poledriver
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The Iceman Cometh: An extract from These Things Happen by Greg Fleet
WARNING: Graphic content and coarse language
I AM not anti-drugs. I believe that there are things to be learned from taking certain drugs. Drugs can take you down a road to enlightenment. Drugs can be fun.
But ice? No.
Ice, if it chooses to take you anywhere, will eventually try to take you backwards down a one-way alley that leads to madness, fear, irrationality, delusion, suicide and murder. Most of those don’t fit under my subheading of “fun”.
This may be a crap analogy, but if you can consider drugs as children, ice (or crystal meth) is the bad seed. The kid that will start killing pets and then grow into a serial murderer.
“That kid just ain’t no good.”
As with most children, ice is so cute and fun when it’s still a baby. But as it grows, you start to notice things. Like how it will never meet your eyes.
One of the reasons this drug has the ability to tear your world apart is that, like most bad relationships, the beginning is heavenly. You feel confident and capable. Strong and more focused than ever before. You feel as though you could do anything. And you probably could. This may be why the Japanese (who I’ve been told invented the drug) gave meth to their kamikaze pilots.
“Fly this plane into that ship.”
“No way.”
“OK, take this drug. Now fly this plane into that ship.”
“Cool.”
I have taken ice. I have smoked it, I have injected it, I have snorted it. Believe me, I am not bragging. I am attempting to show you how, in certain situations, I know what I’m talking about. At one point around 2004-05, my then-partner Catherine and I took ice for about six months.
For a fairly gruesome description of that time, read on, Macduff.
The reason that Catherine and I were taking ice was because I’d recently had a naltrexone implant surgically inserted into my body, in an effort to stop taking heroin. Naltrexone is a chemical that acts on the brain’s opioid receptors and, among other things (though this is the biggie), blocks the euphoric feeling that accompanies the use of opiates. If you are on naltrexone you will not feel the effects of heroin, thus making using it pointless. Most implants remain effective for about six months.
To get a naltrexone implant you must first dry out, or go through withdrawal from heroin and stay off it for three days or so. You then go to a cold and sterile clinic where a doctor will make an incision about 10 centimetres below your navel. The doctor will scrape around inside the incision with a scalpel (the worst part) and make a hole big enough to fit the implant. A naltrexone implant is about three centimetres long and half a centimetre wide. They then insert the implant into the hole and sew you up. You can feel it as a hard lump under your skin. And for about six months you will no longer feel the effects of heroin.
If you are as committed a heroin user as I was, you will go out and have some heroin just to see if it works or not.
But a naltrexone implant is a quick fix. It’s like putting nail varnish on a cracked windscreen. It will work for a while, but one day that shit is going to cave in on you. Probably in about six months, and probably when you are driving.
As soon as I had my new cyborg-like upgrade, I left the clinic and scored. I took the heroin. I waited. And … nothing. I felt nothing. I was free!
I wasn’t free. I was just out on parole.
And if heroin was a prison from which I’d just been released, I was about to start taking a drug that was a psych ward.
A loony bin.
A ship of fools. Ice, ice, baby.
During early meth use, no problem seems insurmountable. You feel as though your brain and body are operating at an elevated level. And then there is the sex. This will be difficult because I, in no way, want people to take ice, not even once. By the end of this chapter I imagine you will know why I feel that way.
But the sex …
My sex life up until that point had been fairly pedestrian. I am, generally speaking, fairly quiet during sex. I’m not demonstrative. I don’t yell porn cliches. If anything, I get intimidated by people who do. I enjoyed sex, but I was more driven by the desire for heroin. And heroin makes you not really care about sex. It makes you not really care about anything.
We started doing things I had never done. We started playing roles when we had sex. We would pretend to be other people. At first, those people were types: bikers, professors, handymen and bored sex-mad cellists. It was amazing.
Then we started having sex with each other while pretending to be various people that we actually knew. I cannot begin to explain the complexities and thrills of that game. To this day I see people I know and think, I have sort of had sex with you, and it was brilliant, or worse, I think, I have had sex with someone while pretending to be you.
