Since I’m not working again for another week or two, I’ve launched back into memoir revisions and it’s going really well. Today I polished up through chapter 9 which is 17 double-spaced pages about the first time I shot up Meth. Fun stuff – the writing I mean, not the Meth … although, well DUH cuz, yeah… that was too, at the time.
I read every addiction memoir I can get my hands on – you could say I’m hooked on 'em, but well, that would just be stupid, so never mind. Anyway, it’s always fun when I’m reading a new one and the author manages to capture my exact feelings, especially regarding those increasingly elusive memories of the High. Like in
Down and Out on Murder Mile, when Tony O’Neill, an ex-junkie, writes about preparing to shoot some dope he just scored with a friend.
And this was it—this was beauty—no sickness, no worries, no nothing, except friends and the safety of heroin and the crack we were about to smoke and a whole day to waste—nothing but days and days and weeks to waste—no matter, life could not intrude into this sacred space.
That was my perception too, a sick and twisted reality where I felt
safe and my activities were
sacred whenever I scored some crack or cooked up my own batch of rock in preparation of spending a day or two (or three) smoking it up in my boyfriend's $1.2 million pad while he was out on tour. Until the shame, guilt and paranoia crept in and the voices whispering from every single tree on our massive lot freaked me out so badly I had to crouch on the floor of the upstairs hallway with a gun I wasn't 100% sure how to use, gripped tightly in my little hand. Yeah... fun stuff alright.
Recently I went to a book signing at Austin’s uber-fabulous, locally owned bookstore
BookPeople where father and son, David & Nic Sheff, did a couple very powerful readings from their respective memoirs. A few weeks later, while devouring these heart wrenching yet ultimately uplifting stories, I again found my own experiences and emotions very closely mirrored.
In his raw, wrenching, phenomenally personal account,
Tweak, Growing Up on Methamphetamines, Nic Sheff writes,
Growing up I’d heard, you know, never to do heroin. Like, the warnings were everywhere and I was scared – do heroin, get hooked. No one ever mentioned crystal to me. I’d done a little coke, Ecstasy, whatever – I could take it or leave it. But early that morning, when I took those off-white crushed shards up that blue, cut plastic straw – well, my whole world pretty much changed after that. There was a feeling like – my God, this is what I’ve been missing my entire life. It completed me. I felt whole for the first time.
That quote pretty much sums up exactly how I felt the first time I did Meth, which incidentally I'd never heard of until about an hour before I did it, intravenously no less. Like Nic, I was afraid of heroin (the only drug I never used, though I eventually smoked opium a few times). Up to that point in my life I'd had pot, acid, mushrooms and Ecstasy a couple times each, but my "gateway drug" really was alcohol which, along with the cocaine I'd become addicted to 4 years later, also made me feel "whole."
Because Nic’s father David Sheff was a successful writer already, I probably looked forward to studying his style of writing more than reading this particular story, that of a non-addict dealing with the disease from the other side. And in fact his prose was as beautiful and brilliant as I could’ve possibly hoped, yet it was his
story that captivated me, so much so that I literally couldn’t put his book down, night after night, almost falling asleep with it still gripped in my hands.
In
Beautiful Boy, a Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction David recalls being taught in Alanon (a 12 step program for the loved ones of addicts),
You didn’t Cause it, you can’t Control it, and you cannot Cure it. He says he accepts the last two thirds of that statement but also that,
I still don’t fully accept the initial C. Instead, I recognize that I will never know how much I caused or contributed to it...I don’t absolve myself—even now...I am so sorry.
Now, I know parents don’t mean to fuck up their kids when they ignore them, brush them off, and otherwise erode their confidence by withholding love, acceptance or affection. It’s not usually with malicious intent that they emotionally abandon them or lash out at them under duress. But mistakes are made because parents are human and thus flawed, no matter how much their children want to believe they’re perfect – the very delusion that sets kids up for getting so hurt. Thinking that goes,
"If Mom and Dad are gods, and they don’t like me or think very highly of me, well then those must be the facts, right? I'm unlovable, even worthless, I guess..." makes perfect sense, to a toddler.
Near the end of his remarkable and important book about the various manifestations of addiction,
America Anonymous, Eight Addicts in Search of a Life, Benoit Denizet-Lewis says,
If I believe anything about addiction, it’s that its roots can usually be found in childhood. (In one study of 872 boys, low self-esteem at eleven mostly predicted drug dependency at twenty.) Not every young victim of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse develops an addiction, just as not every addict had a terrible childhood. But if neuroscientists truly want to combat addiction, a good start would be to develop a pill that buffers kids against the struggles and mistakes of their families.
