Uprising said:
(What amounts to an experience report)
The only damage that comes from the drug is the addiction and effects of pinning up etc which I'd NEVER EVER do, and thats a cert because thats a one way ticket to hell and back if your lucky.
I reckon its even possible to get the odd tenner bag to share every now and again with no harm done. Thought I'd share.
Any thoughts?
The first statement you made is truer than most people imagine; I believe the moment I finally stopped believing myself when I would rationalize the hell out of using heroin and tell myself that I could stop using opioids someday as long as I executed a well-planned/-disciplined/-medicated taper/withdrawal and distanced myself from the entire scene was the first time I pushed down on the plunger of a syringe filled with two bags of heroin inserted into a vein.
From that moment on, I knew that I was on a one-way street for at least 10-50x longer than I originally thought before when I was only snorting, and maybe forever. Indeed, to this day, I require a daily dose of opioids to function, and the many times I attempted to successfully withdraw (I only tried cold-turkey once after I met the needle; I lasted a pathetic 24-26 hours before I was literally writhing on my bed screaming and crying in agony, and that was on klonopin, seroquel, and trazodone @ 3x my normal knock-me-out-now-PLEASE-dosages each) with Suboxone failed utterly (I think I made it two weeks once, but was in danger of losing my job due to the massive swath of work that I hadn't even been able to start due to experience the most profound and legendary lack of motivation that only long-term narcotic abuse withdrawal can precipitate, and that was only one problem among many whose collective sum, at that moment, looked a lot worse than going out and buying two bundles, so that was that).
When I had built up enough debt to begin to scare the shit out of me, I started Methadone. I consider myself very, very lucky to "only" have had around $350k of debt at that point (around $290k of that existed prior to my addiction), to still have my job paying me six figures, to never have been arrested and thus possessing no criminal record, to not (at that time) have any chronic pain conditions, to not have ever put myself in the hospital from using (I came close a few times, waking up hours after a shot on the floor of the room), to not have ever stolen from anyone or anything other than heroin dealers who had already stolen much more from me in the past and bragged about it to their friends, and to still have my significant other and some friends left.
Lucky as I am, I'm still chained to A) Taking (and paying for) 110mg Methadone/day or facing months of more debilitating withdrawal than I've experienced to this point, and B) Not feeling anything other than absolutely insane and ridiculous quantities of other opioids (if the heroin is really good and the bags are really generous, I will feel -- very briefly -- a 10-bag shot; I have shot up to 15 bags in the past while on methadone and have never once achieved a high that was high enough to enjoy), which is especially scary if I'm ever involved in a bad trauma and/or require pain relief for treatment of said trauma (e.g. it's very difficult to pop certain displaced bones back into place without enough sedation to relax the various involuntarily-clamped muscles responding to the pain stimulus), or get cancer, or something.
Your second supposition, in which you "reckon" that it is possible to get the "odd bag" "now and then" "to share with friends" without any "harm" being done, is fraught with dangerous zones full of what are known as Famous Last Words. That said, it's also a question that will get you a great deal of unique answers and to which there is no real answer other than the one that you, by being phenomenally honest with yourself, can provide.
While I feel that anyone can muster the willpower required to simply not do a drug, no matter what the allure is (my feelings differ when physiological symptoms begin to manifest as a result of not doing said drug, e.g. withdrawal, but I'm not talking about that, I'm just talking about the urge to do a drug), what most people do to themselves by using heroin for the first time (and what you've done to yourself by using whatever opioid you enjoyed more than heroin for the first time) is of profound philosophical significance. They have ingested a substance which has caused their brain to fire more pleasure signals than they have ever experienced in their lives, outside of orgasm or a severely transcendental episode of meditative/spiritual bliss (almost everyone's experienced one but not the other, and everyone will agree that it is difficult to experience either "at will" especially just after having experienced it). However, after that first snort, shot, smoke, pill, or whatever, they have discovered a methodology resulting in hours of the best feeling one will ever experience in life (excluding those feelings above that are A) brief in duration and B) infrequent), and they have given themselves that power basically at the veritable press of a button.
Is this a wise move? This is another one of those whiz-bang philosophical questions that Only You Can Answer, so I won't try to argue my specific feelings on the topic (which, in characteristic hedging fashion, change based upon the current cultural attitude towards the notion of Better Living Through Chemistry, as well as the current progress of medical science into the field of narcotics and whether they have yielded an opioid substance that results in no tolerance or dependence).
In any case, the veritable button has been pressed at that point, and in my opinion, if one does not (by choice or otherwise) engage in phenomenal powers of denial/hypnotic suggestion/PTSD/etc., the brain will always kind of desire the feelings of that moment again, just one more time, somehow, if possible, please.
Unfortunately, this mild but persistant desire has the effect of raising the expectations of the second use of the drug so high that it is inevitably a letdown, beginning an infinite loop process in which the user is chasing that first high and never quite getting it again. However, the chasing process involves (thanks to a combination of current medical knowledge, human nature, and the generally capitalist nature of contemporary society) an ever-increasing dose as tolerance increases, and before one knows it, there's a physical dependence that's suddenly appeared, which generally isn't apparent until the user tries to stop and is suddenly wracked with horrible physical and psychological agony, instantly and euphorically curable with a tiny volume of powder. Q.E.D. Addiction.
It's rare that you hear someone utter the "odd bag" "now and then" to "share" "with friends" phrase without slowly but surely justifying that (perfectly innocent and devoid of all above consequences, if done correctly, e.g. with sufficient time between uses to allow any down-regulation that has occurred to reverse itself naturally) collection of phrases to transform into another, subtly but profoundly different, collection of phrases signifying that moment when you've sort of tripped into the rabbit-hole: I "only" use "a little" per day to keep me feeling normal, or I "only" use when my "friends" are "sharing" with me, every 2-3 days, or I "only" use to "celebrate," etc. Each of them is basically someone's personalized ticket to hell, and I guess depending on how the user first encounters it, there are a few stops along the way if you want to walk back to where you were before, but before long it's an express route, do not pass go, etc. ad infinitum.
IMHO, the only person that can indefinitely "chip"/use occasionally without developing physiological dependence is the person who knows that opioids just aren't his/her "thing." This is generally known upon the first use of a full agonist opioid that isn't codeine. These people will either cease opioid use altogether or continue to use maybe 2-8 times a year, give or take, because the experience, to them, basically violates my entire post and ISN'T the most pleasurable thing they've ever experienced aside from orgasm/speaking to god. I have never personally observed anyone ELSE, who DID profoundly enjoy his/her first use of an opioid and who then later learned how easy it is to obtain something like heroin, not end up with an addiction of at least somewhat remarkable magnitude. I've seen people in the latter category successfully "chip" for very short times (never) and for very, very long times (years and years), but each and every one of them that I've ever known has eventually fallen into the rabbit-hole.
This post is already far too long, so I won't continue to ramble about what is likely to decide whether a person will find the addict's lifestyle tolerable or intolerable, or whether a person will find methadone maintenance tolerable/intolerable, or the myriad of ways in which our society is totally fucked up and should be supplying the opioid of choice to any physically dependent individual for an incredibly low cost (perhaps even nothing) which would destroy the black market and thus drastically reduce the incidence of new addicts. Maybe some other time.
But I decided it's been 2-3 years since I started posting on BL so maybe people should know a little more about me. Here's my pathetic addict story as it relates to the comparatively short portion of my life spent using hard narcotics on a daily basis. If you've read this far, wow, I'm sort of flattered, because most of this was most likely shit, especially considering I'm approaching 24 hours without sleep. But hey, hope it wasn't too painful.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
