#but its very difficult to talk sense into a suicidal heroin addict

[hoodienanami]

ppl on this site will be like 'the sex pistols were soooo mean and evil and terrible so theyre not punk!!!' and then worship bad brains

[cultofbeatles]

parts of pattie boyd’s book wonderful tonight that involved george that stuck out to me:

pattie didn't have any of the beatles records at first and only bought please please me since she was going to be in their film 

“on first impressions, john seemed more cynical and brash than the others, ringo the most endearing, paul was cute, and george, with velvet brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best looking man i’d ever seen.”

during a lunch break pattie and george sat next to each other and were both very shy 

george asked pattie “will you marry me?” and after she laughed he said, “well, if you won't marry me, will you have dinner with me tonight?” and she turned him down.

she deadass invited george to hang out with her and her boyfriend at the time.

pattie and george are both pisces.

once reshoots for the film were happening george asked pattie about her boyfriend, she said she had dumped him, and george once again asked her for dinner. she accepted this time.

brian epstein joined them for their first date.

they sat side by side and were too scared to even hold the others hand.

george got along great with pattie’s family.

pattie liked cynthia lennon but found her difficult to make friends with. 

“she wasn't like my friends, who enjoyed a giggle and some fun: she was rather serious, and often, i thought, behaved more like john’s mother than wife.”

there was a rumor that john and pattie were having an affair and pattie worried cynthia believed it. it wasn't true.

maureen cox (ringo’s girlfriend) was another beatles girl that pattie had a hard time being friends with. but said that she was “jolly and friendly, more relaxed than cynthia.”

pattie got along best with jane asher but saw her the least.

“i felt there was definitely a north-south divide among the wives and girlfriends. and i had the definite impressions that the girls from the north (maureen and cynthia) felt they has a prior clam to the boys.” okay shade, we see you. 

(talking about going on holiday with john, cynthia, and george) “it was a good way to split the group. john and paul were the closest in some ways and immensely creative together, but they clashed if they were in each other’s pockets for too long.”

george asked pattie to cut his hair while on holiday and one of the cleaners found his hair and kept it. 

(talking about george) “he was so beautiful and so funny.”

once a “weird looking man” tried to force his way into pattie and george’s house. pattie thought he was either a salesman or a jehovahs witness. it turns out it was paul in disguise. 

george said the only place he got peace was in the bathroom of his hotel suite.

pattie got a lot of letters saying that if she didn't leave george there would be a curse put on her.

 pattie’s cleaner was a male ballet dancer and “a terrific duster.”

pattie would count the days till george came back. once he jumped into the bed early in the morning to wake her up. 

those two would deadass not lock their doors and were surprised that clothes were going missing...what is with older generations and not locking their doors i -

george would be in the studio from 11 am - 11 pm. sometimes midnight. 

george’s mom loved when john would visit and would always ask him for an “upper.”

when john lennon is your drug dealer.

pattie wasn't a good cook but was optimistic.

“i loved listening to him (play guitar), loved the sound of the guitar in the house. sometimes i would start to talk and he'd be so deep in thought about the lyrics or the melody he was writing that he wouldn't answer. we’d be the same room but he wasn't really with me: he was in his head.”

pattie developed a kidney disorder.

(talking about the beatles dynamic) “in many aspects they were still children. they had few real friends apart from each other, and when they were asked questions they could answer as one - they were so much on each other’s wavelength. if one went to a gallery opening, they all went; if one bought a new car or new house, they all did. if one seemed in danger of taking himself too seriously, the others knocked it out of him.”

one evening george stopped the car and said, “let’s get married. i'll speak to brian.” they went to brian’s house, george went inside, and when he came back in the car he said, “brian says it’s okay. will you marry me? we can get married in january.”

briannnnnnn, is it my turn to get married yet pleaseeeee

pattie invited her absent father to their wedding but he did not come.

at the train station everyone left cynthia behind as she was carrying the suitcases and john was carrying nothing. peter brown had to go back and get her. 

pattie’s quote from the lsd in the coffee moment is hilarious to me. “you've just had lsd. it was in the coffee.” john lennon: “how dare you fucking do this to us?”

pattie and george didn't go to brian’s funeral in liverpool but george sent one single sunflower.

pattie stopped modeling because george didnt like it. and she felt like she lost a part of herself.

maureen was afraid of flies.

during the India trip, mia farrow told john that maharishi was inappropriate with her and john wanted everyone leave after that.

after India george and pattie’s relationship changed.

(talking about george) “some days he would be all right, but on others he seemed withdrawn and depressed. this was new: he had never been depressed before, but there was nothing i could do. it wasn't about me, but i found that my moods started to mirror his...so bad indeed, that at times i felt almost suicidal. i don't think i was ever in any real danger of killing myself, but i got as far as working out how i would do it: i would put on a diaphanous ossie clark dress and jump off beachy head.”

george became more obvious about his cheating. it hurt pattie.

george was gaslighting her.

cilla black was staying at george and pattie’s house and was uncomfortably close to george so pattie left. six days latter george called to tell her the girl was gone and she could come home.

“..but my ego was too fragile and i couldn't see it as anything other than betrayal. i felt unloved and miserable.”

“jane asher came home unexpectedly from new york and found another woman in the house, an american girl - and did what i should probably have done with george...”

george would start to talk about his feelings about paul or john but would stop bc he never wanted to admit that he felt left out. 

“we had once been so close, so honest and open with each other. now a distance had developed between us..”

(about yoko contributing to the beatles break up) “the four had never allowed anyone into the recording studios with them, but yoko not only sat by john throughout every session, he consulted her about the music they were making, which upset paul.”

during the let it be sessions there was a time with george and paul got in a fist fight and george left.

the same day john told George he was leaving the beatles, george’s mom told him she was ill and in critical condition.

i love that she vibe checked george. “he was bringing home bad vibes.”

george continued cheating and they continued arguing.

“my diary is full of entries about my unhappiness and the disintegration of our relationship.”

john came to visit george and pattie’s new mansion and said that it was so dark he didn't know how they could live in it, and george recommended that he took of his sunglasses.

eric clapton being a piece of shit and saying “if you won't be with me pattie i will become addicted to heroin.”

pattie said the only thing she had left was cooking and george took that away.

the couple was suppose to go on holiday together but george cancelled last minute bc he didn't want to go with her. he ended up going to spain.

“when i challenged him, he denied it and tried once again to make me feel as though i was paranoid.”

i'm not even...the whole fucking story of the george and maureen affair PISSES ME OFF more than i can describe. maybe i’ll make a whole other post but omfg i'm fuming. fuck them bothhhh. they deserve no rights.

george harrison, mere days before their wedding anniversary: “let’s get a divorce this year.” what an amazing new years resolution jerk.

ringo offered pattie a job.

when george told ringo about the affair pattie was so mad she dyed her hair red. 

george loved pattie’s little brother and was his role model but he wouldn't come to the man’s wedding even though he was invited.

the night pattie told george she was leaving him george came to bed in sadness and said, “don't go.”

“i'm going.”

george invited pattie to dhani’s eighteenth birthday party bc she “had to be there. she was family.”

george had become more of an older brother to her now.

pattie had learned about john’s death from eric clapton and immediately went to the beatles office in london to hang out with everyone there.

(after finding out about george’s death) “i couldn't bare the thought of a world without george. when i left him for eric, he had said that if things didn't work out, ever, i could always come to him and he would look after me. it was such a selfless, loving, generous thing to say and it had always been tucked away at the back of my mind. now that sense of security had gone.”

the last time they saw each other was when george called saying he wanted to visit her new cottage and see her.

pattie didn't go to his funeral nor did she go to the memorial concert that took place a year later. but she spent that day high on the mountains thinking of george. “i was happy to mourn him alone and in my own way.”

she would have dreams of george after his death. “oh george, it’s so wonderful that you are alive after all, this is so fabulous; i knew they had all made a mistake.”

and then she’d wake up.

[gcollectingwords]

Covid-19 & Millennials

The effects that the Covid-19 pandemic is having on Millennials and Generation Z youth, respectively those born between 1984 and 1995 and those born between 1996 and the early 2000s, are mainly related to their mental health. In fact, the pandemic was considered a true collective trauma.

The real possibility of contracting the virus, the uncertainty of the future, job and economic insecurity, lockdown and constant exposure on social media to a multitude of information, which often turns out to be false, have done nothing but instill in young people (but not only) forms of anxiety and worry.

For Millennials and Generation Z, the comparison with previous generations, who considered them irresponsible, lazy, slackers and, in some ways, even responsible for the second wave of contagions, was inevitable. So, in addition to anxiety about the future, there is also the often unfounded criticism of parents, relatives and grandparents.

In addition, for young people the limitations to social relations can result in real psychological damage. What they are experiencing is in fact the age of group outings, of fun, of evenings with friends and of first loves. The pandemic, however, has forced them to stop their sociability and take refuge in technology. If, on the one hand, technology, with its messages and video calls, can be an excellent alternative for continuing to cultivate relationships, on the other hand, abusing the internet and social networks can increase anxiety and lead to depression.

In all this, distance learning for schools and universities is difficult, with questions and exams online, poor connections, hours spent in front of the computer, internships and apprenticeships often suspended or in smartworking mode. Doubts are growing: will I be able to complete the internship? Will I be able to graduate on time? Will I be able to pass the year? These are certainly the questions that are proving to be a source of anxiety for students today.

Teenagers are becoming increasingly lonely and, according to some research, 20-year-olds are even more isolated than retirees. The smartphone can become the only foothold for a social life, swallowing up any chance to meet and hang out with other people. People prefer sexting instead of having sex, ordering food on Just Eat instead of going out to eat, watching Netflix instead of going to the movies. And so gradually people stop meeting new people, because the situations in which it is possible to do so are increasingly reduced. For some, the cell phone and the potential it offers to be connected with a world that would otherwise be unreachable becomes the only reason to live. According to a survey conducted by Telefono Azzurro, 17% of adolescents are unable to disconnect from smartphones and social networks and 1 in 5 wakes up during the night to check them.

The smartphone is not the cause of all evil, but only a tool, as Cesare Guerreschi, psychologist and psychotherapist, founder and president of S.I.I.Pa.C., the Italian Society for Intervention on Compulsive Pathologies, reminds us. The center, which has five locations throughout Italy, deals with the treatment of behavioral addictions and, although it was founded to combat gambling addiction, today in the Bolzano location alone it treats 156 adolescents for nomophobia, the fear of being disconnected and away from the phone.

"With the advent of the new millennium and consequently mass technology, new ways of expressing discomfort have developed," Guerreschi explains. "All addictions, including new addictions, have at their base a unique pattern of behaviors, such as craving, which consists of a very strong and impelling desire for the object of addiction. For drug addicts it can be the spasmodic search for the substance. For the cyber addict it can be the constant need to access the smartphone." For the nomophobic, being away from the cell phone causes anxiety, malaise and uncontrolled anger.

The so-called new addictions, therefore, would be nothing different from those we are used to knowing. In the eighties, drug use was the generational response to a convulsive and incomprehensible time, despite the promises of widespread well-being of Reagan hedonism. The creation of a hallucinogenic para-reality was the most obvious way to escape from the surrounding reality - this also thanks to the contribution of a rebellious imaginary fed by the counterculture, especially music - and the return of heroin and cocaine on the market and the arrival of new synthetic drugs such as crack destroyed an entire generation. Today, smartphone addiction expresses a similar discomfort, although in a less dramatic and obvious way: as during the crack epidemic, the economy is recovering and unemployment rates are stable, but young people continue to create a parallel reality for themselves, in this case a virtual one, refusing to come to terms with the world.

And as in the 1980s, this other reality comes at a high price, even if it is no longer overdoses that kill young people: since 2011, suicide rates among teens have risen alarmingly. At the same time, other risk factors have decreased, such as drug and alcohol abuse and even traffic accidents, but this is not because teens have suddenly become prudent or diligent, but more simply because they don't leave the house to be on their cell phones. Millennials, in short, are safer than teenagers of any other era have ever been. As Jean Twenge, who for years has been conducting studies and research on those born after 1995 (whom she has dubbed iGen, i.e., the generation that can't remember the world without the Internet), acknowledges, parents have also played their part in this, translating an asphyxiating sense of overprotection into the possibility of letting kids do basically whatever they want, as long as they're supervised. Do you want to go to the disco? Okay, I'll take you there and stand in the corner with the other moms. Thus, the myth of adolescent rebellion has also fallen, because the space for insubordination is reduced and the desire for independence languishes in children. And the lack of independence leads to unhappiness.

In spite of the apprehension, according to Dr. Guerreschi, parents are still distant and are not able to talk to their children: "The virtual relationship has replaced the human relationship, even in the most natural relationship that is the one with parents. By now, parents and children communicate through cell phones and via chat, without talking to each other." According to the survey of Telefono Azzurro, four out of five respondents use social networks to communicate daily with their children: the paradoxical thing is that children are constantly told to put the phone away, when it is precisely the adults who abuse it, often using it as the only means of communication with them. Almost all of the young patients at S.I.I.Pa.C. were brought to the center by their parents, and almost all of them are in family therapy.

Twenge also argues that teen segregation occurs not only within families, but more importantly among friends. The progenitor of social, Facebook, is based on friendships that, while virtual, are still friendships. But millennials don't just use Facebook, they also use Instagram, where the number of friends is replaced by the number of followers, a much larger and more indistinct mass. So the desire to be part of a group, of a community, has been replaced by the desire to make a number, that is, not to be left out. This is a very common desire in young people of all ages, but it has become one-way and unrealizable: it is no longer a matter of not being left out of the coolest group at school, but of a social network that has a billion active users.

This phenomenon apparently particularly affects girls, whose depressive symptoms increased by 50% from 2012 to 2015 and who, according to Twenge, committed the highest number of suicides. Females experience more cyberbullying (males still prefer physical assaults) and feel more pressure from beauty standards. When they post a new photo, the research says, they obsessively check the number of likes they've achieved, not so much to have a gratifying confirmation of their appearance, but to not look bad to other users. This causes a strong sense of anxiety, linked to the fact that "you can't" not post anything, because at that point it would mean being totally excluded from social life.

Finally, affecting the mental health of young smartphone addicts is the issue of sleep, which may seem collateral or irrelevant, but is instead a key factor in the onset of depression. 43% of teens sleep less than seven hours per night, a percentage that rises to 51% in the case of 18-year-olds. Looking at a cell phone before bed stimulates the brain and the blue light from the screen inhibits melatonin production, making it harder to fall asleep. Eighty percent of teens admit to using their cell phones during the night, and waking up specifically to check them, a phenomenon called vamping.

Sleepless, depressed and anxious, these millennials are the portrait of a generation that is not at fault. If Deleuze a few decades ago identified schizophrenia as the capitalist disease par excellence, depression is the disease of our time. There is no doubt that mental disorders are not a personal matter, but a collective one. Not only is depression rampant, but it has actually become tolerable: the system, instead of acknowledging its own dysfunctionality, places all the blame on the individual, without considering mental health an issue and a political responsibility.

Adolescents are among the first victims of this system: not only do they work continuously with their cell phones, in the literal sense of the word, consuming advertising, entering data that are processed by digital companies or being at the service of the sharing economy, but they pay a very high price in terms of mental health.

This does not mean that cell phones are to be demonized, on the contrary: as drug addiction teaches us, prohibition serves little or nothing. The solution could instead be to disconnect from the system, and recover human relationships, not only virtual ones. But this won't be possible until we stop holding people accountable for mental illness. And so, kids will only ever be asked "But will you put that cell phone away?", without ever once asking "How are you?".

[faithfulnews]

Work, Play, Poetry

Work, Play, Poetry

By Anthony Domestico

March 4, 2020

The life of the late novelist Robert Stone was filled with improbabilities. As Madison Smartt Bell puts it in his new biography, Stone, whose globe-spanning novels took on American history and the American soul, had “a taste for marijuana and alcohol (and for quaaludes and opiates).” In the 1960s, Stone was friends with Ken Kesey; you can imagine how much imbibing that entailed. While in Vietnam on a reporting trip, he experimented with heroin. (He “snorted, smoked, [and] possibly drank it on one occasion,” Bell writes.) Yet Stone lived to the ripe age of seventy-seven, writing a strong novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl, two years before he died in 2015. “A connoisseur of women of all varieties,” Bell writes, perhaps a little too forgivingly, “Bob was far from above the occasional fling.” He had an open marriage—so open that he had a child with a family friend in the 1960s and a tempestuous affair with a younger writer three decades later. Yet he stayed with his wife Janice for fifty-five years. By Bell’s reckoning, and it seems accurate, theirs was a happy marriage.

But the most pleasant surprise, for me at least, was the decades-long friendship Stone had with Marilynne Robinson. What a literary odd couple they make: Robinson the proud Calvinist and Stone the lapsed Catholic; Robinson known best for her quiet, lovely novels about mid-century Iowa and Stone known best for his wild, prophetic novels—A Hall of Mirrors (1967), A Flag for Sunrise (1981), and others—all probing the manic brain and corrupted heart of American empire. What must the two writers have talked about? The nature of God, I’m sure. (Stone in an interview: “As a result of having been a Catholic, I’m acutely aware of the difference between a world in which there’s a God and a world in which there isn’t.”) The nature of craft, I imagine. (Stone taught at Johns Hopkins and Yale, among other places.)

Bell was friends with Stone, and his affection for his subject comes through. Writing in the first person, Bell recreates trips the two took to Haiti and conversations they had about fiction’s moral purpose. Despite this love, though, Bell doesn’t hold back, especially when it comes to the suffering brought on by Stone’s addictions. The last hundred or so pages are difficult to read, an onslaught of car crashes—Stone was a terrible driver, even when sober—narcotic dependence, increasingly frequent falls, and an attempted suicide. Stone was charismatic, everyone agrees. He was also destructive, to others occasionally and to himself consistently.

Bell is an accomplished novelist in his own right, and Child of Light, like a good work of fiction, lives through its details. Stone “huffed as much oxygen as possible in a back room of Politics and Prose” before giving a reading. David Milch, the producer of Deadwood, put Stone on the payroll at his production company to give him something to do, and some money, after a stint in rehab. Annie Dillard and Joy Williams vacationed with Stone in the 1990s. (Dillard and Stone went white-water tubing in Missoula and saw a brown bear.)

