My Monkey, Pt. 1

8/18/10! I want all of you motherfuckers to mark that on your calendar as the first day Edward is free of his addiction. This is the first day I haven’t taken any form of opiate in over two months, and before that, I hadn’t gone 4 or 5 days free of them in a solid 8 months or so. I barely did anything yesterday—only a cotton shot because it’s a real bitch to wake up in withdrawals (however minor they may be, since I’m coming off of a suboxone detox and not a straight heroin habit) and have to go to work—but I didn’t want to start counting my clean time until I had straight-up done nothing. Of course my problem did not begin 8 months ago, or it never would have progressed to the levels I was using at lately so fast (well, I guess it could and does for others). I have been psychologically addicted to opiates for a solid five and a half years, and my real problems with physical addiction to heroin began about two years ago. I’ll use this post to try to talk a little bit about my history with drugs. I’ll cut this up into portions, because this promises to be long, but as a warning: anyone who doesn’t like long posts can go elsewhere. I’m writing this for me and me alone, just like I’m quitting drugs for me and me alone.

I made it through almost all of high school being pretty damn straight-edge. I didn’t necessarily look down on people who drank or smoked or anything; it just wasn’t something for me. I would imagine every single person who met me to this day would not think I was a party guy or a drug abuser. I don’t give off that image, and indeed for long periods of my life I lived up to this squeaky-clean image. I still don’t think of myself as a party guy. I’m pretty shy and reclusive, which I guess helped speed along my addiction, since for me drug use was never, ever about recreational or social use. I always did it so that I could feel good, fuck everything else. When I was a senior in high school, I got a prescription of Vicodin—a pretty large prescription at that—for some ailment I had that caused a lot of sores in my mouth, so that I couldn’t eat from the pain. I was one of those kids who hated taking medicine for any reason, just because like I said I wasn’t really into drugs of any sort, even over-the-counter or prescription ones, and was kinda macho about not taking them for pain or anything. Unfortunately, I really did need those painkillers, because I hadn’t eaten a meal in days. I am not the type of person who has really had many life-changing moments, but the first Vicodin I ever took was probably the single biggest defining one that happened in my life. I fucking loved it from my very first pill. Now I’m well aware that a lot of drug addicts do not start like this. For most this is a much longer process, and perhaps mine was different for a number of reasons. One, my love of opiates was heightened even more because I linked them with taking away any sort of pain, both physical and psychological. Just like the rush of IV heroin feels that much better when you are hours into withdrawal and you absolutely goddamn need that fix in your veins right now, that first dose of hydrocodone was that much better because it was sweet, sweet relief from the pain. Two, I was not introduced to drugs through social situations, which I do think dilute the effects of drugs for a variety of reasons. You tend to focus on the social experience more than the drug itself I think. That was not me; I didn’t give a fuck about anything else as long as I had that opiate in me. It is amazing how fast my perception of drugs changed from this one time, but that is just how it is. From then on, it was my mission to try as many kinds of drugs as possible because I had found my new calling.

Now at this time I had recently gotten my first real girlfriend. I was very much in love with her at the time, and we had basically spent the last 8 or so months together pretty much every single day. She immediately became concerned about my usage of these painkillers, because one thing that attracted her to me was that I wasn’t like everyone else in high school whose main goal was to get as fucked-up as possible on weekends and party as hard as they could. Also, I had a tendency to want to keep pushing it with the Vicodin. When one wouldn’t satisfy anymore, I would take two; when two wouldn’t, I would take three. And so on. This got her very upset, so eventually I said I would quit and got rid of my bottle of painkillers.

