This is a story about being hounded to death...

One week ago, I was shovelling pills into my mouth, washed down with pints of white wine. The LD50 is the lethal dose that will kill 50% of the test subjects. Lethal doses are normally calculated in milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Tramadol is quite a reliable way to kill yourself, with plenty of examples of successful suicides in the literature, for anybody who wishes to trawl the medical journals.

Most opiates will cause respiratory arrest. Tramadol seems to kill more often through serotonin syndrome, according to what I read in advance of my suicide attempt. I can tell you exactly what it feels like, to reach your wits end, decide to end your life, and follow through with the necessary steps. I can tell you exactly what it feels like, during the periods of consciousness, as you die.

Once I had downed all the capsules and their gelatin shells had started to dissolve, I started to become quite intoxicated, thanks in no small part to the wine I used to wash my legally prescribed pain medication - tramadol - down my throat. Of course, I had stockpiled the capsules, which is not what my doctor had anticipated I would do, when they wrote the prescription, but I was getting a box each visit to the pharmacist, with each box containing plenty to end my life.

I decided to send out some final Tweets, when I believed I was beyond the point of no return. I have no idea whether I inadvertantly saved my own life or not, by alerting my social media contacts to the fact that I was on my way to meet my maker.

Discussion of what pushed me over the edge is not really warranted here, suffice to say that I simply had nothing in reserve when my fragile embryonic new life in this Northern city started to crumble. I had given 100% to my new job, my new girlfriend and my new friends. I had no safety net, when the slender threads that supported me, snapped suddenly.

Firstly, it should be noted that it takes quite a long time for your stomach and large intestine to process enough capsules for you to start to experience the onset of a fatal overdose. I had imagined that 40 minutes would be plenty for the first wave of powerful tramadol to hit me, and to make me unconscious or at least delerious and incoherent. I was wrong - I was able to send out several Tweets that actually seem to make sense now - one week later - as well as being gramatically OK and without spelling mistakes.

Secondly, it should be noted that the ideal scenario of falling asleep and not waking up, did not happen at all. I did get waves of soporific effect from both the alcohol and the tramadol, but I imagine that the adrenalin of knowing I was on my way to the grave kept me mostly conscious. My eyelids would get heavy and my head would drop, but my body fought to stay alive and I kept jerking awake.

Thirdly, I have horrible snatches of memory. I can remember exactly what it was like to fill my mouth with capsules, and gulp them down with wine from a pint glass. I remember how agonisingly long it took to empty out all the packets into the box, which I used as a kind of cup, from which to tip a load of tramadol into my mouth before swallowing it. I can remember the emergency services battering their way into the bathroom, where I had slumped in the dark, waiting to die. I can remember telling them where all the empty pill packets were.

I can remember telling somebody - was it somebody at the hospital? - who my doctor was and exactly what overdose I had taken. I can remember the very worst moment, when the hospital told me that death was likely to be slow and painful, not the unconscious affair I had imagined.

I can remember when I started to have seizures. I can remember begging the hospital not to treat me with activated charcoal; not to pump my stomach; not to resuscitate me if I went into cardiac arrest. I can remember coming round after 12+ hours under sedation, breathing with a ventilator. I had a tube coming out of my nose, one down my throat and one up my dick - I had been intubated, catheterised and had several canulas installed, including an arterial one that was measuring my blood pressure. It felt like I had snot running down my face, but it was just a tube that was being used to put stuff into my stomach to neutralise the deadly chemicals.

I can remember a nurse or a doctor came and asked me a question, and I tried to reply but I couldn't. Every time I tried to speak, my lungs pushed air against the ventilator, and I would be left momentairily be gasping for air until I allowed the machine to breathe for me again.

I can remember a different nurse or doctor reassured me that I would be able to speak once the tube had been pulled out of my throat, where it was impeding my vocal chords. I was so relieved, because it was deeply distressing to lose my ability to talk and have moments where I couldn't breathe.

I can remember being asked how I felt about the fact I had survived an overdose that should have been fatal. I felt terrible about telling the hard-working intensive-care nurse or doctor that nothing had changed... in fact things were worse than ever, as I imagined that the overdose would have caused horrific organ damage. I expressed in no uncertain terms that I still wanted to die.

I can remember drifting in and out of consciousness. From Saturday night to Tuesday morning, I had no idea whether I was in A&E resus, intensive care or the high dependency unit. I can vaguely recall being told, but the memories seem all out of sequence, and dreamlike - quite unreal.