Stone’s writing offers an imaginative record of America’s political and spiritual dimensions: “That is my subject,” Stone wrote, “America and Americans.” Bell reads this wild life and lasting achievement with grace and sympathy.

Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone Madison Smartt Bell Doubleday, $35, 608 pp.

  Baseball here is a business, and Nemens gives it to us from all angles

Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is the best baseball novel ever written, and I won’t hear otherwise. But The Cactus League, the first novel by Paris Review editor Emily Nemens, is also very good.

If Nemens’s debut is not quite in the same league as The Universal Baseball Association, that’s partly because it’s playing a different game. Coover’s is a postmodern novel about the postmodernism of America’s pastime. (We often care less about the game itself than about its statistical representations—batting averages and win shares.) Nemens’s is a work of straightforward realism. Baseball here is a business, and Nemens gives it to us from all angles: superstar outfielders losing fortunes at the gambling table; groupies hanging out by the bullpen; agents hushing up scandals; elderly stadium organists whose stiff hands can’t hit the keys they once could.

The Cactus League takes place in Arizona during spring training. Each chapter, nine in all, follows a different figure associated with the imaginary Los Angeles Lions franchise. Most of the particulars are right. Nemens knows that Notre Dame’s baseball team is in the ACC, and she nicely skewers the increasing encroachment of hot tubs and goofy sound effects in new ballparks. A lovely small detail: Jason Goodyear, the book’s self-sabotaging superstar, gets a signature sneaker—“the first time they’d named a shoe after a ballplayer since Griffey.”

Not everything works. No fan would call a pitcher a “fastballer,” as one character does. (At least it’s not “speedballer,” à la Bruce Springsteen.) No partial owner could demand that a prominent outfielder be traded because of sexual jealousy—and then have it happen within days. (Partial owners don’t have that much power; star players don’t get traded overnight, especially when their replacement has only played college ball.) Such details wouldn’t much matter in a postmodernist romp. They do here.

But the pacing is good and the prose generally strong. Nemens refuses to engage in the romanticizing many fall into when spring comes around. Bartlett Giamatti famously and poetically said that baseball “is designed to break your heart.” After all, Giamatti rhapsodizes, “the game begins in spring…blossoms in the summer…[and] leaves you to face the fall alone.” Fair enough. But Nemens shows how baseball also breaks your heart for more prosaic reasons: because rotator cuffs fray, because spring-training towns are depressing, and because billion-dollar franchises don’t give a fig about poetry.

The Cactus League Emily Nemens Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27, 288 pp.

  In baseball, there can come a point when you’ve so often been described as underrated that you cease to be underrated. Trot Nixon, for example: a decent right fielder in the early 2000s who Red Sox fans so often dubbed underrated that he became overrated. Charles Portis, the Arkansas-born novelist who was famous for being underrated and who died on February 17, never suffered this fate. There’s a certain kind of greatness that, no matter how many times we remark upon it, will always be underrecognized.

People who know Portis, whose out-of-print novels were reissued in the 1990s, probably know him as the author of True Grit. It’s a great novel, and it’s been made into two great movies. But every shaggy-dog story he wrote, every picaresque comedy of American naiveté and dreaminess, was great. His sentences display a funny, poetic, loose yet disciplined, absolutely American prose style. Since his death, fans have been passing around some of their favorite passages. Here are a few of my own. From The Dogs of the South: “I don’t believe we’ve ever had a President, unless it was tiny James Madison with his short arms, who couldn’t have handled Dupree in a fair fight.” From Masters of Atlantis: “It’s not healthy, locking yourself away in here so you can eat pies and read all these monstrous books with f’s for s’s.”

Rest in peace, Charles Portis.

The Dogs of the South and Masters of Atlantis

  For decades, the poet and critic Paul Mariani has been a shining light for those interested in the Catholic imagination. We can hear Gerard Manley Hopkins, that great poet of the dark night, when Mariani laments no longer being able to see the “greengold grass, / glistening the bright skin of the copper beeches.” And we can hear Hopkins again, that great poet of the shining day, when Mariani describes “know[ing] that somewhere, now as then, the wind keeps whispering still”—the Holy Spirit moving and transfiguring always, even when we can’t sense it.

Mariani’s new work of criticism, The Mystery of It All, is a twilight book. Its epigraph, addressed to his wife of more than fifty years, begins, “Moon, old moon, dear moon, I beg you / answer when I call out to you.” Its final sentences read, “‘In His Will Is Our Peace.’ The very words I have etched into our gravestone.” In recent years, the eighty-year-old Mariani has been diagnosed and treated for brain cancer. This gives his epilogue, titled “On the Work Still to Be Done,” particular force.

Yet what is most striking about this book is how buoyant it is, how joyful is its account of a life of reading and writing. Hopkins, Stevens, Berryman, O’Connor: they’re all here, and Mariani attends both to their smallest formal decisions and their most expansive metaphysical concerns. “I have read and taught Stevens for over fifty years,” he remarks. “He is someone who never ceases to delight.” Great critics are able to turn the readerly delight they experience transitive: to explain it, yes, but also to pass it on to the reader. By this and many other standards, Mariani is a strong critic.

Here he is on Hopkins’s darkness: “All is unselved, untuned, and, just as violin or catgut strings go slack, all clear voweling lost, so do we, the words themselves as if swallowed, until ‘all is enormous dark / Drowned.’” And here he is on Hopkins’s sacramental, perceptual joy: “Look at the Welsh farmers with their horses in the countryside about him, breaking up the moist clods of earth: how the light shines upon them, catching the quartz glints, in an instant turning them into diamondlike shards of light—‘sheer plod’ itself doing this, allowing the plow and the sillion both to shine in God’s light.”

Even and especially in twilight, Mariani shows us the light.

The Mystery of It All Paul Mariani Paraclete Press, $25, 240 pp.

  Even and especially in twilight, Mariani shows us the light.

Hopkins, who broke and remade form in almost everything he wrote, would have loved the poet Jericho Brown. The Tradition is Brown’s third collection of poetry. It’s also his best—the most interesting in form, the most wide-ranging in reference, the most daring in its wedding of the private and public, the spiritual and the sexual.

Brown has talked about reading T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” obsessively while working on this book. Eliot’s influence can be felt in this collection’s sense of tradition speaking to, and being changed by, the present. Eliot’s ghost is here. So too are the ghosts of James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, and Essex Hemphill.

Brown writes several poems in a new form he calls the duplex: a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues. “Though I may not be, I do feel like a bit of a mutt in the world,” Brown has said. Queer, black, and Southern, he wanted to create a form that felt as unlikely as himself. These duplexes work by repetition and reconfiguration. Here’s a snippet:

                        My first love drove a burgundy car.                         He was fast and awful, tall as my father.

Steadfast and awful, my tall father             Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.

Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark Like the sound of a mother weeping again.

As seen here, Brown often writes about trauma: the trauma of being a hurt child or a hurt lover; the trauma of being black in America (“I promise if you hear / Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed me”) and the trauma of being queer in America (“My man swears his HIV is better than mine”).

But The Tradition also gives witness to joy—in sex and language, in the traditions of black art and the black church. Brown was raised Baptist, and you can hear this legacy in his imagery and music:

                        Forgive me, I do not wish to sing                         Like Tramaine Hawkins, but Lord if I could                         Become the note she belts halfway into                         The fifth minute of “The Potter’s House”

                        When black vocabulary heralds home-                         Made belief: For any kind of havoc, there is                         Deliverance!

That duplex I quoted from above begins and ends with the same line: “A poem is a gesture toward home.” Brown finds a temporary home, a form of deliverance, in and through tradition in its many forms.

The Tradition Jericho Brown Copper Canyon Press, $17, 110 pp.

Go to the article

[ledenews]

Suicide? No Way - Part 3

(Publisher’s Note: This is the third in a series of articles that will examine the passing of 19-year-old Colby Brown, a 2018 graduate of Cameron High School, who attended Marshall University in Huntington. Colby was pronounced dead on Aug. 26, 2019, after paramedics treated him in the middle of Interstate 64.) Darby Brown and her brother Colby had a thing, and it was the same thing he had with Shelby and his mom when it came to hitting the gym. The little brother babysat. “When are you going to gym? What machines are you using? How long are you there? How many reps? His questions were non-stop, but I know it was because he wanted me to do it the right way,” Darby said. “So, we would Snapchat each other when we were at the gym to be accountable. It really was one of our things.” But then there was August 26, 2019. Colby Brown was pronounced dead shortly after 7 p.m. after he worked out at his gym, attended both of his classes during the first day of his sophomore year, and played video games with five friends.

Colby was popular at Cameron High, a school he continued attending despite moving out of the district. “We were in contact on Snapchat at about 3:30 p.m. that day, but then at 6:35 p.m., I sent him a photo of me at the gym,” Darby said. “Usually, he would send something back that was supportive, but not that time. I didn’t hear back from him, and yes, I did think it was odd at the time because he always replied, especially when it came to the gym. “That day, though, the photo I sent him was opened, but there was no response, and I thought it was odd and rude that he wouldn’t answer me because he always did without fail,” she continued. “I mean, why would he open my message and not respond? Now, though, I’m not so sure it was him who opened that message. And then we found out that after that, his location was turned off on his phone right around the same time.” The end result is what is known. Colby Brown died that day on Interstate 64. A young lady who stopped when seeing him fall to the cement knelt over him during his final breaths. “It doesn’t add up, and that's why I still don’t know what really happened to Colby, and that is what is so infuriating,” Darby said. “I have all of these theories in my mind, but I don’t have enough information to make sense of a single one of them. I don’t know, and that’s why we’re so desperate for more information so we can know where he was and maybe why this happened. “It’s just not right. It’s been over five months, and we still don’t know anything new other than I don’t have my brother anymore,” she said. “And the state police still have not given back his phone because the investigation is said to be ongoing, but I wish they would just give it to us so we can go find the answers like we have been since this accident happened.”

Colby's family created this collage showing the young man at various ages. ‘Thank you, sir. May I have another?’ Pledging a fraternity was a discussed topic. His mother and his sisters were anti-frat for reasons of their own, but Colby was surrounded daily by members of the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity. His roommates and the boys with whom he was playing video games on the day he died, were mostly Alpha Sig members. If Colby had, in fact, decided to pledge to join his friends, no one in his immediate family was informed. “He had told us that he wasn’t really interesting in joining a fraternity, but all of his friends were fraternity members of Alpha Sigma Phi,” Gwen explained. “One of his roommates was the president of the fraternity, so I guess it is possible that he finally gave in and decided to pledge. “But if that turns out to be the truth, I’ll be very surprised,” she said. “But he was growing up, living on his own, and was making his own decisions. I do not know if he made that decision on the day he died, though.”

Gwen captured this image from a news station reporting on her son's death. Alpha Sigma Phi is a national fraternity with more than 8,000 undergraduate members and 56,000 living alumni, according to the organization’s website. It was founded on Dec. 6, 1845, at Yale University, is the 10th oldest national fraternity in the nation, and is one of 12 fraternities at Marshall University. Investigations into behavior and hazing have taken place at Marshall concerning fraternities and sororities during the past five years. Jon Crow, once a family friend and a classmate of Colby’s, did not say anything when he visited for Colby’s funeral about the fraternity or whether or not he had decided to become a pledge. “All he told us was the same story over and over again,” Gwen recalled. “They all smoked a bowl of weed, and then Colby went downstairs because he didn’t feel good, and then he just left. That really doesn’t sound like something Colby would ever do. “I mean, he never just left without saying goodbye, so I don’t know. Obviously, we know he did leave, but like that?”

This card from his freshman year at Marshall University has Colby's name and Alpha Sigma Phi as the listed organization. Herd Life? The legal drinking age in West Virginia is the same as it is in the other 49 states – 21 – but that wasn’t an obstacle for Colby and his friends, Darby insisted. Why not? “Colby found out during his freshman year that there are bars in Huntington where you could get a special card and those bars will allow you to drink if you are pledging the right fraternity,” Darby claimed. “And yes, even if you are underaged. And Colby did get one of those cards from one of his friends, but he told us he used it only to go to that bar and that he was never really going to pledge the fraternity.

Colby's sister Darby insists that some establishments near Marshall University issue cards to fraternity members so patrons younger than 21 years old can consume alcohol. “I told him that it wasn’t his type of thing and I really didn’t want him to get involved with it because you hear so many stories from all over the country. But I also had a friend die at WVU because of hazing. Nolan Burch died because of that culture, and that made me worry about my little brother,” she said. “When it came to college, I was the person he went to because I graduated college just before he was a freshman at Marshall.” Once his personal belongings were collected from his apartment and his car, Gwen did find a new card for the Premiere Pub & Grill with no name or organization listed. The question Colby’s family has asked is whether the new card was another gift, or was it earned somehow this time? “I don’t know if he had to do something for it. Maybe,” Darbie said. “But I don’t know if he had to do something his freshman year to get that card. He just acted as if he just had to be interested in pledging to get it, but as for his sophomore year, that’s something we never talked about. “His freshman year, he had a card for Jake’s, but that bar closed down, but he had a couple of cards in his wallet from a place call the Premiere, and one of his roommates, Jon Crow, was a bouncer at that place,” she explained. “If he went down to Huntington with the intentions of pledging that fraternity, he hid it from us, and that wouldn’t have been like him. He wasn’t a secretive person with us.”

The initial report conducted by law enforcement indicated that Colby Brown had taken his own life. Heroin in Huntington The entire state of West Virginia has gravely suffered from the opioid crisis, but the Huntington area? It was stricken. The largest city in Cabell County is met with many of the same challenges law enforcement encounters here in Ohio County because of its proximity to state borders. One after another. One day in 2017, more than 20 people overdosed on opioids laced with fentanyl in Huntington, and the city since has been a focus during the epidemic. But opioids? Heroin? Colby? “The only way he would do anything like that is if he didn’t know it,” Darby insisted. “And that stuff didn’t come back on the first toxicology report that we finally received from the private investigator. All that was on it was marijuana and nothing else.

Colby had earned a Promise Scholarship and had plans to earn a business degree at Marshall University. “I know there was mention of him doing mushrooms, but that isn’t listed on that report either,” she continued. “He liked weed, and we all knew it so that is why we are anxious to get the second toxicology report that hopefully will be completed soon.” In 2017, 1,019 West Virginians died of an opioid overdose, and in 2018, 900 perished, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. Quick response teams are operational in 22 of the state’s 55 counties, and the first squad was formed in 2017 in Cabell County. A paramedic, a law enforcement officer, and a recovery coach are involved. “I know Huntington is ground zero for opioid deaths, but I also know my brother would have never gone there,” Darby said. “He was too concerned with his health and his body to ever do anything like that of his own accord. Now, was he slipped something without him knowing? We don’t know. “Colby has seen people in our family struggle with addiction, and it’s something he paid attention to and something he always said he would avoid at all costs,” she said. “I know he would not get on that path of opioid drugs even if he wanted to experiment with something. That was something he would never get involved with; that I know. He saw it destroy too many people.”

Colby was unable to take Penny to Marshall for his freshman year, but once he secured an apartment with friends, his canine went to college with him. A Shiny Penny No More Gwen’s voice changes when she begins to talk about her son. It lowers into persistent somberness and often is difficult to hear during conversations. She and Colby’s sisters are not alone in their sorrow. Penny, a canine Colby took to Huntington with him for his sophomore year, has changed, too. “At first, Penny would look for him any time she heard a car door or an engine rev up,” Gwen said. “But now, she acts depressed and just wants to sleep all of the time. She’s not the same dog she was, and she’s a 6-year-old Boxer. I just think she’s sad and that she’s lonely. She misses her best friend. “She doesn’t like to be left alone, either,” she continued. “Penny seemed angry during the first few weeks, but now she just seems so damn sad.”

Colby traveled with his family to Myrtle Beach in July 2019 and posed with his sister Darby for this fun photo. The family has been contacted since this series of stories began on January 11, and they are hoping and praying that more people step forward with any information they may know to be true. “That’s really what we want, so I’m glad that some of his friends are now reaching out to us to help us fill in the parts of his timeline that we don’t know yet,” Darby explained. “No piece of information is too small, either, because this is a big, giant puzzle we’re putting together ourselves because of the lack of help from the investigators. “If you talked to him the day before or the day of Colby’s death, that’s important to us, and if you talked to any of the people he was around during those days, that’s also important to us,” she insisted. “I would love to hear from more people; that’s for sure.” (Photos provided by the Brown family) Read the full article

[sizzlingballs]

Furiously Happy

I’ve been reading this book by Jenny Lawson who talks about mental illnesses and her experience with them. One point she brings up is how medication for mental illnesses are not fun. I like to somewhat compare them to birth control pills where you have one goal you want to meet, not getting pregnant. But along with that need, there are many side effects like gaining weight, becoming more hormonal, losing sex drive, etc. My goal for my medication is to relieve myself of the constant churn in my stomach, the voices in my head that turn against me when they should be with me. Then there’s the hard part of finding the right medication. Some either work, but have terrible side effects. Some may not work in the way you want them to, like relieving your anxiety but making you too lethargic and tired to do anything. Others can be amazing, but then their use wears off. Then the search for another drug begins. I started out with Cymbalta, which apparently has a lot of drug legal issues right now that I was not aware of. No doctors ever showed any concern about that medication. My main doctor gave it to me without much questioning and handed it off like it was some candy. I felt constantly tired where simple things like going to classes were a struggle. It was even difficult to stay awake in most of them no matter how much or how little sleep I had. I just wanted to lay on the couch in my apartment and watch Netflix forever. It even got hard to want to go out with friends at some points. I wish my doctor actually cared for my mental health enough to stop me from taking Cymbalta and suggest something better. Something with fewer side effects that made me feel alive and like myself. Sometimes I think this medication robbed me of so much in school. I also think how it helped me just in the sense of numbing my anxiety. That’s all I see this medication as now that I no longer take it. It was just a way to numb my anxiety and most emotions I had. I don’t even consider it medication, more like a drug your body gets addicted to like heroin. Cymbalta is also a pain killer (which I didn’t know either) which was highly addictive. That’s why when I had a few days without taking it, I would get serious withdrawals like vertigo. I could be happy, and I was, but everyone in my life knows how easy it is for me to laugh. Being easily happy comes with its consequences too of being easily sad. I guess I didn’t necessarily feel sad on the medication, but I wanted to feel more than slight happiness.  There are days where I’ll feel worthless, fat from gaining weight, ugly, lonely, and unlovable. I push past those days and see so much proof that my mind is lying to me. That I’m very much loved and days are worth living. I’m not trying to say I’m suicidal because I could never do that to my family. They’re the ones that always remind me why life is amazing and worth living. 

