Shady0807 – "The Thoughts of a Gentleman"

ADDICT… ADDICTION…

   These are words that I don’t like to use. I don’t feel like I’m in this category. You can be addicted to pretty much anything. People are addicted to playing video games. People are addicted to chocolate. Hell, people can be addicted to Internet porn. That doesn’t mean that they will curl up, vomit violently, break out in cold sweats, and shiver so hard that they think they are going to break their own spine. I am chemically dependant.

   I started drug and alcohol abuse when I was 15. It started with smoking some weed and drinking on the weekends, but it didn’t take long to develop a serious problem with hard drugs. By the time I was 17 I was taking LSD 3-4 times a week and doing cocaine every day. I had older friends so getting alcohol wasn’t a problem. I would pretty much binge drink every night of the week. I remember doing half gram lines of cocaine while I was tripping my balls off, and had been drinking heavily for hours. Teenagers will be teenagers, but this was no life to live. By the time I was 2o I had quit cocaine, but still drank frequently and stayed high all the time. I would wake up, smoke weed on the way to work, smoke weed on my lunch break, smoke weed on the way home, take a shower, and then smoke weed the whole night until I passed out. It wasn’t until I was 22 that I found Oxycontin.

   You here alot about being addicted to the drug. What you don’t hear is how you become addicted to the process of doing the drug. I never liked needles, so I never shot up. I crushed up the pills and snorted them. It wasn’t just the high that got me. It was the anticipation of the buzz while I was crushing it up. The feeling of it going up my nose. The taste of the drainage when it hit the back of my throat. The warmth when it hit my stomach. Finally, the rush that exploded through my body when it hit me. Within a year I was doing up to 400mg a day. People that are terminally ill and dying usually get a max of 240mg per day. I had a very bad problem for about 3 years and then my car wreck happened. I hit a semi head on at 70mph. The lady that did my insurance adjustment said it was a miracle I was alive, let alone didn’t have a scratch on me. Don’t get me wrong, I was banged up inside pretty good. I had 3 broken ribs, a broken ankle, and 2 torn discs in my lower back. Most people would have seen this as an eye opener. I seen it as a chance to now get prescribed the drugs I had been buying off the street. It’s alot cheaper that way.

   I started going to a Dr. that was pretty well known for giving out pain narcotics. After telling him about my wreck and him looking at the hospital records… It didn’t take much. He started me on Norco, which is a hydrocodone that comes in a 10/325. The nice thing was he would give me 3 refills at a time. He would forget about it when I went back the next month and write me another script with another 3 refills. After 3 months of going, I had it set up to where I could go to a different pharmacy every week and pick up my script of 100 pills. Now Oxycontin was my drug of choice, but this was still an opiate, and it was alot cheaper. I would pick up my bottle and during the 10 minute drive home I would get full. I would usually chew up 10 of them on the way home, and then eat handfuls here and there the whole night. My script of 100 pills would be gone in 3-4 days max. I kept bitching about pain, even though I was numb to the world, so he kept giving me stronger drugs. Norco turned to Percocet, Percocet turned to a low dose of Morphine, and Morphine turned to Oxycontin… which was my goal all along.

   I now had my own script of the drug that I loved the most. I was prescribed 90 40mg pills a month. That was not a good thing at all. I would get my script and basically stay up until they were all gone. I would try to sleep and all I could think about was getting up and railing another one. So once again my script would last me only about a week, and after having Oxycontin all the time, the Percocet and Norco were useless. I was back to buying off the street again. Now I live in Indiana. Oxycontin goes for a dollar a milligram. So when I’m use to doing 300-400mg a day, that’s $300-$400 PER DAY! No one can afford that. I started Dr. shopping. I was seeing 2 different Drs. that would each give me a script at different times of the month, so I should be good, right? Not even close. Between the 2 scripts I was lucky to make it a total of 10-12 days. I couldn’t live like this. I would use before I went to bed and literally wake up 4 hours later with cold sweats and chills, so I would have to use again just to go back to sleep. I went to rehab…

   Rehabilitation… that’s kind of a funny word if you’ve ever experienced it, at least the places I went. I went to rehab 7 times in one year. I tried 3 different facilities and they were all the same. They would keep me for 3-4 days to detox me, keep me on meds to help with my withdraws, put me on anti-depressants, and send me home with a follow up appt. a month later. Do people really think that works??? I abused pain narcotics for 4-5 years. It seems like you would have to be an idiot to think keeping me for a few days would change that. I still continued to use multiple times every day. Alot of people that I knew couldn’t afford the habit anymore, so they started going to the Methadone clinic. For those of you that don’t know, Methadone is a drug that is used to get people off of heroin, which Oxycontin is basically synthetic heroin so it helps with all your withdraw symptoms. The problem with Methadone is that it is just as habit forming as Oxycontin, if not worse. I knew people that had taken it for over a year and if they didn’t have it, they would be just as sick as if they were withdrawing from the Oxys. I seen it in too many people to even waste my time. After a few more months of suffering with my dependancy, I found a place that used Suboxone in an out patient program. Suboxone is a synthetic opiate that does basically what Methadone does, but is supposed to be less habit forming. You start taking a certain dose depending on how long you had been on drugs, and they slowly ween you down. The 4 months I was on Suboxone was the best and easiest time I’ve ever had, but no matter how you look at it, I was still taking something every day. That’s where the mental game comes into play.

   I’ve now been clean for 5 months. The 4 that I was on the Suboxone, and 1 without anything. I should be happy, right? Life has never been harder. I have days where I wish that I would have died in my sleep. I don’t go day by day, it’s more like hour by hour. The user dreams get worse instead of better, and the temptation gets stronger by the minute. I dream of the day that I can go a few hours without thinking about using… but I’m a realist and I don’t think it will ever happen. I am now a hollow shell of what I once was. I don’t even know who I am. I spent so many years fucked up on drugs, and I started at such a young age that I don’t know what to do for fun. Since I can remember, getting fucked up was all I did. I feel alone, depressed, and un-connected to the world. I’m no longer the animal that drugs made me, but there are days that I think about going back because at least then I knew who and what I was. Now I’m just lost… and that’s the only way to put it.

   The reason I’m writing this is to thank everyone that reads it. Writing poetry is the only time I get to escape from reality, and it’s you guys that keep me going. Getting positive feedback on the poetry I write is what I look forward to everyday. If you met me in person you would have no clue that I’m capable of writing the things that I do. Very few people that know me personally know that I write. I have been labled as this guy who dresses nice and tells women what they want to hear just to get them in bed. I guess I’ve given myself that image so I have no one to blame, but I really am a good person. I just wanted to thank all of you again for your support. It means everything to me to know that you guys enjoy my writing. I’d like to give a special thank you to… Chloe, Fresh to Death, Craving Oxygen, Oracle of the Pearl, The Sleeping Typewriter, Wavemaker 2, Jan Freeman, Simone, and Dumakey… and everyone else that enjoys my writing. I hope this let you guys know and understand me on a more personal level. Thanks for your time!!!