I can remember being wheeled into a general hospital ward at some point on Tuesday, and then wheeled off to my own private room. I can remember slowly regaining some mental capacity. I can remember a visit from a psychiatrist, where I again expressed my distress with my situation and fear that I would not be able to guarantee my own safety - what had improved since I had tried to end my own life? Nothing. In fact, my situation had worstened: I had no idea what kind of state my apartment would be in when I got home - my wallet, keys, phone and other personal effects had gone missing. It seemed unthinkable that I would have to face potentially being locked out of my apartment, with no money or credit cards on me, and no means of contacting anybody.

When I did finally make it back home, things were worse than I had even imagined. My laptop and digital camera had been stolen. Every single prescribed medication had been stripped from my shelves and drawers and cupboards. There was one single solitary pregabalin capsule, almost left mockingly on my bedroom floor which lay in disgraceful mess. I need pregabalin for nerve damage in my left ankle/foot... as a non-opiod painkiller. I desperately needed some of the zopiclone that I had stockpiled, in order to sleep after such a horrific ordeal. These are not dangerous medications, ironically. I had moved myself off the tramadol, because it was not desirable to use it as a long-term painkiller. I had stockpiles of zopiclone, because it was useful for these very eventualities. The home treatment team had thrown bucketloads at me, because sleep is so important for good mental health. Where was all my prescription medication?

There was no sign of my mobile phone anywhere, and without my wallet and laptop, I was completely stuffed in terms of being able to get a message to anybody. From Saturday night until around 3 or 4am on Wednesday morning, I had been completely cut off from the world... mostly unconscious, and without access to telephone, email or social media.

Wednesday daytime, the way I was treated at the office - where I went to store the few valuables that had not been stolen - was extremely odd; if not downright rude and unpleasant. It was most unsettling indeed to be treated so oddly at my place of work, especially after surviving a suicide attempt and having suffered a burgulary. I was also fighting off panic attacks and pain, because my legally prescribed medications had been stolen too.

After a quite baffling experience at the office, where I was ushered out of the door as if I was an interloper, the CEO of the company I had been doing consultancy work for, spoke to me to say that he would be very happy to see me for a beer, but that I could spend the rest of the week sorting out everything that now dauntingly lay ahead of me: repairing the damage from the break-in and replacing the stolen items. Life is profoundly difficult without your credit and debit cards, mobile phone and laptop.

I managed to get an emergency prescription for 7 days of pregabalin and zopicline, so that I could restabilise my medication regimen. I managed to get enough cash out from the bank to replace my laptop, but not my smartphone or pay for repairs to my flat. I was starting to be overwhelmed with the enormity of the task that was expected of me: for a suicide survivor to carry on with their life as if nothing had happened. My home felt violated and insecure. There was something weird going on at work. It was deeply unsettling.

Gladly, I was re-admitted to hospital at Accident & Emergency, because I was driven into crisis by the horrendous near-death experience, only to then find that my two most valuable and prized possessions - my smartphone and laptop - had been stolen, and my flat had been ransacked; my front door and bathroom door were smashed up; the place had been turned upside down.

The fact that I was discharged from hospital and ended up back at my trashed apartment at 3 or 4am on Wednesday morning is something that should never have come to pass. What the fuck are you doing discharging a suicidal person in crisis, into a situation where they've got more on their plate than they can handle? How the fuck am I going to go back to life as normal, without my smartphone, laptop or a secure home to keep myself and my possessions in? How the fuck am I going to get through life without the pain medication for my nerve damage, and sleep medication for the horrendously stressful circumstances.

Being re-admitted to hospital - first the Accident & Emergency department, and then psychiatric hospital - was inevitable, and essential for my safety and wellbeing.

I could have bounced back, but the strange experience at the office and the amount of things I had to sort out due to theft or loss, was simply too much for somebody as sick as I was then.

I managed to get a replacement debit card for my business bank account, and make some cash withdrawals using my passport, but after replacing my mobile phone and laptop I had very little money left; I was exhausted stressed and in no mood to return to my home that not only felt violated, but also not a secure place to keep myself and my valuables.

My very worst fear was realised: that of finding myself completely alone in this Northern city with nobody to turn to for support. Without a smartphone, I felt completely cut off from social media. By some strange co-incidence, my work colleagues were both out of town. This was the perfect storm. This was exactly what I never wanted to ever happen - to be isolated and alone.

