I know a lot of people who have succumb to the indulgences that were once fun and seemed harmless .Smoking and drinking were perhaps seen ,from the point of a child , as how to appear adult in those years when we used to add a year to our actual age. Remember being fifteen and saying you were sixteen as well as those years before you turned twenty one . Did you alter your drivers license? Through adulthood we faced many other temptations that , perhaps,were fun at first .Those seemingly innocent self indulgences came along in social situations. Everybody was doing it so it didn't seem to be so bad at the time.It was fun , things were fun , we were young and winning all our fights not reflective or bitter but hopeful and yearning.
Somewhere along the way the fun became a habit. If it was big enough , a habit became a maintenance. The social indulgence became an obsession.This habit building succession can be applied to many things including social communications like "Myspace" or "Facebook" but the physical challenges of drinking , smoking , and recreational drugs are more immediate,destructive, and consuming to the individual.The social indulgence became an activity instead of a sideline , a side dish to human interaction.
"What are you going to do this weekend?"
"We're going to drink till our gums recede."
At this point it might be still a social event however the timing becomes habitual. The drinker learns when his "Bar" opens and looks forward to the time that he can drink. Security is having a safe amount of booze available at all times . It may be a six pack or perhaps a case of beer , a quart , a gallon of vodka , an ounce or ten joints of pot, a gram of cocaine, or even just a pack of cigarettes.The body starts craving , the timing calls, a certain amount must be imbibed. The individual cannot see the progression objectively at some point in the progression of the monster taking over , the addiction taking it's due. Sometimes friends and family see signs of the problem , sometimes not. The individual does not want to hear negative remarks because objectivity is gone.
Sometimes drinking can be analogous with a disease. Actually, in my opinion much of any addiction should be recognized as a disease. A disease is bigger than will power and moral legislation. A disease isn't treated with law enforcement or supernatural promises. A disease sometimes can be treated with other drugs, medications to alleviate the need for the habitual problem. Sometimes the replacement can be as bad or worse than the original addiction , as in the case of methadone substituting for heroin .
In the early nineteen sixties the drug LSD was used to treat alcoholism with some good results. There might have been other positive uses for LSD but for the campaign of our government to stop the recreational use by the public before it was made illegal.The legal uses by psychoanalyst were cut off by the government deceptions of the era ,for instance the campaign to spread the word that LSD could cause malformations of fetuses like the another drug in the news at that time,thalidomide. This was a lie ,a myth perhaps created in an effort to stop the experimentation of people with a (then)legal substance.It is very possible that LSD could be used to treat other addictions but that will not be an acceptable theory to be tested in the current climate.What we see as laymen are "Bad trips" which are over-publicized while the benefits of the exploration of the self and the bringing to light of the sub-conscious has been neglected.Recently I was a approached to edit a theoretic paper on the "Eleusinian Mysteries"of ancient Greece.The theory was associated with an earlier period of time in Egypt .The theory had to do with the use of drugs during initiations and rites. The drug mentioned was ergot which had hallucinogenic effect , similar to LSD.While the paper was well constructed and well researched and documented, I advised the psychoanalyst to avoid any association with LSD. LSD has gone the way of "Pot" and the campaign "worked" to demonize and see the relatively harmless as producing horrendous habitual problems. The government has yet to truthfully associate alcohol with the problems it brings about and that is probably because of the strong alcohol lobby hanging around congress and their "Parties".
The idea that "I can control it," is a recognisable phrase to addicts. They might actually believe the sentence as they mention this idea to others but later ,when their bar opens,they have to attend to their ministries.One birthday , my step father gave me all the domestic sherries as a present.I did drink them all eventually and one that I didn't care for at the time was a dry sherry. It had a bitter taste and I drank it slowly over ice. Time after time when I decided to cut down I would drink the dry sherry with the idea that because I didn't like the taste I wouldn't drink as much. What actually happened was that I kept drinking more .I drank two bottles at a time , then three.Once I recognized that I was loaded I thought I might as well go back to my regular choice of booze.The point is that I found a way to sneak around my own limitations that I had put on myself.Later I found that the only way for me to stop was to stop and not to ween myself off gradually. There is no self control , that is the nature of addiction. That is the nature of disease as well. You can't recover from a common cold by willing yourself to stop sneezing.
