Once an Addict

Two minutes late, I sneak into a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, unsure if this is where I should be at 8:00 pm on a Saturday night. All my peers are out, probably drunk at bars or house parties, smoking blunts and doing coke off someone’s key or a tiny metal spoon that looks like it belongs with an American Girl doll tea set. But I’m here, standing at a coffee table, avoiding the stray eyes that always follow the newcomer and browsing through little pink and green and blue pamphlets with titles like “Self-Acceptance,” “The Triangle of Self Obsession,” and “Just for Today.” I’m twenty-four. It’s 2018. And this is the first Narcotics Anonymous meeting I’ve been to in three years. It’s also the first meeting I’ve come to both clean and sober. 

The meeting is in a college classroom with open windows and a small circle of roughly ten chairs. No one has taken their seats yet, they’re all standing around, making small talk. I keep my head down, hoping not to be noticed as I look for a seat.

Across the room, a buff bald guy in a blue and white tank-top waves to me so I go to introduce myself. He looks young, probably twenty-eight or thirty, and his bright smile and animated mannerisms make me feel bad about being nervous. He tells me his name—let’s call him Steve—and when I go to shake his hand, he waves me off, saying “We hug here, man. We’re like a big family.” 

We hug, and he tells me I’ll feel right at home soon. I shrug and say thanks, not sure if I believe him. The truth is, I don’t know if I need to be here. I’m not even sure I’m an addict. I managed on my own to stay clean from coke and dope for three years. I kicked both habits solo. No rehab. No NA. But a recent relapse with crack cocaine caused me to reconsider. So, here I am to give it a chance. I find an empty seat and wait for the meeting to start.

The meeting begins and we go around the circle taking turns introducing ourselves. All names and characters listed here are a recreation from my memory and do not violate the personal anonymity of anyone who attended this NA meeting.

“Hi, I’m an addict named Steve.”

“Hi, I’m Anna and I’m an addict.”

“I’m an addict named Tom. I’ve been an addict for fifty years.”

As they continue around the circle, I question the legitimacy of my own struggles. Am I really like them? Really an addict? What am I going to say when it’s my turn to introduce myself? 

*

For a long time, I’ve rejected the idea of ‘addict’ as an identity tag. In the past, I actively renounced NA and AA because of phrases like “Once an addict always an addict.” It struck me as counterintuitive to recovery, damaging even. How can I recover if I will always be an addict? The notion of an inescapable label condemning of a fate you are powerless to overcome can be overwhelming at best, and downright defeating at worst. This concept causes many addicts to give up entirely. Entering recovery under the pretense that we can never completely recover both defies logic and departs from the definition of recovery.

 Recovery, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is “The restoration of a person (or more rarely, a thing) to a healthy or normal condition, or to consciousness.” Or “The regaining or restoration of one’s health or a mental state.” These definitions imply that complete restoration (a comeback, a return) to a ‘normal’ life is not only possible, but also an integral part of what it means to recover. The trouble is, the way recovery is referred to in common addiction treatments depicts it as an ongoing process that can never truly be completed, because we aren’t just trying to recover from addiction, we are trying to recover from ourselves as addicts.

How can we recover from ourselves?

You can get sober, maintain abstinence, make amends and build flourishing new relationships, but you can never fully recover because of the implication that you are an addict, and the inherent risk of relapse always remains. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, between 40% and 60% of recovering addicts relapse within the first four years of recovery. And that only counts the ones who complete treatment. Even though relapse is a part of recovery, and some people see it as progress, there are many others who see it as failure. The fear of failure keeps many addicts from even trying. Addiction expert Dr. John Kelly says that “people who feel more stigmatized are less likely to seek treatment, even if they have the same level of addiction severity,” and that “they’re also more likely to drop out of treatment if they feel stigmatized and ashamed.” The word addict has a way of making us feel ashamed about our problems, like there is something wrong with us and our flaws are our own fault. Although for some a label can be helpful, even feel liberating, all it does is create a preset of conditioned thoughts, feelings and behaviors that reinforce the very ailment we seek to cure. It can be extremely difficult to imagine a future in which we are healthy, or anything more than a burden to those around us, because of the concept that we are the condition, rather than have the condition.

NA and AA present an either/or logical fallacy in which we either accept their understanding of ourselves and our situations and embrace and work the 12-steps, or we fall back to the same three fates that commonly befall addicts: Drugs. Jail. Death. 

Once an addict always an addict.