I thought about throwing myself off a high building, or under a bus. In the end, I finally made it back to where I should have been allowed to stay: the safety of hospital. Surviving a suicide attempt is a big deal, and then to have shit to deal with at work and home, was horrendous.

My memory about how I arrived back in hospital is just as fucked up as you'd expect of somebody who's been through a near-death experience and survived, but only barely. I'm not sure what's real and what's dream. I feel like I died all over again. I have these strange memories of trying to replace my mobile phone, laptop and get enough cash out of the bank to replace my iPhone too. I can remember waking up on a hospital trolley and re-orienting myself with reality... there were lots of things that I could vaguely remember, but they seemed to be from a different life. Had I died and had my heart restarted? Certainly, there was a period where I was sure I was dreaming. Perhaps I was still having seizures, because of the unbelievable disturbance to the stability of my life, including the regularity with which I was able to take my medications and soothe my jangled nerves with alcohol.

I write to you now, in stone cold sobriety. My alcohol consumption has been practically zero for a whole week... cut at a rate that would easily cause problems, especially considering that all the other medications that I have been prescribed have been very irregularly given to me too. Rebound insomnia from suddenly stopping zopiclone would be expected. Suddenly stopping pregabalin will have terrible consequences, as with any of the GABA agonists. I'm surprised I haven't had MORE seizures or perhaps even been killed by the sudden withdrawal of medications that I had become physically dependent on, as well as alcohol. You can't just suddenly stop drinking and taking the pills that I had been prescribed - you have to taper down gently.

In a way, I'm in a good situation now that I'm off all the alcohol and most of the meds that I had become dependent on. My sleep is terrible, I'm in a lot of pain, and I'm overwhelmed by anxiety and a general sense of unease, but it's good to not be drinking so much and having to take pills just to stay calm through some incredibly stressful events.

My housing, employment and general situation is dreadful. I'm being royally dicked over by everybody who has sensed that I'm in a vulnerable state. It's an abosoute disgrace, how people have tried to put the boot in and deal the final death blow to me, when I was already bruised and bloodied and at death's door.

I'm in psych hospital until Monday at least, which is a blessed relief. I have a room with a door that hasn't been kicked in and has a fairly sturdy lock, with which to protect my valuables. I get three hot meals a day and there's plenty of hot water. There are loads of mental health professionals on hand if I was feeling suicidal again.

Sadly, I am having to turn to the law to defend me from mental health discrimination, illegal eviction, and hopefully recover my valuables that were lost or stolen due to negligence. At least I am in a safe place from which to defend myself. Justice will prevail.

I think it's outrageous that I was ever declared fit and well enough to be let out of hospital, especially given the ransacked shithole I had to go back home to, and the mistreatment I received at work. However, I am also sympathetic towards the police, who have a difficult job to do, as well as to the fact that I have received a substantial amount of hospital care, to save my life.

There's a fairly simple ethical guiding principle here though: don't fuck with vulnerable people. I'm pretty mad that I'm the one with the stolen iPhone, MacBook, the battered and bruised body, the missing medications and having faced some terrible stress, on top of the situation that was already so horribly desperate that it drove me to try to end my own life. Nobody is coming to me and offering me compensation of any kind, despite my phone and laptop being supposedly covered under a company insurance policy.

I have a fully functioning conscience - a moral compass - and I am trying to set matters straight that I am responsible for. Even in the midst of what might have been the final hour or two that I walked upon this Earth, I still had concern for rectifying certain things, and I still do. I'm being treated like shit, but I don't feel that entitles me to treat others like shit. I'm in a horrible situation, but I'll do what I can from where I can... although I do expect to be treated fairly and in accordance with the contractual obligations, housing obligations and obligations to not be discriminated against because of my mental health crisis. The door swings both ways, and I take my ethical conduct very seriously.

Sadly, the law and solicitors of various flavours are being involved, which means I can do little until they're back at work again on Monday. I need to proceed through the official channels, seeing as I'm being beaten with a legal stick. I'm outraged that my housing and income is under threat, simply because the opportunistic shits that I've been doing some work for have sensed an opportunity to try and scam me.

I wish everybody would just do the right thing, or offer to rectify things when they have made a mistake.

Anyway, as you can tell, I'm feeling quite sorry for myself, given the shitshow of my life. My guardian angel has arrived in the nick of time to help me stay afloat, but I'm still battered, bruised, organ damaged, hospitalised, under threat of illegal eviction, my client is in breach of contract with unpaid invoices, my employment offer has been withdrawn due to mental health discrimination, and the dreadful ordeal on Tues/Weds with being released from hospital too early, has pretty much fucked any chance of recovering my delicate poise. Everything was so fucking fragile, and it burned down in the blink of an eye.