In the 12 years that I've been informally studying addiction (not to mention my 15 years of "hands-on" research), it’s become clear there are 2 major contributing factors. One is a genetic predisposition – it really does run in families
genetically, as in through “nature,” completely aside from the effects of “nurture.” The other factor is childhood trauma (here's the "nurture" part) and by that I don’t mean just the kind of shocking physical and/or emotional abuse you hear on the news, because to sensitive children, something as common as divorce or a lack of quality attention can cause a traumatic shift in the delicate, budding sense of stability or self-confidence a young child has managed (hopefully) to establish. Voilà – trauma. And while growing up with
one of those 2 issues can contribute to future addiction, the odds increase dramatically when someone is saddled with both the genetic predisposition
and childhood trauma.
I used to feel such shame for the pain I inadvertently caused my parents as an addict, but later I realized it was very likely equal to the amount of pain they inadvertently caused me as I was growing up. Depression and stress can make people act in ways that hurt their children in exactly the same way addiction causes children to act in ways that hurt their parents. It’s actually kind of a cool form of karma.
David Sheff says of his son Nic’s behavior,
Often when he was using – his behavior unconscionable, his self-destructive course unfathomable and unstoppable – I felt, How could he do this to me? How could he do this to [our family]? ... [Then, after reading Nic's book] I learned anew that he wasn’t doing it to us. He was doing it to himself. We were innocent bystanders, collateral damage.
In the book’s Afterward, David then delves into how our government is handling what many of us believe to be the biggest (costliest) problem our country faces.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs in 2008, Leonard J. Paulozzi, M.D., MPH, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, summed: “The mortality rates from unintentional drug overdose have risen steadily since the early 1970s, and over the past ten years they have reached historic highs.” First-time users are younger, the drugs themselves are stronger, and there are many more types of drugs to abuse. Users can get their drug of choice whenever and wherever they want. Yet in spite of these facts, the federal government boasts that we’re making progress. Statistics are manipulated, misused, and ignored to mask the fact that we’re playing a zero-sum game, because addicts, unless treated, will find drugs.
The government’s handling of the problem would be laughable if the implications weren’t so disastrous. Four thousand Americans have died over the course of five years in Iraq, whereas more than twenty thousand die each year of drug overdoses alone, and that number continues to rise. In many regions of the country, overdoses have or will soon surpass automobile accidents as the leading cause of non-natural death. Consider the related tragedies that can result from drug use – crime, accidents, suicide, drug- and alcohol-caused illnesses, lost productivity – and you’ll begin to fathom the enormity of the problem, much of which is hidden.
It’s hidden because most addiction-related deaths are officially ascribed to other causes: suicide, homicide, auto and other accidents, heart attacks, hypertension, pulmonary disorder, strokes, and other brain hemorrhages, hepatitis and other infections, HIV/AIDS, liver disease, respiratory disease, kidney disease, septicemia, and on and on. Health insurance companies – and Medicare and Medicaid – often refuse to pay (or pay at a lower rate) for treatment of illnesses or injuries caused by drugs or alcohol, so doctors trend to report a diagnosis that will ensure payment. Thirty-two states still enforce statutes – the Uniform Accident and Sickness Policy Provision Laws, enacted in 1947 – that allow insurance companies to refuse to cover medical care in hospital emergency rooms if alcohol or drugs contributed to the patient’s condition. Also, payment of life insurance may be denied if drug or alcohol abuse led to death, so doctors and medical examiners do grieving families the “favor” of citing a death’s immediate cause – an accident or an ailment – rather than the underlying, primary one. And apart from these more practical reasons, addiction remains a secret because of the overwhelming shame associated with it. Last year, when the scion of a prominent Midwestern business family died suddenly, newspaper accounts cited the cause of death stated on the coroner’s death certificate: injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident. The lethal dose of heroin in the young man’s bloodstream was never mentioned.
While we go on denying the ubiquity of addiction, we marginalize and stigmatize its victims. According to a national survey called The Face of Recovery, one quarter of the people in recovery have been denied a job or a promotion or have had trouble getting insurance; seven in ten reported that they had experienced shame or social embarrassment. In our society, addicts are viewed as having a character deficiency rather than a serious illness. We ignore their condition except to criminalize it and the dangerous behavior it can lead to. In addition, the threat of arrest and prosecution make it less likely that addicts will admit their problem and seek early treatment. So the disease progresses, making it more likely that addicts will become criminals, often dangerous ones.
