NJ2NYC2NJ
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2008
- Messages
- 235
I was a regular heroin smoker for about 5 years, up until about 6 months ago. Initially, I was using it only "recreationally," perhaps once a week or so. Slowly, however, the drug and I developed a pathologically intense relationship, and I eventually worked my way up to a bundle-a-day habit, which I maintained for the last two years of my habit. I could only juggle the duties and responsibilities as a friend, boyfriend and $100/day drug addict for so long, before I started to drop the ball.
Eventually, my drug use started to seriously interfere with virtually every aspect of my life and I decided that a radical reappraisal of my day-to-day routine was in order. Over the course of 2 months, I quit my job, broke up with my girlfriend, and started going to a methadone clinic. The methadone treatment worked well for me from the outset (60mg/day peak), and when the healthcare providers at the clinic asked me if I'd be interested in either a 6-month taper-down-to-nothing treatment (6MT) or the more indefinite open-ended maintenance treatment (MMT), I figured 6 months should give me enough time to reassemble my life and opted for the 6MT plan.
Fast-forward 6 months. The last two weeks of treatment were becoming increasingly difficult, having dipped from 10mg to 5mg and from 5mg down to 0mg... And I found myself suffering from anxiety and mild withdrawal, virtually around the clock. I eventually cracked and dug through various storage boxes in my closet before stumbling across the Jackpot box --- the box in which I kept all of the bundles I had bought and used over the last couple years, all wrapped up in rubber bands and stuffed in a plastic bag. I grabbed the box and took it back to my desk for a closer inspection. At my desk I opened up the box, a Converse sneaker box, and inside was the white shopping bag, filled with approximately 100 used bundles.
Open opening the bag I was greeted with a familiar smell that could only be created by thousands of invisibly miniscule specks of heroin dust floating up in my nose. This was formerly my bundle graveyard... While I was using, I would smoke my way through a bundle, then, re-stack and band it, and relegate it to the graveyard bag, to be kept for nostalgia or posterity (ha!) or whatever.... I never really thought of re-using the bags, I figured I had split them and "squeezed" every significant bit of powder out of each bag and that this was more or less about as much as one could do with these bags. However, in my current weakened state, and with no more methadone from the clinic, my temptations and anxieties were kicking in... And short of going out and trying to score a bundle (which was now impossible, as I had intentionally deleted the phone numbers of all of my former connects upon entering the methadone clinic), this was pretty much the "best" I could do towards alleviating the creeping panic and pain.
I started to un-band a bundle, and proceeded to re-open a bag... Analyzing the exceptionally thin layer of residue which lined each interior surface of the bag, trying to figure out what my best option would be for harvesting the remaining dust residue. Eventually I decided on using a straight razor blade to scrape the bag at an angle, thereby collecting the dust on the razor, which could then be transferred to a sheet of aluminum foil for it's ultimate date with my lungs. I repeated this process for the rest of the first bundle, and then again with 4 or 5 more bundles, before I had a relatively decent hit amassed atop the foil. I found a pen (pipe) and Bic lighter... And then, with virgin-like giddy apprehension, I took a hit.... And held it for over a minute before exhaling.
Within a few minutes, the anxiety and discomfort slowly washed away, with a slowly radiating warmth and fuzziness taking their place. It wasn't a monster high, but it was enough to completely satisfy whatever urge I'd been feeling leading up to the hit. Despite my satisfactory experience, I figured it could only get better with more and more bundles scraped... So, naturally, I continued scraping, piling and smoking... Until I had made my way through about 30 of the bundles, at which point I decided that I had had enough for the time being, and retired for the evening. The following day it was more of the same... Another 25 or 30 bundles scraped and piled and smoked, and another day passed by with a comfortable, warm veil of opiates mediating the paths between my neurons.
This lasted, of course, only 3 or 4 days before I had gone through each bundle, and I found myself again trying to come up with a new engineering solution to my high/sober dilemma. I soon figured out that instead of my usual "pen scrape," I would try using the steam escaping from a boiling tea kettle to "steam clean" the inside of my pen pipe, so as to collect the dark drops that emerged from the pen and boil them down over a foil sheet. I tried it, and it worked... The brown liquid soon boiled down to a brown layer of oils which would then burn off into the familiar dragon I had been chasing for so many years. But, naturally, this was something that could only be done once... And I soon thereafter found myself seemingly out of salvageable gear, and creative ideas.
Fast-forward 5 days. I've been going through a low-grade withdrawal for the last few days... And it's honestly been a lot better than some of my previous attempts at quitting heroin cold-turkey, albeit from much higher dosages. I don't have much of an appetite and have only eaten twice in the last 4 days. I can't sleep at night, and my days are usually spent in states that vacillate from anxious to short-tempered to downright despondent... But yet, I'm still here, and I think I've seen the worst of the withdrawal. It's now been over two weeks since my last methadone dose, and I'm pretty sure I'm over that withdrawal too, for the most part.
Opiate withdrawal can be harrowing ordeal... And I'm not sure there's any easy way around it. I'm considering going on suboxone in the near future, with the hope that I can continue with my slow taper schedule, slowly working my way down to the point at which I can cease taking opiates (and their kin) altogether. For some people, maintenance treatment is a great idea and works well for them. For me, however, I have a nagging suspicion that unless I can work this addiction through, and completely work my way through the taper-down schedule, I won't really have much of a chance at avoiding these sorts of drugs altogether.