Pretty much, I was supposed to write about how much I love Jenny Lawson and her book, but then I started to talk about my mental illness. She and I relate in our weirdness and our anxiety. If anyone wants something hilarious and very real about mental illnesses, check her out. 

[phandide]

London Street Club

Title: London Street Club

Word Count: 6521

Warnings: use of opioids and heroin, discussion of opium, suicide (not dan or phil), character death

Genre: Drama, angst, non-chronological

Description: Cure for all boredom, vandal to all well-being, and the vice that compels itself. This story about how relationships are destroyed by opioid addiction.

A/N: I wrote this ages ago and I’ve been fiddling with it for months. Obviously I don’t think dan and phil are addicted to heroin, but in some ways it’s not about them its just about my feelings.

   Phil wakes up in a small room, a basement. He’s tangled in a heap of blankets that don’t seem very clean, on top of a floor that seems far dirtier still. There’s a damp layer of grime and refuse all around him, harsh on the slate grey concrete.    He looks to the left, seeing Dan curled next to him. He’s face down, cheek pressed against the awful mud and scum that stains the place around them. He’s not moving, and Phil fancies for a moment that when Dan dies, he could look the way he looks now. Piteous and wretched on the floor of a place they don’t know. Phil prods his shoulder to wake him, and he groans. “We need to go home,” he says, when Dan seems coherent enough to understand it. “Now?” He asks slowly, touching his face where dirt is smeared all over it. Phil shrugs. “We can’t stay here.” That seems to be answer enough, and they both leave the pile of blankets and go to a rickety set of wooden stairs that has daylight coming through the top. Phil hangs on the banister, finding it difficult to stay upright under his own power.    Upstairs, there are three people sitting around a kitchen table, having tea. Phil and Dan stop in their tracks a moment, staring wide eyed at the people who stare right back. “Who are you?” One of them asks. Neither of them answer immediately. “Um,” Phil starts. “We came by for the party last night.” “You went to the basement?” one of them asks. Phil feels distinctly uncomfortable, a feeling that almost becomes physical pain as the strange tension in the room thickens. Dan looks confused, and stiff, like he’s feeling the same tension. “Look, sorry about your basement,” Dan says shortly. “Where are we?” “Throgmorton,” is the answer. They don’t stay any longer, going out the door into the chill of early spring.    They go some ways down the street in silence, it's the early afternoon, but Throgmorton is a small street and they don’t see many people. Phil feels like he’s walking through a cloud, the world around him is just as blurry as his mind, and he feels like a pilgrim lost in the reaches of his own skull. “What did we do last night?” He finally asks. His eyes ache where he’s been wearing his contacts for far too long. “Took something,” Dan says. Phil appreciates that he does, even though his memory is not suffering in any sense. “Took what?” ‘Taking something’ seems so abstract, as though they’re characters in a movie. Not a movie Phil particularly likes, he’s vacant and vacuous and feels as though he’ll be that way for the rest of his life. He feels nothing about this, his emotions are diluted. “Pills, dunno what they were.” “Why did we do that?” “Look, Phil,” Dan says, sighing heavily. “I don’t know. All I know is that I’m filthy, and I want to go home and take a shower. Do you feel awful about what’s happened?” Phil takes a moment to evaluate the question. What does he feel about this? About talking to those strangers, waking up in their basement, walking home at two o’clock on a Sunday. “Not awful. I mean, I’m confused.” “Let’s talk about it later. I feel kind of shit right now.” Phil nods listlessly, and they continue the walk to the station. -------------------------------- Dan hardly ever does anything without Phil, this is one of the basic facts of their relationship. There was a world, once, where touch was a rarity and emotional closeness even moreso. Now he can have Phil, and touch him, and hold on any time he cares to. By all accounts, he has ascended to an unimaginable richness of situation, to always have Phil in his access. But he still knows himself, and he holds to the hope that he can be happy. He can be happy, and maybe even content. The ability must be hard-won, a war for Dan’s soul that seems fought by sheer power of will. But Phil only has so much strength, and Dan himself only has so much strength, and the last bastion of self-loathing and years of practiced pain is something even their combined efforts have trouble conquering. Phil has his own problems. Problems that Dan desperately wishes he could wipe away, siege until they are withered and forgotten. But Dan can’t even solve his own problems, and he feels woefully inadequate in the arenas of comprehending Phil’s. ---------------------------    Phil thinks that opium must be very Romantic. At some point in the distant past, it was squalor and money and degradation. Wars were fought, wars were won for opium. Dan has pills in his hand, pills that Phil thought he must’ve asked someone for. Phil wondered for a vague moment why he would do that. “Do you want to?” Dan is timid, uncertain. It seems sweet on him, Phil thinks. “Maybe. Do you know what it is?” Dan shakes his head. Phil is fighting a battle, then, resignation and hesitancy roiling inside him. “I think it could be nice,” Dan says. “I don’t want to do it alone,” he adds, quieter. Phil understands then, that regardless of whether this is right or wrong, it is something Dan wants, very much. Phil tries to do the right thing by the people he loves, to refuse the offer, but the Romantic notion threatens to steal him away, too.    Phil thinks. The party is loud, he can barely hear his own thoughts, but he thinks. One night won’t do any real harm, and maybe it will be a learning experience. Maybe it will be fun. “Yeah, I will,” he says, and they do.    It takes a long time to kick in, Phil thinks. But when it does, he is so, so glad. Happy he’d said yes, happy Dan had gotten the pills, happy that the stars had aligned to give him this feeling.    He’s smiling at Dan, and Dan’s smiling back. The very air around them is sweet.    Later, though, he thinks it stops being okay. Dan is crying, sobbing really, and making a scene. Dan doesn’t turn all red and splotchy when he cries, not the way Phil does, and Phil finds that he thinks the look of Dan crying is quite beautiful. And then he remembers that this means Dan is upset. “What’s wrong? Try to quiet down,” he says. People are looking at them. He takes Dan’s hand, drags them away to the first door he sees, down some steps into an unfinished basement that Phil is dismayed by. It seems important to be alone, though, so he grits his teeth and guides Dan to sit on a lone chair covered by a blanket. “What’s wrong?” He asks again. “I h-hear things!” Dan cries, his breath is coming in fast, hitching gasps that even in his intoxicated state Phil finds worrying. “What do you hear?” Astonishingly, Phil feels fully prepared to deal with this. Invigorated by his artificial jollity, perhaps, and full of passion as he stares at Dan and wonders how a person could possibly hold such delightful stuff inside themselves. Even Dan’s pain and hurt are nectar, like Phil could have all of it, understand all of it, and love. “Memories,” Dan gasps, and seems to have difficulty speaking, his mouth moves silently before he can get more words out: “I remember all the things they say!” “Who are ‘they?’” Phil holds onto Dan with both hands, tensed like he’s watching the most suspenseful movie he’s ever seen. Maybe he is. “Why do they hate me so much?” Dan moans, like he’s received a mortal wound, like he can’t bear the pain of what he’s thinking. Phil is thrown back in time, back in time to what grade school bullies said to him, to what people said about him when they thought he could not hear, and when they knew he could.    Dan is still weeping, Phil still holding on, but all Phil can think of is the people who have passed away into time, the people who he can never talk to or touch or even see ever again. Remembering isn’t pleasantly nostalgic, anymore, but an oppressive wave of the past that turns his insides dark.    He cries, he looks up to the shadowed rafters, shedding the misery that had come to him unbidden. Dan has slid down off the chair, lying at Phil’s knees, and even though Phil knows that he must be sad, he must be sad because he is crying, there is a part of him that marvels at the idea that they are, at this moment, very beautiful.    It seems right. ---------------------------------------    The next morning is filled with the kind of emptiness Phil cannot hope to penetrate. As though the very air is holding him in the bed, unable to move or speak. But he listens very hard, trying to detect if Dan has already awoken. It’s never silent though, not in London. Phil wonders if he would be able to hear Dan, even if he were making any noise.    He is suddenly filled with the urge to go and check, make certain that Dan is alive and present and in existence. He rises from the bed, fighting a bout of dizziness that tells him he is still not completely sober. Down the hall, he pushes open the appropriate door, and sees Dan still asleep.    Phil stands still in the threshold for what feels like an eternity. He’s not thinking, or even really observing, just standing there and experiencing the emptiness in his own head. He wonders, eventually, at the enormity of the gulf between him and reality. Phil is an island, not to be reached by the world or anyone in it.    He thinks that maybe, if only Dan were awake, things could be normal and Phil would be able to be present in reality.    But Dan’s not awake. It’s been a day and a half since the party, and Phil still feels something he can only describe as strung out. He thinks that maybe he’ll never feel the way he did before, the way he did for the first twenty four years of his life. Actuality gone, replaced by a nothingness that Phil can’t put a name to. How apt, he thinks, how fitting that he should lose the passion that he had so painstakingly fostered, tailored expertly to suit his job, to suit his art.    It’s so easy to lose things like that. But Phil isn’t upset. Nothing could upset him, now, nothing at all. He lays down on the floor, and the door is still open, and he falls to sleep right on the carpet. ---------------------------------------------------    When Dan awakes, he realizes first that he has a splitting headache. He realizes second that he doesn’t care at all, he knows the pain exists and he can even feel it, but he is not upset. In fact, he feels rather jovial about it.    As soon as he identifies that feeling, he goes still. Why doesn’t he care about the headache? Does this signify some larger self-loathing? Some microcosmic demonstration of Dan?    After a moment, the suspicion seems pointless. Dan already knows how he feels about himself, but he also knows that when he took the pills, he didn’t care anymore. He recalls crying, and being upset, but it doesn’t seem real, anymore. Certainly not real enough to upset him now, or make him regret his actions.    He climbs out of bed, and then sees Phil lying on the floor, half in the hall and half in the room. In a puerile fit of whim, he crosses the room and puts his toes in Phil’s hair, prodding until his flatmate groans and sits up. “What are you doing on the floor?” Dan asks. “I was just tired,” Phil explains simply. “Tired? Tired enough to leave your own bed and have a nap on the ground?” Dan chuckles and Phil shrugs and stands up. “Awfully tired, tired enough to sleep on the toilet, maybe,” he says, and Dan rolls his eyes. They go into the kitchen, the clock on the oven reads 10:00. “Do you want food? I want food,” Dan announces, looking around but making no real move to procure any food. “Order takeout. I feel too undead to cook anything right now. Or later. Or ever.” “Do whatever you’d like. There are no coffins about, but I’m sure the toilet suits you just fine,” Dan remarks.    Dan tries to behave inconspicuously, but inside he feels devious, already devising what party they’ll go to in a week, and how he’ll convince Phil to go out two weekends in a row. He almost can’t convince himself, but in the end, the promise of that happy feeling makes him certain that whatever else happened, they would be going out again. -------------------------------------------------    When Phil is drunk, he finds it difficult to even speak. Not in the sense that he’s physically unable, but that the place in his brain where words usually come from is just...empty. Back when he was in university, his friends discussed other friends, and classes, and pets. Phil was silent, feeling remote distress over the fact that he simply did not care about what was being said. This apathy felt like a prison.    Therefore, he is immediately enchanted by opium when he finds he can say anything he likes. Memories and ideas and jokes all float to him uninhibited, and he spouts them as easily as the sun expounds light.    The second time he takes pills with Dan, he feels light, and happy, and as though he is being driven mad. The tunnel of memories and old thoughts seems to pull him ever farther back, away from Dan, no matter what he says. Still, a frenetic need to engage makes him yearn to be free of the constraints of his own mind, to pull free and simply be with Dan.This dichotomy pulls at his being, tearing him asunder and filling him with hysteria the likes of which he has seldom felt before.    However hard he tries, however beautiful Dan looks in that dimness on the dilapidated couch, he is far away. Maybe farther than he ever has been. Because even with the siren call of the present, he is drawn back in perfect clarity to a moment in year two when he spilled glue all over the carpet, and another in year ten when he dropped his mother’s wedding china on the floor in the kitchen.    When they return home, he falls asleep. He dreams in stilted images and sounds, first Martyn, screaming incoherently about some pain Phil does not know of, and wishes he did. After that it’s Dan, saying nothing but staying still and remote and unreachable until Phil’s own tension wakes him from the dream, disoriented by what he has seen. He finds it difficult to fall back asleep, the things he saw in the dream won’t leave him and he begins to feel as though they’ll be imprinted in his mind forever. ---------------------------------------------------    Dan prefers not to look at the piano, anymore, let alone play it. He sees it, and is drawn away. Away from Phil, away from London, into a world that only exists to him. Memories and fear and distress. He can’t stand the impressions that come to him, when he played the piano for his family, for his friends, for a million instances.    There is something about the solo performance, he thinks, that is ultimately infantilizing. He has no music to read, and he looks out at the faces of whatever strange assortment of relatives and acquaintances are listening, and sees the blankness, the emptiness, the lack of interest. He feels as though he is being tolerated and humored and burdensome. Pressure wells up inside of him and he can’t bear it, he can’t stand the feeling of ineptitude that swallows him, it is so, so painful. “Why do I remember so many pointless things?” He asks Phil one day, when they are both of them sober. “I’ve unrepressed everything.” Phil nods, sagely, perhaps. Dan has always thought of Phil as someone who knew quite a lot about the world, even if he was not concerned with the gruesome details in the same way Dan was. “I do, too, lately,” Phil admits. He looks vaguely perturbed, and Dan finds himself wondering what it is that Phil is remembering. “It’s not just remembering, it’s...thinking about it. Almost constantly.” “Yes, I know. What do we do?” Dan asks, but Phil doesn’t answer, probably because Phil does not know any more than Dan knows. -------------------------------------------------

