Blue Rant 1

I am a drug addict. I've always been a dabbler, at least since I was thirteen or so. I'll put it this way, I can't remember what it feels like to be sober for an extended period of time. I've gone through a number of phases. Loved alcohol and marijuana from the start, though neither's ever been the source of any serious existential crisis of mine. Don't get me wrong, they've both pissed off an ex-wife and a girlfriend or two, caused me skirmishes with law enforcement and in the case of alcohol landed me brief stints of incarceration, but none of these things ever really troubled me too deeply. I'm not broken down old drunk or a complete social deviant with absolutely no regard for my own reputation or legal status. I just thoroughly enjoy a good time and am comfortable with consequences that some might find socially awkward or embarrassing. The plain fact is I often require chemical assistance to achieve the kind of good time I crave. I am far beyond the stage of addiction that needs to utilize denial as a defense mechanism.

As a teenager aside from the pot and booze I rather enjoyed inhalants. After experimenting with model glue, nail polish remover and various other household chemicals i gained a preference for gasoline. I became quite the fan of the strange hallucinatory journeys off to which the vapors would carry me. My teenage buddy and I would ride his little Honda dirt bike just far enough down the trails that we weren't likely to encounter any adults and huff away entire afternoons. Eventually the smell of the fumes became an issue for us and our parents were able to discern what we were doing. At thirteen I experimented with a large dose of seeds from the jimson weed plant. This was the culmination of roughly a week of research some friends and I were conducting with the plant that led to some rather inconvenient results for me. I lapsed into a state of temporary madness that lasted for the better part of a week. It was as though I were dreaming the entire time but unfortunately for me I was awake and walking around my neighborhood and eventually my parents' house. This resulted in me spending my fourteenth birthday in a psychiatric facility.

In my twenties I developed a strong infatuation with hallucinogens, mainly LSD and mushrooms. This little distraction greatly pissed off the afore mentioned ex-wife and on several occasions nearly hastened the divorce that would come years later for reasons more complex than simple substance abuse. I still really hadn't reached any level of personal distress over my drug use at this point. I considered myself an adventurer and a thinker and firmly believed (and to a certain extent still do) that the "outlaw status" of my illicit activity was more a reflection of flaws in the legal system than in me.

After the divorce things got a bit heavier and a bit darker. At various points during my marraige and my youth prior to that, I had participated in some experimentation with some of the so-called "harder drugs" such as narcotic pain pills, various sedatives and cocaine. As with all of my previous periods of drug use, my post divorce time seemed to be definable by a corelated period of chronological time and a dominant substance I favored for getting high. This being said I can say that my thirties could have been called "the cocaine years." As a younger man I had occasionally experimented with coke and frankly had been less than impressed with the buzz. I've always been more of a fan of drugs that slow me down than those that speed me up but for whatever reason, in my thirties I developed quite the taste for the effects of cocaine. There were a couple of contributing factors to this shift in preference that are noteworthy. the first was simply a geographical factor. I am a low to middle income resident of a medium-sized city who has spent his entire adult life living in an urban environment. In my neighborhood street corner drug transactions are an everyday reality. You don't even have to be involved in the drug game to get to know the players if you ever go out in your own community. As you may be able to deduce from the background information I have already provided, I have never been exactly 100% uninvolved in the shady business that goes on at street corners within a block or two of my front door. Familiarity with local dealers came quickly and easily to me. The main product being peddled in my neighborhood at that time was crack cocaine, a relatively cheap source of a quick intense high that I had no trouble developing a taste for.To compound this circumstance, a dear old friend of mine had risen up in the local scene to become one of my city's top dealers of the supposedly more acceptable powdered form of cocaine, and he and I soon worked out a business relationship, which without going into detail, involved me having access to large quantities of cocaine and him making a lot of money. After many months (perhaps a couple of years, I'm not sure - it's all a bit blurry in my memory) I had a fairly severe habit on my hands. I spent countless hours and dollars sniffing lines and drinking liquor, and when money and/or resources got tight I would score some crack from the local corner boys and blast off in desperation to escape the disaster I had allowed my life to become. Finally I was feeling that personal distress, that existential crisis that i had never previously associated with my drug use. Every day i woke up and I hated myself and every night I drank myself to a state of deferred judgement and went and scored a bag of blow or a rock of crack and blasted off to that place that I knew I would only come crashing down from, landing in an even lower place and hating myself more each time.

Something had to give. I couldn't go on living like that and for the first time in my life I seriously contemplated suicide. I hated what my life had become, knew I had only myself to blame and didn't see a way out. I needed alcohol and cocaine to face life, but I hated what my life had become as a result. Ever the survivor, I decided against suicide and simply got up one day, packed a small bag, gathered the money i had access to and left town. i didn't announce my departure to anyone other than a couple members of my immediate family. I was placed in self-imposed exile for almost a year and I spent that time facing and fighting my demons. For the first several months I didn't even drink a beer, smoke a hit of weed or anything to alter my state of consciousness at all. I had come there to beat cocaine addiction and I can say without hesitation that I was successful.

TO BE CONTINUED...