The "Cookie Crumbs" Scandal...

WELL, I have spent the last day or two feeling like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards. This is all my "brain's" fault for making me "elevated" all night the night before and unable to sleep. Either that, or the mystical rivers of my Energy Sphere have been overflowing. I'm not sure which. I tend towards the mystical energy explanation nowadays ~ the world is full of mystical energy that scientists aren't even able to measure. I once found a Chinese medicine leaflet on the bus that explained how every "illness" I have ever suffered resulted from a deficit, excess or misalignment of vital energy.

Apart from a few crumbs found wrapped in a cigarette paper (which I wasn't entirely sure didn't come from an old digestive biscuit) I have not touched heroin for something like four days. (I'm not sure as I don't count days "clean". I think it's unhealthy.) The "crumbs" could have been 1/100th of a gram. Not very much. The methadone is holding me again and I don't need any more than the prescribed dose. But I am taking it in two goes. Half around 6am; the second half around 4pm. It seems to work much better that way. I feel really sorry for Americans and people from other countries where methadone seems only to be available on Supervised Consumption. It's not so much the "supervised" bit I disagree with (although it is rather demeaning to have to drink it in a public pharmacy in front of althelete's foot sufferers, bachache pensioners and pregnant women) ~ it's the compulsion to drink an entire day's dose at once. It just doesn't last 24 hours. If I drank my entire dose once a day I might need 1.5 or x2 as much. And I would still probably wake every day feeling crap. My dose has gone UP to 30mg a day now. At least 30mg works. A few months ago I was down to 14mg and I didn't exactly feel brilliant on that little. You know methadone is more addictive than heroin?! (Which the clinic never warned me, by the way. I think that would make an interesting court case, don't you?) More to the point though: how on earth am I ever to get off that crap??! I asked not one but two workers at my present clinic could they exchange my dose to one of (far less addictive) morphine instead and they said no. (Without explanation.) When I pointed out that on heroin I was able to drop directly from £80 or £100 a day (this was years ago) straight down to £20 with no withdrawals they looked confused. (My point being if morphine's easier to titrate down then I want morphine.) But it's not in their interest to understand common sense when they're a methadone/suboxone clinic and hence blinkered to every more effective treatment option.

At the peak of my habit, by the way, 100mg would barely hold me. Even when I gave it four or five days in a row. So my dose went up above 130mg. I'm not very proud of that...

I really need a savage guard dog/bodyguard. I'd like one like this from the Pedigree Chum advert.

Really I'd like an Akita (of course). They look really ferocious when annoyed.

I HAVE BEEN reading The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Age 13¾

Here's the TV adaptation starring Julie Walters as mother and Beryl Reid as Grandmother. None of the male actors seems to be famous, except Chris Gascoygne (Nigel).

When I say I want a dog, I mean one like Adrian Mole's. With scruffy fur. Except mine needs to be savage and ferocious. I need a guard dog/bodyguard too.

Oh by the way, I found out why Korean boybands look like girls. It's because they dye their hair ginger...

¡Quiero aprender español!/+ my "love affair" with HEROIN: how it REALLY BEGAN!

YESTERDAY I DUG OUT my old £30 ($44.70) Spanish Linguaphone course and had a bash at hablando en español. I did moderately well. Spanish is "cognate" with French (both languages being forms of "baby Latin") and I have a French A level (higher school certificate). But a lot of the little words you'd use day-to-day are different. Eg bed = le lit = la cama; apple = la pomme = la manzana; town = la ville = la ciudad; suitcase = la valise = la maleta and so on. Other day-to-day words are cognate with the French but not English eg customs (at the airport) = la douane = la aduana. But the higher vocabulary is similar to both English and French eg electricity = l'électricité = la electricidad; Liberty - Equality - Fraternity = liberté égalité fraternité = libertad igualdad fraternidad.

As far as I know, Spanish is the easiest major language for native speakers of English, after Italian (Italy is one European country I'd really like to go to. The Hungarian support worker at Binky's halfway house says the Italians "have everything: beautiful countryside, beautiful art and the cities: Venezia, Bologna, Milano, Napoli, Roma...

