I'm on Suboxone now, from which (even more so methadone) withdrawal is even worse than what it's supposed to supplant, but thankfully have a very understanding (but pretty expensive concierge-medicine style doctor who I just call whenever pay cash and meet him at a cafe or his luxury apartment) doctor and pharmacist (at a local family-owned independent store which I've found to be the best, and which has fronted me a few pills once in a while), God bless them, but as far as heroin does, I kind of do believe that withdrawal builds character (and lowers tolerance as either a side benefit or a convenient way of killed, depending on whether or not you're an idiot when you do your first shot afterwards) …
But what it
does do, and what I mainly mean by that sense, is that it teaches you that it is not the end of the world. Knowing you won't have your DoC (including when I had to get a bupe Rx on
shabbos from my Jewish Dr.) for a few days
is panic inducing, but once you realize that unless your dope habit is truly astronomical, then kicking it is no more three really bad days of diarrhea and flu symptoms and the rest, and then two pretty bad days of feeling agitated, and then another few days of general unpleasantness, physically anyway (the psychological part being the hardest; or all of us would've just quit, including me, and not have gone on bupe) … worse things happen …
I mean, I'd take that over catching a beating with steel boots and baseball bats, which has happened to me, or getting stabbed or shot, only the former has happened to me and it was more of a slice than a stab, but still, or getting a broken leg and dislocated shoulder and back injury trying and/or lesser injuries in the course of physically controlling one of my "students," which has also happened to me—and I still can't run or climb stairs properly without gripping the watchamacallit even if the devil out of hell was chasing me and am a fat bastard behind that—these of course in the opposite corners of my junkiedom and professional life, or even the psychological trauma of being the victim of an armed home invasion (bound and hooded and threatened with guns and shit, happened to me twice), or a three day bout of delerious cotton fever brought on by a really stupid attempt to shoot questionable dope and OTC doxylamine as a potentiator, or even, maybe, the mental agony of a really bad breakup, I mean, what I guess I'm trying to say is, bad stuff happens in life, especially in The Life, so;
…and, not to say that being a junkie is something you aspire to, but you can't really say you're a junkie unless you've had to kick dope in jail or some similarly adverse situation …
either way, out there in the big bad world …
you learn that that shit is relative, you know, not so much "kids starving in Africa"-relative, but more so like, look, I can learn how to tell my lizard-brain to
STFU once in a while, right? Dope is relative.