(OK, this is where you offer you own personal experience... Or offer clever ideas as to how I might go about squeezing the invisible remaining dust from my bags... Or tell me I'm a self-indulgent asshole for developing such an addiction in the first place and then going on an internet forum to post about the whole experience to a bunch of people who've probably already heard a multitude of variations of the same story and don't care to hear about my own particular experiences.... Or whatever else)
Eventually, my drug use started to seriously interfere with virtually every aspect of my life and I decided that a radical reappraisal of my day-to-day routine was in order. Over the course of 2 months, I quit my job, broke up with my girlfriend, and started going to a methadone clinic. The methadone treatment worked well for me from the outset (60mg/day peak), and when the healthcare providers at the clinic asked me if I'd be interested in either a 6-month taper-down-to-nothing treatment (6MT) or the more indefinite open-ended maintenance treatment (MMT), I figured 6 months should give me enough time to reassemble my life and opted for the 6MT plan.
Fast-forward 6 months. The last two weeks of treatment were becoming increasingly difficult, having dipped from 10mg to 5mg and from 5mg down to 0mg... And I found myself suffering from anxiety and mild withdrawal, virtually around the clock. I eventually cracked and dug through various storage boxes in my closet before stumbling across the Jackpot box --- the box in which I kept all of the bundles I had bought and used over the last couple years, all wrapped up in rubber bands and stuffed in a plastic bag. I grabbed the box and took it back to my desk for a closer inspection. At my desk I opened up the box, a Converse sneaker box, and inside was the white shopping bag, filled with approximately 100 used bundles.
Open opening the bag I was greeted with a familiar smell that could only be created by thousands of invisibly miniscule specks of heroin dust floating up in my nose. This was formerly my bundle graveyard... While I was using, I would smoke my way through a bundle, then, re-stack and band it, and relegate it to the graveyard bag, to be kept for nostalgia or posterity (ha!) or whatever.... I never really thought of re-using the bags, I figured I had split them and "squeezed" every significant bit of powder out of each bag and that this was more or less about as much as one could do with these bags. However, in my current weakened state, and with no more methadone from the clinic, my temptations and anxieties were kicking in... And short of going out and trying to score a bundle (which was now impossible, as I had intentionally deleted the phone numbers of all of my former connects upon entering the methadone clinic), this was pretty much the "best" I could do towards alleviating the creeping panic and pain.
I started to un-band a bundle, and proceeded to re-open a bag... Analyzing the exceptionally thin layer of residue which lined each interior surface of the bag, trying to figure out what my best option would be for harvesting the remaining dust residue. Eventually I decided on using a straight razor blade to scrape the bag at an angle, thereby collecting the dust on the razor, which could then be transferred to a sheet of aluminum foil for it's ultimate date with my lungs. I repeated this process for the rest of the first bundle, and then again with 4 or 5 more bundles, before I had a relatively decent hit amassed atop the foil. I found a pen (pipe) and Bic lighter... And then, with virgin-like giddy apprehension, I took a hit.... And held it for over a minute before exhaling.
Within a few minutes, the anxiety and discomfort slowly washed away, with a slowly radiating warmth and fuzziness taking their place. It wasn't a monster high, but it was enough to completely satisfy whatever urge I'd been feeling leading up to the hit. Despite my satisfactory experience, I figured it could only get better with more and more bundles scraped... So, naturally, I continued scraping, piling and smoking... Until I had made my way through about 30 of the bundles, at which point I decided that I had had enough for the time being, and retired for the evening. The following day it was more of the same... Another 25 or 30 bundles scraped and piled and smoked, and another day passed by with a comfortable, warm veil of opiates mediating the paths between my neurons.
This lasted, of course, only 3 or 4 days before I had gone through each bundle, and I found myself again trying to come up with a new engineering solution to my high/sober dilemma. I soon figured out that instead of my usual "pen scrape," I would try using the steam escaping from a boiling tea kettle to "steam clean" the inside of my pen pipe, so as to collect the dark drops that emerged from the pen and boil them down over a foil sheet. I tried it, and it worked... The brown liquid soon boiled down to a brown layer of oils which would then burn off into the familiar dragon I had been chasing for so many years. But, naturally, this was something that could only be done once... And I soon thereafter found myself seemingly out of salvageable gear, and creative ideas.
Fast-forward 5 days. I've been going through a low-grade withdrawal for the last few days... And it's honestly been a lot better than some of my previous attempts at quitting heroin cold-turkey, albeit from much higher dosages. I don't have much of an appetite and have only eaten twice in the last 4 days. I can't sleep at night, and my days are usually spent in states that vacillate from anxious to short-tempered to downright despondent... But yet, I'm still here, and I think I've seen the worst of the withdrawal. It's now been over two weeks since my last methadone dose, and I'm pretty sure I'm over that withdrawal too, for the most part.
Opiate withdrawal can be harrowing ordeal... And I'm not sure there's any easy way around it. I'm considering going on suboxone in the near future, with the hope that I can continue with my slow taper schedule, slowly working my way down to the point at which I can cease taking opiates (and their kin) altogether. For some people, maintenance treatment is a great idea and works well for them. For me, however, I have a nagging suspicion that unless I can work this addiction through, and completely work my way through the taper-down schedule, I won't really have much of a chance at avoiding these sorts of drugs altogether.
(OK, this is where you offer you own personal experience... Or offer clever ideas as to how I might go about squeezing the invisible remaining dust from my bags... Or tell me I'm a self-indulgent asshole for developing such an addiction in the first place and then going on an internet forum to post about the whole experience to a bunch of people who've probably already heard a multitude of variations of the same story and don't care to hear about my own particular experiences.... Or whatever else)