Fundamentally, where is my girlfriend, my friends - my support network - as well as my work colleagues, income, housing and all the other pieces of the puzzle that make a liveable life? All I can see are circling vultures, greedily eyeing me up as a piece of carrion.

At least we have a decent legal system here in the UK and justice will prevail eventually. Nobody can get away with acting unethically and abusing vulnerable people. I'm safe in hospital. I can defend myself from here.

Finally... I got my replacement laptop working and I'm back online.

Without the structure of being able to capture images and compose my thoughts on the pages of this blog, I've been rather cut adrift. Without my social media contacts, I've felt totally isolated and that nobody knows what I'm going through, although my guardian angel has bridged the gap very well, so I must give a great deal of thanks to her.

Nobody knows just how close to the edge you are until it's too late. What an absolute shitshow.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide

This is a story about trying too hard...

"You've got to meet my friend..." she enthuses. "Can [my friend] stay at your place on Saturday?" she asks, well in advance of the weekend. "You two were separated at birth - you share the same spirit animal" she tells me. The pressure to get along with this new person - talked about in reverential terms - is immense.

She's planning a meal out. At the restaurant, I'm told that I'm going to be sat specifically next to this over-hyped friend, because it's assumed that we are going to get along like a house on fire. That's an arson joke, but we'll get to that later.

Friday - the night of the meal - all my new friends-to-be had signed a card to welcome me into their lives. There was a helium balloon on the table, like at a 5-year-old's birthday party. Nobody ever went to such elaborate lengths to make me feel a sense of belonging; acceptance. I was almost moved to tears, but I had a job to do that night: to meet & greet and make a good first impression.

We were eating dinner - Brazilian barbecue meats - and my 'spirit animal' was sat in the corner of our booth, not eating. It was announced - against her wishes - that she had been on a 4-day drug binge, taking what is colloquially known as "meow meow". Unsurprisingly, an exclusive diet of powerful stimulant drugs does not give you an appetite for anything of nutritional value. Sitting in a restaurant is probably the last place on earth I'd ever want to be after a binge like that. I decided to temporarily park any "getting to know you" chit-chat with her until a time that my spirit animal was in a better place, physically & mentally.

After dinner, the group began to fracture. There were some who wanted to go to a packed noisy pub selling lousy overpriced drinks, and others who preferred to come back to my nearby apartment, where we could all have a comfortable seat on my big couches, and converse without having to shout - a bona fide middle-class thirty-something cliché: the house party.

One reason for the success of the house party is that it's a far better environment for the consumption of recreational drugs. I'm not foresworn from drug use, but to me, addiction is not a social activity. My general personality and attitude - no fear & everything to excess - had led me to drug overdoses of supercrack that put me in hospital with multiple organ failure. My drug taking was not recreational - it was abusive, reckless and akin to playing Russian roulette with a 6-bullet revolver loaded with 5 bullets.

If you have successfully made yourself a comfortable wealthy middle-class life, it's your mortgage repayments and other household bills that keep you awake all night, not powerful Class-A narcotics. To lose just one night of sleep and have the mentally destabilising effects of recreational drugs, has a profoundly negative effect on the week that follows. I never noticed that my weekend partying had a negative knock-on effect on me when I was young, but now my age has now become a factor.

One of my new friends - who's the same age as me - did the sensible thing and headed home at a reasonable hour. He had his sister's wedding on the Saturday and he appointed me as the responsible adult, in charge of putting the girl who was going to drive him to the wedding, into a cab, in time for her to then drive a gazillion miles across the country. "How are you going to stay awake and concentrate on the road after partying all night?" I asked her. "Amphetamines" was her answer. I can't fault her logic - if it works for fighter pilots, then why wouldn't it work for an ordinary car driver.

Fighter pilots have "go pills" and "no-go pills" which are taken respectively at the beginning and end of a mission. I offered to make her one of my special "no-go" preparations, so that she wasn't wired as hell at the wedding and clearly off her nut on speed, but she declined.

At the first ever party I've thrown in my new apartment, it was snowing. When the "good stuff" started to run out, Billy Whizz came out for a run. The white dusting on a makeup mirror started to become a hybrid mix of different substances. Molly came for a visit too.

