February 6, 2004

• How my Tastes Have Changed

  
  

  It was my night to drive the rehab van to the NA meeting again.  I drove last week, but the alternate driver had an event to attend at her child’s school tonight, so we’ve altered the schedule, and now her turn will be next week and we start all over with alternating weeks.

  
  

  I have realized that one thing these meetings do for me is to make me remember how I was and how I have changed.  I need to remember that, because that’s what I’m supposed to talk about when I share, and I must talk, y’know?  It is good for me, also, to remember how I was and to observe how I have changed.  It gets me oriented in time, so to speak–reminds me of the road I’ve traveled and where it has brought me.  That’s a lot like what I think that old woman in my dream was urging me towards when she told me to start journaling.

  
  

  “Drug of choice” is a phrase often heard at our meetings.  Forty-some years ago, my drug of choice was a cocktail of adrenaline, dopamine and endorphins.  I was a chronic risk-taker, thrill-seeker, addicted to my own brain chemistry, not only the adrenaline of fear and exhilaration, but the dopamine of orgasm and the endorphins of rough sex or willful SI.  By 1963 or ’64 (although I did not know this at the time) I’d reached adrenal exhaustion.  The most obvious sign of that, although no one ever told me this and I found it for myself decades later in my study while trying to find cures for what ailed me, was the onset of asthma and other severe allergic symptoms.

  
  

  It was then that I started seeking out exogenous highs… when the endogenous highs began to fail me, I started looking to drugs to reproduce those feelings.  That was about the time, also, that I became old enough to legally buy liquor.  I seldom ever needed to buy it, though.  Men were always happy to buy me drinks, and I was always a cheap date, a one or two drink drunk.  But I hated and still detest the taste of alcohol.  Nor do I enjoy puking, falling down, and being told the next day about my bizarre behavior of the night before.  But the booze from the bars and liquor stores, and the tranquilizers and painkillers from the doctors, were the only drugs I knew, the only things then that I had access to.

  
  

  Then, in 1965, I went to Japan.  While I was there I heard that a new drug, LSD, was out there, available.  A few years previously I had read a Life Magazine article about Dr. Leary’s work at Harvard.  I looked for LSD, asked around, and heard from several of the GIs I knew (I was there as a guest of Uncle Sam, an Air Force dependent) that they knew where to get some, but no one came up with any in the time I was in Japan.   I was curious about it but not driven to seek it out, because what I had read about it did not attract me so much as intrique me.

  
  

  Then after I returned to the States, one night on duty in a convalescent hospital, I was in the nurses’ station reading the PDR.  The description of methamphetamine grabbed my imagination.  Its therapeutic use was as an antidepressant, but it had interesting side-effects:  it relieved symtoms of asthma and allergies, gave energy.  All of that sounded great to me.   I’d been depressed since childhood and the drugs the doctors gave me (barbiturates, opiates, tranquilizers)  only made it worse–not to mention what alcohol did to me.  I started seeking a source.

  
  

  It took a while, but I found my source of supply:  outlaw bikers.  First, they supplied me with marijuana, their second drug of choice after alcohol.  At the time, Bay Area bikers were dealing amphetamines, big Mexican “white crosses”, four-way scored tablets that tasted vile but did the job.  The bikers, however, around there and then, did not approve of using the speed, and they avoided all psychedelics.  That changed in time, but for a while my ol’man was bucking the system by buying speed for me.  He did it though.  That biker who claimed me as his property liked the mood it put me into, and it was cheaper at only 5 cents a hit (how times have changed!) than either booze or weed was.

  
  

  Coming down was misery, so I tried to avoid running out of speed.  Then I got into the company of needle freaks and discovered something that wasn’t there with the pills:  a rush.  I rushed.  I ran.  I crashed and burned, hard, in jail.  But before then, I’d put not just a lot of amphetamines in my veins, but lots of other drugs too.  Along the way I’d found some LSD, and even a few downs that I could enjoy injecting.  And now all of that is ‘way behind me.  Psychedelics are, as Dr. Leary said, self-limiting.  Enough is enough and eventually one realizes that.  I kicked the needle, the ups and the downs, thirty-some years ago and have had no strong desire to go back.  I had fantasies.  I had a series of dope dreams while I was locked up, dreams of chasing down the meth, scoring, finding works, trying to find a vein… I never managed to get off in one of those dreams, but did come close a few times. 