I do not remember how long this lasted, but at one point I just couldn’t help myself and continued using. This was when more signs of addiction began to rear their head: this was when I started to lie about my use on a daily basis and hide it. It probably was when I became more ashamed of my use, since it’s not fun to lie to the person you loved most right to their face about your use, but it became something I was good at and eventually it just became second nature, something I didn’t think about whatsoever. If nothing else, addiction makes you into a complete liar. Who would want to be friends with a drug addict if they told the truth about their problems? Not the kind of friends I wanted, at least, since I was never a fan of the people in the drug scene themselves. I tried to stay as much outside of it as I could other than buying the drugs. My use progressed, and I discovered OxyContin, which was a lot stronger than Vicodin. At this point in my life, I was still open to trying all sorts of drugs, since I wanted to discover what all the highs had to offer. I was doing amphetamines and coke and stuff like that a lot. But I always came back to opiates in the end, and they were what I loved most. That feeling of relaxation and the beautiful, tranquil euphoria I never found anywhere else. I think I got caught by Alex (my girlfriend) one more time in this period, but other than that, it was pretty smooth sailing. After I got caught that time, it was another two years before she found out again, in which time my use would of course escalate (as it always seems to).

My drug use picked up when I went to college, since my freshman year was my loneliest, most depressing year that I have ever had. I had absolutely no friends, and I think my drug addiction made me have an increasingly negative worldview. I felt like I was looking at everyone I saw through a cave, and no one could get close to me. My drug addiction really changed my attitude, in the sense that it just made my views a lot darker. I realized there were millions of others like me, not necessarily drug addicts, but a world full of people with depression and anxiety and so many other problems. What kind of a world was this where so many people were suffering? Why does everyone act happy all the time, when they are just denying that people like this exist? I thought all of the smiling, happy people I saw around me were full of shit—not real human beings—or else they were only smiling on the surface, hiding the pain that lurked down deeper inside of them. I couldn’t relate to anyone around me, I thought. I just felt like an alien wandering in a cold, barren world. It should be noted that I was not really a junkie at this point, because I still had some shards of self-control which would disappear later in my life. I didn’t have particularly many drug hook-ups, since as I said, I knew no one at school, so I would only get drugs at home and bring them back with me. It amazes me now that I could have coke or painkillers on me and actually have them for weeks. What self-control! The first time I tried heroin was when I was a freshman at JMU. I drove to Baltimore with some guy and picked up some, but afterwards I decided it wasn’t worth doing again, since it just felt very sketchy and the heroin I got wasn’t the best. I was not injecting at this time in my life, although I don’t think I had any huge qualms against it. Most of what I remember from freshman year was the constant craving for drugs. Since my connections were not great, I was often left drugless, reading up about them online, wishing so bad I had them. Almost every waking hour was spent thinking about drugs.

Basically from the very start of my drug use, I had the bad habit of self-medicating. Since I am a shy person and probably have some anxiety issues, as well as of course depression, any time that I thought I would be uncomfortable, I would take some drugs. I used drugs all the time to do presentations, for social events that I dreaded, for people that I didn’t feel like dealing with. Any time I felt down and I had drugs around, that was what was going in me. That was just how I was from the start. I think even from the first few weeks and months I knew I was an addict. I think for most addicts, there is a long period of denial, but I don’t ever remember one from me. After all, if I couldn’t give up drugs for the person I loved the most, someone I felt blessed to have in my life, how the fuck was I not a drug addict? After all, I was not stupid and knew that drugs would bring unhappiness into my life, although not particularly much at this point. I really just felt like my drug use was inevitable. I never thought about stopping at this point. It really was a long time before I started to feel like I had a bad problem.

The first time I ever injected a drug was the summer after my freshman year. This was another major turning point for me. I was buying drugs with a guy and we got Dilaudid, which is a really strong painkiller that exhibits a very strong rush if injected and is somewhat worthless through other routes of administration. He offered to shoot me up my first time, and I agreed, because like I said I didn’t really have any strong qualms against injecting by this point (I honestly forget if I was that against it to begin with, but I’m sure I was more against it than I had become by this point). Because it’s such a strong drug, he didn’t put in very much for this first shot, so I didn’t really feel it. It was really just as well, since almost immediately after he shot me up, his mom came in screaming at me to get the fuck out, that she knew her son was using again. He was a lot bigger junkie than I was at this period of my life. Anyways, I took my drugs and a syringe and got the hell out of there. The first time I ever injected myself, later that night—that was the real turning point. I put in more Dilaudid—2mg or so—and proceeded to register to make sure I was safely in a vein (which proved to be a lot easier than I thought it would be), and then slowly pushed in the plunger. Goddamn it, this was the best fucking feeling I had ever had. It felt like all of the air was sucked out of my lungs and there was this colossal tightness which gripped my chest, and then the most euphoric warmth possible began to emanate out of the very center of my being, it felt like my soul, and it overtook my entire body, releasing that tightness, turning it into pure bliss. It felt like I was floating in a whirlpool of warmth that was pushing my body about, and slowly I drifted away into the happiest place I had ever been. Fucking A, I had to have more of that. I honestly don’t think I ever got that good of a rush again from an opiate—even shooting up heroin when I was deathly sick—but fuck it if I wasn’t going to try my hardest to get that feeling back. That was easily the best drug experience I had had up until that point, and my fate had seemingly been decided for me. I was going to be a needle fiend.

