A New World....

Once you've entered into the world of opiates, you begin to notice details of your surroundings that you were previously oblivious.  I live in a medium sized city in the Mid-Atlantic/Northeast, and in a more "urban" environment like my own, it is easy to notice the discarded evidence of this world's inhabitants.  On any given day, I can easily spot multiple discarded heroin bags upon the sidewalk, torn open Suboxone sublingual strip wrappers, and at the very least, the brightly colored orange caps from disposable syringes, if not the whole "rig" itself.  Prior to my baptism into this alternate world, the detritus of such drug use would have been as invisible to me as the homeless man laying on the sidewalk to bourgeois city dwellers.  How, exactly, did I gain admission to this world you may ask?  Well, it truly was a combination of several important personal and environmental factors that came together at just the right moment in a serendipitous way I refer to as the "perfect storm" of addiction.

It was 2010, and I recently been promoted to an upper-level managerial position at a national service company, specifically I managed the inventory, procurement, shipping & receiving and basically anything else required in the warehouse.  This however, quickly turned into a position in which I was the "go-to answer man", the door to my warehouse (where my office was located) quickly resembling a revolving door with no promise of ever resting.  I suppose when you have proven yourself to be the most competent employee, you're going to attract that kind of attention.  Add onto this an owner whose personal psychopathy trickled down to every employee in the form of a continuous, daily anxiety induced panic attack.  For those unfamiliar, an electromechanical service company like the one I previously worked for primarily maintains and services commercial equipment, so for example, my employer serviced the espresso machines exclusive to Starbucks throughout the country, as well as the saws and paint equipment inside of all the Home Depots.  What is distinguishing about this industry, and the source of much of the anxiety and stress, is that your customers ONLY call you when there's a problem, and because these are international corporations that breakdown their profit analysis to hundredths of a cent, they're attitude is that the machine had to be fixed yesterday.  I could go on and on about the stresses that added up at this job, but what is especially relevant is how they effected my person.

With an environment drenched in stress and anxiety, and nearly every member of the company actively depending on me to solve their day to day problems, it began to take a toll.  I used to get panic attacks on the way to work, would actively wish for a car accident on the way to work, or wake up before work and be genuinely disappointed and angry that I wasn't sick so that I could stay home.  Garnish in my daily, prescribed consumption of adderall (dextroamphetamine), and needless to say, I was exceptionally "high strung".  I'd have to get so amped on adderall on a daily basis to keep up with the endless responsibilities that by the time the work day ended, I was so tweaked out that I was desperately seeking anything to bring me down....and weed, which I had been smoking for the previous ten years, just couldn't cut it anymore.  Enter stage left, the final piece of the puzzle.

At that job, we had daily UPS package delivery in the morning and pickup in the afternoon and because I was the S&R manager, I became friendly with our UPS driver....who just so happened to have been managing his own network of painkiller connections and suppliers for some time previous.  Well, I remember the first time he offered me something, which were 10mg oxycodone (what I now refer to as "baby pills", but hey, I'd do anything to return to those low tolerance days) and as soon as it hit me, it releaved my stress and anxiety, mental and physical, and my endogenous depression which had been effecting me for years.  In fact, what I remember most about that experience was not a "high", but a general sense of well-being and the disappearance of my depression, I even remarked: "this is how happy people must see the world."  Initially, they didn't catch on right away, as I only did them on my own time, but the first time I took some AT work, everything changed....

All of a sudden, instead of work being the soul-crushing drudgery and boredom I resented (and every experience I've ever had with work has been characterized as such), I could not only tolerate it, but find pleasure and satisfaction in it.  When I combined the opiates with my adderall, it was even better as the opiates removed all the negative side effects of the amphetamine and the amphetamine removed all the negative side effects of the opiate putting me into a place of absolute focus and concentration, but also being completely relaxed and calm....basically, when everything feels good on the inside, everything feels good on the outside as well.

Before long, I was graduating to stronger opiates and higher doses.  I remember one of my favorite early regimens was performing what I called "Adderall alarm clock".  This is where you set your alarm clock an hour before your normal waking time, and upon waking up, you ingest your adderall immediately and return to bed, allowing the metabolized adderall to wake you up in approximately an hour.  The point is that you never have to awake to being tired and groggy, you basically awake ready to jumpkick out of bed and start your day.  I thought to myself, the only thing that could make this better is to include a couple 60mg time released oxycodone into the procedure, so that I basically would wake up into a pharmaceutical speedball, which more or less turns your waking existence into one completely absent of sobriety.

For those that haven't found bliss in chemical dependency, it may be hard to understand, but I'll do my best to try.  Having those painkillers and adderall in my position was akin to having the most dependable friend ever, so in my mind, I never once feared or lamented the possibility of a bad day at work, because I know that as long as I had my pills, it could never be that bad and never get to me.  While some of you may not be able to understand specific drug dependencies, I think everyone can understand the allure of a 100% guarantee that you'll never have a bad day or a problem you cannot handle.  There's also the added benefits of opiates....they had completely cured the symptoms of my depression that several anti-depressants couldn't even come close to achieving, but also, when your brain is being flooded with opiates and the rewarding dopamine your brain releases in response, you basically find ANY and EVERY activity, no matter once how boring or menial, satisfying and fun.  To put it simply, at least with me, when I was on opiates, I was literally never bored, sad, frustrated, or unhappy, no matter how drab or unstimulating the surroundings.  For someone like myself of very high intelligence, which means I get bored easily, this was the answer to a lifelong search.  To sum it up succinctly, whenever the UPS driver would deliver painkillers to me at my job, I'd announce: "Guess who's working overtime tonight!!!" with excitement...perhaps that can demonstrate their power and allure, after all, how many of us would celebrate the idea of working overtime at a job we'd normally hate and dread?

In the end, it's not hard to figure out how this progressed....I have to go to a job I hate almost every day, so therefore I need to take these substances that solve that problem nearly every day.  This, however, brings me to an interesting point, something that I find differentiating about my addiction that others, and that is my use of opiates, not to escape from the world and my responsibilities, but to engage and fulfill them with a confidence I did not have previous.  Because of the pharmaceutical speedball I was riding, I went from $12/hr to $65,000/year in  just three months and had become the company's second hand man behind the VP, going to conventions in other cities and the like.  On top of that, no matter how long my day at work was, or how hard, I'd always have the patience and character to leave that at work, and come home to my girlfriend and still have energy to patiently deal with any of her problems and still cook dinner and do chores.  It basically gave me the motivation and will that I had lacked my whole life, and on top of all of that, it completely pushed by depression into remission, something that I honestly thought would be impossible, something that I had come to terms with having to suffer through the duration of my life.

So, while drug use and abuse may be a choice, for certain people, that choice is remarkably harder to make that for others.  Basically, I found a substance that neutralized the main source of stress and anxiety in my life, stopped my lifelong depression in it's tracks, and made me the person I always wanted to be in the eyes of others (I was more outgoing socially, never angry or mean).  So, to ask someone like myself to make such a choice, is to basically ask me to ignore a substance which made my life worth living, and that's an understatement.