"It looks like cocaine / But it's just sadness" ;
Legião Urbana - A while ago
My name is J., I'm an addict, and I'm clean for today. I abused many drugs - marijuana, alcohol - and tried everything: mushrooms, LSD, morphine, ketamine, diazepam, clonazepam, lorazepam, amphetamine, MDMA. I think the list ends there. But it was always cocaine that made me kiss the canvas. I remember the first time I used it. I was used to drugs whose effects were very evident. I sniffed a few lines with a friend. He died of AIDS after some unsuccessful attempts to get clean from injecting cocaine abuse - the "thud" and sharing needles and syringes. Sad. He once told me that he had smuggled cocaine to powerful people in the 1980s in exchange for a few grams. At the time we glamorized drugs, we thought that dying before the age of 30 was the only possible project. Anyway. I didn't have any great sensations when I used it for the first time, and the biggest excitement was trying cocaine. It is important to remember that cocaine, at the time, was expensive and very little available. It was rumored, quietly, that so-and-so had access, some Latin Americans who were in the country to study, and an American who lived in the city. A mysterious drug. The drug of the elite. Parties filled with champagne, with cocaine served on silver trays, snorted into US$100 bills. The artists. The millionaires. Only fish scales (it was said to be the purest drug, which emitted glow in the light). I lived for a while in a city in the interior of .... and there the availability of drugs was huge. “It snowed”. These were times of euphoria. The bill would be paid later. And it would be very expensive. I moved to a big city and continued using multiple substances. Until the day my world fell. As it said Renato Russo in Faroeste Caboclo"and to hell he went for the first time". Me too.
Let's flood Brazil with cocaine
I heard that the PCC made a negotiation with the Colombian cartels in the early 1990s: we are going to flood Brazil with cocaine. At the time, I was clean. Well, that's not quite it. After 2 years clean, after a hospital stay, I had gone back to drinking fermented drinks and smoking marijuana. This went on for many years. But I stayed away from cocaine. One night - I had separated and was living alone, after drinking a little ( at the time there was no dry law ), I was driving home and passed by a favela. A guy waved at me with something I couldn't identify - "Hey, Joe, what's up?" . Obviously I was curious and came back. “How much is it? Derreal. Give me 1”. It was dust. Of excellent quality. They called it dice, because it was taken straight from the brick. There was Faustão too, which was 5g. That year was really crazy. I ended up at the clinic again, because I started using it every fifteen days, then weekly, then several days a week, until I was using it daily for a year without stopping, in the end about 7g per day. I went insane. I no longer ate, slept little, in a kind of permanent vertigo that knew no beginning or end. After a trip in which it became clear to my family how serious the situation was, I consulted my psychiatrist on a Sunday and started using disulfiram, an alcohol antagonist, and I stopped drinking. I had already stopped smoking marijuana a few years ago. By rekindling a relationship, I was able to stay sober for 1 month. It was then that my addiction changed its characteristics: instead of daily use of the drug, I switched to another way of using it: binge, which means the compulsive and prolonged use of the drug, common with cocaine and alcohol. And then the disasters were more and more severe: I just couldn't stop and was spending fortunes - some time ago, during my intoxications, I would indulge in basfond. I won't go into details, but I experienced everything worst you can imagine. Hundreds (yes, hundreds) attempts to stop using, more than a dozen hospitalizations (much more) and always ended up relapsing. Two destroyed marriages, lost jobs, economic bankruptcy, illness - I lost my sense of smell for over a year (and worse things). I tried geographic change... I reached the bottom (maybe) ? Several Rehabs. Here's a note: although predictable, because no one can handle living with an active addict - or experience it badly, very badly - separations, relationship endings are pure poison for most addicts. Recovery needs to be very solid so that they can face these situations in a mature way. How often do you hear in Mutual Aid groups “well, I ended a relationship” or “after my divorce/separation”? ...and here comes a story of an often brutal relapse. As they always say, I'm glad you're back. Many can't.
A light at the end of the tunnel: Recovery
Is it possible to recover from cocaine use? Yes, like any other drug. The possibilities are ridiculous, somewhere around 13%. In other words, 87% of addicts (considering alcoholism as an addiction) live in a back and forth of advances and setbacks and often lose the battle for one reason or another. Some die. Others never recover. They don't even try. We will talk about Recovery for cocaine addicts at another time. But we have already pointed to a Holistic Recovery. Another life. Physically. Mentally. Spiritually. Without these (Twelve) Steps, you won't get very far.
This image was captured on Pinterest in the profile Ego of Stigma.
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