its advocates claim it to, nobody would ever use on top of it, just as street heroin addicts don’t use on top of their doses. Now that stands to reason. Methadone does work for some people. 4% of addicts are treated successfully on methadone. But the other 96% deserve something else. Something better. And they need it NOW.

Oh roll on tomorrow. Money. Phone top-up. Can ring Deshane, find out about my supposed house move etc. Roll on fucking Specsavers with my Reactions lenses so I can get my other pair tinted blue. I know blue lenses are meant to be bad for the eyes but surely the UV filter will cancel that out. Blue light triggers wakefulness in the brain, which red light cancels out. So amber lenses are very good for insomniacs to wear while trying to sleep when it’s light outside. Blue lenses would if anything make one more wide awake and chirpy. I used to wear dark blue sunglasses all the time until a freak wave in Goa swept them away…
… then there’s that poor goldfinch hopping forlornly from perch to bleak perch in a gloomy cage in a shop he hates. They say caged birds don’t sing. This one doesn’t. Part of me believes he wants me to rescue him. The other part tells me this is sheer folly, that I’m in no position to be taking on new pets and what would happen if I became ill? A hamster can be left for a week or longer. Nocturnal hamsters can happily live hidden away in closets in the dark; daylight loving birds can be bundled into cupboards when landlords pay unexpected calls and the dark will shut up their chirpings but that is a far from ideal solution. I kept my robbies hidden from view at all times when I was out of the house and nobody ever discovered them. I’ve now found a female golden hamster sleeping in a ball… there are also lback and white ones going at £5 each in the goldfinch shop but the man has a very dismissive attitude. This is the same man who said “oh they’re not Syrian hamsters; I think they’re normal ones” DUR!

Oh I’ve got to go the more I think the worse I feel. I’ve been trying to access the local wireless networks free of charge. I wouldn’t make a good professional hacker. For example “Mary”’s network I tried passwords contrary, Magdalene, London, the part of London we’re in, the name of my road, what I assume to be Mary’s road and so on. The anti-hack security is wise to this and pauses pregnantly when I enter anything raringly obvious like password or secret… I think I’m going to have to stick with Starbucks in future…





THIS IS THE BEST EUPHORIC TRANCE TUNE EVER

binary finary 1998/1999
the version i knew came out 1998



5 comments:

Janice Seagraves said...

Keep working on going clean, Gled. I know you can do it.

Anonymous said...

Hi,I think money would solve things so write that book!And you could dye your hair green now that its platinum!Once you get fed up with it.Or pink,purple,orange or even blue.Mmmmmm blue,sky blue.That might cheer you up.Or not. xxxxx Annie

Akelamalu said...

You're doing good Gleds, keep up with it. If you were rich wouldn't you spend the money on heroin?

Gledwood said...

Janice: I bloody well hope so.

Annie: I did consider seaweed green in long strangling streaks years ago when I went out a lot (even though I had chronic fatigue syndrome (spent 99% of the night in the chillout room)) anyway I didn't go for it on the back of not wanting to be "the one with the green hair" know what I mean. Might still do it though. I'm thinking of getting Specsavers to dye my glasses blue. Costs £12. That's the lenses, not the frames. Plot for a book sprang into my head not 2 days ago. Really fucking obvious too. It was the type of book you can write over and over with a new novelty gizmo each time I just couldn't conceive the plot without the novelty factor (for book 1). Now I have conceived, my baby can be born

Gledwood said...

Akelamalu: you commented while I was answering 1 and 2

would I spend it on heroin? just the first week until I got my arse down a proper private clinic

i would leave the country rather than do rehab

in fact i would buy a fuck-off house in London and go to NA in Kensington and Chelsea for a year THEN go travelling knowing I'd done it and could trust myself on Burmese soil

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