   Phil wonders if he’s losing himself. He’s not one to share opinions, not without necessity. But where they had once been secret, they now seem non-existent. He had been sure that he didn’t want to get high again, not because he didn’t like the feeling but because he didn’t like the hangover, did not like the absent feeling that had gone on for days. Phil had thought that his surety would matter, at least about this one thing.    It doesn’t matter. They go to another house party, and Phil knows it’s out of character and Phil knows that he should wonder about the real reason they’re going out again so soon. Even though Dan has a remarkable ability to make it seem innocuous, make it seem like they’re just fulfilling a social obligation, Phil knows better.    It would be difficult for Phil not to know better, because he feels he can identify the element in Dan that is pursuing something out of his own control. It feels as though Dan is on a quest for happiness, and Phil is pulled along to the Siren call. This is an absurd notion, and Phil knows it, he knows deep down in his heart that he is desperate, too, and they are both naive enough to ignore what that desperation indicates.    There was a life before the first party, and a life after. Taking the pills makes Phil feel closer to Dan than normal, this is a loud statement, because they are always close. But this artificial happiness erases those long established interpersonal struggles, it erases the delicate dance to the truth of what the other is feeling.    Old pain comes up, with the chemical influence. The pain of grief and insecurities that are so long embedded into them they will never leave. Things that would never see the light of day, come out and suddenly Phil is at the mercy of all those old horrors and cureless ails. But it feels good. It feels good to be reminded of what he is, and to feel those primordial things right alongside Dan, who he thinks must be the most important person in his life.    So even though Phil knows that Dan is the conquistador, and that his younger companion is the one guiding them deeper into the cartel, he knows better than to think himself guiltless. When Dan says “do you want to go?” Phil will always respond in the affirmative, and he does nothing to stop what is happening.    He thinks then, that he must bear the burden of the blame in this. He should be older and wiser and more resistant, because he could stop Dan, too. But he doesn’t stop Dan, and he doesn’t stop himself. And two becomes three and four and five. And he stops counting. -------------------------------------------------    Dan laughs, laughs harder than he can recall ever having laughed. He’s on the couch, next to Phil, and he thinks that even if he wanted to stand he would not be able to. “I really love you,” he says to Phil. The television is on, but it’s contents are nothing but flashing colors, utterly incomprehensible. Phil smiles, and Dan is glad. He has noticed, in their way, that Phil tends to be more temperate during these times. Less prone to the long bouts of talking that Dan is ever prone to. Phil looks and stares and laughs and cries, but he doesn’t speak what he’s thinking very often at all. Like the things in his head are so engaging that he can be thrilled by it all without ever coming out. Dan finds this enthralling. “I love you, too,” Phil does say, and Dan is gone laughing again. “It’s so easy to be happy,” Dan says. “I spent so long thinking it was impossible, but it’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done.” “You were really that  unhappy before?” Phil asks. Dan catches the thread of self-doubt in his question, with an astuteness that he feels proud for possessing. “I was happy about you,” Dan explains. “You made me happy, and our life made me happy, but Dan didn’t make me happy at all.” Phil nods, and looks like he’s returned to the internal world, and Dan is filled with glee, squeezing at Phil’s arm and awed at the universe inside of his flatmate. “What about now?” Phil asks finally, he’s smiling now, like he finds Dan’s excitement charming. Dan thinks that he probably does. “Now?” Dan exclaims, gesticulating. “Now, who gives a shit!” ------------------------------------------------------------    A number of days later, Phil has just filmed a video. He feels that he displayed an appropriate amount of energy, an appropriate demeanor, and he feels relieved to have found himself capable of the task. Editing the thing seems to take half his life, but it does get done, and he reassures himself that he is up to the rigors of employment.    Their daily life is strange, these days. Phil remembers things from his childhood that he thought he would never recall again, and it is not a pleasant experience. Not so much because the memories are negative, but moreso because they are entirely too vivid. He can hear his mother chastising Martyn, and he can see the people at his grandfather’s funeral, an event he hasn’t even thought of in years. It feels like a strange form of madness, where the past is fighting to swallow Phil whole. This feeling makes him feel as though he needs Dan far more than he rationally ought to, needs the reminder that the present exists, and that the past has all given way to the life he lives, now. A happy life. Only rarely does he go into a room his flatmate is not in.    Sometimes, he can tell Dan feels this, too. He stares into the wall and looks entranced. On these occasions, Phil remembers the first time they took anything, Dan crying out about the things he hears. Phil wishes that he could find the cap for the wellspring of repressed moments that seem to have caught them both in a vice. At one time, they had had a future, and now Phil feels them regressing from that supposed Golden Age with a frightening rapidity.    Phil is reminded constantly that he and Dan have both had years and legions of people and events that have made them who they are. There are details of Dan that he will never know, simply because he was never there. The reverse is also true, and Phil wishes that they had been together forever, each knowing everything about the other. This is not rational, or even normal, and Phil knows that in some sense. But it hardly matters.    He has headaches when he sobers up, now. Phil thinks, when he holds his head and tries to resist the urge to take more pills, that nothing can save them, anymore. -----------------------------------------------    The first time anyone offers him heroin, Dan does have a long moment of hesitation. The person who offers it to him is someone he has often gotten pills from. “I have some, if you want it,” is all he says. No pressure, no pushing. Just if you want it. Does he? He’s seen the movies, he knows that it won’t be good. Not for him, and not for Phil, even if Phil doesn’t decide to do it with him.    Still, Dan has always been plagued with grand ideas about the universe. His life lacks any fundamental meaning, except the pursuit of happiness. He has happiness, this premise he does not dispute, even to himself, for he is far beyond determining the distinction between ‘sincere’ happiness versus the chemically induced sort. The two main tenants of his philosophy have been torn asunder, for he has happiness, but that happiness does not preclude the meaningless damnation that he’d always thought would be cured by contentment.    He has not fully conceived of this idea before, and suddenly the knowledge that happiness has not saved him seems monumental and destructive. The belief structure, that castle he’d carefully constructed for himself, had proven defeatable. He has nothing, no more intellect to protect him and certainly no more to protect Phil. This thought hurts more than the others, in some deeply intimate sense, Dan is able to function because he thinks of himself as clever. This is gone. Almost everything has gone, but this loss is more acute. Nothing can be regained, but only mourned over.    Dan takes the heroin, he takes it home and he cries. Phil sits with him in the lounge and Dan wishes that he could feel good without taking anything. He laments the fact that being high causes him pain, enormous pain, and yet he still needs it.    His crying is hitched, like a spasming fit that he cannot control. When he stops, he leans on Phil and looks around their flat. He wonders how long they will be able to continue living in London. He wonders how long they will be alive at all. ----------------------------------------------------    Phil does not mind watching Dan tie off, though perhaps he should. The image is spectacularly vulgar, and spectacularly lovely. The scene reminds him of stone and bitter tastes and lights shining off into darkness, and other things after that fashion. It seems heady and honest.    The allure of it is inexplicable. Phil has not lost the capacity for rational thought, after all. The wise thing to do, and indeed, the adult thing to do, would be to stop. But he doesn’t stop. He waits for Dan to finish with the needle that both of them use, and he follows suit. He’s pale, it’s easy to find a vein. Phil supposes that the world must be composed of many small blessings. -----------------------------------------------------    It is near noon when Phil’s phone rings in his ear. Waking from a fitful sleep, he answers the call from his mother. “Hello Mum, how are you?” He asks, and the silence that follows makes him grip the phone tighter. There is a noise that sounds like a sob, then, and Phil holds his breath. “Phil, it’s your brother…” she says slowly, like it takes great fortitude to simply get the words out. “He’s passed on,” she finishes.    Phil knows that his mother said something else, wanted to tell him something else, but he cannot hear it. He cannot speak, he can barely think, because Martyn Lester, and all instances of him in Phil’s mind, are all coming at once and they are married to disbelief and shock, horrible shock that will coagulate into pain and fear and despair.    He drops the phone, leaving it on the floor without hanging up. Dan is asleep in his own room, and Phil leaves his own bedroom and wanders dumbly in, sitting on the bed. His weight shifts the mattress enough to wake Dan, and he must see the look on his face, because he immediately sits up and asks what’s wrong. “Martyn’s dead,” Phil announces simply. He sees Dan’s eyes grow wide with shock, musing on the idea that his emotions and Dan’s are nearly in perfect sync, separated by only a few moments. In that vein of thought, Phil watches the connections in Dan’s mind, feeling as though his own emotions are deadened by seeing them mirrored on Dan’s face.    Phil knows, he knows the moment that Dan finally settles into the gripping despair that Phil himself is feeling. He feels, for a bizarre second, that he is so glad that Dan cares that Martyn is gone. Quickly that is overshadowed, though, by burning anger that sickens him even as it invigorates him. “How did it happen?” Dan asks, and this throws Phil off. “I-I didn’t ask. I didn’t think of it,” he explains haltingly. Dan seems satisfied with the answer, but Phil is angry about this, and his anger imagines that Dan is still wallowing in morbid curiosity, imagines that Dan is picturing the ways Martyn could have died. Of course, this makes Phil imagine them, picturing a thousand different deaths that all leave Martyn broken and cold and he cannot think of this.    In the frenzy of these thoughts, he leans forward, encroaching into Dan’s space until their lips are pressed together. Phil is pushing, he has his hands around Dan’s wrists, wrists marked by injection bruises. Dan allows this, maybe because what is happening seems insurmountable, and maybe because he doesn’t mind indulging Phil in this.    Phil knows, peripherally, that Dan has injected far more often than him. Some far away, rational part of him knows that Dan has grown weaker than him, and that his feebleness perhaps throws suspicion onto what Phil is now doing, holding him, pinning him, squeezing at the tenderness around his bruised arms. But then Phil leans down, biting at Dan’s neck, and the noise this elicits makes him forget that doubt, and it makes him forget that the way he is acting is very much not Phil.    For the first time, perhaps in a very long time, Phil feels as though he is doing something decisive. No longer is he lead along to the bewitchment of opium, no longer is he in the thrall of the past. The past is gone, the connection is broken, any continuity between the Phil of juvenescence and the Phil that exists now is dead. He thinks again of the dream he had, the dream that stays with him even now; he can’t hear Martyn, anymore. Before, that screaming had dominated Phil’s imagination and driven him mad. Now, he focuses his energy into the second part of the dream, he dedicates himself to pursuing the Dan who is remote, he endeavors to drag him closer until they are inextricably connected to one another. It does not occur to him to think that perhaps they already are.    Phil feels at once soothed and deeply aggravated by the sexual act. No longer is Dan the conquistador, and his love for the poppy has made him frail. Phil has become Alexander, taking as he wishes, with no burden of judgement from others. Dan’s face twists in an image of ecstasy that Phil finds perversely gratifying. More than gratifying, perhaps, it is obscene. Phil has always found Dan immensely beautiful, an amalgam of the ancient, classical beauty that is as physical as it is incorporeal.    That fairness has been smeared, by now, though. Where once Dan’s face had been rounded by generosity, it reeks now of fatigue, a starved appearance that balances on a knife’s edge between the old beauty and the debasement that encroaches further by the day. Normally, Phil strives to forget this, to lend the future threat to oblivion. But in the fervor of the sexual frenzy, it seems thrilling.    Phil releases Dan’s wrists, instead electing to cup his face, and he bites at lips he imagines to be lovely, and heart shaped. Perhaps they are, but reality and fantasy are nearly indistinguishable, now. He can feel Dan’s nails scratching into his back and he feels the urge to scream. It has all become too much.    It is this, more than anything else, this feeling of being crushed inside his own skull that compels Phil to move lower. Still, his ministrations are acts of aggression rather than plain sexual desire: he bites and sucks, Dan doesn’t move much except to put his hands on Phil’s head as he mouths at his stomach. Phil takes this as encouragement until Dan makes a wailing sound out of tune with Phil’s attentions. “Phil, it hurts,” Dan cries out, and Phil sits up abruptly. “What hurts?” He asks, utterly confused. Dan clutches at his own skull, curling in on himself as Phil tries to understand what has happened. “Everything...my head hurts, my bones hurts,” he is crying, now, Phil realizes slowly. Dan’s face is ruddy and scrunched not in pleasure but in pain. Phil realizes with terrible awe what has happened, and he feels dizzy from the revelation. “Please,” Dan grasps his arm. “Please go get the needle.” “I-what? Why did you wait so long?” Phil thinks to ask, even as he stands to go to the kitchen where he knows the thing is. Dan still lies prostrate on the bed, in as much agony as Phil has ever seen a person in. “I wanna feel fine without it,” Dan moans. Phil’s brow bunches, he can feel himself make the expression, but he feels only an echoing astonished horror, so disparate from the stress he knows he ought to be feeling that he flees without saying another word. -----------------------------------------------------------    The next call Phil gets is from his father, who tells him that the funeral will be in a week. They will go back to Phil’s hometown, and Phil spends a scant few seconds trying to imagine what that is going to be like before he spares himself. “You want to come to the funeral, don’t you?” He asks Dan. Phil’s initial anguish has petered away, leaving only the rancid numbness that has become familiar to him. “Of course I do,” Dan says, and a moment passes before he realizes the problem at hand. Maybe Phil can go without for long enough to be discreet while they deal with this, but neither of them have a similar confidence in Dan. They stare at one another for a long moment before Dan seems to come to a decision. “I’ll manage,” he swallows. “It doesn’t matter how, but I’ll be there for you.”    Phil is hardly reassured by this, but the larger part of him is relieved, maybe warmed by this declaration of Dan’s affinity. The idea that Dan possessed love for him, and was not wholly taken with heroin. “Okay,” he says. -----------------------------------------------------------    As means of being discreet, they take up in a cheap hotel room once they arrive in Lancashire. A day early, they visit Phil’s parents. The idea that he no longer has any family except for them is difficult. Phil had long had the rather hopeful notion that one day he and Martyn would both be old, they would both have families. The notion that they would remain brothers, simply put.    Still, emotions are stilted and awkward. Phil finds it difficult to arrive at an acceptable level of empathy, instead floundering and finding himself staring into space. Dan is cordial, but not much more than that, with eyes emptied by weariness and nebulous undertones of distress. The elder Lesters seem to distracted by their own pain to put much stock into these details, and Phil is too tired to think much more about it.    That evening, the day before the service, Phil leaves the hotel and walks. The night is cool, but he has come to expect this of the place where he grew up. He arrives at a park bench before he sits, putting his head in his hands. He understands, of course, the precise events that had lead to the way their lives are crumbling, but he still feels compelled to ask why?    Nothing about it seems logical. Not that Phil demands logic of the world, necessarily, but he feels deeply wronged, on some level. Wronged, because their careers languish while Dan fades away into himself, laughing hysterically and falling back on the floor, unaware of the world. Wronged, because Phil himself feels as though he is becoming someone he never wanted to be, someone angry and resentful, someone with no options. What could they have done to deserve this?    Phil can feel the tears run down his own face, knows that he is incapable of fixing all the things that have gone wrong. He can’t bring Martyn back, he can’t undo the long series of foolhardy decisions he and Dan have already made.    If addiction is an ocean, Phil has thus far managed to tread water, to keep his head afloat to some degree. Dan is pulled ever deeper into the waters, and Phil doesn’t feel equipped to save him. He doesn’t feel like it’s fair that the responsibility falls to him, he wants someone, anyone, to help him, to save them. He imagines, somewhat fantastically, that this person would’ve been Martyn.    The idea that their salvation lies in a dead person seems indicative enough in itself that they both are damned. Phil stands up and wipes his tears. He returns to the hotel.    He slides the card through the door, and sees Dan lying on the bed. He lies down next to him, and hears the sound of people talking loudly on their way past the closed door. Phil turns on his side and stares for a long time at Dan, who is on his back, eyes closed. He closes his own eyes for a long moment, listening to the silence, before his eyes fly wide open.    Dan is not breathing.    Desperately, Phil shakes his arm, prods him, and gets no response. He leans in close to Dan’s face, and feels no breath. Pressing fingers to both wrists, he searches for a pulse, and finds none.    Standing, he runs a hand through his hair, his own breath comes heavily. He paces for several harrowing moments, before he stops and looks back at the bed. Falling to his knees, he cannot help the sound that comes from him. Even to his own ears, it sounds horrid, ragged and terrifying.    Once he begins, he cannot stop screaming, the sound is filling his own ears, drowning out the view right in front of him, but it cannot. His head is pounding, his throat strained by the effort, even as the sound degrades into sobbing, the kind of grief that moves his whole body and puts his heart in a vice.    People bang on the door, and he doesn’t answer. A few minutes later, they come in anyway, and look at him with expressions of shock and confusion. He is cowering against the wall farthest from the bed, now, but he lifts his hand, pointing without being able to look at the body.    He doesn’t look, but they do. And even then they don’t immediately understand. It takes them an age to grasp that this man they have never seen before is dead, and in this time they look between Dan and Phil blankly. In this blanket thick of time, Phil begins to wonder if they are even human at all, with their empty staring.    How nice for them, to forget what death looks like.

[integrativeaddiction]

Crystal Meth Detox Symptoms

Contents

Combat heroin withdrawal

Crystal meth detox

Crystal meth detox timeline

Include immense cravings

Detox withdrawal process

Medication-assisted treatment combining

It can come in pill, powder, liquid, and crystal form also known … substance to help combat heroin withdrawal symptoms, acc…

Treatment in a detox facility is suggested for those reliant on crystal meth due to the strong withdrawal symptoms faced when ending the use of crystal meth.

George Kolodner, a board-certified addiction psychiatrist and medical director of the Kolmac Clinic in Silver Spring, said his clinic saw an increase in crystal meth users beginning … or treat the p…

police Chief Joshua Winters said his big concern for meth and crystal meth has everything to do with how people act while und…

Symptoms of crystal meth detox. Methamphetamine in not a drug one can detox from easily. The beginning of the withdrawal symptoms usually manifest as soon as the last dose wears off, and they reach a high-point within 24 hours.

Home » Drugs » Crystal Meth Detox Center. Crystal meth is an extremely potent stimulant that is highly addictive and can do serious damage to a The severity of withdrawal symptoms from crystal methamphetamine depend on the length of time the drug is used, the amount of the drug used, the…

The physical symptoms of crystal meth withdrawal are relatively minor as compared to other hard and highly addictive drugs. The meth detox process can be extremely unpleasant for those who have been under the drug's influence for a long period of time.

Methamphetamine or meth withdrawal can cause horrible withdrawal symptoms. … symptoms of psychosis is a hospital or medically managed detox center.

They including the lack of detox centers and inpatient drug treatment facilities … Cummings noted the use of crack and powd…

Effects and Symptoms of Crystal Meth Withdrawal. crystal meth detox timeline and Protocol. The journey from methamphetamine dependence to recovery can take several months, and maintaining a healthy, drug-free lifestyle is a lifelong process.

Crystal meth is a form of methamphetamine, a stimulant drug that has limited medical use for treating attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and promoting weight loss. Medically supervised detox for crystal meth withdrawal symptoms is the first step of recovery from addiction.

During the same time, about 17 Summit County residents sought help at a hospital emergency department for withdrawal and detox symptoms. Before the opioid … In the spring, authorities made the bigge…

NOTE: Crystal meth detox is NOT a complete drug rehab program. Simply stopping the abuse and use of addictive drugs is not a treatment in and of itself. While each drug addiction is different, some common withdrawal symptoms associated with crystal meth detox include

Meth withdrawal can be difficult to deal with and attempting to detox alone usually doesn't … Crystal meth withdrawal symptoms begin around 24 hours after the …

Opiate drugs, including prescription painkillers and heroin, can produce withdrawal symptoms just hours after the last dose, and the symptoms can last for a week or more. Unassisted withdrawal may not be life-threatening, but it can lead to relapse. Medications and therapy, accessed in medical detox…

Signs and Symptoms of Meth Detox and Withdrawal. We know from … Meth, also known as ice, crystal meth or glass, is a very powerful stimulant. It is a synthetic …

At least one study has shown that the use of crystal meth in Australia has … of heavy crystal meth use is cause for concern. Heavy use can lead to addictive behaviour, which includes tolerance, depe…

Meth or Methamphetamine is a powerful and addictive synthetic stimulant. Click here to learn about its symptoms of withdrawal and methods of treatment. … conditions in which a person can die. Here is more information about detoxification.

As it turns out, the effects of withdrawal from methamphetamine are primary … or medical detox refers to medical management of the symptoms of withdrawal that  …

Crystal meth is generally considered to be addictive, possibly due to the euphoria its abuse can create and the inherent and natural. The intensity of withdrawal symptoms associated with crystal meth detox, as well as how long detox lasts, will be impacted significantly by a number of factors that will…

Crystal meth has been in the gay community for a while … or if they’re not suffering withdrawal symptoms when they try to quit. They don’t realize that those symptoms affect only a small percentage …

WHAT DOES THE Crystal Meth DETOX PROCESS LOOK LIKE? People who experiment with crystal meth are quickly struck by how powerful the drug is. Expectedly, crystal meth withdrawal symptoms include immense cravings, which is one of the reasons why crystal meth addiction is…

Methamphetamine can produce a high lasting longer than 24 hours. Authorities say the drug can help combat heroin withdrawal s…

Crystal methamphetamine is a psycho … Sleep patterns change with increased symptoms of insomnia. Meth users often talk too fast, slurring their words together and not making sense. Withdrawal from c…

Typically, this is when most Meth users will start to use the drug again rather than simply completing their withdrawal from it, as the side effects and symptoms are particularly painful and difficult …

Jul 19, 2018 … While a crystal meth detox can cause a lot of scary symptoms on its own, it's the best way to kick the habit and save yourself or someone you …

Aug 30, 2016 … Quitting crystal meth can lead to unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. … Detox and rehab programs can manage withdrawal and help people …

Long-term users of crystal meth experience withdrawal when they stop the drug. Withdrawal symptoms include fatigue, depressed mood, loss of pleasurable feelings and suicidal thoughts. These symptoms m…

Considerable anecdotal evidence suggests that for a majority of sex addicts with a co-occurring addiction the secondary drug of choice is crystal … develop symptoms of psychosis including paranoia, …

Nov 29, 2018 … Medical detox and treatment medications can help ease those pains. … Crystal meth, also known as methamphetamine, is a very powerful …

Learn about methamphetamine addiction symptoms, warning signs, withdrawal, causes and negative health effects of meth abuse. Delta Medical Center.