We fail miserably when it comes to education about drug abuse and addiction. The week-long education sessions provided at school pale – in quality and quantity – in comparison to messages that promote use and abuse. We fail at prevention too because we’re inept at diagnosing and treating the psychological and social problems that create fertile ground for addiction. “A presentation on the dangers of drug use will have little impact on the likelihood that a child who is experiencing depression, anxiety, learning disabilities, eating or conduct disorders, low self-esteem, or sexual or physical abuse or neglect, or who has no hope for the future, will self-medicate with drugs and alcohol,” writes Joseph A. Califano Jr., the former U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare, in the book High Society.
Stigma and prejudice have also curtailed financial support for research into addiction. As a result, few effective treatment options have been developed, and thus addiction carries a relatively poor prognosis, which reinforces its stigma. (Many people think addicts can’t get well.) Addicts who manage to find their way to a good program may find it impossible to pay for it; costs for the most highly recommended programs may run at $30,000 to $50,000 a month – or more. Therefore few addicts get the long-term, comprehensive care the need.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an estimated 23 million Americans are hooked on drugs or alcohol, representing an annual economic loss of $524 billion. Go ahead and read that line again, I’ll wait.
Now, chew on this tasty statistic for a moment: For every dollar spent on treatment for addiction, taxpayers save more than seven in other services, largely through reduced crime and medical fees and increased productivity. A visit to the emergency room, for instance, costs as much as a month in rehab.
And one more: Each year we spend, or rather misspend, more than $50 billion on the war on drugs (total so far is more than $2 trillion). On prisons we spend billions more as a result of drug use. And yet the annual budget of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which includes almost all drug-related research and development, is less than $1 billion.
In
America Anonymous, Benoit Denizet-Lewis asks the question, Why do some recover and others die? He doesn’t know, but believes the “experts” can teach us – meaning the addicts themselves. He writes,
We’ve historically “treated” [addicts] in two ineffective ways: We’ve either locked them in prison, occasionally offering cursory rehabilitation there but more often hoping they’ll be scared straight and return to their drug-infested communities with a newfound resolve to "Just Say No.” Or, we’ve mandated them to short-term treatment programs, barely scratching the surface of their problems before patting them on the back and returning them to their drug-infested communities—but not before reminding them to avoid the “people, places, and things” that might cause them to relapse.
The [Drug Treatment Alternative-to-Prison] program recognizes the absurdity of both approaches. It understands that recovery rarely happens in thirty days and that it is about far more than stopping the addictive behavior. Recovery demands that addicts learn “all the adult things you weren’t doing because you were too busy getting fucked up,” [a drug counselor] once told me. Long-term treatment allows for that kind of process.
On the last page of Benoit's book he echoes one of my long-held opinions, one which has compelled me for years to speak and write openly about my own past addictions. Benoit quotes his friend Jody, a recovering addict and drug counselor, who says,
You can have the best treatment center in the world ... but nothing will really change in this country until people in recovery, and those who care about people in recovery, decide that they’ve seen enough heartbreak, enough needless death. People in recovery need to stand up and demand to be counted. We don’t have nearly enough people out there screaming until something changes, until we start devoting real money and resources to fighting this disease. Where are the millions of addicts in this country who are sober and have turned around their lives? They need to be on the front lines of this war, but they’re at their AA and NA meetings in church basements, talking to each other. And that’s great, and that’s important, and personal recovery depends on it, but man, that’s not enough anymore! I mean, when will we wake up and flip the fucking script?”
Speaking of scripts, I just wrote a helluva good one about Meth addiction. I’ve also written an addiction memoir that I’m more than one third of the way through revising. I’m also almost halfway through writing a collection of short stories on the topic of addiction, one of which has been published already. I just had an essay on addiction accepted for publication and I intend to blog, every now and then, on it too. I know this is a long post but I felt it was important so thanks to anyone who managed to stick with me here. In fact, while I’m at it, thanks to everyone who managed to stick with me *out there* too – not the easiest thing to do when you love an addict.
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optimistic
authentic
bouncy
irritated
okay
determined
busy
sympathetic
worried
contemplative
