narcotics

The first question's in, and it is a tough one. It's been a long time since I’ve thought about these things, and for good reason: It isn’t good to dwell on them, especially when you’ve not been sober/clean for long. That said, I want to strongly discourage you from continuing to read if you’re in recovery, which here I’ll qualify as less than a year since you last used.

Just to be clear: If you haven’t been clean for at least a year - and even then, check your conscience - go watch a movie or read a book.

Gustavo/Dad writes:
Every time I have been treated with a narcotic pain med, in addition to the (variable) pain control, I have felt either nothing, or nausea and/or an intense malaise.
Question: Did your first doses of narcotics feel good? If not, what made you take the second dose?

Deep breath.

Here we go.

Did your first doses of narcotics feel good?

Yes, but my first doses were small and I wasn’t in any pain. I’m no doctor, but I wonder if this made a difference.

A few things are important to understand here:

1) My first experiences were with the little cousins of heroin - hydro- and oxycodones like Lortab and Percocet. Still narcotics, but nowhere near as strong.

2) By the time I was experimenting with narcotics - probably late summer ’07 - I’d been through marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines, ecstasy, and hallucinogens (LSD as well as experimental designer drugs like the 2C family). The significance of this is that I’d already watched the effects of a variety of drugs on my body - I was experimental in my use to the nth degree - and was very practiced in, quite literally, controlling my body in the event of negative effects. I’m not sure how to relate this except in terms of the stomach flu: Have you ever been sick, or felt as though you were about to be, and “steeled” yourself, perhaps until you were closer to the toilet? It’s like that.

3) I wanted it to feel good. I wanted it very badly. This begins to answer the second question, but I’m not ready to go there, yet.

More to the point, I think, are my first few experiences with the drug Oxycontin, which led to my heroin addiction in early 2009. These experiences would have been anti-climactic if I'd been expecting anything. I snorted the crushed-up pill and it made me sickly, lazy, and cloudy. Very similar to the symptoms you described, Dad. It wasn’t until one of my friends showed me how to use it intravenously that I fell in love. And oh man did it make me sick.

What made you take the second dose?

As I said above, what made me take the second dose is, well, wanting to. At that point in my life, drugs had been my way of escape for a few years and I was committed to them. It wasn’t all peaches and cream, but when it came down to it, I got results (apathy, dumb happiness, rootless pleasure). I was buying the lie.

What’s crazy is I knew it was a lie and I kept going. I could put you in touch with the people with whom I used to shoot up or smoke or whatever and every one of them will tell you about how I would talk about Jesus and how I wanted to quit, much to their chagrin. It wasn’t every time, but Jesus came up a lot when I was high. I wrote things in my journal like this, pleading with God to deliver me, make it better, anything. But another part of me was all in.

I got sick almost every time. I didn’t throw up, but I felt awful. The initial rush was followed by an incredible wave of nausea, but I was addicted to it as much as I was addicted to the needle and the drug itself. I cherished it, to some degree, because it meant I’d just shot up.

(Soap box: I hope you see that these are not cut-and-dry, black-and-white feelings. Feelings rarely are, but these are twisted and dark - are they not? - and I can't make sense of them outside of Christianity. How else do you explain this infatuation with what is incontrovertibly evil than to say I am evil? And if evil, at odds with God. And if at odds with God, in need of a Savior!)

Beyond that, I’d already gone so far even before the Oxycontin and heroin that, even though I knew I’d be sick, it was all I had. I mean, I know that’s not true, but it felt true. I’m here to tell you: when you’re sticking a needle in your vein, there doesn’t seem to be any way out.

This doesn't feel complete, but I hope it's the beginning of an answer. Follow-up questions are welcome, as are completely different ones.

(If you're a recovering addict and you didn't take my advice to quit reading and now you're feeling crazy, do the following: a) Pray earnestly for deliverance, picturing Jesus on the cross paying for it, and know that I've been praying for you while writing this. b) Call me, Gary, or someone you trust, stat.)

give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Hi there.

I have a hard time writing most of the time. This is why I post monthly-ish and not more often.

