What's interesting is the desire to do it again is always in the back of your head.
I can go weeks or months or years without touching an opiate but it's always in the back of my mind.
You would think an OD would scare you but it doesn't. I fell out parked next to a fire station a couple years ago and woke up to a needle in my vein and EMTs telling me I wasn't breathing and they gave me Narcan. It was surreal and yet I still used again after that. I've gone months to a year without touching it and still went back. My advice? Don't start if you haven't already.
This is exactly where I'm at. I used pills from 2001- 2009 before lack of availability sent me to street dope. It's an all too familiar story when you talk about H use. You get hurt physically. For me it was 2 ruptured discs in a nasty football injury my senior year of High School. My family doc put me on roxicodone 15's. dosed me at 1 every 6 hours as needed. Well I needed it every 6 hours. In the early 2000's it wasn't uncommon at all for family doctors to hand out painkiller scripts regularly. This was sorta the beginning of the whole "epidemic" era. It was almost 4 months until I finally had the surgery to fuse my vertebrae back together and by that point Roxicodone had "stopped working" entirely.
That's what I told the doctor anyway. Truth of the matter is that I had built up enough of a tolerance that I wasn't getting high off of my 4 15's/day dose anymore. It still stopped the pain just fine, but no warm fuzzy feeling anymore. by the time I actually made an appointment with my ortho surgeon, I had convinced my doctor that what I really needed was morphine. Dilaudid to be more specific. The surgeon didn't hesitate to put me on it after the operation. Again, pain meds didn't have the stigma they do today. Once my script ran out early...go figure an addict's pain meds wouldn't last as long as they were supposed to lol...my doc caught on to my little charade. He was kind enough to taper me off the pills, but I never forgot how that first high felt. I didn't give a damn about anything. It was like my back was perfectly normal again.
When I couldn't get them from a doc, I turned to the street. Then when i couldn't afford them on the street, I started using dope. It didn't ruin my life to the extent as some of the stories you will hear but that's not because i wasn't a full blown junkie, it's because i had wealthy parents who fed my habit. they paid for everything.
Eventually I got busted with 1.5 grams, a rig, a cooker, a lighter, and tracks all over my body. not just my arms. i had em on my kneck, my hands, anywhere i could find a good vein. I was looking at a stint in the "state hotel" aka prison of quite a few years or treatment. naturally i went with treatment and have been clean since then. almost 25 months.
But as was said earlier, I still have that thought of using in the back of my mind, and sometimes the front, everyday. In fact, I think its fair to say I still miss the high. I believe that once you use H, you're fucked. That feeling is something you just don't forget.
