Late in the Viet Nam conflict, I was loitering around the hootch when one of the troops burst out of the low slung building to spew vomit across the compound.
Gross.
That was my first-hand introduction to the effects of smoking heroin. It turns out that the nausea is part of the deal, it’s necessary if you want to get the most out of the high. This is a physical reality of opiate addiction.
Opiate addiction was an extensive problem for American soldiers. The disease of addiction destroyed morale, took lives, and killed my peers. It was the quest to get out of one’s own skin, to be somewhere, to be somebody we were not. Viet Nam was a good training ground for that.
Let’s say my recovering friend, we’ll call him Kenny, says that explanations of what it’s like to be an alcoholic/addict are lost on folks who haven’t been in the user’s shoes, so those with the disease just give up trying to explain. Delusions and hallucinations are part of the high…they keep it interesting for the user. To lose feelings of inadequacy, the feeling that the user doesn’t belong where he is, and get the rosy glow and elevated mood anybody who takes opiates for pain can experience are what the alcoholic/addict thinks they seek. Kenny says that users are really “filling the hole in the soul”, or “getting out of themselves”.
I read a cover story in Time magazine when I was 18 years old that explained that researchers had found the “alcoholic gene”…complete with a spectrograph featuring the twisted, gnarled gene. Appropriate, eh? I was sold, and still agree that alcoholism is genetic.
Kenny’s winning me over to the theory that if you drink enough and use enough drugs, you can warp that gene in a person born a “normie”. This leads to fun in addiction land, as defined by the book Alcoholics Anonymous: a mental craving accompanied by a physical allergy, which gets worse, never better. When an addict or alcoholic uses, a chain reaction is set off. They crave the great drug: MORE! When they don’t get their drug, the user gets sick; that’s the physical sickness most folks identify as the problem, especially concerning opiates like Oxycodone. Kenny says the general public has no idea that there’s more to addiction than the physical symptoms, and the drive to drink and use is overpowering, the user must fill that hole in his soul.
Kenny has friends who would kill to get the kind of hallucinations you may get when taking oxycodone…they love talking with people who aren’t there…people who are there are frequently a pain in the butt who just want the user to quit using drugs and alcohol. Their nightmare is who they have to face after the hallucinations go away…themselves.
Finally, Kenny says the oxycodone and other medications found in medicine cabinets across the country are like heaven in a bottle to an addict. If you don’t need them for pain, dump them. Anybody who has a problem is driven to look in that cabinet by an unstoppable compulsion. Leaving them hanging around is called enabling my friend, which would call for another story featuring a different friend, we’ll call her Marie.
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