tl;dr
Well, at least I did one more step in admitting to myself that I really ruined my life at my own will...
I sought isolation from the school crowd when I was 14 years old. I started with dextromethorphan, but it wasn't something I could take daily for a long period of time, so when I once bought codeine-based medicine when there was no DXM at a local pharmacy, I soon found out that was that. A year later or so I met my first girlfriend that had been addicted to morphine and then heroin. And no, it wasn't her who introduced me to "hardcore" drugs. She knew I took codeine and didn't want to give me morphine. I just used her contacts and after I got morphine myself, she couldn't really do anything. I'd take it anyway, probably even more if she had dumped me. Still, I don't regret those times, when we were both spaced out in love as if no one else existed but us. As I was naturally interested in chemistry, it didn't take long for me to make more contacts after I had landed in the capital, which was the only city with powder heroin at that time. And I had no choice but landing in that sin city as there had been no morphine in my city for like half a year, and my hydrocodone wasn't enough to replace it (quitting was no choice back then...).
As I look back, at some point it became my obsession to try different opioids, mostly 4,5-epoxymorphinans and morphinans, for the sake of feeling these little differences between them. And then I could also go back and lose myself in the dissociation DXM used to provide me with, but then it was much clearer with ketamine and analogues. I don't know if drugs like MDMA, MDA and alike can be considered "hardcore", but definitely morphine-MDMA/MDA-ketamine combos were hardcore. In the end, after I half-awoke from the narcotic amok and decided to go on "self-maintenance" being said "no" by the specialists in my city and in the capital, methadone wrecked me. And it was then when I started smoking weed heavily to alleviate pain from the never-ending withdrawal, I had never earlier used weed to help myself with W/Ds, going cold turkey I'd always just use BZDs which are another "hardcore" drugs I got terribly addicted to...
It was at the same time when I started using DXM. The first 10mg temazepam pill I took when I wanted to calm my nerves to call a girl. A young and yet not ready for the kind of love I aspired to girl. The girl I hated for this for many years after. She was one of the stars in the school surrounded by a lot of boys, one of the alpha females in the school who turned out to be just thinking about love the way I prematurely started desperately longing for ... It shook me just as a lot of my peers' behaviours and views shook me, and it was then when I partially realized I'm "different". I grew up too fast and when my peers grew up too, the past events made me unable to function normally with them.
I don't mean only sex, it was a few years later when I was like 17 and dated a 15 year-old, and then I saw how teenage girls think about love. It's romantic, it's perfect, but it's only in their minds. When I realized that, I stopped, and decided that for me it would be making love, but for her it would be a completely new experience possibly changing her life by changing her view on different things relationship related. To be perfectly honest, after that first falling in love at 14 I got to be too cautious with these things. It was all when my first girlfriend was abroad and actually had left me saying I deserved better when she was leaving. So that 15-year old girl would have been the second girl I would have made love to. With the love between my first girlfriend and me being the most romantic, euphoric and at the same time delicate, now I know I actually kind of hurt that 15-year old girl letting one of my male peers who knew nothing about the importance of intimacy and caring deprive her of her virginity. And I would have deflowered her.