Crystal Meth Withdrawal Symptoms. How Long Does Meth Detox Take? Detox Centers and Treatment Programs. Detoxification naturally occurs when someone stops using any drug that they've taken regularly over a long period of time. The body eliminates the drug from the system…

KITCHENER — A young woman pleaded guilty on Monday to stabbing a 73-year-old Kitchener man to death while she was high on cry…

Crystal Meth Detox & Withdrawal Treatment. What is Crystal Methamphetamine Addiction? Crystal meth highs last longer than that of other drugs and the consequences of crystal meth use are frightening. Crystal meth is classified as an amphetamine.

Dec 8, 2016 … Learn more about the symptoms that occur during crystal meth withdrawal, … Are there detox medications to treat meth withdrawal symptoms?

Meth and crystal meth detox refer to a gradual reduction in their doses. Of course, the aim is to clear the last molecule of the drug from the body. Withdrawal symptoms vary in severity and duration depending on various underlying factors. For example, your personal physical and genetic traits.

Crystal meth, also known as methamphetamine, is a very powerful man-made stimulant drug that has become increasingly popular with drug abusers. There are no medications approved by the FDA that are specifically designed to be used in the detox withdrawal process from crystal meth.

Sep 26, 2018 … When meth addiction sufferers quit using, they go through withdrawal. Meth withdrawal symptoms can be intense, but medical detox can help …

Quitting crystal meth abruptly typically brings on uncomfortable symptoms for long-term or frequent users. Crystal meth withdrawal is not life-threatening in many cases, but it can be difficult for users to manage the symptoms on their own, which is why a medically monitored detox is recommended.

Withdrawal symptoms in abstinent methamphetamine-dependent subjects …… treatments versus pharmacological treatments for opioid detoxification. Cochrane  …

Police Department holds a rock of crystal meth. (Leonard Ortiz/Digital … epidemic — for which medications exist to help combat addiction — medical providers have few such tools to help methamphetami…

Crystal Meth is one of the worst drugs that individual can become addicted to. Learn the effects and symptoms that an addict might face. Effects of Methamphetamine on the Body, Brain, and Spirit of the Addict. It is common for meth users to have progressed to the drug from other stimulants, such as…

Experience with his own sister’s crystal meth addiction helps him relate and create a space … open sores and hallucinations are just a few in a long list of symptoms. Clarkson has experienced many o…

Feb 15, 2010 … Most crystal meth detox centers simply provide treatment to avoid the physical withdrawal symptoms. If you're serious about recovery, though, …

Though meth detox is rarely dangerous it is tough and unpleasant, and The Use of Medications for Meth Detox. There are no FDA approved medications available to treat methamphetamine addiction, but in some cases, medications are used to minimize distressing symptoms during the detox period.5.

Cocaine Addict Pictures Before And After After initially denying the charges, they appeared at Preston Crown Court last year and both pleaded guilty to being concerned in the supply of cocaine. Defending Heller, Philip Barnes said his client had never made any money from the theft Addiction Treatment In Nc WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — The Wilmington City Council unanimously approved a special use permit for an addiction treatment cent… Opiate Addiction Treatment in Asheville, North Carolina. Our center in asheville offers medication-assisted treatment combining counseling services and Methadone. We also Addiction Treatment Dfw Addiction Treatment Services helps families with addiction find a drug rehab program that's personalized to their needs and accepts their insurance. director of the Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. While most Addiction Treatment With A Dark Side Nov 23, 2013 … Buprenorphine addiction treatment produces some embarrassing news stories. It also saves … Addiction treatment with a dark side. HP: Now … “When used correctly, [suboxone] can help addicts recover,” notes the report’s only clause that portrays the Suboxone Treatment Ri Aug 11, 2011 … Keywords: Buprenorphine, buprenorphine/naloxone, diversion, injection drug use, self treatment, Suboxone, Subutex, opioid dependence, … Treatment with SUBOXONE Film. Stages of treatment. SUBOXONE Film is not recommended in patients with severe hepatic impairment and may not be appropriate Crystal Meth Effects Table of contents. Recreational use. Effects: Brain. Effects: Body. Addiction and withdrawal. Treatment and rehabilitation. Crystal meth is a highly addictive… Crystal meth and methamphetamine abuse is a global problem with close to 25 million abusers. Some people take crystal

[nancygduarteus]

No Family Is Safe From This Epidemic

The last photograph of my son Jonathan was taken at the end of a new-student barbecue on the campus green at the University of Denver. It was one of those bittersweet transitional moments. We were feeling the combination of apprehension and optimism that every parent feels when dropping a kid off at college for the first time, amplified by the fact that we were coming off a rocky 16 months with our son.

We had moved him into his dormitory room only that morning. I remember how sharp he looked in the outfit he selected, and his eagerness to start class and make new friends. We were happy, relieved, and, knowing what we thought he had overcome, proud. Earlier that day, at lunch, I asked Jonathan whether he thought he was ready for the coming school year. “Dad, I can handle it as long as I continue my recovery,” he said. “Everything flows from that.”

Only three days later, Jonathan was found unresponsive in his dormitory-room bed, one of several victims of a fentanyl-laden batch of heroin that had spread through the Denver area that week.

* * *

Jonathan grew up as the introverted, but creative, younger kid in a career Navy officer’s family. He was born a week after I returned from a long deployment, and lived through two more before reaching his fourth birthday. During one six-year stretch, he attended school in five different districts due to military moves. The one constant was his big brother, his best friend, whom he followed around like a rock star. I remember him grinning from ear to ear when he was asked to play on his brother’s soccer team because they were short one kid, and again when the two of them learned to ride a bike on the same day.

It wouldn’t be the last time Jonathan proved himself a quick study. In second grade, Jonathan’s teacher called to notify us that he was selling school supplies to his classmates, lending them money with interest. In fifth grade, he made a perfect score on the Virginia Standards of Learning science test. In ninth grade, he hit a walk-off single in a baseball tournament. A year later, he pitched seven gritty innings of no-hit ball over two consecutive all-star games, with the help of a curveball that seemed to defy gravity.

Jonathan was quiet, but he had a big heart. He helped coach little kids in baseball and laid wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery. He had no enemies, only friends. His baseball coach told us his mind was a gift. “He was a brilliant kid who never laughed out loud that I can remember, but he had a wry and knowing smile,” he told me. And Jonathan was humble, only replying “thank you” when complimented, never letting anything go to his head. “Jon didn’t brag about what he knew or who he knew,” his coach told us.

Jonathan’s military lineage extended to a grandfather and great-grandfather who also served in the Navy, and a great-great-grandfather who was a Prussian cavalryman. One of the few times I saw Jonathan beam with genuine pride was when he was given his great-great-grandfather’s  sword at my retirement ceremony. The moment was deeply meaningful to him because it signaled equal recognition among family; Jonathan had to pedal hard in the shadow of a successful father and a brother now carrying on the tradition of military service.

On the surface, Jonathan was a handsome, shy, gentle kid with a warm and disarming demeanor. But underneath that exterior he struggled with anxiety and depression that eventually spiraled into addiction, with all its sickening complexity.

* * *

Many people have a simple understanding of addiction. They think it only happens to dysfunctional people from dysfunctional families, or to hopeless people living in the street. But our addicted population is spread across every segment of society. Rich and poor; white and black; male and female; old and young.

There are several gateways to opioid addiction. Some suffer a physical injury, and slowly develop a dependency on prescribed painkillers. Others self-medicate for mental ailments using whatever substance is available. Because the brain is so adaptable while it’s still developing, it’s highly susceptible to dependencies, even from non-opioids like today’s newly potent marijuana strains. We now understand that such early marijuana use not only inhibits brain development, it better prepares the brain to be receptive to opioids. Of course, like opioids, marijuana has important medical applications, and it seems to leave less of a mark on the fully mature brain. It’s worth examining whether it would make sense to raise the legal marijuana age to 25, when the brain has fully matured.

From an early age, Jonathan lacked confidence and self-esteem. He never seemed comfortable in his own skin. He followed more than he led. Like many of the 40 percent or more of teenagers who have reportedly suffered from one mental-health issue or another, Jonathan started on the road to addiction early. He began by sneaking a bit of alcohol at night in order to bring himself down from the Adderall a doctor had prescribed him, based on a misdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder. By eighth grade, he was consuming alcohol in larger quantities, and beginning to self-medicate with marijuana. Next came Xanax, and eventually, heroin.

We first tried counseling and psychiatry for Jonathan, thinking this was merely a matter of bad friends and worse choices. We figured he would age out of it and turn away from drugs. Not understanding how addiction progresses, we foolishly hoped, reinforced by his assurances, that every incident would be the last one. The incidents worsened after a girlfriend turned away from him and he was disqualified from playing varsity baseball his senior year due to deteriorating grades. One April night that year, a suicidal gesture and a car accident left him in the hospital and us with no doubt that we needed to make a radical change.

With no available spaces in treatment facilities in Washington, D.C., Jonathan detoxed in Richmond, Virginia, for a week while we frantically searched for an inpatient center that would accommodate his dual diagnosis of depression/anxiety and addiction. He growled that putting him into treatment was the worst mistake we would ever make. But we stuck with our decision, and sent him away to two sequential state-of-the-art inpatient treatment programs.

According to the treatment professionals with whom we worked, it takes most addicts well over a year of skilled, intense inpatient treatment to even have a chance of recovery, and my son is evidence that not even that amount of time is a guarantee. Effective treatment generally requires a combination of craving-reducing drugs (to give recovery a chance), time (for the brain to literally recover), counseling (for the addict to understand what he or she is going through), mutual support (to maintain sobriety), and transition training (to prepare for reentering society).

Even getting people into treatment can be difficult, although some are trying to make it easier. In drug courts, for instance, judges are able to suspend drug-offense sentences in favor of an addict entering—and remaining in—a treatment program. But these programs are still terribly expensive. Because the military’s Tricare medical system would not adequately cover treatment for a dual diagnosis, we dug in and spent more than the equivalent of four years’ tuition at a private college for 15 months of treatment for Jonathan, a sum that would be well beyond the reach of most American families.

It wasn’t until our exposure to the parent-education sessions at Jonathan’s first treatment center that we awakened to the full horror of addiction’s relentless spiral. Unlike cancer, which can be seen under a microscope, addiction works away at the brain much more covertly, using its own flexibility against it.

As Sam Quinones writes in his book Dreamland, the morphine molecule has “evolved somehow to fit, key in lock, into the receptors that all mammals, especially humans, have in their brains and spines ... creating a far more intense euphoria than anything we come by internally.” It creates a higher tolerance with use, and, as Quinones continues, exacts “a mighty vengeance when a human dares to stop using it.” What starts as relief of physical or mental pain transforms into a desperate need to avoid withdrawal.

Treatment was tedious for Jonathan, due to long periods of boredom and his discomfort in being required to reach out to others and talk about himself. But he knew he needed help to recover. Over 16 long months we saw him almost miraculously begin to pull out of the abyss. We were gradually getting our son back. We watched his brain recover as he turned back into his old self. He was more communicative, happy to see us when we would visit, and even led a 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous meeting once per week.

In his last few months in treatment, Jonathan sought and earned his emergency medical technician qualification. He said he wanted to use it to help others, especially young people, avoid his experience. He was so proud that he had found something he loved to do. It was one of the very few things that would light him up in a discussion, so we brought it up with him whenever we could.

Based on his steady progress in recovery, and his successful completion of the rigorous EMT certification program, we thought Jonathan was ready to reenter normal life, and we believed he deserved the chance. Together, we decided he would attend the University of Denver, which had granted him a gap year after high school. Thanks in part to a sympathetic admissions counselor who had an experience with addiction in her own family, the school agreed to allow him to enter in the fall.

His incoming class was required to read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy over the summer and write an essay about a person who had a profound impact upon their life. Jonathan wrote powerfully about encountering a man in the grip of an overdose-induced cardiac arrest in a McDonald’s bathroom during the first ride-along of his EMT training. He said the experience made him realize how precious life is. “I never found out his name,” he wrote, but the experience made him see his life “in a whole new light.”

Sadly, the morphine molecule had burrowed deeper into his brain than we understood. Even as he was writing his moving essay, referring to himself as a former addict, his relapse was already one week old. Such is the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of the disease of addiction.

In the weekend before we dropped Jonathan off at college, we missed the telltale signs of relapse. Feeling the shame of his condition, Jonathan used the addicted person’s shrewdness to hide them. As for us, we were blinded by our own optimism. We read his restlessness as an understandable case of nerves about what was coming next, or perhaps too high a dosage of anxiety medicine. In retrospect, it appears he was experiencing symptoms of withdrawal.

* * *

Scientists who study addiction understand how little it takes to return at full strength. Even brief flashing images of drug paraphernalia are sufficient to trigger a flood of dopamine in a recovering brain that can, in turn, cause a relapse. The addict is all the more vulnerable when access to the drug is so easy. The location where Jonathan, two weeks away from entering the University of Denver, was taking a nighttime EKG course is close to one of that city’s open-air heroin markets. He told one of his friends back home that he had been offered heroin while walking back to where he was staying, but had refused. This encounter likely provided the stimulus for his relapse and eventual overdose.

Instead of allowing these open-air markets to thrive, we would do well to develop “safe-use zones” like those in Portugal and parts of British Columbia. These areas not only dramatically reduce opioid overdoses (because trained users of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone can be right on the scene), they can offer treatment to addicts who are ready to seek help.

We are hopeful that the exceptional efforts of a determined Denver police detective will lead to the apprehension, prosecution, and punishment of the drug dealer who sold our son that fatal fentanyl-laced dose. Indeed, the deadliest link in the overdose supply chain is the street dealer who looks an addicted person coldly in the eye and sells what he or she knows could be their last high. However, much of our prosecutorial apparatus views selling drugs as a “nonviolent crime.” Many refuse to prosecute for the small amounts dealers carry. Dealers are sometimes released overnight, allowing them to move on to another location to resume their deadly work.

Meanwhile, addicts continue to suffer under long-standing stigmas associated with drug use, and are subject to the same punishments as dealers. Data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime-Reporting Program shows that of the approximately 1.2 million people arrests for a drug-related offense in 2016, 85 percent were for individual drug possession, not the sale or manufacture of a drug. This is no way to solve an epidemic.

* * *

Drug overdoses, like the one that took Jonathan from us, are now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50 years old. The Centers for Disease Control reports that more than 64,000 Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses in 2016, including 15,446 heroin overdoses alone. The total is more than 20 times the number of Americans killed on 9/11.

The costs of the opioid epidemic—in terms of health care, its corrosive effects on our economic productivity, and other impacts on society—extend far beyond the loss of life. The White House Council of Economic Advisers just raised its estimate of the epidemic’s annual cost from $78.5 billion to a whopping $504 billion. Princeton University’s Alan Krueger recently completed a study suggesting that 20 percent of the reduction in male participation in our workforce is due to opioid use, and that nearly one-third of prime-working-age men who are not in the labor force are taking prescription pain medication on a daily basis. I sit on the board of a medium-sized industrial company in America’s heartland that has had trouble recruiting employees, despite being willing to hire anyone who walks in the door who can pass a drug test.

If America is going to reverse this epidemic, we need to start treating it like the national emergency it really is. We need a call to arms like the one that led to our nation’s dramatic decrease in cigarette usage, or the effective Mothers Against Drunk Driving movement. There are reasons to hope that public awareness of the opioid epidemic is finally beginning to catch up with the facts on the ground, but its defeat will only be possible through a concerted effort that includes full-spectrum prevention, stronger prescription-drug controls, more robust law enforcement, and far more access to quality treatment. All of this will in turn require major increases in public resources.

The final sentence of Jonathan’s University of Denver freshman essay reads, “I now live my life with a newfound purpose: wanting to help those who cannot help themselves.” Jonathan was very serious about his recovery. He wanted to live, and was on an upward trajectory, with brand-new hopes and dreams. He fought honorably against the demons of this disease but, as with so many others, he lost his battle. Losing Jonathan has left us heartbroken, but we are determined to carry his purpose forward. If his story leads to one less heartbroken family, it will have been worth sharing.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/an-epidemic-from-which-no-one-is-safe/546773/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

No Family Is Safe From This Epidemic

The last photograph of my son Jonathan was taken at the end of a new-student barbecue on the campus green at the University of Denver. It was one of those bittersweet transitional moments. We were feeling the combination of apprehension and optimism that every parent feels when dropping a kid off at college for the first time, amplified by the fact that we were coming off a rocky 16 months with our son.

We had moved him into his dormitory room only that morning. I remember how sharp he looked in the outfit he selected, and his eagerness to start class and make new friends. We were happy, relieved, and, knowing what we thought he had overcome, proud. Earlier that day, at lunch, I asked Jonathan whether he thought he was ready for the coming school year. “Dad, I can handle it as long as I continue my recovery,” he said. “Everything flows from that.”

Only three days later, Jonathan was found unresponsive in his dormitory-room bed, one of several victims of a fentanyl-laden batch of heroin that had spread through the Denver area that week.

* * *

Jonathan grew up as the introverted, but creative, younger kid in a career Navy officer’s family. He was born a week after I returned from a long deployment, and lived through two more before reaching his fourth birthday. During one six-year stretch, he attended school in five different districts due to military moves. The one constant was his big brother, his best friend, whom he followed around like a rock star. I remember him grinning from ear to ear when he was asked to play on his brother’s soccer team because they were short one kid, and again when the two of them learned to ride a bike on the same day.

It wouldn’t be the last time Jonathan proved himself a quick study. In second grade, Jonathan’s teacher called to notify us that he was selling school supplies to his classmates, lending them money with interest. In fifth grade, he made a perfect score on the Virginia Standards of Learning science test. In ninth grade, he hit a walk-off single in a baseball tournament. A year later, he pitched seven gritty innings of no-hit ball over two consecutive all-star games, with the help of a curveball that seemed to defy gravity.

Jonathan was quiet, but he had a big heart. He helped coach little kids in baseball and laid wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery. He had no enemies, only friends. His baseball coach told us his mind was a gift. “He was a brilliant kid who never laughed out loud that I can remember, but he had a wry and knowing smile,” he told me. And Jonathan was humble, only replying “thank you” when complimented, never letting anything go to his head. “Jon didn’t brag about what he knew or who he knew,” his coach told us.

