Once you have become addicted to heroin and then got clean your body has changed. Where as someone who has never been an addict can dabble, smoking heroin, chasing the dragon through a tin foil flute for up to three weeks, even a month and all the price they pay is a deep depression and a couple of days sleeping the ex addicts cells have been altered. They can maybe have a day, sometimes two but their bodies recognise it instantly and within three days they are fully addicted again. I am not sure if this is the case with alcohol, Valium or other drugs but I know it is also true for ex cigarette addicts. They can have one but if they smoke for three days they are hooked again and must undergo a full withdrawal to get back to being clean. This is why relapse is so common. Seldom will heroin addicts recover and those who do are prone to relapse. Self control is gone. AA talk of addicts who stay clean for years and for no reason anyone can fathom they go out and get trashed. Usually this will be followed by a few months or years trying to regain sobriety. I pity the alcoholic. I am only a semi alci but I can't walk down supermarket isles, I can't go to parties easily.
I give you one example. I'd been working for several months fitting out the Centre for a life in Newcastle. On the final night all the crew who had spent the last few months living and working together on this grand project decided to go for a meal. We ate, then hit the bars. I had a few drinks and took a couple of e's as all of us did. A monster of a night with fifteen odd of us sampling the night life of Newcastle fuelled by MDMA and alcohol. The next day we all drove off. The others to there beds to sleep it off. Not me. I was straight down to leeds and at Richards on a two week heroin binge before I managed to get re medicated on subutex. Subutex has saved my life. The fact it renders heroin and all other opiates useless means even if I take heroin I don't feel it. There is a similar drug for alcoholics called antibuse. This doesn't prevent the effect of alcohol in the same way subutex does with heroin but it makes the drinker so ill they won't try drinking.
So these last fifteen years since I stopped using heroin and take the blocker subutex I have led a conventional life. At least heroin wise.
But the addict is expert in self deception. They believe their own lies.
In 2004, the year leeds rugby league became champions again for the first time in 32 years my father had a fall. He had an unusual condition that I still don't fully understand but they put him on some pills to lower his blood pressure. They dosed him far too high. This caused him to fall in the street where a passerby found him lied there unconscious. At the brain hospital it was found the fall had caused bleeding inside his skull. I drove up to leeds and after a tantrum with the doctors, he had been unconscious for five days, I got them to scan him. They had though he had had a stroke but if they had left it another day he would have died from the build up of pressure. They drilled two holes in his skull and drained off the blood. This had to be done again. They operated on the original problem too. He was talking rubbish. Horses were landing on the ceiling, I was a rock star.. It would be months before the bruising would subside and at the time we didn't know if he would recover.
I drove up to leeds during these first two weeks but my money ran out. There was no one else around to kick the doctors arses, (these days with the NHS you have to kick up a fuss as they are overburdened and underfunded). I asked around for work and an exhibition joinery company I knew vaguely offered me work to enable me to stay in leeds for the months it would take for my father to recover. These were a great bunch of lads. I helped fit out The Deep in Hull, Birmingham museum, we worked on the exhibition around hms victory and the Mary rose in Portsmouth. We did the tank museum in bovington and Plymouth museum among others, too many to recall. But most of the time I was in there workshop near wetherby, visiting my dad most evenings, talking to him, trying to get his brain going properly again. Testing him with mental road maps and leeds rl sporting history.
Being my best freind it would have been rude to stay anywhere but with richard. Looking back the stupidity of this amazes me. He was dealing again after his spell in prison. The jailhouse had turned him in to a different person. In the whole 10 months I stayed with him I can't say I saw him eat more than two microwave meals and drink two cups of coffee. His was a diet of special brew and heroin. He just didn't care about himself anymore. I am forgetting an important point. I had tex my dog so needed someone to look after him. He was a husky cross German shepherd and they need to be with someone all the time. Only richard could provide this love. I could have abandoned the dog. Many would have, but it gave richard purpose and some pride. Tex was quite a beast. A real wolf of a dog. So my day began with taking tex out, in to the van for 7, pick up a snack and a coffee for breakfasts, drive to work, build stuff all day, come back to Richards which would be full of junkies smoking gear and pipes of crack, take the dog out, feed him, then try sleep in his bedroom as the crack and smack smoke flowed under the door. But never gave in. Stayed strong. Helped richard pull himself together. It was not long after I returned to frome that he was found dead in his room, his body full of heroin, methadone, alcohol, the coffee table lined up with forty odd special brew cans each full of piss as his disability made going to the toilet a hassle. Whether it was suicide in the purest sense I can not say but it was a drift in to no motivation to live and self medication to death. I miss him. He was my best freind. I carved a headstone for his grave and spoke at his funeral but at the time I was in pieces and couldn't deliver the words I wanted to. I hope he would understand.
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