  
  

  In the real-life waking world, I didn’t even come close.  Various drugs have come into my hands and into my body for various therapeutic and recreational uses, but for all intents and purposes my addictive use of illicit drugs ended over thirty years ago.  Following the advice of a bunch of abstinent heroin addicts who ran a residential rehab center, I substituted sugar, chocolate and caffeine for the meth.  They almost killed me, those last three licit drugs.  They were so readily available and socially acceptable that nobody, not even I myself, recognized my addiction for what it was for decades.  Even now I encounter drug addicts who express doubts about the addictive characteristics of such “foods” as sugar, casein, gluten, etc.  That junkies can ease their withdrawal by substituting those substances might, one might think, be a clue, but many people are still clueless.  Not so for many biochemists and nutritionists.  Their research confirms my experience.

  
  

  I have been “clean”, abstinent from my first, last and most difficult to kick drug of choice for over fifteen months.  I quit the sugar-casein-gluten cocktail (my favorite delivery system was always cinnamon rolls) on Halloween of 2002.  That’s the date that, by right, in a perfect and rational world, should be my NA “birthday”.  But it isn’t because, for one thing, I wasn’t “in the program” then.  I didn’t have help to quit.  The program didn’t even help me quit my social and recreational marijuana use, but that’s the occasion that I mark with my NA “clean date” of May 23, 2003, the day Greyfox came off his last alcohol binge and quit tobacco and weed (and cut down on sugar) at the same time.  I quit smoking then because when he quit I could see no reason to go on growing and smoking the nasty stuff.  Besides, it always gave me the munchies and made it harder to resist my sugar cravings.

  
  

  It was that easy to quit pot, easier really than to go on smoking, no detox or withdrawal symptoms, no cravings, just an occasional habitual blip of an urge to indulge at some time when I’d habitually indulged before, always followed quickly by the recall that I’m now a non-smoker.  That’s how I know that I wasn’t ever addicted to cannabis.  There are two sorts of biochemical responses to pot:  some people are stimulated by it, while others are relaxed and sedated by it.  I’m one of the former, Greyfox one of the latter.  It has to do with brain chemistry and the balance of neurotransmitters in individual bodies.  From some informal anecdotal research I’ve conducted I’ve learned that, at least in my small sample, it is those who are sedated by it who tend to become addicted to it.

  
  

  There are those, too, I’m told, who don’t become addicted to sugar.  I was addicted to it probably before I was weaned from the bottle and that “formula” of condensed milk and corn syrup.  I have to really watch my consumption of fruit, and should probably avoid fruit juices altogether, because there’s just too much concentrated sugar there and if I forget what I’m drinking and try to quench thirst with it, I get a sugar high and then have to grab the reins, stop the binge, take my amino acid supplements (the neurotransmitter precursors that quell my cravings) and get back on track.

  
  

  And that is how my tastes have changed.  Until fifteen months ago, my attempts to kick the sugar jones were sporadic and apparently insincere.  I’d quit for a while but if someone tempted me with chocolate candy or a cinnamon roll I’d indulge.  Sometimes I would “cheat” and indulge secretly, as just about every addict has done when “trying” to quit.  Trying to make people think we are trying to quit is more like the truth.  Addictive behavior is similar no matter what the drug is.  Abstinence and recovery are also similar, no matter what drug we’ve left behind.  In meetings, if I just talk about my “drug of choice” and don’t say it’s sugar, everyone can relate to my experiences.  But of course I don’t often do it that way.  I’m too up-front and in-your-face to have any fun dissembling.  And that, too, is one of my tastes that has changed.  Oh how I used to love putting people on, but that’s another story….

  
  

  P.S.
  It was a wretched, horrible night for driving, weather-wise.  Snowing lightly as we started on our way into town, it increased all the way.  If I’d had to stop at the first traffic light after I pulled away from the rehab in that van, I’d have skidded into the intersection, but luckily the light changed and I was able to ease around the corner with only a slight loss of traction.

  
  

  Greyfox met me back at the rehab in his car and we headed back toward Wasilla on our way home.  The road was blocked by a wreck, apparently a high-speed head-on.  We turned around and took an alternate route.  Before we’d gone three miles we noticed traffic slowed ahead of us, easing around a rollover, a truck on its side blocking all of one lane and part of the other.

  
  

  With my new healthy diet and my neurotransmitter precursor supplements, I no longer have exhausted adrenals.  The wrecks, the skidding into intersections, the long drive home, gave me all the old feelings of adrenaline rush and letdown–and it wasn’t any fun.  My tastes really have changed.

  • 5:44 am
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