(no subject)

Heroin in New England, More Abundant and Deadly

Officials in northern New England report a sharp rise in overdoses and heroin deaths.

This was such an aggravating article.

“One reason for the rise in heroin use is the restrictions on doctors in prescribing painkillers."  I would be interested in seeing the numbers for total opiate overdoses.  Saying that heroin overdoses are skyrocketing without saying that Oxy overdoses are decreasing, increasing or staying steady, is not that helpful.

"A $6 bag of heroin in New York City fetches $10 in southern New England but up to $30 or $40 in northern New England, law enforcement officials said."  This just seems weird – how can you maintain a price differential that high.  Also, and maybe this is just because I was the worst kind of girl junkie, and always had someone else cop for me, but I thought single bags in New York were permanently set at $10 with just the quantity changing.

"Theresa Dumond, 23, who lives on the streets of Portland, said she sells her body three times a day to support her heroin habit.” Ugh.

“Novice users are more likely to share needles"  I would actually be interested in the data on this.

"Maine is the first state that has limited access to specific medications, including buprenorphine and methadone, that have been proven to be effective in treating addiction, a step taken to save money."  Great.  Though maybe that fact should have been in the first paragraph of an article talking about increased overdoses in Maine.

"After her most recent term in prison, for drug trafficking, her friends and family thought she was clean. She was even preparing to go back to school in cosmetology and hairdressing and hoped she might regain custody of her young son.But one night last month, Ms. Watson-Carter injected some very pure heroin, according to her father, Michael Watson, a retired Amtrak police officer, who lives in Maryland.‘She was taking the same amount she would usually take, but it was so concentrated and pure that she overdosed,’ he said.” Or maybe doing heroin for the first time after being in prison is a known risk for overdose.

(no subject)

Reading through my journals from the two months between getting back to school in 1994 and starting to shoot heroin, it’s like the most ham-handed foreshadowing ever.

I was such an idiot.

Writing yourself into drug cravings

Anonymous asked: Oh well... I deleted your site from my newsreader feed. I like it in many ways but on occasion it triggers me. After 17 years clean that's uncomfortable. Why is that your concern? I don't know. I guess I'm curious about something. How do you avoid that? Especially as your material is sometimes sexy in a dope way & you don't have clean addicts (and NA) in your life to detox your thoughts with. Do you ever write yourself into dope nostalgia / craving? I SO don't want to go there myself.

I’m really sorry that you had a bad reaction to my blog.  I need to be more careful about tagging things, and I’ve been pretty resistant to using “continued after the break" as a way to warn people.  I guess I’ll need to think about it some more.

For me, the writing has been really helpful.  I have a great CBT therapist and I’m on zoloft, and I think that unmanaged depression was probably putting me at the greatest risk of relapse.

I had built up this gulf between the person then who did the drugs, and the person now who was having drug dreams and decompensating.  Two nights ago I had a dream about meth, and I woke up at 5 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, and it put me in a really fucked up mood.  But I told my husband what was going on, and took a long walk over lunch, and took some advil for the headache, and listened to my favorite music, and wrote about it, and last night, I was able to tell myself, Just go to sleep; this won’t feel like such a big deal in the morning.  It actually seemed like something of an accomplishment, considering that in the past, that same sort of drug dream has sometimes snowballed into weeks of feeling like shit.

But I totally understand that it was hurting you, so unfollowing me was probably your best choice.