Before I press on let me take the time to first say that the 12-steps on their own are inherently valuable. Through my own recovery I have found, over seven years clean from dope, now three years clean from coke, that I have worked all twelve steps, even without direct intention and without pursuing them in chronological order. The twelve steps fit naturally with an abstinent recovery lifestyle.

However, the problem as I see it with traditional NA and AA recovery models stems from the dogmatic and narrow minded “once an addict always an addict.” Young addicts who are desperate and near hopeless either reject this idea and continue to use, become defeated by this idea, and continue to use, or we accept this ultimatum and work the 12-steps until the term addict becomes so ingrained into identity, that we start to lose any concept of self we may still retain. Who we were becomes so attached to who we are, that it prevents us from becoming who we may be. Addict confines us to a one-dimensional concept of self that prevents growth and is limiting of our true potential. For those who work it, the 12-step program can and sometimes does help many addicts enter recovery and live better lives. But 12-step programs fail to transcend their biggest flaw. Accepting and owning our roles and identities within addiction is an important part of the recovery process. But limiting our growth to an identity we can never overcome is asinine. Once sober or clean, settled, and progressing in our recovery, we must drop the label of addict and go through deep interpersonal changes within our own identities, or we will remain susceptible to relapse, doomed to the self-fulfilling prophecy embedded in the expectations and aphorisms of NA and AA. Once an addict always an addict.

*

The first time I questioned if I was an addict, I was fifteen. I had been smoking weed every day since I was fourteen. I started drinking whole bottles of NyQuil, huffing cans of computer duster, stealing my brother’s Ritalin, and doing just about anything else I could get my hands on. Real drugs, like coke, heroin, and meth weren’t easy to find where I lived out in the sticks of Baltimore County, Maryland, so I would fill my body with just about anything else rumored to spark a buzz. I had recently read Nic Sheff’s debut memoir, Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines, and I instantly connected with his fuck-it-all vibe and his incessant need to numb the pain of everyday life. He made sex and drugs—especially drugs—seem so cool. Looking back, he glorified it. But maybe it was just me who romanticized and idolized it. Either way, I knew right then that I would one day have my own drug addiction story to tell. But my experiences never seemed as bad compared to what I read in Nic Sheff’s book. I didn’t feel like my suffering was extreme enough to be considered valid.

At seventeen, I got expelled from high school for stealing money from freshman gym lockers. I needed cash for weed and cigarettes, pills and whatever I could find. After that, I started experimenting with opiates, mostly over the counter pills, Suboxone and Methadone, too. I got put on probation for stealing from the freshman, and I barely completed the JOINS (Juvenile Offenders In Need of Supervision) program that facilitated my probation. I managed to pass all my drug tests with fake pee, still smoking the legal and highly dangerous synthetic cannabinoid k-2. By age twenty, I discovered coke and quickly started using every weekend. Every weekend eventually became every night I didn’t have to go to sleep early to get up for work. I sold weed to support my habit while also smoking more than an ounce a week. Things were manageable for a while. Just recreational fun. I still felt like I knew I was going to write a book one day, but every time I compared my story to Sheff’s I never felt like my story was bad enough to be worth writing. 

Then I tried heroin.

I was twenty-one. I had been trying to convince my then girlfriend Serenity’s younger sister Ly, that creating a new identity was the sure way to beat her dope addiction. She had been in and out of rehab. She AMA’d her last treatment center and I was dead scared the next relapse might be her last. I saw how much Ly’s drug use was hurting Serenity, and I started to care for Ly too. I wanted to help. I stayed up late at Serenity and Ly’s dad’s house, drinking after Serenity went to bed. It was just Ly and me on the couch. We were well alone, so I thought I’d finally try and talk with her about our drug problems. “Criminal Minds” flashed in the background as I told her my ideas about addiction—about how it’s a trap created through self-identification, and that it’s possible to break your mind free with the right tools. I explained how I’d stopped cigarettes, not by quitting but by creating a new identity. “Quitting is just an action. You’re still attaching yourself to what you want to remove yourself from.” I sipped my Fat Tire. “You have to create a new identity. I don’t smoke. I’m not a cigarette smoker.”

Ly puffed her Marlboro 27 as I continued. “I just don’t believe that ‘once an addict always an addict’ crap.” I continued with an example of how a retired football player is still a football player. “To quit, you’re still attaching yourself to what you want to remove yourself from. You see, it’s all about identity.” In this sense, a retired football player would move on from his past and become known by the new identities he embraces, from announcer, to spokesperson, to talk show host, etc.