Cont -
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/li...en-by-greg-fleet/story-fneuzlbd-1227494947900
WARNING: Graphic content and coarse language
I AM not anti-drugs. I believe that there are things to be learned from taking certain drugs. Drugs can take you down a road to enlightenment. Drugs can be fun.
But ice? No.
Ice, if it chooses to take you anywhere, will eventually try to take you backwards down a one-way alley that leads to madness, fear, irrationality, delusion, suicide and murder. Most of those don’t fit under my subheading of “fun”.
This may be a crap analogy, but if you can consider drugs as children, ice (or crystal meth) is the bad seed. The kid that will start killing pets and then grow into a serial murderer.
“That kid just ain’t no good.”
As with most children, ice is so cute and fun when it’s still a baby. But as it grows, you start to notice things. Like how it will never meet your eyes.
One of the reasons this drug has the ability to tear your world apart is that, like most bad relationships, the beginning is heavenly. You feel confident and capable. Strong and more focused than ever before. You feel as though you could do anything. And you probably could. This may be why the Japanese (who I’ve been told invented the drug) gave meth to their kamikaze pilots.
“Fly this plane into that ship.”
“No way.”
“OK, take this drug. Now fly this plane into that ship.”
“Cool.”
I have taken ice. I have smoked it, I have injected it, I have snorted it. Believe me, I am not bragging. I am attempting to show you how, in certain situations, I know what I’m talking about. At one point around 2004-05, my then-partner Catherine and I took ice for about six months.
For a fairly gruesome description of that time, read on, Macduff.
The reason that Catherine and I were taking ice was because I’d recently had a naltrexone implant surgically inserted into my body, in an effort to stop taking heroin. Naltrexone is a chemical that acts on the brain’s opioid receptors and, among other things (though this is the biggie), blocks the euphoric feeling that accompanies the use of opiates. If you are on naltrexone you will not feel the effects of heroin, thus making using it pointless. Most implants remain effective for about six months.
To get a naltrexone implant you must first dry out, or go through withdrawal from heroin and stay off it for three days or so. You then go to a cold and sterile clinic where a doctor will make an incision about 10 centimetres below your navel. The doctor will scrape around inside the incision with a scalpel (the worst part) and make a hole big enough to fit the implant. A naltrexone implant is about three centimetres long and half a centimetre wide. They then insert the implant into the hole and sew you up. You can feel it as a hard lump under your skin. And for about six months you will no longer feel the effects of heroin.
If you are as committed a heroin user as I was, you will go out and have some heroin just to see if it works or not.
But a naltrexone implant is a quick fix. It’s like putting nail varnish on a cracked windscreen. It will work for a while, but one day that shit is going to cave in on you. Probably in about six months, and probably when you are driving.
As soon as I had my new cyborg-like upgrade, I left the clinic and scored. I took the heroin. I waited. And … nothing. I felt nothing. I was free!
I wasn’t free. I was just out on parole.
And if heroin was a prison from which I’d just been released, I was about to start taking a drug that was a psych ward.
A loony bin.
A ship of fools. Ice, ice, baby.
During early meth use, no problem seems insurmountable. You feel as though your brain and body are operating at an elevated level. And then there is the sex. This will be difficult because I, in no way, want people to take ice, not even once. By the end of this chapter I imagine you will know why I feel that way.
But the sex …
My sex life up until that point had been fairly pedestrian. I am, generally speaking, fairly quiet during sex. I’m not demonstrative. I don’t yell porn cliches. If anything, I get intimidated by people who do. I enjoyed sex, but I was more driven by the desire for heroin. And heroin makes you not really care about sex. It makes you not really care about anything.
We started doing things I had never done. We started playing roles when we had sex. We would pretend to be other people. At first, those people were types: bikers, professors, handymen and bored sex-mad cellists. It was amazing.
Then we started having sex with each other while pretending to be various people that we actually knew. I cannot begin to explain the complexities and thrills of that game. To this day I see people I know and think, I have sort of had sex with you, and it was brilliant, or worse, I think, I have had sex with someone while pretending to be you.
Cont -
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/li...en-by-greg-fleet/story-fneuzlbd-1227494947900