Predictably, like any party that Charles is invited to, the whole room was talking over the top of each other and making boastful claims. For some reason, my reaction to this was to admit that I'm a grower not a show-er. This prompted one of the guys to claim that he was both a grower AND a show-er. Having been dared to get my dick out and show him I duly obliged in front of my guests. This guy then took me in the kitchen to prove one part of his aforementioned claim: he did have a substantially proportioned soft penis.

I then asked the room for their opinion on a classic ethical philosophical dilemma thought experiment, knowing that it would provoke lively and entertaining debate. Soon, this prompted a couple to leave the party, almost without saying goodbye because they were still arguing about the 'right' answer to a question that divides legal, moral and scientific opinion. "Bullseye" I thought to myself.

With Charles still having a strong influence on the room, oneupmanship raged out of control. We ended up comparing scars. While the girls were not exactly thrilled to show off any evidence of self-harm, me and the guy with the big [soft] dick debated who had the better scar from an operation. This segued into "who's spent more weeks in hospital?" as I steered the competition towards "who's the most insane?" knowing that I would easily be the undisputed champion.

At this point I was getting a bit bored with the war of words, so I just rolled up my sleeve and slashed 3 or 4 cuts into my arm with a kitchen knife. I then became immediately aware that I was so desperate to impress my new friends that I had just mutilated my body in a sudden act of self-harm.

With the theme returning to dares again, my 'spirit animal' dared me to suck my own penis. I explained that without an erection, it would be a difficult act to fulfil, but in the spirit of the dare, I asked if she would be content to see me lick my own foreskin. She confirmed that it would satisfy the conditions of the dare. Without hesitation, I dropped my trousers and got my soft penis as close to my mouth as I could, and then pulled my foreskin until I could touch it with my tongue - it was actually easier than I thought it would be. Obviously, there are not that many people - especially growers not show-ers - who would drop their trousers and suck their own dick for the amusement of their guests. This was a far more impressive feat of courage than cutting my arm with a kitchen knife.

After that, the number of crazy anecdotes that I could tell were stories that all revolved around a similar theme: being hospitalised or locked up in police cells. The stories that drug addicts tell are not that varied or interesting.

I decided to demonstrate my culinary skills in the kitchen. With an unspecified secret ingredient - some of the snow that was falling earlier in the evening - I gave a practical demonstration of a chemistry experiment. Namely the conversion of a salt to a "free base" where water, carbon dioxide and sodium chloride are isolated as 'useless' byproducts. This chemical reaction allows a salt with a high melting point - which would combust in the presence of a naked flame - to be altered into a crystal with a low melting point, allowing it to be vaporised without burning.

With sodium bicarbonate mixed with the mystery ingredient, in a spoon, a few droplets of water were added. The carbon dioxide fizzed away in a delightful effervescent chemical reaction. A few pinches of sodium bicarb later and we reached the point where the fizzing stopped. Then, I heated the spoon and boiled away the salty water, leaving only the "free base" crystals.

What would you do with this crystalline substance, one might ask?

Well, first, you need to take an empty beer or soda can and make an indentation at the opposite end from the bit you drink out of. Then, perforating the thin aluminium of the can with a pin, you can create an area where air may enter the can, when you to suck on the end you'd normally drink out of. Another option - if you can find such an object - is to take a hollow glass tube and put wire wool (Brillo pads work well for this) into one end.

Having allegedly made this concoction and strange contraption - which was all part of me showing off what a badass I am - I had allegedly demonstrated how to make crack cocaine and a pipe to smoke it. There couldn't have been a more "fuck you - I'm fucking hardcore" demonstration of how 'streetwise' I am, unless I'd whipped out some rubber tubing, a thin aluminium spoon, clean pins (hypodermic syringes), a small ball of cotton wool and proceeded to 'cook' a batch of heroin and prepare it for injection. I've never injected heroin by the way, although I did have fentanyl - which is 1,000 times more powerful - injected into me in hospital. Most people are afraid of needles and associate needle use with people whose drug addiction has led them to a completely dysfunctional life that consists of a miserable merry-go-round of theft/robbery/prostitution, 'fencing' stolen property, scoring herion and then getting high until there's no drugs left and there's only 4 hours until you get "junk sick" and have to repeat the whole exercise again.

Before I put the last of my party guests into a taxi - my friend who was driving to the wedding - at about 6:30am, three of us insufflated a few final lines of white powder, allegedly.