All I have seen of Spain is a tiny part of the Costa del Sol around Málaga: Mijas Costa, the (inland) clifftop town of Rhonda... I have spent just under an hour in Madrid, where I left the railway station to wonder at the vastness of the city stretched out on the plain below me as far as the eye could see... oh yes and Algeciras and the boat to Tangier from where I took the trains to Marakech, Fez, Rabat and Oujda but my 1991 Moroccan adventure is another story...

¡Well my depression seems to have cleared! ¡And I actually felt a rush of Spanish-induced excitement! ¡¡Wow!! ¿Do you like my Hispanic upside-down punctuation marks? Bloody hell I'm glad that shitty mood has cleared. Some days last week I was starting to feel truly horrendous. I phoned my folks who seemed to think the dismal voice was drug-induced. But I was wide awake and a hell of a lot more cheerful than before I banged up smack just to make it through the day.

I'm engaging with groups a lot better at the druggieclinic I attend. I'm not sure methadone is "working" for me as well as it's meant to. I told my worker that if I can't make an improvement I'm thinking of going to a private clinic who will prescribe XR Morphine Sulphate Tablets (MSTs as they're known on the street). My worker said that any improvement is down to me. Fair dos, but methadone is supposed to be a "heroin substitute" and if staying off the gear is really such hard work, requiring iron willpower and I feel so drastically better on street gear then the methadone really is NOT substituting for heroin at all. It's just masquerading as a substitute. It's hard to get MSTs on the NHS in the UK, but in other countries like Austia and Australia they're used routinely as the second-line treatment for patients like me (there are a lot of them) who don't take well to methadone treatment. MSTs are time-release pills, taken twice a day. I have experience of oral morphine in syrup form. I drank about 240mg, fell asleep in the late evening, and woke up feeling about a hundred times better than I'd ever felt waking up on methadone (which usually entailed a gasp of panic as my body, supposedly held on the "substitute" drug, cried out for lack of heroin. I didn't "gauwch" (no heroin-induced stupor) and I wasn't "high"; I just felt perfectly OK. They like to tout methadone's "lack of heroin-like 'high'". But nobody I know talks of a heroin "high". When you're as opiate-dependent as I am, heroin is a drug for survival. Junkies who want to get "high" will pipe crack ~ and I haven't done that in a long long long long time.

My biggest thing against MSTs is that other people, on coming off methadone or suboxone ~ neither of which make you feel very good ~ say they feel "really depressed". So depressed, in fact, that two people I know ended up back on methadone/suboxone within weeks of detox and a third went screaming back to heroin. (That was Lucky, my good friend who died.) I do feel really depressed (episodically) on methadone. My hope is that, in sticking with a drug that makes me feel shitty as methadone does, I'm facing the inevitable misery upfront ~ before detox, rather than after... (There is some logic in this?... Surely...) That the transition from very little methadone to none at all will be easier for me and less of a psychological (not to mention psychiatric) step down...

The final matter is that ALL my severe mental problems flared drastically and really came to the fore the time I gave up heroin for many weeks, living on methadone alone. For all I know methadone could be causing all this manic-depressive psychosis. And at its peak it really was full-blown delirious manic psychosis ~ with me so incoherent I couldn't even speak English. At all I didn't even know it was possible to go crazy like that.... If I DO find out methadone has caused all this I SHALL BE VERY UPSET INDEED. And will seriously consider suing the clinic for malpractice. Because I SAID how dodgy I felt on methadone and NOBODY EVER LISTENED. 

My prospective new worker says MSTs are completely out of the question and says if I need to up my dose of antipsychotics that's for my GP to do. Well I don't see that I need to see a GP to take even MORE drugs to counteract SEVERE side-effects of another drug (methadone) I never really wanted to be on (would never in a million years have chosen that if the clinic had offered a true range of alternatives)... oh I don't know I'm just really unhappy on my progress on 20mg methadone. I should be far happier. Should be 100% clean and off all drugs by now (somehow I knew that was never going to happen).

