Kicking Coke in Public

ALL OF A SUDDEN I FEEL STRANGELY EXPOSED, making progress in my drugs-fight and reporting online.

Cocaine, or more to the point, crack, has long been a feature of my life, holding hands with heroin and tangoing together as daily speedballs in certain years gone by. More recently I was reduced to Snowball Mondays. I'd buy just enough crack for one nice little pipe, then crush the rest into heroin, to make into snowballs.

Cocaine intensifies the effect of heroin and just like butter on bread or sugar in coffee, the combinations's hard to give up once you've picked up a taste.

An old drugs worker put it best: "Crack just separates you from your money as quickly as possible. And it makes you use even more gear."

Although I've usually had the control to keep my spend at £10 or £20 and then leave the crack alone (people who insist on buying the smallest amount then saying "let's get some more!" and "let's get some more!" really annoyed me. I always saw the high of crack as temporary and false and thus far easier to see "through" than my beloved heroin, who's done everything to make my life the garden of delights it is today. Ooo! Is Gledwood being sarky here?!

Now back to crack. I managed to beat it back to a single day a week and when it wasn't that day even if I had the dollars I didn't feel tempted. Compartmentalizing life is one thing I'm good at, so I found myself sticking to this rule without much trouble.

Also I was so unused to exercising any moral gumption it made a spiriting change actually to make a decision and prove I could stick by it.

But of course my Crack Mondays have been sabotaging all attempts to steer heroin clean. Because come the weekend's end ~ and Sundays have always been miserable for me ~ and I'm always broke ~ I'm suddenly chucked into the glory of a monday morning with money and a double temptation and so I always gave in, and so the only pattern I made in life was circular: a vicious circle too!

So you see that little bit of coke was far more of an issue than it might seem at a casual glance. I didn't dare post this much yesterday because my inner demons love so much making me a hypocrite. I can just imagine posting "I did it!" then running straight to the dealer. As soon as addiction flourished in me so too did an inner gremlin who seemed to spiritedly enjoy chucking my resolutions to the wall. After all I'd lost so very many dignities there was no way now I could do without the consolation of drugs cushioning my fall. And so I didn't. And so I lost the power to resist.

Please don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying "I've done it. I've kicked the crack"; I never can. (You can only ever do it day by day...) But I managed it yesterday and that felt like some achievement...

hey! Now I can throw out my crack bottle collection (they were brandy miniature like the three to the top left pictured). I need the drawer space and I don't need the reminder.

I STILL FEEL SHAKY WHEN I SAY ALL THIS. Something in me just wants to sabotage and cheat. I'm a drug addict! How can I ever trust myself again?

OK: before this post turns viciously circular as well I'm going to ping off like a roborovski.