Jonathan’s military lineage extended to a grandfather and great-grandfather who also served in the Navy, and a great-great-grandfather who was a Prussian cavalryman. One of the few times I saw Jonathan beam with genuine pride was when he was given his great-great-grandfather’s  sword at my retirement ceremony. The moment was deeply meaningful to him because it signaled equal recognition among family; Jonathan had to pedal hard in the shadow of a successful father and a brother now carrying on the tradition of military service.

On the surface, Jonathan was a handsome, shy, gentle kid with a warm and disarming demeanor. But underneath that exterior he struggled with anxiety and depression that eventually spiraled into addiction, with all its sickening complexity.

* * *

Many people have a simple understanding of addiction. They think it only happens to dysfunctional people from dysfunctional families, or to hopeless people living in the street. But our addicted population is spread across every segment of society. Rich and poor; white and black; male and female; old and young.

There are several gateways to opioid addiction. Some suffer a physical injury, and slowly develop a dependency on prescribed painkillers. Others self-medicate for mental ailments using whatever substance is available. Because the brain is so adaptable while it’s still developing, it’s highly susceptible to dependencies, even from non-opioids like today’s newly potent marijuana strains. We now understand that such early marijuana use not only inhibits brain development, it better prepares the brain to be receptive to opioids. Of course, like opioids, marijuana has important medical applications, and it seems to leave less of a mark on the fully mature brain. It’s worth examining whether it would make sense to raise the legal marijuana age to 25, when the brain has fully matured.

From an early age, Jonathan lacked confidence and self-esteem. He never seemed comfortable in his own skin. He followed more than he led. Like many of the 40 percent or more of teenagers who have reportedly suffered from one mental-health issue or another, Jonathan started on the road to addiction early. He began by sneaking a bit of alcohol at night in order to bring himself down from the Adderall a doctor had prescribed him, based on a misdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder. By eighth grade, he was consuming alcohol in larger quantities, and beginning to self-medicate with marijuana. Next came Xanax, and eventually, heroin.

We first tried counseling and psychiatry for Jonathan, thinking this was merely a matter of bad friends and worse choices. We figured he would age out of it and turn away from drugs. Not understanding how addiction progresses, we foolishly hoped, reinforced by his assurances, that every incident would be the last one. The incidents worsened after a girlfriend turned away from him and he was disqualified from playing varsity baseball his senior year due to deteriorating grades. One April night that year, a suicidal gesture and a car accident left him in the hospital and us with no doubt that we needed to make a radical change.

With no available spaces in treatment facilities in Washington, D.C., Jonathan detoxed in Richmond, Virginia, for a week while we frantically searched for an inpatient center that would accommodate his dual diagnosis of depression/anxiety and addiction. He growled that putting him into treatment was the worst mistake we would ever make. But we stuck with our decision, and sent him away to two sequential state-of-the-art inpatient treatment programs.

According to the treatment professionals with whom we worked, it takes most addicts well over a year of skilled, intense inpatient treatment to even have a chance of recovery, and my son is evidence that not even that amount of time is a guarantee. Effective treatment generally requires a combination of craving-reducing drugs (to give recovery a chance), time (for the brain to literally recover), counseling (for the addict to understand what he or she is going through), mutual support (to maintain sobriety), and transition training (to prepare for reentering society).

Even getting people into treatment can be difficult, although some are trying to make it easier. In drug courts, for instance, judges are able to suspend drug-offense sentences in favor of an addict entering—and remaining in—a treatment program. But these programs are still terribly expensive. Because the military’s Tricare medical system would not adequately cover treatment for a dual diagnosis, we dug in and spent more than the equivalent of four years’ tuition at a private college for 15 months of treatment for Jonathan, a sum that would be well beyond the reach of most American families.

It wasn’t until our exposure to the parent-education sessions at Jonathan’s first treatment center that we awakened to the full horror of addiction’s relentless spiral. Unlike cancer, which can be seen under a microscope, addiction works away at the brain much more covertly, using its own flexibility against it.

As Sam Quinones writes in his book Dreamland, the morphine molecule has “evolved somehow to fit, key in lock, into the receptors that all mammals, especially humans, have in their brains and spines ... creating a far more intense euphoria than anything we come by internally.” It creates a higher tolerance with use, and, as Quinones continues, exacts “a mighty vengeance when a human dares to stop using it.” What starts as relief of physical or mental pain transforms into a desperate need to avoid withdrawal.

Treatment was tedious for Jonathan, due to long periods of boredom and his discomfort in being required to reach out to others and talk about himself. But he knew he needed help to recover. Over 16 long months we saw him almost miraculously begin to pull out of the abyss. We were gradually getting our son back. We watched his brain recover as he turned back into his old self. He was more communicative, happy to see us when we would visit, and even led a 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous meeting once per week.

In his last few months in treatment, Jonathan sought and earned his emergency medical technician qualification. He said he wanted to use it to help others, especially young people, avoid his experience. He was so proud that he had found something he loved to do. It was one of the very few things that would light him up in a discussion, so we brought it up with him whenever we could.

Based on his steady progress in recovery, and his successful completion of the rigorous EMT certification program, we thought Jonathan was ready to reenter normal life, and we believed he deserved the chance. Together, we decided he would attend the University of Denver, which had granted him a gap year after high school. Thanks in part to a sympathetic admissions counselor who had an experience with addiction in her own family, the school agreed to allow him to enter in the fall.

His incoming class was required to read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy over the summer and write an essay about a person who had a profound impact upon their life. Jonathan wrote powerfully about encountering a man in the grip of an overdose-induced cardiac arrest in a McDonald’s bathroom during the first ride-along of his EMT training. He said the experience made him realize how precious life is. “I never found out his name,” he wrote, but the experience made him see his life “in a whole new light.”

Sadly, the morphine molecule had burrowed deeper into his brain than we understood. Even as he was writing his moving essay, referring to himself as a former addict, his relapse was already one week old. Such is the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of the disease of addiction.

In the weekend before we dropped Jonathan off at college, we missed the telltale signs of relapse. Feeling the shame of his condition, Jonathan used the addicted person’s shrewdness to hide them. As for us, we were blinded by our own optimism. We read his restlessness as an understandable case of nerves about what was coming next, or perhaps too high a dosage of anxiety medicine. In retrospect, it appears he was experiencing symptoms of withdrawal.

* * *

Scientists who study addiction understand how little it takes to return at full strength. Even brief flashing images of drug paraphernalia are sufficient to trigger a flood of dopamine in a recovering brain that can, in turn, cause a relapse. The addict is all the more vulnerable when access to the drug is so easy. The location where Jonathan, two weeks away from entering the University of Denver, was taking a nighttime EKG course is close to one of that city’s open-air heroin markets. He told one of his friends back home that he had been offered heroin while walking back to where he was staying, but had refused. This encounter likely provided the stimulus for his relapse and eventual overdose.

Instead of allowing these open-air markets to thrive, we would do well to develop “safe-use zones” like those in Portugal and parts of British Columbia. These areas not only dramatically reduce opioid overdoses (because trained users of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone can be right on the scene), they can offer treatment to addicts who are ready to seek help.

We are hopeful that the exceptional efforts of a determined Denver police detective will lead to the apprehension, prosecution, and punishment of the drug dealer who sold our son that fatal fentanyl-laced dose. Indeed, the deadliest link in the overdose supply chain is the street dealer who looks an addicted person coldly in the eye and sells what he or she knows could be their last high. However, much of our prosecutorial apparatus views selling drugs as a “nonviolent crime.” Many refuse to prosecute for the small amounts dealers carry. Dealers are sometimes released overnight, allowing them to move on to another location to resume their deadly work.

Meanwhile, addicts continue to suffer under long-standing stigmas associated with drug use, and are subject to the same punishments as dealers. Data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime-Reporting Program shows that of the approximately 1.2 million people arrests for a drug-related offense in 2016, 85 percent were for individual drug possession, not the sale or manufacture of a drug. This is no way to solve an epidemic.

* * *

Drug overdoses, like the one that took Jonathan from us, are now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50 years old. The Centers for Disease Control reports that more than 64,000 Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses in 2016, including 15,446 heroin overdoses alone. The total is more than 20 times the number of Americans killed on 9/11.

The costs of the opioid epidemic—in terms of health care, its corrosive effects on our economic productivity, and other impacts on society—extend far beyond the loss of life. The White House Council of Economic Advisers just raised its estimate of the epidemic’s annual cost from $78.5 billion to a whopping $504 billion. Princeton University’s Alan Krueger recently completed a study suggesting that 20 percent of the reduction in male participation in our workforce is due to opioid use, and that nearly one-third of prime-working-age men who are not in the labor force are taking prescription pain medication on a daily basis. I sit on the board of a medium-sized industrial company in America’s heartland that has had trouble recruiting employees, despite being willing to hire anyone who walks in the door who can pass a drug test.

If America is going to reverse this epidemic, we need to start treating it like the national emergency it really is. We need a call to arms like the one that led to our nation’s dramatic decrease in cigarette usage, or the effective Mothers Against Drunk Driving movement. There are reasons to hope that public awareness of the opioid epidemic is finally beginning to catch up with the facts on the ground, but its defeat will only be possible through a concerted effort that includes full-spectrum prevention, stronger prescription-drug controls, more robust law enforcement, and far more access to quality treatment. All of this will in turn require major increases in public resources.

The final sentence of Jonathan’s University of Denver freshman essay reads, “I now live my life with a newfound purpose: wanting to help those who cannot help themselves.” Jonathan was very serious about his recovery. He wanted to live, and was on an upward trajectory, with brand-new hopes and dreams. He fought honorably against the demons of this disease but, as with so many others, he lost his battle. Losing Jonathan has left us heartbroken, but we are determined to carry his purpose forward. If his story leads to one less heartbroken family, it will have been worth sharing.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

No Family Is Safe From This Epidemic

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/no-family-is-safe-from-this-epidemic/

No Family Is Safe From This Epidemic

The last photograph of my son Jonathan was taken at the end of a new-student barbecue on the campus green at the University of Denver. It was one of those bittersweet transitional moments. We were feeling the combination of apprehension and optimism that every parent feels when dropping a kid off at college for the first time, amplified by the fact that we were coming off a rocky 16 months with our son.

We had moved him into his dormitory room only that morning. I remember how sharp he looked in the outfit he selected, and his eagerness to start class and make new friends. We were happy, relieved, and, knowing what we thought he had overcome, proud. Earlier that day, at lunch, I asked Jonathan whether he thought he was ready for the coming school year. “Dad, I can handle it as long as I continue my recovery,” he said. “Everything flows from that.”

Only three days later, Jonathan was found unresponsive in his dormitory-room bed, one of several victims of a fentanyl-laden batch of heroin that had spread through the Denver area that week.

* * *

Jonathan grew up as the introverted, but creative, younger kid in a career Navy officer’s family. He was born a week after I returned from a long deployment, and lived through two more before reaching his fourth birthday. During one six-year stretch, he attended school in five different districts due to military moves. The one constant was his big brother, his best friend, whom he followed around like a rock star. I remember him grinning from ear to ear when he was asked to play on his brother’s soccer team because they were short one kid, and again when the two of them learned to ride a bike on the same day.

It wouldn’t be the last time Jonathan proved himself a quick study. In second grade, Jonathan’s teacher called to notify us that he was selling school supplies to his classmates, lending them money with interest. In fifth grade, he made a perfect score on the Virginia Standards of Learning science test. In ninth grade, he hit a walk-off single in a baseball tournament. A year later, he pitched seven gritty innings of no-hit ball over two consecutive all-star games, with the help of a curveball that seemed to defy gravity.

Jonathan was quiet, but he had a big heart. He helped coach little kids in baseball and laid wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery. He had no enemies, only friends. His baseball coach told us his mind was a gift. “He was a brilliant kid who never laughed out loud that I can remember, but he had a wry and knowing smile,” he told me. And Jonathan was humble, only replying “thank you” when complimented, never letting anything go to his head. “Jon didn’t brag about what he knew or who he knew,” his coach told us.

Jonathan’s military lineage extended to a grandfather and great-grandfather who also served in the Navy, and a great-great-grandfather who was a Prussian cavalryman. One of the few times I saw Jonathan beam with genuine pride was when he was given his great-great-grandfather’s  sword at my retirement ceremony. The moment was deeply meaningful to him because it signaled equal recognition among family; Jonathan had to pedal hard in the shadow of a successful father and a brother now carrying on the tradition of military service.

On the surface, Jonathan was a handsome, shy, gentle kid with a warm and disarming demeanor. But underneath that exterior he struggled with anxiety and depression that eventually spiraled into addiction, with all its sickening complexity.

* * *

Many people have a simple understanding of addiction. They think it only happens to dysfunctional people from dysfunctional families, or to hopeless people living in the street. But our addicted population is spread across every segment of society. Rich and poor; white and black; male and female; old and young.

There are several gateways to opioid addiction. Some suffer a physical injury, and slowly develop a dependency on prescribed painkillers. Others self-medicate for mental ailments using whatever substance is available. Because the brain is so adaptable while it’s still developing, it’s highly susceptible to dependencies, even from non-opioids like today’s newly potent marijuana strains. We now understand that such early marijuana use not only inhibits brain development, it better prepares the brain to be receptive to opioids. Of course, like opioids, marijuana has important medical applications, and it seems to leave less of a mark on the fully mature brain. It’s worth examining whether it would make sense to raise the legal marijuana age to 25, when the brain has fully matured.

From an early age, Jonathan lacked confidence and self-esteem. He never seemed comfortable in his own skin. He followed more than he led. Like many of the 40 percent or more of teenagers who have reportedly suffered from one mental-health issue or another, Jonathan started on the road to addiction early. He began by sneaking a bit of alcohol at night in order to bring himself down from the Adderall a doctor had prescribed him, based on a misdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder. By eighth grade, he was consuming alcohol in larger quantities, and beginning to self-medicate with marijuana. Next came Xanax, and eventually, heroin.

We first tried counseling and psychiatry for Jonathan, thinking this was merely a matter of bad friends and worse choices. We figured he would age out of it and turn away from drugs. Not understanding how addiction progresses, we foolishly hoped, reinforced by his assurances, that every incident would be the last one. The incidents worsened after a girlfriend turned away from him and he was disqualified from playing varsity baseball his senior year due to deteriorating grades. One April night that year, a suicidal gesture and a car accident left him in the hospital and us with no doubt that we needed to make a radical change.

With no available spaces in treatment facilities in Washington, D.C., Jonathan detoxed in Richmond, Virginia, for a week while we frantically searched for an inpatient center that would accommodate his dual diagnosis of depression/anxiety and addiction. He growled that putting him into treatment was the worst mistake we would ever make. But we stuck with our decision, and sent him away to two sequential state-of-the-art inpatient treatment programs.

According to the treatment professionals with whom we worked, it takes most addicts well over a year of skilled, intense inpatient treatment to even have a chance of recovery, and my son is evidence that not even that amount of time is a guarantee. Effective treatment generally requires a combination of craving-reducing drugs (to give recovery a chance), time (for the brain to literally recover), counseling (for the addict to understand what he or she is going through), mutual support (to maintain sobriety), and transition training (to prepare for reentering society).

Even getting people into treatment can be difficult, although some are trying to make it easier. In drug courts, for instance, judges are able to suspend drug-offense sentences in favor of an addict entering—and remaining in—a treatment program. But these programs are still terribly expensive. Because the military’s Tricare medical system would not adequately cover treatment for a dual diagnosis, we dug in and spent more than the equivalent of four years’ tuition at a private college for 15 months of treatment for Jonathan, a sum that would be well beyond the reach of most American families.

It wasn’t until our exposure to the parent-education sessions at Jonathan’s first treatment center that we awakened to the full horror of addiction’s relentless spiral. Unlike cancer, which can be seen under a microscope, addiction works away at the brain much more covertly, using its own flexibility against it.

As Sam Quinones writes in his book Dreamland, the morphine molecule has “evolved somehow to fit, key in lock, into the receptors that all mammals, especially humans, have in their brains and spines … creating a far more intense euphoria than anything we come by internally.” It creates a higher tolerance with use, and, as Quinones continues, exacts “a mighty vengeance when a human dares to stop using it.” What starts as relief of physical or mental pain transforms into a desperate need to avoid withdrawal.

Treatment was tedious for Jonathan, due to long periods of boredom and his discomfort in being required to reach out to others and talk about himself. But he knew he needed help to recover. Over 16 long months we saw him almost miraculously begin to pull out of the abyss. We were gradually getting our son back. We watched his brain recover as he turned back into his old self. He was more communicative, happy to see us when we would visit, and even led a 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous meeting once per week.

In his last few months in treatment, Jonathan sought and earned his emergency medical technician qualification. He said he wanted to use it to help others, especially young people, avoid his experience. He was so proud that he had found something he loved to do. It was one of the very few things that would light him up in a discussion, so we brought it up with him whenever we could.

Based on his steady progress in recovery, and his successful completion of the rigorous EMT certification program, we thought Jonathan was ready to reenter normal life, and we believed he deserved the chance. Together, we decided he would attend the University of Denver, which had granted him a gap year after high school. Thanks in part to a sympathetic admissions counselor who had an experience with addiction in her own family, the school agreed to allow him to enter in the fall.

His incoming class was required to read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy over the summer and write an essay about a person who had a profound impact upon their life. Jonathan wrote powerfully about encountering a man in the grip of an overdose-induced cardiac arrest in a McDonald’s bathroom during the first ride-along of his EMT training. He said the experience made him realize how precious life is. “I never found out his name,” he wrote, but the experience made him see his life “in a whole new light.”

Sadly, the morphine molecule had burrowed deeper into his brain than we understood. Even as he was writing his moving essay, referring to himself as a former addict, his relapse was already one week old. Such is the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of the disease of addiction.

In the weekend before we dropped Jonathan off at college, we missed the telltale signs of relapse. Feeling the shame of his condition, Jonathan used the addicted person’s shrewdness to hide them. As for us, we were blinded by our own optimism. We read his restlessness as an understandable case of nerves about what was coming next, or perhaps too high a dosage of anxiety medicine. In retrospect, it appears he was experiencing symptoms of withdrawal.