I suppose my point is this: having seen over years many people of different ages, intelligences, backgrounds etc doing pretty much the same on methadone ~ ie, they take it when nothing better's on offer but as soon as they can get their hands on heroin, they do it. I've seen old people blowing their pensions on gear. Then they go back to the clinic thinking they've failed. Well MAYBE METHADONE HAS FAILED THEM! All I know about methadone is I WANT TO GET AS WELL CLEAR OF THAT SHIT AS FAST AS I POSSIBLY CAN. I hate it, resent it, LOATHE MYSELF FOR COMPROMISING ON A DRUG THAT IS WELL KNOWN TO BE EVEN MORE ADDICTIVE THAN HEROIN AND HARDER TO WITHDRAW FROM! (The clinic never told me that little fact before putting me on it ~ another thing I might sue them for.)

And you know, with a convoluted life story like mine, it's very difficult to remember the precise whys and wherefores... well:~~~ THE TRUTH ABOUT ME AND HEROIN came to me yesterday morning, first thing on awakening. The ONLY REASON I ever asked someone to get me heroin in the beginning was that I was so unhappy I wanted to kill myself.I truly was dead-set on dying. ~ And I knew heroin overdose was supposed to be the nicest way to die. You fall asleep and never wake up. So I gave an Indonesian man (one of the few non-students I knew) £50 to get me half a gram (back in 1992 heroin cost £10 a point and if he could have got it for any cheaper than £50 I didn't begrudge him pocketing the difference. I fully intended to snort the whole lot in the bath. If I didn't OD, I hoped I'd drown...

A few days later he came back to me saying he couldn't get it (couldn't be bothered, more like). I still had a ridiculous, botched attempt at overdosing and drowning myself. It obviously didn't work (well I'm still here, aren't I?) But about FIVE YEARS LATER this same person sold me a £20 deal of powder cocaine at a rave in Norwich (only time I've ever scored snorty coke) saying he "had a bit of brown in a drawer" if I'd like to come back to his. Of course I was round like a shot ~ I'd always wanted to sample heroin purely out of curiosity. He was dealing the stuff by then and said I could have as much as I could smoke. So I smoked a full £20 deal, which astonished him. Then I went home with another £20 deal. And that was my introduction to heroin. My point being: if I hadn't sincerely wanted to kill myself I'D NEVER HAVE GOT INTO HEROIN TO START WITH. You see ~ IT WAS ALL ABOUT DEATH TO BEGIN WITH!

I'm sorry to end on a negative note. I'm thinking maybe I ought to write out my life story. I find telling the truth distances me from the facts. I want to be as remote from them as possible... I'll retell my life to avoid EVER RELIVING IT AGAIN. I mean, it doesn't matter if no "real" publishers are interested: I'll dump it on ebook, told by "Anonymous"... (or "by Gledwood": whichever).

I'll leave my closing paragraph to Google Translate:~~

Entonces, espero que tengas todo bien. Lo siento, no he visitado ninguno de vosotros. No he estado alrededor. Me siento mejor ahora. ¡Guau, me siento bien de estar vivo!

So, I hope you're all well. Sorry, I have not visited any of you. I have not been around. I feel better now.Wow, it feels good to be alive!

Illustrated: Rhonda; Mijas; 30mg morphine XR; methadone bottle; methadone 20mg;  brown heroin; death; e-reader ...

LINK: WHY METHADONE DOESN'T WORK (Guardian newspaper)
 

Methadone is a highly addictive synthetic opiate, more addictive than heroin and harder to withdraw from, but it survives the digestive system and so does not need to be injected. Most addicts loathe it. They call it green gunk and grimace as they swallow. All of today's addicts have been coming to the pharmacy for months, some for years. And that's the problem.

And what of those heroin addicts not in treatment? They visit me regularly for clean needles to inject filthy brown street heroin. There is growing evidence to support treating these long-term relapsing addicts with pure heroin. A blueprint for the requisite regulatory changes has been created, but until the laws are changed they must remain thieves and prostitutes, rather than patients, victims of legalised social neglect.

Desperately Seeking An Alternative to Methadone...

I JUST FOUND OUT I live three minutes from a "major shopping area". What? Loads of shops selling untaxed under-the-counter tobacco? And anything you like, as long as the packaging is in Polish? Well if that's major, then maybe I do...