The physical addictions are more immediate and demanding monsters.On the TV show"So You Think You Can Dance"there was a dance choreographed to show a dancer playing the part of "Addiction"torturing his partner,a beautiful blond young woman.It was an outstanding depiction of the theme as he caressed her ,pulled her, dragged her, bullied her, and successfully continued to drag her back to his control. It brought tears to my eyes because I recognized him.I think that perhaps addiction as a whole might classify as a disease much as does alcoholism.Almost ,like a virus,though small,it can become bigger than the victim.A social event brought many people innocently to drugs but as the plot developed , other people were no longer needed,only the habit.Treatment should not involve the idea of "Just say no!",moral legislation,law enforcement,or the supernatural.Keep up your own regiment ,if you can,but try not to blame yourself,if you fail sometime.
Almost two years ago I lost another good friend to the beast.His wife contacted me and said he was taking a lot of laxatives and wasn't interested in her anymore. I told her to look for his stash and she found the percadon.They went to the doctor and the doctor found a cracked rib and prescribed "percadon" , so now he was getting them from the doctor and from the black market. As things progressed he went on methadone maintenance to get off the percadon. He loved the methadone high but this treatment makes your bones brittle. He nodded out in his kitchen ,fell, and broke his hip. After the hip replacement surgery he was found dead in his hospital room slumped over his guitar.There was nothing I could say to him by phone as his phone seemed to magically run out of battery whenever I confronted him with the issue of his re-found addiction.My helplessness was nothing next to his own in the throws of the ecstasy of his habit which was a government supported maintenance treatment.
I know too many women right now who are wrapped tight in their cups. They speak with me sometimes sounding like I did as a young man , bragging to me about their sexual contacts, speaking too loud, and not focusing.Manliness isn't really attractive in women.The aggressive behavior is annoying and transparent. Neither of the three women can see themselves as I see them. They are all in their fifties and they wouldn't have a lot in common, if they even knew one another,yet they would be happy drinking together.The loss of control , focus, depression, and aggressive behavior would put them all in the same category , over compensating for their insecurities , calling me out of the blue though I never had a relationship with any of them.I wish there were something I could say to allow them to see that I have done the same , have known others who have suffered worse , even death , in the throws of their addiction and they aren't alone in the fact that the problem might be beyond their control. I did confront one of the women by day when I knew she would have a sober moment and told her that she calls me like an old boyfriend when she gets drunk.I haven't been able to reach her again for well over a year. Now, I try not to be too blatant in my observations.
I got a call last night which woke me up as I had to get up this morning . It was near two and I had probably been fast asleep for at least a half an hour when the phone rang. In a stupor I got up as I forgot to put the phone nearby. I fumbled ,looking for the phone but didn't reach it in time , standing next to it as it stopped. I went downstairs to see who called on the caller ID and I knew it was someone who knew me from way back when people called me around the clock. I called her this afternoon ,no answer. she eventually called back and said ,"You called me?" Of course , I told her I was calling her back . she said she didn't notice what time it was at the time she called . There wasn't a lot to say but I mentioned I had been thinking about her as I was writing this blog article about addiction.It wasn't like I was ever one of her old boyfriends , it was her husband who I had known since 1966 and died a couple of years ago( the methadone story above). Addictions have a way of being passed along to people close by as well as the children. She mentioned that his son was going into something "Blue" , a drug she couldn't explain but it is all the same drug , the same , monster , the same reliance , the same self indulgence. I knew that she also must have had a booze moment to call me.
I wish there were something I could say that would change anything about the addictive personality and destructive things that go along with it.I have spoken with people and recognized that they were just pretending and not really focusing on what they were pretending with me, namely that they were staying away from the monster. It does take one to know one and you can't kid a kidder and all that jazz . Recognizing the lie doesn't help a thing in my heart. Anything can be over done. I have a friend who carries a thirty pound bag and another ten pounds or more in a second bag. She didn't always carry all that weight but it seemed to accumulate. There was nothing I could do to keep her from carrying the forty pounds everywhere. The baggage was keeping her from getting work and people looked at her strangely. I told her the truth as I saw it and tried to get her to come out without the weight but she would even take it to the bathroom when she visited here.Eventually she lost her place , the second time in two years.Her habit brought her down yet she continued to cling to it.This is addiction, this is sickness, this is the nature of a disease. It becomes bigger than the victims needs. I wish there were something I could say that could have changed anything.