My spirit animal had a nice time until the drugs started to wear off, and then cognitive impairment, a drug-induced panic attack and akathisia (inability to stop twitching/tic'ing and/or jiggling of legs) left her in a rather sorry state where it was pretty clear that she was suffering from an unpleasant ordeal. I tried laughing at her. I tried telling her to stop being such a wuss, given the relatively 'mild' binge that she'd been on - just 4 or 5 sleepless nights, and relatively low doses of very impure drugs. In the end, I took pity on her and made her a little shot glass with things to cure her anxiety, replace lost dopamine and serotonin, and basically put her to sleep - there's no 'magic bullet' for insomnia and sleep deprivation, but sleeping pills damn well help. I threw all manner of things into my special 'comedown cure' that would ease her suffering. She was talking gibberish; she couldn't understand what I was saying, and I had to spend 20 minutes trying to maintain her concentration and eye contact for long enough that she could swallow what I'd prepared for her. Then, finally she fell asleep with a look of calm on her face. I don't mind babysitting the occasional person who's going through the consequences of 'self-inflicted' shit, but it would have been inhumane to let her suffer unnecessarily.

Saturday night, I made her another concoction that would prevent "the Sunday from Hell" where the consequences of an outrageous drug binge were brought into sharp focus by the need to start work again on Monday. "I want to order a pizza" she announced at about 11:30pm, having swallowed the curative remedy only 10 minutes earlier. "You have 10 minutes to get into bed, otherwise you're going to pass out on the floor" I warned her. My earlier good work had moved her out of binge mode and into a state where her appetite had returned, but 8 more hours of quality sleep was vital for both of us. The die was cast.

10 minutes later, I pulled her mobile phone out of her hand - the pizza company's number half-dialled - picked her up from the floor where she had collapsed in a most unladylike position, and carried her to bed. I was so tired that I could barely see straight to send a couple of texts before I passed out too.

After 9 hours sleep, we both awoke feeling pretty damn refreshed, considering the way we'd abused our bodies. I'd improved her average daily sleep time for the week, from 2.5 hours to 5.3 - more than 100% better. Ideally, we would all have perfect sleep hygiene and get 8 hours a night. I needed to end her drug binge, save her from many hours of unnecessary suffering and let her catch up on desperately needed sleep. I was giving her a fighting chance of not losing her job, thus spiralling even further downwards. This is about the best you can ever hope to do for an addict until they're ready to acknowledge that their addiction is rampaging out of control. Addiction always leads to complete & indiscriminate destruction of your entire life, health and will prematurely kill you.

I incurred the wrath of my 'spirit animal's' best friend for not condemning her addictive behaviour. Do I have the moral authority to lecture anyone on their lifestyle? I know better than anybody else I've ever met, how you can go from riches to rags. Supercrack was the paving stones of the road to Hell - hospitals, police cells, hostels and sleeping rough. I overcame my addiction to one of the most powerful drugs on the planet, as well as dealing with the total destruction of my life - divorcing my wife, selling my house, losing my job. So it would seem that if anybody's got an opinion that's worth respecting, it'd be mine. However, humans' relationship with drugs & alcohol is way more complex than "this is bad for me so I'm going to stop"... otherwise nobody would take drugs, get drunk, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee or energy drinks.

We live in a world where we try to find somebody with anatomically opposite genitals to us, squirt some love snot into them, and then spend the next 18+ years looking after our blood and mucous covered alien-like midget progeny, that was painfully ejected from the girl's sex hole. Human behaviour does not follow purely rational rules.

Human use of intoxicating beverages and preparations of plants that contain bitter alkaloids - with the intention of seeking psychoactive effects - is behaviour that's almost as old as cave painting, making fire and sharpening pieces of flint to make spears.

My kidneys are over 50% recovered from my last hospital visit. The facial tic that was caused - quite literally - by brain damage, has now repaired itself. The people and places that are no longer in my life because of supercrack addiction, have been replaced by a new city, new home, new job and new friends. Yes, it could've been worse, but believe me... nobody needs or wants to be told the bleedin' obvious. If it was just a case of saying "fire is hot and will burn you" and "knives are sharp and will cut you" then we'd see a 100% reduction in those injuries, by the bullshit logic that we need to nag and shame addicts into fixing their dirty little habits.