I have been desperately keying things into google to try and find an alternative to methadone treatment. Before you say: Subutex/Suboxone is NOT an alternative for me. When I tried it my sleep shrivelled down to 4 hours per night, every night. Two weeks later it was still at 6 hours max. All this is a really good way of triggering a manic episode, because it always starts with reduced sleep, (eventually shrivelling to about 6 hours, once every three days. Or about 2 to 2.5 hours a night, on sleeping pills.)

I do not want to play with my mental equilibrium as well as experimenting with ways better than methadone of getting clean.

The problem isn't that there are no or few alternatives: every opiate and opioid out there ~ including heroin itself (that is, prescription diamorphine) ~ could be used to treat heroin addiction. The issue is that the government of the UK does not want to tackle this problem, has no coherent strategy, and just wants to sweep the whole issue under the carpet.

If methadone were really so brilliant, you wouldn't see the same pattern in almost all users: when they're short on money, they'll stick to their scripts willingly. When money comes, the first thing they do is score more heroin. I'm sorry, but this is just the way it is.

A true treatment would obviate the DESIRE to use on top. Methadone has never helped with this. Ever.

The research shows (of course) that prescribing heroin to heroin addicts reduces all use "on top" significantly. And that the savings in crime and criminal justice are enormous. (By the way you can test whether somebody is using street heroin on top of a pharmaceutical heroin script, because street heroin contains impurities the pharmaceutical grade stuff does not...)

Last year, I went weeks on end without dabbling in heroin. Problem was, I was having a psychotic episode at the same time, the most marked symptom of which was a severely elevated mood. I actually went higher than I've ever gone on crack. And that is saying something. Which probably partly explains my extreme vehemence against drugs at that time (why spend on drugs when you're higher than drugs already?)

So I have bipolar mental issues complicating this matter badly.

I don't know what to do. Really, I'd like to go on "MSTs" (that is, extended-release morphine pills). Or DFs (dihydrocodeine). Both are used in this country, and on the NHS, yes both to treat heroin addiction. Only finding the former is about as likely as finding a hen's tooth on your doorstep in the morning. And the latter seems to be used mainly in police stations and (sometimes) prisons. The main problem with DFs is, you have to take them every four hours and if you forget you'll rapidly start feeling dire. Morphine just sounds bad, especially to people who don't realize that methadone is actually FAR MORE DANGEROUS.

Ukh I don't know what to do.

One tiny, twinkling ray of hope comes from Australia, where researchers have discovered a way of blocking the immune system's response to morphine, that may actually prevent morphine addiction (and therefore heroin addiction) ever occurring...

Technorati: new treatment for morphine addiction...

Peter Biskind ~ methadone kills twice as many per year as heroin

If you don't believe methadone is extremely hard to come off, have a look at some of these... the first few out of 39,348 posts on the subject...




QUENCH: DREAMS
This doesn't properly get going until 2min44 into it but it's still v good...




THIS IS SOMETHING REALLY SPECIAL
I found it via DJ Juno's blog.
She used to DJ at the parties I used to go to...
This isn't a techno track though. You have to watch and listen. The words are spoken by Carl Sagan...

Desperately Seeking "Normality"

THE WEEKEND IS OVER. And I only feel slightly better. I tried to resist the urge to take That Stuff but my resistance only lasted until this morning when I walked for half an hour each way in the rain to get a £10 bag. Heroin is the only thing that makes me feel better. Also I have heard several times that methadone can actually CAUSE depression, or at least make it worse. This definitely seems to be the case with me. So I'm going back to the druggieclinic next week and asking whether I can have something else. Not Subutex/Suboxone. No way am I prepared to go sick for something that I know is going to disrupt my mood, shrink my sleep down to four hours and make me feel unnaturally wide awake all the time and probably hyper. The two other options are dihydrocodeine, better known here as "DFs" [short for DF118, their old brand-name] and extended-release morphine pills, known to the junkies as "MSTs" [Morphine Sulphate Tablets]. My worker recently dropped into the mix the fact that they CAN prescribe MSTs, if they really want to. I was anti-methadone enough, a few months ago, to consider going private just to get morphine pills on prescription as an alternative to methadone. Apart from the fact that you feel way better on them (and I know this because a few years ago somebody gave me a bottle of Oromorph syrup, which I drank in 250mg doses (wasn't tempted to inject, amazingly) and which made me feel way way better than methadone ever has; morphine is easier to reduce and detox off than methadone. They love saying how much more addictive methadone is than heroin ONCE YOU ARE STUCK ON A SCRIPT. Yet nobody EVER warned me of this beforehand. Which sometimes puts me in a mind to sue the clinic for clinical negligence for this, and that they know I have a history of depression and that methadone makes that depression considerably worse.