Yes, yes, I know: so do you so does everyone who writes get over it and write you just have to do it suck it up yadda yadda YADDA!

But I had an idea.

You know, when I started this blog, it was before heroin. Now, it's mostly about heroin or rehab or whatever, and the more I talk with people, the more I realize how many questions y'all have. And here I am - white, male, upper-middle-class, lover of Jesus since I was eight, great family, ex-junkie. (That is to say, NOT minority, male, poverty-level, no father, projects, ex-junkie.) I come from where you come from (which is perhaps why there are so many questions).

So. Help me. Help me help you. You have questions? I have answers. (And I want prompts.)

I should qualify that. I'll have experiential answers about particular drugs. Everything but peyote, anyway. I probably won't have answers about why people do what they do - alternatively, I'll have answers you won't like - but it might make you feel better to have asked and to have been answered by someone who was there, even if what you receive is subjective and inconclusive.

Maybe someone you know is going through it. (Me, circa 1998.) Maybe you're toying with some taboos with which you never thought you'd be toying. (Me, circa 2002.) Maybe you're in the middle of it, up to your neck in it, can't stop it, scared shitless. (Me, circa 2007.)  Maybe you're a wet-behind-the-ears homeschooler who just has no clue and you'd like to. (Well...)

Ask.

Oh, and that's the great thing about the intranets and about Blogger in particular: you can ask anonymously! Or not, which would be even sweeter.

SEND THESE, THE HOMELESS, TEMPEST-TOST TO ME,
I LIFT MY LAMP BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR!

Truth

This is my exposition of an original idea (not of my inception) about what blinds the human race to Truth, which is or should be our chief concern.

From the beginning, there is engendered within us a set of ideas about The Way Things Should Be. This happens in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our schools – read cultural context. As we grow older, we either accept these ideas or reject them, and it is this platform from which (typically) we launch into our adult lives. Now, the reasons we accept or reject them are manifold – peer pressure, or wanting to be accepted by a certain group, is perhaps the biggest – but it is not my purpose to delineate them here. My purpose is to draw out this truth:

Much of what we believe we believe because we want to believe it, and this directly affects our facility to embrace what is true.

The obvious example: Truth as an absolute.
Most people no longer believe in Absolute Truth because our time is a time of pluralism, and no matter how many times the starkly obvious logistical flaw of pluralism (or tolerance) is exposed – that is, the moment you say everyone can have their own truth, you are asserting a claim on truth which is absolute – the average intellectual pushes blindly forward toward a future he or she expects to be all green with love and acceptance.

Why? If you’re starting to have strongly negative feelings, I implore you to try the following: forget that you and I may embrace totally different worldviews and take an objective look at what I just said. Reread it. Pluralism cannot work, and to say otherwise is to denigrate the Reason you so cherish and claim to employ.

Here’s why this happens: It feels right! It just does, doesn’t it? I really want tolerance to work, too, sometimes. I want to believe that everyone can believe what they want and it'll all work out. “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad,” right?

Well, wait a minute. Doesn’t that philosophy encourage the consumerism we all claim to hate? And that’s just one example. How about pedophilia? Oppressive dictatorships? We would call the pleasure these offenders experience twisted, but we gave up the right to say so at the door of broadmindedness.

(I understand that the tolerance camp’s prima regula is that it’s only ok as long as you’re not hurting anyone else, but, honestly, I've been at this for three hours now and I don't have the energy or desire to address the inherent problems of this qualification. They are there, I assure you.)

The point, in summary:
Our desires – what we want and feel – have an incredible power, a terrifying power which carries the potential to blind us, not only to the Truth of God, but to truths like the logical fallacy we just briefly examined.

I said at the beginning that I am not the first to think this, and that’s because of the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John. Jesus told the Pharisees with whom he was speaking that they were blinded to the eternal life standing right in front of them because they sought (or desired) glory from one another. They wanted so badly to be held in high esteem, to be well-regarded, to be the first pick on the basketball team during high school gym class, that the Truth to which they thought they’d given their lives passed before their eyes unnoticed and, worse, maligned.

So. Go ask yourself some hard questions.