* * *

Scientists who study addiction understand how little it takes to return at full strength. Even brief flashing images of drug paraphernalia are sufficient to trigger a flood of dopamine in a recovering brain that can, in turn, cause a relapse. The addict is all the more vulnerable when access to the drug is so easy. The location where Jonathan, two weeks away from entering the University of Denver, was taking a nighttime EKG course is close to one of that city’s open-air heroin markets. He told one of his friends back home that he had been offered heroin while walking back to where he was staying, but had refused. This encounter likely provided the stimulus for his relapse and eventual overdose.

Instead of allowing these open-air markets to thrive, we would do well to develop “safe-use zones” like those in Portugal and parts of British Columbia. These areas not only dramatically reduce opioid overdoses (because trained users of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone can be right on the scene), they can offer treatment to addicts who are ready to seek help.

We are hopeful that the exceptional efforts of a determined Denver police detective will lead to the apprehension, prosecution, and punishment of the drug dealer who sold our son that fatal fentanyl-laced dose. Indeed, the deadliest link in the overdose supply chain is the street dealer who looks an addicted person coldly in the eye and sells what he or she knows could be their last high. However, much of our prosecutorial apparatus views selling drugs as a “nonviolent crime.” Many refuse to prosecute for the small amounts dealers carry. Dealers are sometimes released overnight, allowing them to move on to another location to resume their deadly work.

Meanwhile, addicts continue to suffer under long-standing stigmas associated with drug use, and are subject to the same punishments as dealers. Data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime-Reporting Program shows that of the approximately 1.2 million people arrests for a drug-related offense in 2016, 85 percent were for individual drug possession, not the sale or manufacture of a drug. This is no way to solve an epidemic.

* * *

Drug overdoses, like the one that took Jonathan from us, are now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50 years old. The Centers for Disease Control reports that more than 64,000 Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses in 2016, including 15,446 heroin overdoses alone. The total is more than 20 times the number of Americans killed on 9/11.

The costs of the opioid epidemic—in terms of health care, its corrosive effects on our economic productivity, and other impacts on society—extend far beyond the loss of life. The White House Council of Economic Advisers just raised its estimate of the epidemic’s annual cost from $78.5 billion to a whopping $504 billion. Princeton University’s Alan Krueger recently completed a study suggesting that 20 percent of the reduction in male participation in our workforce is due to opioid use, and that nearly one-third of prime-working-age men who are not in the labor force are taking prescription pain medication on a daily basis. I sit on the board of a medium-sized industrial company in America’s heartland that has had trouble recruiting employees, despite being willing to hire anyone who walks in the door who can pass a drug test.

Related Story

Why Can’t Addicts Just Quit?

If America is going to reverse this epidemic, we need to start treating it like the national emergency it really is. We need a call to arms like the one that led to our nation’s dramatic decrease in cigarette usage, or the effective Mothers Against Drunk Driving movement. There are reasons to hope that public awareness of the opioid epidemic is finally beginning to catch up with the facts on the ground, but its defeat will only be possible through a concerted effort that includes full-spectrum prevention, stronger prescription-drug controls, more robust law enforcement, and far more access to quality treatment. All of this will in turn require major increases in public resources.

The final sentence of Jonathan’s University of Denver freshman essay reads, “I now live my life with a newfound purpose: wanting to help those who cannot help themselves.” Jonathan was very serious about his recovery. He wanted to live, and was on an upward trajectory, with brand-new hopes and dreams. He fought honorably against the demons of this disease but, as with so many others, he lost his battle. Losing Jonathan has left us heartbroken, but we are determined to carry his purpose forward. If his story leads to one less heartbroken family, it will have been worth sharing.

Original Article:

Click here

[womensdiary-blog]

10 Common Types of Drug Addiction

New Post has been published on https://womensdiary.com/10-common-types-of-drug-addiction.html

10 Common Types of Drug Addiction

10 Common Types Of Drug Addiction

What do you know about drug addiction? When someone in the family is affected by this problem, it affects everyone around them. It is like having an uninvited elephant in the living room. You can’t help but notice it, but since nobody knows how to get rid of it, you all pretend it’s not there.

Alcohol Addiction

Alcohol Addiction occurs when someone cannot stop drinking alcoholic beverages without outside intervention. Alcoholics typically seek out only friends, relatives, and social occasions that allow them to drink. They also drink alone in order to hide how much they are drinking. The longer they drink, the more they need to consume to feel an effect from the alcohol. They begin to feel withdrawal symptoms if they go for too long without alcohol, and they remedy these symptoms by more drinking.

Speed Addiction

Speed Addiction occurs with the repeated use of stimulants that include speed, Dexedrine, bennies, uppers, crystal meth, or other substances. The user will feel euphoric and energetic but will also experience an increase in his heart rate and blood pressure. They also become very nervous and agitated, short tempered, and restless. Sometimes they cannot control feelings of impulsivity. Many drugs intended to treat attention deficity hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have the same stimulant effect. Mostly it’s taken in pill form, but it can also be snorted or injected.

Marijuana Addiction

Marijuana Addiction results from smoking or eating marijuana. Most people who have this drug addiction tell anyone who will listen to them that scientists cannot prove that it causes any harm and that it should be legalized. However, it creates the same impaired vision, poor judgments, and reaction times as alcohol, so anyone under the influence of cannabis should not be permitted to drive. It also causes people to experience feelings at the extreme ends of the emotional spectrum. They get confused and paranoid.

Cocaine Addiction

Cocaine Addiction comes from repeated use of this white powder processed from the leaves of cocoa plants. Crack cocaine is the same substance formulated into small rocks or chunks. Either way, the user can snort it, smoke it, or inject it. It causes the same euphoria and energy as stimulants, but brings the user to addiction much more quickly. This type of drug addiction places the same stresses on the nervous system, and it also carries a higher risk of cardiac arrest. The effect of the high vanishes quickly and the user crashes unless he uses more of this powerful drug. It was originally developed as a stimulant and an anesthetic but was outlawed when its harmful characteristics were recognized.

Hallucinogen Addiction

Hallucinogen Addiction comes from a variety of illegal drugs. LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and mescaline became popular in the 1960s but resurged in high schools within the past decade. Either of these manufactured chemicals can be ingested in pill form or placed by dropper into beverages or onto tiny paper squares. Psilocybin mushrooms, also called shrooms, create the same feelings of euphoric detachment from reality. Ecstasy is a newer drug, another manufactured chemical. It causes the person who has this type of drug addiction to lose all inhibitions and for this reason is known as a sexual stimulant.

Inhalant Addiction

Inhalant Addiction results from breathing in chemical fumes that alter the mind. Commonly known as huffing, abusers can find it anywhere. They will breathe in the chemicals from aerosol cans. They will empty out indelible pens such as Magic Markers. They seek out paint thinners and gasoline fumes. Canned air like that used to clean off your computer keyboard is like champagne for huffers. Symptoms are loss of coordination and blurred speech. Inhalants can cause brain damage and death.

Nicotine Addiction

Nicotine Addiction is a most difficult drug addiction to overcome. People can buy it legally in cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, or snuff. It both calms and excites the central nervous system. When the rush of the tobacco use subsides, the user seeks out more. The physical harm it causes includes cancer, lung disease, and heart disease. The nicotine is the addictive substance in tobaccos, but it is intermingled with harmful tar and myriad other chemicals such as formaldehyde. Users who are denied nicotine become hostile and agitated.

Opioid Addiction

Opioid Addiction occurs from use of specific pain medications. Some of them, like morphine, opium, and heroin, are remanufactured from organic origins. Others are based on codeine, including OxyContin and Hydrocodone. They serve to depress the central nervous system and so are also called downers. But like uppers, they create a feeling of euphoria. Some of these drugs are snorted or injected; others come in pill form. Overdose can quickly cause respiratory and then cardiac arrest.

Phencyclidine Addiction

Phencyclidine Addiction is from use of the drug most commonly known as PCP. Originally it was yet another drug developed as a white powder in a laboratory for medical anesthetic purposes but then banned because of its harmful side effects. Also known as angel dust, and often mixed with marijuana to give it an extra punch, it can be snorted, smoked, or eaten. It has a stimulant effect and is among those drugs that become addictive very quickly. Users can suddenly become violent and suicidal.

Sedative Addiction

Sedative Addiction includes use of those drugs manufactured and prescribed specifically to treat anxiety, depression, and insomnia. Some of the most common types include any of the barbiturates as well as Lunesta, Valium, Xanax, or Tranxene. Sedatives depress the central nervous system and make the user feel relaxed and carefree. This type of drug addiction will deprive the person full use of his senses since he cannot reason well and often cannot walk straight or speak clearly. As with opioids, the user is lulled into euphoria and he does not recognize impending death from respiratory arrest.

The first step is recognizing that what you see in the person is the medical diagnosis of a drug addiction that needs to be treated, and not a crime to be punished. Most people think of intervention in terms of a family member talking to the substance abuser about his need to stop, but an intervention also occurs when the user backs up into the legal system from charges related to his use. So where do you go from there?

[samtheflamingomain]

ramblings of a drunkard

I guess it's time for me to do more writing, since it seems I run in cycles lately: I get so morbidly depressed that I can't get out of bed, I lament writing, I finally write, then I get a few weeks of relative stability. Seeing as how I'm at the end of that stability, spent two days in bed and dreading opening up Notepad, I suppose it's time.

This time it's harder, because I don't know what to say. I feel like I covered everything that happened in the past few months in my last post. There's a similar theme in my therapy sessions. I just had one last night and I didn't know what to talk about despite there being so much to talk about. And now I don't know what to write about.

I've never been at a loss for something to whine about Before (I was kicked out) because I was still being abused by my parents. Emotionally and financially. Now that I've cut all ties to them, I should be happy. But I'm not.

My therapist says I'm grieving. But I don't know how that could be possible. I've spent my whole life wishing my parents would get divorced, wishing they would get kidnapped, even wishing that, when my mother was in a car accident, that she would die from it. And I always hated myself for it.

I guess I'm grieving something more complicated: The idea of good parents. The fact that I spent 22 years truly believing I was a bad person to my core. The fact that I finally got what I wanted but not early enough to fix me.

I guess I should address my alcoholism, since it’s what comes up for me every single day.

It's been almost three months to the day since I left, and of those roughly ninety days I've spent maybe ten of them sober. I've put over $500 of liquor on my credit card. I never used to understand why I drank, why I smoked weed, why I knew that, if offered, I absolutely would've done harder drugs.

When I was in the hospital I got to know a drug addict who'd done every substance you could name. He was, like me, a smart guy. Now, he claims to have had a good childhood, so I know my "reasons" for my addictions are different than his, but he struck a chord with me when he said, "I never thought about it as a mental health issue. I thought I just did it to have fun."

I always felt the same. I remember when we got an anti-drug propaganda book in middle school, detailing all the horrible things each kind of drug did to you. But there were also descriptions of how each drug was great. And I thought to myself, "I can't wait to try all these." Because they sounded like fun - as long as you don't get addicted. And like every teenager on the planet, I thought "that would never be me."

As the book warned, it comes on slowly. It started, for me, in France, where they drink like fish at every evening meal. I remember fondly the buzz I'd get from half a glass of wine. When I got back to Canada, I spent six months desperately looking for someone to buy me alcohol and cigarettes.

I eventually did, around my 18th birthday. The people I met who were legal were also heavily into weed. I was never big on the idea of weed because my parents were joint chain-smokers and had been since my birth. They drove high. They did everything high. I never got to know who they were because they spent their entire lives high.

But I tried it. I don't know why I kept doing it, though, because the first fifty times I smoked I would have anxiety attacks and horrible thoughts and imagery of torture run through my mind. I guess it was one part "everyone else is doing it" and another part "everyone else is enjoying it; there must be something I'm missing."

This was the period of my life where, when asked, I'd say I preferred getting drunk over getting stoned.

But by the time I was 19, that had reversed. It wasn't really a matter of my weed experiences getting less anxiety-driven, but more of a growing distaste for alcohol, pun intended.

Ever since the first night I got drunk with my legal friends, I had no concept of "drinking responsibly", "pacing yourself" or "knowing when to quit". This resulted in many embarrassments, terrible hangovers, and a few cases of mild alcohol poisoning.

I know the reason why I was so reckless: I didn't care what happened to me. Most of the health-related results of alcoholism come later in life, and I never saw myself making it to “later in life”, in every sense of the phrase.

I eventually ran out of money to keep drinking myself sick and switched back to weed, which was always readily available and free, as my parents grow their own. One terrible day, I decided to try a popper. Just one, to see what it was like. One turned into thousands.

I was addicted to poppers for 3 years and change. For a while they were just an indulgence. Then they were a crutch, and then a necessity. I promised myself almost every day that I'd quit when I ran out of cigarettes. Then I'd just steal cigarettes from my mom. Then I'd get sick of that and buy another pack. Rinse and repeat.

It had started getting really bad around my 22nd birthday, when I started having terrible chest pains and coughing up black phlegm every hour. But I still couldn't quit.

I had my last popper the day I was kicked out and haven't had access to weed since. It's the longest I've gone without weed since I graduated high school. Unfortunately, like my many (ex) friends who were addicted to poppers, I quickly and firmly replaced them with alcohol.

Now I know I'll never smoke weed again because going back after this long would likely result in a horrible anxiety attack. In fact, all my plans of trying all the drugs are cancelled because of my newly-heightened anxiety.

But you know what doesn't increase anxiety? Alcohol!

I don't want to kill myself anymore, so drinking is now a bit of a tricky thing for me. See, before, I didn't care if I drank myself into a coma and never woke up, and that reflected in the fact that I could drink a 26er in about 4 hours without worrying about my safety. Because I didn't care about my safety. Now that I do, I try to control myself, but old habits die hard, and I just know that I can't, as reflected by the fact that I'll still drink a 26er in 4 hours but all the while worrying I won't wake up.

I tried rationing; doing shots instead of drinking from the bottle, doing cocktails instead of shots, and most recently, drinking beer instead of liquor. My only problem with that is that it's more expensive, tastes disgusting, and gives me terrible hangovers. (Yes, for some reason I don't get them as bad when pounding back 5 shots an hour, god knows why).

I'm at the point where 12 beers over 5 hours barely gives me a buzz. I lay in bed in agony for at least 3 hours every morning. And then by 4pm I go get more and do it all again, watching my credit get worse and worse by the day.

Part of me understands why; as my therapist says, I'm grieving. Lots of people drink after a loss. But another part of me doesn't understand why I've always needed something to get through the day. I long for the days before I was introduced to weed and alcohol and Tylenol 1's. I don't get why, now that I'm out of an abusive house, I still seek ways to alter my consciousness.

There were times when I was away from them: the 2013-14 school year and the 2014-15 school year. The first I was in a dorm - very lonely, but I was in a relationship. Once I was dumped, my substance use skyrocketted, and it never really went back down. I've had periods where I didn't rely on weed and booze, but they were few and far between.

It was the summer between school years, back at home, that I really started to rely on weed. I excused it as the only thing keeping me from going insane working 12-hour shifts at Dominos for 4 months. I planned on quitting when I moved out again, and I did, for about a month. I found a weed dealer in Toronto (as if that's difficult) and any spare cash I had went towards it.

But spending money on weed was a deterrent. I went a few weeks at a time sober, then a month smoking. And in November, when I started doing poppers, I felt like I'd found the thing that would carry me through my depression until I "got better". I thought I'd be able to stop whenever I found something to make me truly happy.

But that's the thing about my life: I've never been truly happy. When I moved back “home” in May after a suicide attempt and a hospital stay, I had access to free weed again. From May 2015 to February 2017, the longest I went without a popper was a month. After another hospital stay. Then I broke and bought cigarettes. Then I broke and had a half a joint. Then a full joint. Then I bought another bong. Then a popper piece. And by the one-month mark, I was right back where I started.

I know wishing doesn’t do a damn thing but I wish I’d never discovered poppers because weed on its own is relatively harmless. Poppers are worse than cigarettes because you smoke them unfiltered and in one hit. Alcohol is probably just as bad if not worse, especially, in my case, on the wallet. 

I wish I’d never gone to France. I wish I’d never gotten into a toxic group of drug addicts who, to this day, have made nothing of their lives and continue to drink and smoke their troubles away. But I guess I’m not much better. 

I’d like to end on this note: we’re all addicts in some capacity. I’ve always believed this. From the day we’re born, there’s something we do to cope. Some are addicted to heroin, others are addicted to mindful thinking. My point is that some addictions are worse than others. I’m not a chemist or a doctor so I can’t be sure, but I think 6 beers 6 days a week is still better than 20 poppers a day 7 days a week. 

Hopefully I can start whittling that down to no beers no days a week and replace it with something healthier, but as things are now, I don’t see a way out.

Stay Greater.

[brownducks]

‘A Scanner Darkly’ - Philip K Dick

First published at The Quietus, who let me write whatever I like about long-dead novelists, bless ‘em

“Everything in A SCANNER DARKLY I actually saw. I mean, I saw even worse things than I put in A SCANNER DARKLY. I saw people who were reduced to a point where they couldn't complete a sentence…and this was permanent, this was for the rest of their lives. Young people. These were people maybe 18 and 19, and you know, it was like a vision of hell. And I vowed to write a novel about it sometime.” – Philip K. Dick

A Scanner Darkly was Philip K Dick’s fortieth novel, and it’s one of his best-known works. It’s paranoid, disturbing and dystopian, but it wasn’t a vision of the future – it was a memoir.

Its main character, undercover narcotics agent, Bob Arctor, lives in a California that feels straight out of the early ‘70s, although we’re told the novel is set in 1994. When Arctor tries to infiltrate the supply chain of a drug called Substance D, he becomes addicted to it – his own supplier, Donna, is the woman he loves. His friends and housemates are all addicts, too. The plot ramps up when his police colleagues, from whom his identity is protected, ask him to run surveillance on himself, which is no-one’s idea of a good time: whenever he’s not on Substance D, he’s watching videos of himself on it.