After that night I offered to take Ly to meetings. She agreed, but only if I would buy her heroin one last time. I knew this wasn’t a good idea, but I had been wanting to try it, too. I thought we would get high just one time, then start recovery together. I got swept up in my new addiction for Ly and forgot all about Serenity. I thought heroin would be the way to Ly’s heart. I hoped I could show her it’s not that hard to stop. I wanted to save her. I thought I loved her. I decided I would rather jump into the fire and burn with her than watch her die slow and alone.

If buying heroin for someone is a good way to show them you love them, then I built her the Taj Mahal. “Going to meetings” was the only reason Ly’s parents would let her leave the house. The thing is, we almost never went. Instead, we would meet her dealer then go to the building where the meetings were held and shoot up in the downstairs bathroom. If we finished in time, we would sit in the back of the meeting, nodding out until it was over. The goal had been to have a little fun and then get clean together. We could still smoke weed if we kicked dope. But after three months of telling each other “One last time,” Ly got clean on her own, my relationship with Serenity crumbled, and soon, I was all alone in the hell I deserved. It was just me and a needle, coke and dope. The devil’s sweet embrace.

In the epilogue of Tweak, Nic Sheff discusses an idea he got from a Herman Hesse book about art as a conversation. Essentially the concept is that each person’s work is a response to someone else’s work. The works that speak to us and inspire us move us to think about our own stories in conversation with everything we take in. Nic Sheff’s work deeply affected me, and I’m moved to respond. Looking back, I idolized him for the wrong reasons, and I couldn’t have been more foolish. Now when I read his books, some of the drug use still seems cool, but it’s no longer glorified. Now when I read his words and I remember myself shooting up, I get a visceral reaction. I picture myself missing the vein or shaking so hard I stab the needle through my arm. Now when I read his words my mind flashes back to getting robbed at gun point while trying to score on the street. When I think of dope all the worst memories flood my brain, and thankfully they overpower the memories of that bitter choke and euphoric rush.

When we break down the word addiction to its more modern roots, we get ad– “to”, and diction– “choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing.” This may be far from the literal definition of the word today, but I find this to be an interesting and noteworthy coincidence. When it comes to addiction as a conversation, I have a lot to say. I choose my words carefully, because I don’t want to glorify, romanticize, or perpetuate a horrible cycle that I firmly believe can be overcome. I want to add my diction to the conversation about addiction. I want my memoirs and essays to go beyond simply telling my story and add to what it means to recover. Where I used to be discouraged by how different my story is from Sheff’s I now realize that difference is its true power. 

A few months after Ly got clean and Serenity and I broke up, coke didn’t seem as fun. Dope stopped getting me high. I was using just to keep from getting sick. My life had become unmanageable, so I took it upon myself to get clean. Nothing I shot into my veins would numb the pain anymore. I wasn’t ready for total sobriety. I kept smoking weed, but I knew I had to get off the hard drugs. I switched to Suboxone to avoid withdrawals and then slowly weened myself off, because I’d heard the withdrawals from suboxone can be worse than dope. But one thing I shot into my veins changed everything. I had read about Ketamine and its ability to reduce opiate cravings and withdrawals. An experimental Russian study found questionable success in treating heroin addicts with ketamine. Questionable, but success, nonetheless. I injected myself with ketamine once a night for an entire week. Through the profound and intense psychedleic state known as ego dissolution transcendental experience, I lost all sense of self, my consciousness merged into an infinitude of nonexistence and then I was reborn with a certainty that I would never return to dope. My cravings were gone. My remaining withdrawals dissipated. I shed tears for my life of shame and betrayal. I had lost all my friends, destroyed my relationship with Serenity, endangered and enabled Ly, and as I would find out a year later, had contracted hepatitis-C from shooting up.

After using ketamine once a night for an entire week, an intense acid trip on the night of the new moon helped me set my intentions and rethink my life. This might not be something that could work for everyone, but it worked for me. I set goals, like going back to school, working out, and meditating. I got clean. I started skateboarding again. I reconnected with old friends. I worked to rebuild the life I had destroyed.