I got my first estazolam pills from a guy I'd got to know via the Internet, an abstinent tweaker with much similar problems to mine - unable to live in loneliness. This acquaintance of mine suffered from terrible insomnia and could get as much estazolam and lormetazepam as wanted to. Well, a bit off-topic, the story of his life as he has told me would make a great book... Then I started getting scripts for estazolam, lorazepam, and temazepam myself from a local clinic. The way I was doing it may leave some at a loss for words, but it really was that simple. I, a 14-15-year old kid, went to the clinic and left a slip of paper with the name of the medicine and the name of the patient at the reception desk. Of course I wasn't the patient, but as a matter of fact it was all 100% legal, no scam. The prescription was ready to be collected on the day after. Estazolam was prescribed for an insomniac patient, so I could switch it with requests for lormetazepam, lorazepam, nitrazepam, midazolam, and triazolam. Temazepam* was for an elderly patient with anxiety, so I could switch it with alprazolam, diazepam, oxazepam, medazepam, bromazepam. Lorazepam was for a person with epilepsy, I didn't switch it with anything, actually it was my BZD of choice, so I was mostly leaving slips of papers with request for this particular BZD and estazolam. Luckily doctors in Poland are now more hesitant to prescribe BZDs, so no teenager with similar problems to my past problems will hurt themselves. When I got to my 4th or 5th psychiatrist, I was already addicted to BZDs. She just kept prescribing me more and more antidepressants, whatever I wanted, and I manipulated her into switching me from lorazepam to clonazepam (very bad mistake). I lived quite close to the Eastern border, so there was plenty of phenazepam, gidazepam, and benzobarbital available on the black market. It was so easy to carry on with my worst addiction... Now as I look back, I really blame my then psychiatrist for switching me to clonazepam. I was the patient suffering from addiction, not thinking clearly, she was the doctor, and she was there to help me, to cut my dose, and not eventually get me on 6mg of clonazepam a day scripts. If she couldn't manage it, she should have sent me to an addiction specialist.
With stimulants I never had any problems, although I used different kinds of them when I was already addicted to opioids and benzodiazepines. It wasn't until last year when I started using amphetamine heavily. It was after I got off methadone and was in the end placed on Suboxone by the very same doctor who had kept refusing to get me on the maintenance programme in the past. I couldn't cope with "sobriety", Suboxone vs. methadone is like heaven and hell, methadone dulled my mind and on buprenorphine my thinking was clear. I felt as if I had woken up from a twilight dream. This doctor also immediately started cutting my clonazepam dose when I was hospitalised. From 4mg to 2mg right away, then later to 1mg, and 0.5mg, but it was too fast for me, and when I was officially off, I was actually still taking clonazepam, but I had to get it from the black market (I was kind of mad at myself that I stopped visiting the previous psychiatrist from whom I could get legal prescriptions for more clonazepam than I really needed). Anyway, amphetamine gave me confidence and I was really doubting myself despite Suboxone, literally when I looked at myself in the mirror after snorting amphetamine, I saw a different person - attractive, self-assure of his virtues etc. Without amphetamine I would see a sad guy no girl would look at. It had been then like a year since the end of my latest relationship, and, it's not a thing I'm proud of considering how the world is nowadays, I can't face this world all by myself without a woman, there always had to be someone. A lot of amphetamine and weed + BZDs for comedowns for a couple of months until I went to England (where I smoked weed too because I got terribly depressed after 2 weeks looking for a job with no success, I started thinking that something is wrong with me if I can't get a
normal job).
Now I'm back in Poland and I'm freaking out unsatisfied with Suboxone, it's only better when I've got a break from it to get the old opioid calmness and warmness, or when I smoke weed all week long to the point I feel more sober having smoked. I've yet to visit my programme as I was given Suboxone for ~5 months before I went to England. I should still be in England and I don't quite know how to go there after a few months of not having to see all these methadone dulled faces. I just don't want to. I'm running out of Suboxone, so soon I will have to or I will finally kick it as it's not doing it for me and I've got enormous cravings in my head. When I got off methadone, there was still an alternative - Suboxone. Now I know there is nothing else I can be offered to fight mental cravings and at the same time I'm afraid that Suboxone withdrawal will be as hard as methadone withdrawal was. Thus I'm also afraid that I will soon fully relapse on morphine, and stronger opioids are 1 step or at most a few steps from morphine. Even having codeine one can do magic, so this really is a big concern for me.
* Temazepam being recognized worldwide as the second most
dangerous benzodiazepine after flunitrazepam was actually then seen in Poland as a weak anxiolytic, weaker and easier to get than diazepam. Only recently I heard from one person that he was prescribed it for problems with sleeping. I never heard before of it being used as a hypnotic.