Substance D is basically speed. For a long time, this was Dick’s drug of choice (I’ve written before about how you can conjure up an image of him at his desk, furiously typing, blinds drawn to block out the South California sun. He said he could turn out 68 pages of prose a day when he was on speed). Substance D is especially nasty, though. It destroys the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, so that they first function independently and then compete, destroying any coherent idea of the self. In the case of Bob Arctor, it means that the addict self and the narc self eventually become unrecognisable to one another.

Dick denied that he based Arctor on himself, but their situations are strikingly similar: after his fourth wife Nancy left him, in 1970 – taking their daughter Isa with her – he said, “I got mixed up with a lot of street people, just to have somebody to fill the house. She left me with a four bedroom, two-bathroom house and nobody living in it but me. So I just filled it with street people and I got mixed up with a lot of people who were into drugs.” Arctor, too, had a family, but found himself alone and involved in drugs. “And then I just took amphetamines,” Dick says. “I have never ever taken hard drugs. But I was in a position to see what hard drugs did to people, what drugs did to my friends…” In A Scanner Darkly there's a strong sense of “how did I get here?” – that this isn’t where Arctor is meant to be. It’s likely Dick thought this about himself after the end of his marriage, too. When he was writing it, his then-wife Tessa would find him at his desk in tears.

By the time he wrote A Scanner Darkly, Dick was clean. He also had a horrific rehab experience in Canada which gave him the idea for ‘New Path’, the rehab organisation in the novel. Before, he would knock out up to four novels a year, but he worked on draft after draft of Darkly for four years. It was different; it required him to wrestle with a devastating period in his life and create something that would help him come to terms with it. Perhaps because it was less of a flight of imagination than other novels he’d written, this fidelity to reality forced him to slow down, get it right. Its depth and density reflect this. Also, its timeless truths about drug addiction and perfect evocation of the grotty southern California of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s make it a canonical drugs novel.

Post-war, two ways of writing about drugs emerged: in the early ‘50s, on the one hand there was William Burroughs, unnerving and brazen about heroin addiction in Junkie. On the other, there was Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, recommending a nice afternoon listening to Mozart, staring at some flowers and dropping a soupçon of mescalin. In the early ‘60s the Huxleyian narrative of blissful transcendence dominated – his 1962 novel Island is the ultimate pro-psychedelics story. Alan Watts’ Joyous Cosmology came out the same year; Leary, Alpert and Metzner published The Psychedelic Experience soon after. But by the end of the decade, these beatific ideals had collapsed. There was acid burnout – a move towards heroin, speed and cocaine. In the background, there was Nixon’s war on drugs and the Vietnam War. When Dick wrote A Scanner Darkly, he wasn’t alone in charting the cultural wreckage of the late ‘60s – in Joan Didion’s era-defining The White Album, she writes that when she was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Santa Monica, her symptoms did not seem to her “an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968”.

Even so, the characters in A Scanner Darkly are recognisable today. Dick’s addicts are paranoid, wired and desperate. When they’re high they sit around shooting the shit, which is often very funny. Dick believed it to be both his saddest and most humorous work; a great deal of the novel is just them talking drug-addled rubbish at one another (Dick was also proud of the novel’s “very funny suicide scene”). Some of them have a grimly recognisable entrepreneurial spirit, too. Arctor’s smart-ass housemate Barris says at one point, “I’ve got a temporary lab set up at the house…watch me extract a gram of cocaine from common legal materials purchased openly at the 7-11 food store for under a dollar total cost.” Homespun drug production? Distinct shades of Breaking Bad there.

But it’s not just a novel about drug addiction. Dick was always spilling over with beliefs, questions and epiphanies. A Scanner Darkly races back and forth between depicting the nervy, brutal shape of drug abuse and Bob Arctor slowly losing his grip on his identity, trying to understand why it insists on being elusive and unstable. This instability is, of course, directly linked to the way in which Substance D causes – as Dick says, wonderfully – “organic brain damage producing split-brain dysfunction and a tragic parody of bilateral hemispheric parity”. But it also connects to a far greater set of ideas Dick was exploring, primarily metaphysical, and especially so as he wrote this.

Dick was an enormously wide-ranging reader and thinker – apparently he pored over his giant set of encyclopaedias (he would have loved the internet). But his reading suggests a certain wayward solipsism, which might be necessary, I guess, if – as he was – you’re busy creating your own cosmology. He read especially widely in mysticism, theology and spirituality, and as he tumbled further into this realm, there’s a sense that whilst the outside world deeply informed his work, what really lit him up was the construction of his own metaphysics. As much as he was anchored in the now (and in A Scanner Darkly this is especially true), he was also working out his own fantastically idiosyncratic responses to the kinds of abstractions that have been asked forever, most especially who am I? And is this reality the only reality?

Dick’s novels always pulsate between possible selves and possible realities. He was open-minded and in earnest. But in the case of A Scanner Darkly, in which the other self and the other reality are created by Substance D, all further possibilities are foreclosed. The only self is the disintegrated drug addict, the only reality their collapsed horizon. Everything implodes inside this paranoid subjectivity. It’s fascinating – in this novel alone, Dick shuts down a question he would normally push to the weirdest possible limits; it says an awful lot about the extent to which it stands out from the rest of his work.

In the early months of 1974, whilst writing the novel, Dick had a set of visions which formed the basis for his VALIS trilogy, and are also intricately detailed in his collected journals, ‘The Exegesis of Philip K Dick’. (Robert Crumb also turned them into a comic.) Based on the date, he called them the ‘2-3-74’ visions. These events convinced him – amongst much else – that there was another being within him: a first-century Christian called Thomas. Dick also came to believe, in all seriousness, that Anaheim, where he lived, was very clearly also first-century Rome or Palestine; that they were one and the same, and the two thousand years between them did not exist.

He was pretty confident about being Thomas and about his new interpretation of spacetime. As the PKD scholar Erik Davis remarks, “Dick dived into the deep end of the pool of weird”. He had ruptured reality and there was no looking back. As it stood, aspects of 2-3-74 had also been foreshadowed in his earlier writing, which made it all the more convincing. Through these visions, which refuted the idea of a single reality and a single identity, he barrelled towards a feeling of transcendence; towards something mystical and sacred that could eclipse everything that came before. You can see this play out in his novels – characters enter a process – a difficult struggle (just like Dick’s himself, which went on until he died of a stroke in ‘82) – to break free from the spell, or the entrapment, of their reality and reach something like salvation. It’s almost a Dick dialectic: reality plus rupture equals redemption.

A Scanner Darkly doesn’t do this, though. There’s no redemption, no light in the dark. This means that even as Dick was elaborating an entire metaphysics in his diaries, in Darkly, he was, very simply, writing his grief. “It is a very sad novel and very sad things happen to very good people,” he says. This makes it all the more a historical record, or even more accurately, a novel about drug addiction.

Since A Scanner Darkly then has no investment in predicting 1994, there’s no point asking what it got right about the future. Its few elements of science fiction, such as the ‘scramble suit’ that allows Bob to hide his identity in order to spy on himself (brilliantly depicted in Richard Linklater’s 2006 film adaptation, by the way); and the holographic projections of his house that he also uses to monitor himself, are background notes. Dick’s editor, Judy Del Ray, had to push him to make the novel more convincingly science fictional. “Judy, you know damn well the book is about the ‘60s,” he told her. Even so, he almost can’t help but write prescient novels. Even his novels were uncanny precogs – how meta.

In A Scanner Darkly, legal and governmental forces pretend to rehabilitate addicts, but inevitably, in this pessimistic universe, they enable them. The circulation of Substance D represents the epitome of a corrupt system, and making this point in the ‘70s might have made Dick seem a bit fringe, a bit of a conspiracy nut, but today he’s an anti-authority touchstone – a harbinger for exposing how corruption is at the very centre of things. There’s also, of course, the fact that surveillance is omnipresent in the novel, and that Bob Arctor watches and reports on himself. Dick’s surveillance dreams are the reality of social control today. You could also, if you want, say that Arctor’s split into two is an analogue of the real-life self and the self on the internet; the former watches the latter, and the latter is, of course, enmeshed in a web of monitoring. You could even go further and say that Substance D, causing self-surveillance and self-estrangement, is a symbol of identity dissociation in the same way the internet is.

But this is all conjecture. Really, Dick just wanted to talk about the friends he lost to drug abuse, and the pain it caused. In the Author’s Note at the end of the novel, Dick says, “This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did.” There’s a list of his friends who have either died or been damaged by drug addiction and he says, “I loved them all”. (He puts himself in that list too – to Phil: permanent pancreatic damage.)

Usually, when we think of Philip K Dick we think of his astonishing foresight. He played with simulacra, fractured realities and multiple selves in ways no-one else did and that uncannily anticipated the postmodern condition. The transformation of a novel like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep into the stunning noir of Blade Runner has also made him synonymous with the hypnotic aesthetic of future-dreaming late capitalism, which is, in fact, far removed from his grubby, shambolic novelistic worlds. His prescience and the aesthetic vision we’ve superimposed on him are the reasons why he’s so popular; he dreamed up the myths of the future and we have filled them out, made them real.

Yet I stick to what I’ve always believed about him – that pretty much the driving force of his writing was to make us empathise with others and with their suffering. A Scanner Darkly was, as he says, “from the deepest part of my life and heart” – it is bound up with his own experience of loss, grief and addiction. Yes, Dick was a brilliant thinker, but it’s about time we gave more space to the other aspect of his brilliance – that he was also fully in touch with his own humanity, and able to turn it into such dark, funny and visionary novels.

Thanks to Kiran for her help and to Mark Fisher (RIP) for his essay on A Scanner Darkly

[ledenews]

Suicide? No Way - Part 3

(Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of articles that will examine the passing of 19-year-old Colby Brown, a 2018 graduate of Cameron High School, who attended Marshall University in Huntington. Colby was pronounced dead on Aug. 26, 2019, after paramedics treated him in the middle of Interstate 64.) Darby Brown and her brother Colby had a thing, and it was the same thing he had with Shelby and his mom when it came to hitting the gym. The little brother babysat. “When are you going to gym? What machines are you using? How long are you there? How many reps? His questions were non-stop, but I know it was because he wanted me to do it the right way,” Darby said. “So, we would Snapchat each other when we were at the gym to be accountable. It really was one of our things.” But then there was August 26, 2019. Colby Brown was pronounced dead shortly after 7 p.m. after he worked out at his gym, attended both of his classes during the first day of his sophomore year, and played video games with five friends.

Colby was popular at Cameron High, a school he continued attending despite moving out of the district. “We were in contact on Snapchat at about 3:30 p.m. that day, but then at 6:35 p.m., I sent him a photo of me at the gym,” Darby said. “Usually, he would send something back that was supportive, but not that time. I didn’t hear back from him, and yes, I did think it was odd at the time because he always replied, especially when it came to the gym. “That day, though, the photo I sent him was opened, but there was no response, and I thought it was odd and rude that he wouldn’t answer me because he always did without fail,” she continued. “I mean, why would he open my message and not respond? Now, though, I’m not so sure it was him who opened that message. And then we found out that after that, his location was turned off on his phone right around the same time.” The end result is what is known. Colby Brown died that day on Interstate 64. A young lady who stopped when seeing him fall to the cement knelt over him during his final breaths. “It doesn’t add up, and that's why I still don’t know what really happened to Colby, and that is what is so infuriating,” Darby said. “I have all of these theories in my mind, but I don’t have enough information to make sense of a single one of them. I don’t know, and that’s why we’re so desperate for more information so we can know where he was and maybe why this happened. “It’s just not right. It’s been over five months, and we still don’t know anything new other than I don’t have my brother anymore,” she said. “And the state police still have not given back his phone because the investigation is said to be ongoing, but I wish they would just give it to us so we can go find the answers like we have been since this accident happened.”

Colby's family created this collage showing the young man at various ages. ‘Thank you, sir. May I have another?’ Pledging a fraternity was a discussed topic. His mother and his sisters were anti-frat for reasons of their own, but Colby was surrounded daily by members of the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity. His roommates and the boys with whom he was playing video games on the day he died, were mostly Alpha Sig members. If Colby had, in fact, decided to pledge to join his friends, no one in his immediate family was informed. “He had told us that he wasn’t really interesting in joining a fraternity, but all of his friends were fraternity members of Alpha Sigma Phi,” Gwen explained. “One of his roommates was the president of the fraternity, so I guess it is possible that he finally gave in and decided to pledge. “But if that turns out to be the truth, I’ll be very surprised,” she said. “But he was growing up, living on his own, and was making his own decisions. I do not know if he made that decision on the day he died, though.”

Gwen captured this image from a news station reporting on her son's death. Alpha Sigma Phi is a national fraternity with more than 8,000 undergraduate members and 56,000 living alumni, according to the organization’s website. It was founded on Dec. 6, 1845, at Yale University, is the 10th oldest national fraternity in the nation, and is one of 12 fraternities at Marshall University. Investigations into behavior and hazing have taken place at Marshall concerning fraternities and sororities during the past five years. Jon Crow, once a family friend and a classmate of Colby’s, did not say anything when he visited for Colby’s funeral about the fraternity or whether or not he had decided to become a pledge. “All he told us was the same story over and over again,” Gwen recalled. “They all smoked a bowl of weed, and then Colby went downstairs because he didn’t feel good, and then he just left. That really doesn’t sound like something Colby would ever do. “I mean, he never just left without saying goodbye, so I don’t know. Obviously, we know he did leave, but like that?”

This card from his freshman year at Marshall University has Colby's name and Alpha Sigma Phi as the listed organization. Herd Life? The legal drinking age in West Virginia is the same as it is in the other 49 states – 21 – but that wasn’t an obstacle for Colby and his friends, Darby insisted. Why not? “Colby found out during his freshman year that there are bars in Huntington where you could get a special card and those bars will allow you to drink if you are pledging the right fraternity,” Darby claimed. “And yes, even if you are underaged. And Colby did get one of those cards from one of his friends, but he told us he used it only to go to that bar and that he was never really going to pledge the fraternity.

Colby's sister Darby insists that some establishments near Marshall University issue cards to fraternity members so patrons younger than 21 years old can consume alcohol. “I told him that it wasn’t his type of thing and I really didn’t want him to get involved with it because you hear so many stories from all over the country. But I also had a friend die at WVU because of hazing. Nolan Burch died because of that culture, and that made me worry about my little brother,” she said. “When it came to college, I was the person he went to because I graduated college just before he was a freshman at Marshall.” Once his personal belongings were collected from his apartment and his car, Gwen did find a new card for the Premiere Pub & Grill with no name or organization listed. The question Colby’s family has asked is whether the new card was another gift, or was it earned somehow this time? “I don’t know if he had to do something for it. Maybe,” Darbie said. “But I don’t know if he had to do something his freshman year to get that card. He just acted as if he just had to be interested in pledging to get it, but as for his sophomore year, that’s something we never talked about. “His freshman year, he had a card for Jake’s, but that bar closed down, but he had a couple of cards in his wallet from a place call the Premiere, and one of his roommates, Jon Crow, was a bouncer at that place,” she explained. “If he went down to Huntington with the intentions of pledging that fraternity, he hid it from us, and that wouldn’t have been like him. He wasn’t a secretive person with us.”

The initial report conducted by law enforcement indicated that Colby Brown had taken his own life. Heroin in Huntington The entire state of West Virginia has gravely suffered from the opioid crisis, but the Huntington area? It was stricken. The largest city in Cabell County is met with many of the same challenges law enforcement encounters here in Ohio County because of its proximity to state borders. One after another. One day in 2017, more than 20 people overdosed on opioids laced with fentanyl in Huntington, and the city since has been a focus during the epidemic. But opioids? Heroin? Colby? “The only way he would do anything like that is if he didn’t know it,” Darby insisted. “And that stuff didn’t come back on the first toxicology report that we finally received from the private investigator. All that was on it was marijuana and nothing else.

Colby had earned a Promise Scholarship and had plans to earn a business degree at Marshall University. “I know there was mention of him doing mushrooms, but that isn’t listed on that report either,” she continued. “He liked weed, and we all knew it so that is why we are anxious to get the second toxicology report that hopefully will be completed soon.” In 2017, 1,019 West Virginians died of an opioid overdose, and in 2018, 900 perished, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. Quick response teams are operational in 22 of the state’s 55 counties, and the first squad was formed in 2017 in Cabell County. A paramedic, a law enforcement officer, and a recovery coach are involved. “I know Huntington is ground zero for opioid deaths, but I also know my brother would have never gone there,” Darby said. “He was too concerned with his health and his body to ever do anything like that of his own accord. Now, was he slipped something without him knowing? We don’t know. “Colby has seen people in our family struggle with addiction, and it’s something he paid attention to and something he always said he would avoid at all costs,” she said. “I know he would not get on that path of opioid drugs even if he wanted to experiment with something. That was something he would never get involved with; that I know. He saw it destroy too many people.”

Colby was unable to take Penny to Marshall for his freshman year, but once he secured an apartment with friends, his canine went to college with him. A Shiny Penny No More Gwen’s voice changes when she begins to talk about her son. It lowers into persistent somberness and often is difficult to hear during conversations. She and Colby’s sisters are not alone in their sorrow. Penny, a canine Colby took to Huntington with him for his sophomore year, has changed, too. “At first, Penny would look for him any time she heard a car door or an engine rev up,” Gwen said. “But now, she acts depressed and just wants to sleep all of the time. She’s not the same dog she was, and she’s a 6-year-old Boxer. I just think she’s sad and that she’s lonely. She misses her best friend. “She doesn’t like to be left alone, either,” she continued. “Penny seemed angry during the first few weeks, but now she just seems so damn sad.”

Colby traveled with his family to Myrtle Beach in July 2019 and posed with his sister Darby for this fun photo. The family has been contacted since this series of stories began on January 11, and they are hoping and praying that more people step forward with any information they may know to be true. “That’s really what we want, so I’m glad that some of his friends are now reaching out to us to help us fill in the parts of his timeline that we don’t know yet,” Darby explained. “No piece of information is too small, either, because this is a big, giant puzzle we’re putting together ourselves because of the lack of help from the investigators. “If you talked to him the day before or the day of Colby’s death, that’s important to us, and if you talked to any of the people he was around during those days, that’s also important to us,” she insisted. “I would love to hear from more people; that’s for sure.” (Photos provided by the Brown family) Read the full article