LSD has been used in psychedelic therapy to make the unconscious conscious, and to allow for deep personal introspection and insight into one’s own life. Psychedelics like LSD temporarily turn off the Default Mode Network (DMN) the center of the brain responsible for negative self-referential processes. Shutting off the DMN in this way works as a mental reset button which allows us to view ourselves and conceptualize our lives in new and productive ways. In fact, all psychedelics work by this same mechanism. What fires together wires together. What fires apart wires apart. They create rapid neuroplasticity and reopen a critical period during which new synaptic pathways can form so old habits die while new ones thrive. Neurologically, addiction is an overcompensation of the brain’s normal reward processing system. The ‘now power’ of an instant dopamine rush takes precedent over all future goals and desires. Shame, trauma, and negative shifts in self-image reinforce the cycle and drive up the urge to use as an escape from a mind and a self we feel trapped in and personally victimized by. But why should we feel victimized by ourselves? Addiction is normal. It can happen to anyone. By the same measure, so can recovery.

Ironically enough, Bill Williams, a co-founder of AA actually experimented with LSD when psychedelic research first began in 1956. He believed LSD could act as a temporary ego reducer that could help alcoholics accept the spiritual tenets of AA. But the other members denounced LSD as just another drug, so it never came into practice. AA rejects it to this day.

Although there were plenty of times when I abused LSD as just another drug, the more I took it, the more it started to show me about myself. I found it to be a powerful tool for conscious expansion and cognitive restructuring. I knew that with the right intentions it could help me face that deep empty hole I had been trying to fill with coke and dope. These psychedelic therapies are new and controversial, and trials are still underway, so I had to take everything into my own hands. Through psychedleic intervention I created a new identity for myself, a new identity that only fell apart three years later when I relapsed with crack cocaine. After that relapse I took LSD again and I’ve remained clean ever since.

*

The question, “Am I an addict?” still weighs heavy on my brain. I used to feel like a fraud, like my experience was less valid because I didn’t have it as bad as some of my friends or some of the people I’ve met in NA. NA meetings often feel like pissing contests. Whose life has been worse? Who’s done the most drugs? How many times have you overdosed? Value there only seemed to be verified by the extremity of one’s hardships, and my struggles always seemed to fall short. Ironically, that always made me want to use more.

The worst of my addiction, when I was shooting up both coke and dope—sometimes at the same time—only lasted about four or five months. That sounds like child’s play compared to some people I know who have been struggling for over ten years. But four or five months was enough to destroy my life, contract Hep-C, (a life-threatening disease that I’m lucky to now be cured of, thanks to the gastroenterologists at Upper Chessapeake Medical Center) and change me so deeply that I can never go back to who I was before. I echo neuroscientist and ex-addict Marc Lewis when I say, “why should we call it recovery if it’s the beginning of something new?”

The etymology of the word addiction, from the classical Latin addīctus is “assigned by decree, made over, bound, devoted,” past participle of addīcere “to assign, to make over by sale or auction, to award, to appoint, to ascribe, to hand over, surrender, to enslave, to devote, to sentence, condemn.” In this sense, the word was typically used as an adjective connected to a noun. When combined with my own name, the stigma of “addict” certainly does enslave and condemn. Another definition of addiction from the 1530s describes it as “the state or condition of being dedicated or devoted to a thing, especially an activity or occupation: adherence or attachment, especially of an immoderate or compulsive kind.” So, if to be an addict is to devote myself, whether to drugs and intoxication or to recovery and abstinence, maybe the word addict still fits. But recovery should not feel like a punishment or some ill fate to which I am bound and condemned—forced to bare all in shameful recognition of the person I was, just beyond reach of the person I could become, powerless, forever defined by my past as an addict. Sure, in active addiction I was powerless. But in recovery I am powerful. I invoke my agentive authority over the labels that dictate my own identity.

I no longer wish to prove the legitimacy of my struggles. That’s as counterintuitive to recovery as “once an addict always an addict.” Instead, I want to focus on my identity within recovery, beyond addiction. I want to focus on the ways I choose to live now, powerful, forever guided and supported through my present recovery into a recovered future in which I can live a ‘normal’ life.

As I sit here in the circle at the NA meeting, there’s no time for all of this to go through my head. But somewhere deep within, I know that saying “addict” before my own name won’t help my recovery or my self-image. So, here I am, ready to try again. I’ve gone from simply clean from my drugs of choice, to completely sober. No weed or alcohol. Just me. Instead of an identity that clings to a fucked-up past to validate my suffering, I choose an identity that validates my healing. Instead of focusing on who I was—a liar—a cheat—a thief—a fiend—a loser—all contained inside the label “addict”—I choose to focus on who I am. I am a writer. I am a friend, a brother, a son. I am strong. I am brave. I am intelligent, creative, and resilient. I am whole.

 All eyes fall on me as my chance comes to speak. “Hi, I’m Colin.” I force a sheepish smile, still nervous that everyone will judge me. “And I’m healing.”