I spoke of my near death experience and to get to the heart of it I will have to write a fair bit to contextualise. Suicide attempt is too grand a description but I was certainly trying to burst some sort of psychic boil I had developed.
Regular readers of skreeworld will know of Francis cricks astonishing hypothesis. It wasn't an idea new to him. Hypocrites had said the same thing and Charles Darwin repositioning us as just another animal ought to have brought the idea to the fore. All our loves, all our dreams, all our expectations, all our emotions, all our thoughts, all our feelings, all our transcendent moments triggered by music and art, all of this is down to no more than the electrical, chemical and other processes that take place beneath our skulls. Neuroscience fMRI scanners are showing visual images of the proteins burned when we have a thought. Alzheimer's reveals the personality, the very soul of a person can be subject to organic disintegration. There is no soul as far as any science has managed to show. Though the astonishing hypothesis is not a new idea, it is as significant as Galileo or Darwin in its magnitude of the way it ought to make us see ourselves. Everything we know about consciousness comes from looking at the physical matter of brain and body.
Once this is accepted two things become obvious. Firstly that emotions are not magical at all. Even the sensations of falling in love or the love one feels at the birth of their children, all emotions are organic. Something physical is taking place. We are along way off knowing how any of this works but it must be true. Just as memory can be wiped from physical brain damage so too the capacity for emotions can be destroyed by brain injuries.
We still live most of our lives as if none of this were true. We are like children believing in Father Christmas. It seems somehow wrong, counter intuitive, we live as if we have souls. Even atheists do it. But we must crack this one. We need to accept. It is true we no longer blame schizophrenics for their madness nor lock young pregnant girls away in lunatic asylums. Most people now accept that depression is not the victims responsibility. You can't just tell them to get a grip, pull their socks up, because their condition is physical. Somewhere on a microscopic level there is an imbalance of neurotransmitters. There maybe techniques to help but blaming the patient is generally now regarded as stupid.
It was candace pert working in sol snyders laboratory who discovered much of how we understand ourselves. She discovered opiate receptor sites. And much more. The concepts that led to a revolution in psychiatry. Prozac nation we became. If serotonin could be forced to be accepted by the receptor site then a pill could make you happy. Exercise triggers our own opiates. Endorphins we call them. Our actions, from running to smiling trigger chemicals that affect our mood.
So if we accept all this it must be true that, just as some are born brighter than others, prettier than others, more athletic than others, then some will be born opiate deficient. Studies have shown that alcoholics invariably have insufficencies in certain blood sugars. We must accept that drug addicts are self medicating against a condition they did not ask for. Addicts come from all walks of life, all strata of society. In fifty years time just how stupid it is going to seem that we thought heroin addicts were just lazy bums who couldn't be bothered.
Another point worth making is the one of free will. Libet famously revealed through his experiments that activity could be detected in the brain micro seconds before an individual 'decided' to do something. It can be no other way. There is no little man inside our heads controlling our bodies. The electro chemical activity that takes place prior to us taking a decision is not something we control. Free will does not exist in any real sense. If you know a person well you can often guess what they are going to do way before they decide to do it.
This is where Alcoholics Anonymous are so right. The acceptance that you have no control over your relationship with drink is the first step. It is also the most important. I don't know why I have no self control with certain substances but to live a sober life I have to accept that I have no control. Here skreeworld and AA go our seperate ways. They say you must submit to a higher power and to be fair they have a very good successs rate. Far greater than any NHS or conventional medicine. But there is a slip in to cultish ness seen in the religious fervour of Russell brand. Basically AA don't want atheists or agnostics. They are a religious cult. Not a bad one but you must submit your self to the group. There ought to be rival groups to break their monopoly, ones open to all. Still, as I say, they have it right in that the addict has no control over their actions with their substance of choice. I suspect it is the group talking, the opening up and talking to each other that is the secret of their success, not the higher power. But I am not here to criticise AA.