Often an addict is conveniently labelled as a black sheep, and becomes entertainment for the group that surrounds them. Lots of concerned hand-wringing and "we need to do something" empty talk goes on, but all that really happens is that the addict becomes a pariah, with nobody nonjudgemental left to turn to - it's the loneliest thing... lonelier even than being a homeless person injecting heroin under a bridge. Trust me: to spend time in the company of addicts and alcoholics who make no secret of their loss of control and the destruction of their lives, is to gain a nonjudgemental social support network that can make the difference between life & death. Fuck any condescending prick who thinks they're a moral authority who can sit in judgement and save you from yourself. Even with my stories of drug-induced insanity, hospitals, police cells and psych wards being by the far the most extreme you've ever heard, I can't tell an addict or alcoholic what to do with their life.

To hear the same hectoring, lecturing bollocks from people who [do or don't] know what it's like to realise you've overdosed and you've got 30 seconds to dial 999, or just let yourself die... it's not working, is it? I don't know if you've seen the stats, but only Portugal is winning "the war on drugs" and the way they're doing that is to destigmatise and decriminalise drugs, despite immense pressure from the United States to stop saving lives and improving the wellbeing of the Portuguese people.

So, that was the weekend that was full of drug-fuelled insanity that would supposedly trigger me to relapse back onto supercrack. Bullshit.

Tags: #addiction #friends #drugs

This is a story about indoctrination...

I wrote a lengthy Facebook post on Sunday morning, condemning jingoistic rhetoric, especially in light of the emboldenment of closet racists by Brexit & Donald Trump. As our fathers and grandfathers who served in the armed forces during World War II die, I am angry that we seem to be left with a bunch of deluded nationalist wankers who think that warfare is a glorious thing. There are no winners in war - only one group getting to impose terms on another.

As children disengage from education and unjustly inherit a hopeless future of minimum wage zero-hours contract McJobs, we have witnessed the rise & rise of the Call of Duty series of computer games. The aggregate profits from Call of Duty, vastly eclipse all the money taken at the cinema box office & DVD sales, for war movies.

If you learn about warfare from computer games, not from history lessons, then you gain the false impression that wars are won by individual soldiers' heroic actions. The story told by computer games is that war is exciting entertainment and one man can be victorious against insurmountable numbers of enemy forces. When playing a computer game, you don't have the visceral fear that you are going to be wounded or killed. There's no risk to your life or health and you don't hear the screams of people, as they bleed to death in agony. When you kill a 'virtual' soldier you know they're not real - they're not human like you are. All humans have a family; you and the 'enemy' bleed red; everybody is equally shit scared of death and injury.

When we learn about history at school in the UK, it's all about World War I and World War II. We're taught about the USA sending cannon fodder for the D-Day beach landings. The Brits talk about 'winning the war'. The Yanks talk about 'helping the Brits win the war'. Due to Cold War propaganda, it's now no longer acknowledged that it was the Russians who conquered Berlin and cornered Hitler in his bunker, where he committed suicide. The fact is that Nazi Germany fought on too many fronts and over-stretched itself.

It's hard to conceptualise a war of attrition - trench warfare - like World War I, when ground troops would be sent 'over the top' only to be shot to pieces by machine guns. Through the genocide of the Native Americans and happy geographic accident, the USA has been able to pour trillions of dollars into the development of weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear bombs were dropped by the USA, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians - men, women & children. The USA has a romanticised a kind of warfare that's cowardly, clean and clinical - dropping bombs on a defenceless 'enemy' thousands of feet below.

Every decisive weapon that has ever been developed in history - from the pointy stick to the suicide bomber - has conferred not only a military advantage but also a psychological one. If you've ever been prodded with a pointy stick, it's not very nice and it makes you wish you had a pointy stick, with which to at least defend yourself, if not to get revenge on the person who prodded you. If you have ever prodded an unarmed person with a pointy stick, then you are joining the ranks of every man who ever carried a spear, slingshot, bow & arrow, dagger, sword, musket, rifle, pistol, rocket launcher or machine gun. Weapons turn an ordinary animal that can only fight with teeth & claws, into an increasingly powerful combination of man & machine, capable of mass murder. The arms race is a natural reaction to armed oppression.

I like to think of myself as a cosmopolitan Citizen of the World, as opposed to a nationalist. Racists with the St. George's flag draped around their shoulders make me want to vomit. However, the educated middle-classes who work well-paid professional jobs, have many things of value - houses, cars, cash in the bank, stocks & shares, holiday homes and a bunch of other stuff too - but English white trash have nothing: no hope of a better life, and their life is dog shit anyway. The most valuable thing that an English 'chav/pleb/prole' has is their British citizenship, which entitles them to welfare benefits, free healthcare and social housing. I can somewhat understand why the Brexit brigade wouldn't want to share the only thing they've got in their life that's got any value: their UK government handouts.