So I went back to sophomore year at JMU with a bunch of OxyContin, because, being me, I was not about to go back to school and meet my new, random roommate sober. I dreaded such things, just like I dread a lot of things. I had pretty much already become obsessed with the needle by this point: I was in love with the rituals of shooting up—the spoon and the cotton, drawing up the liquid into the barrel and tapping out the air bubbles, and especially the plume of blood as you register and you’re about to push in (how many junkies salivate over this image?). But of course, most of all I loved the rush, something you get from no other method of administration of a drug. It was like starting drugs all over again. To me, drugs are so very different when you shoot them up versus doing them in other ways. Every drug has a distinct rush, and I wanted to feel them all. So going about research with this state of mind, I read that coke had the absolute best rush IV. I had to try this. So I went about getting some coke and OC for the comedown (I would never again do any stimulants without an opiate for the comedown, because that shit sucks, especially if you are banging the stimulant), and began my first experiments with intravenous cocaine. Although at first I did not load up enough coke into the needle to be on the safe side (I read about people saying to put ¼ to ½ lines into it), but once I put enough into the spoon (probably a lot more than I was snorting at the time), I found nirvana for the IV drug user. The cocaine bellringer (named thusly because of the loud, metallic ringing that fills your head after you shoot a big enough shot) was the absolute best feeling I ever had. As much as I love Dilaudid and heroin rushes, they simply pale in comparison to a really good shot of good coke. The euphoria is untouchable. I also walked into one of the most compulsive drugs there is. What makes IV coke so addictive is its combination of that almost absurdly intense rush with a very short duration, so I would end up shooting again and again and again to keep that high/rush going. It turns your arms into a bloody mess as you have to keep re-jabbing the same veins over and over again with increasingly blunt needles (at this point I had not discovered that you could order boxes of 100 needles online for cheap), often missing shots because your hands are shaking so much from the excessive amounts of coke that you can’t register properly and keep the needle in the vein as you inject (also coke is a local anesthetic, so it tends to shrink your veins with use as well, making all of this even harder). All of that stuff just comes along with IV cocaine use—the price you have to pay for that pinnacle of pleasure which you will end up chasing through thousands of dollars and wasted years.

This was pretty much precisely the point where I lost any last remaining shreds of self-control that I had. I was a slave to that needle. I told myself every damn day to not go on a binge, but every damn day I ended up failing. I started looking like a mess and becoming more and more reclusive. Really everything flew out the door; all that I cared about was getting that big fucking rush. Thankfully, this was the two years later that I was talking about earlier, and Alex found out about my drug use again. She told all my drug dealers not to sell to me anymore or to tell her if I was buying from them (since she knew most of them, because I was still buying drugs only around home at this point). Because of this, and because I made her drug test me, since I said I would never be able to quit otherwise, I was able to go pretty sober for the next few years. It was insanely hard at first, and I would sit by myself in my room with my old needles, putting them up against my arm and pretending to inject myself over and over again, and because my mental recall of those insane rushes was so strong, I would actually get lightheaded and my heartbeat would jump up. I even shot myself up with water, but decided this was just more of a terrible tease than anything else. The first few months were really, really hard, and I think for a long time I would try to cheat the drug tests by getting high on various shitty things, but eventually I think after about a year drug use left my mind alone. Things were not perfect in my life, but at least my whole day wasn’t consumed with thinking about buying drugs.

Part 2 later…

--Edward