You can smoke heroin for up to a month if you have never been addicted and suffer little more than a hangover. Alcohol seems to never addict many people who remain able to use it as a social lubricant with no ill affects. Sadly, others end up drinking all day every day. It has never caught me as bad as this but I have spent years in the past as an evening alcoholic. For many years I drank at least a bottle of wine a night. To cope with a lecturing job I had 20 odd years ago I would drink a bottle of winky each night. To get through the day I would split the codeine off nurofen plus. This was my first opiate addiction. I would take whole boxes, driving to new towns so as not to get the pharmacists suspicious. Back in those days the tablets were helpfully half pink and half white so you could see where to split them. A crappy opiate habit.
Meanwhile, back up in leeds my home town, due to the wars in Afghanistan our inner cities were flooded with high quality brown heroin. (Where is it all now? Some say the Americans get it all thanks to there servicemen but the quality of heroin in England now is so poor I haven't seen a beggar gouching out, nor heard of an overdose in years. Heald up by methadone prescriptions they continue to inject and smoke brown powders with percentages of heroin as low as 5%). But back in 97, 98, 99 there was tons of very strong heroin on the streets. Of my own circle of freinds, and I mean my real close buddies I grew up with a good dozen died from overdose. Fortunate not to live there I could go up to visit on brief holidays of up to a week, staying with my best freind from childhood richard RIP. .His was the one house I could always turn up at no matter what state I was in, drunk, hanging, psychotic and he would welcome me in and let me stay. I would dabble with the gear but never got a habit. Not then anyway.
I moved to frome and after working for Fred BAIER for a couple of years I set up my own workshop. Down on a farm by a river with a vast field for tex my dog to run around in. I have written about the Fred years so I'll jump straight in to frome. I gathered a group of freinds, many were glass blowers from Neil Wilkins studio, Clive, my best mate at that time was chief designer for Kevin McCloud lighting. Since then Kev has gone on to TV work. His programme Grand Designs is popular amongst the creative middle classes. He still has connections here and recently did a series with a tricket, a oat builder freind of mine. He's a bit of a knob but he's ok.
Now, in my early thirties I finally discovered MDMA and dancing. Each weekend would start on a Friday and we'd do pills sometimes coke and dance all night at clubs in bath and Bristol. Sometimes trips to London or parties in marquees. One weekend I remember going to two parties in London and walking across the city, high on ecstasy marvelling at the new millennium eye. Someone had the idea to fly to Spain so we flew out, still drugged up to the costa edl sol. We stayed with this war photographer, doing more pills. Some argument saw the car windscreen getting smashed then a vicious fight ended the fun and we flew home battered and bruised. My ecstasy period lasted just two years before the chemicals spoiled my head. After the weekend the week would sag into a depression only picking up around Thursday when the pills began again. This cycle became too much, my brain battered and sore, I gave up raving.
Around this time the heroin epidemic was continueing in leeds and regularly I'd be going up for some old freinds funeral. Turps died in st George's crypt, overdosing. Martin died round at Richards overdosing. Dirt box, Gerry, and several others, many I'd known since childhood I went to there funerals around this time.
Richard, my best freind had begun dealing to support his habit. Nothing much, just to a few freinds. The police came knocking and took him in to his bedroom. He had an eighth, little more than personal use amount. But one of the drug squad answered the door to two seperate people who had come to score. God only knows how they fell for it but he said, "Richards gone out for a bit, he asked me to sort anyone out who came round". If you can't smell a pig there is something seriously wrong with you. "So, how long have you been scoring off richard for then.""oh, about two years".
With these statements and the eighth, despite this beig his firsts fence for dealing heroin they gave him three years.
He served eighteen months but came out a changed man. The following six or so years were basically a spiral down in to his suicide/ overdose. He'd lost his marbles a bit and fallen in love with this restitution who just bled him to death.
Back in frome I'd met old freinds and developed my own heroin habit but immediately sought medical help. I had perhaps six months honeymoon period before getting myself a subutex prescription. This is a partial agonist and blocks the effects of heroin. So bar the odd relapse my life has been medicated so as heroin doesn't work on me.
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