 I wish I hadn't said all that stuff about antidepressants yesterday because someone like Anna Grace will think I want a psychotic episode. This is not what I was saying. I only ever want to be manic when I'm down because that is the only sort of "happiness" I can conceive of. I do not, by the way, and never will, accept feeling run-down, pissed off and mildly depressed and constant low-grade sickness as any kind of "normality" because it is NOT NORMAL AT ALL.

 The ONLY time I have ever felt truly "normal" in the past two years or so has been in the immediate aftermath of short hypomanic episodes. And they do have to be mild and short. I didn't feel at all normal following true mania. I felt really confused. Couldn't remember things like appointment times. And I remember thinking at the time that this was worse than concussion ~ and I say that advisedly, as I was once hit on the head by a truck and kept losing track of where I was and what I was doing for days afterwards. No fewer than THREE people took advantage of me when I was recovering from that breakdown ~ always other addicts and always in connection with drugs. I just thought You wait. Just wait until the Vehemence hits me again and I'll open my mouth and blow the full force of the whirlwind right at you and you'll never know what hit you.

As for dying: the lower down I go the less I believe I will ever die. Thoughts of suicide become ever more torturous as I am obsessed by the horrific possibility that suicide may fail. All I have ever wanted is 100% certainty of death, and that cuts down the number of possible avenues considerably. I knew two people who managed to top themselves in spring 2010. One jumped in front of a tube train. The other took every bit of psychiatric medication and methadone she had. Neither of these methods bears a chance of death anything like high enough for me. To die on modern antipsychotics and SSRI antidepressants you have to be really, really freakishly lucky. And a person with longstanding, heavy opiate addiction could easily take several hundred milligrams of methadone and feel nothing more than heavily stoned. Tube trains enter the stations very slowly (they only seem to rush in so rapidly because you're close to the train in a confined space) ~ plus there's a whacking great trench under the live rail, meaning a massive chance that you'll fall down there and live, but probably get clothing, hair and limbs tangled in the wheels ~ a recipe for a complete medical mess. A Muslim once told me that if you stab yourself you will spend eternity in hell stabbing yourself over and over. Which narrows methods of suicide down to only one: deliberate opiate overdose. I can think of better ways of spending eternity. But shooting up gear for ever and ever would be a good compromise. The gear now is so weak, it wouldn't surprise me if I coudln't take a half-ounce all at once and live. That's another reason I want to be OFF methadone as quick as possible. It has nothing to do with wanting to live clean and everything to do with wanting to die clean. I have always known I would never be lucky enough to overdose myself accidentally; have always known I was going to have to make it through right to the bitter end. I don't want to live, but I know I have to.

See everything goes negative yet again. I saw my worker today. I had to tell him I was feeling crap because he keeps trying to con me into group therapy, which I'm not doing any more. He asked if I had any mental problems and I said no. Feeling depressed isn't really a mental problem, just an emotional problem. As for any chance of my dying, I wouldn't worry about it. To stand any chance of success at suicide you have to prepare very carefully and the more depressed a person is the less strength and volition they have to put plans of any type into action. Especially really complicated ones like suicide where you have to write notes, lock and barricade all doors, switch off phone etc etc etc it's all too much to get right.

Well there is nothing else to talk about. Crap weekend, crap week: same shit, different day.



Illustrated: Oromorph and suicide ~ I seriously doubt this method would work. You have to shoot straight through at least one brain hemisphere and that shot is way too low to assure death




*******

ANYTHING to get off the subject of death. Here are 2 tunes. I'm afraid the first is technically funeral music Mozart's Requiem: Lacrimosa. But it doesn't sound funereal to me. The non-techno versions are all crap. Nowhere near loud enough.



Celine Dion Celtic Women: Ave Maria
I'm not Roman Catholic but I like the tune...



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