I watched the Christopher Nolan film Dunkirk yesterday. I saw it at an IMAX cinema, shot on 70mm film (well, the digital equivalent anyway) which made it an immersive experience. I didn't expect it to affect me emotionally. I honestly could not have given a fuck whether Private Ryan was Saved or not.

I've been a keen sailor/yachtsman, since childhood. There's something inescapably British about living on a small island. I've spent lots of time at sea, and I have no illusions about what a formidable impasse any stretch of open seawater presents, even in the absence of man-eating sharks. The English Channel - where I've sailed and kitesurfed more than anywhere in the world - is one of the windiest places on Earth and has some of the biggest tides, which create dangerous fast-flowing currents that exceed the maximum speed of many boats.

In the film Dunkirk, when the flotilla of British fishermen and amateur pleasure boaters, appeared on the horizon - to evacuate the beach packed with 400,000 troops, surrounded on all sides by advancing Nazi troops - I was crying like a baby. This is a true story. 326,000 troops were evacuated by a hastily assembled hotchpotch of any vessel that was capable of making the channel crossing and getting close enough to the beach for soldiers to clamber aboard these motorboats, fishing trawlers, sailing yachts and every other kind of boat you could imagine.

Land of Hope and Glory or God Save the King did not play as the soundtrack, nor did Rule Britannia or any other overtly patriotic clichéd music. Dunkirk wasn't plastered with Union Jacks or other national symbols. However, when the film is about to end, the soundtrack finishes with a subtle reboot of Edward Elgar's Variation IX "Nimrod" which is played grave. The orchestral piece is played so slowly, that few would be able to immediately identify the chords, name the work and its original composer.

I don't wear a poppy on Remembrance Sunday and I don't watch any of the television coverage, let alone attend the ceremony.

The British Legion has metamorphosed into something that's got an unpleasant association with racists, and is on the same spectrum as the British National Party (BNP), the English Defence League (EDL) and Britain First. I have a knee-jerk reaction that causes me to reject the flag-waving nationalism that inversely correlates with the economic prosperity of our once-great nation and empire. Nationalism breeds bigotry and xenophobia, which leads to hate crimes and racially motivated atrocities.

Of course, to feel guilty about slavery, the conquest of nations, genocidal massacres, imperial aggression and oppression of whole nations - hundreds of millions of people - is not something I can take any rational personal responsibility for. I wasn't alive when the British gunned down over 1,000 unarmed Sikh men, women & children, who were peacefully gathered in Jallianwalla Bagh public gardens. I protested against the invasion of Iraq. I've protested against every war that Britain has fought, since reaching voting age - when in theory, all wars became fought in my name, as a member of the UK electorate. In a democracy, the blood of the innocent is spilled on every citizen's hands.

However, something about my upbringing in Britain has clearly indoctrinated me, as I was so deeply emotionally moved by Dunkirk. Perhaps living by the sea and being a keen dinghy sailor, yachtsman and kitesurfer, has given me an appreciation for the treachery of the oceans and the difficulty of evacuating 326,000 soldiers, trapped on a beach, to a place of safety. I can directly relate to feelings of every yacht skipper towards the safety of their crew and the duty of care that is morally owed to anybody who is in need of assistance - the sea is a cruel and deadly place, and to return crew, passengers and shipwreck victims to safe dry land is a responsibility felt amongst all captains and skippers.

Watching a very British war movie, doesn't make me want to build a wall and turn the United Kingdom into a fortress; I don't want to deport every Muslim and Eastern European; I don't want to racially abuse people who weren't born in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland; I don't want to EVER say that "national security" is a justification for the infringement of the sovereign rights of another nation state, through war, invasion, dropping bombs, drone strikes and UN economic sanctions that cause disproportionate suffering to innocent civilians. I didn't rush out of the cinema, and immediately want to punch the first foreign-looking person that I saw.

I'm obviously conflicted. It was a wake-up call, that I've been so subtly indoctrinated, that I'm not even aware of my own Britishness. I hope that doesn't mean that I'm more of a closet racist than I care to admit to myself or others. Am I really just as bad as Trump supporters and neo-Nazis, beneath my cultured & educated, compassionate liberal metropolitan tolerant & inclusive veneer?

It's a dichotomy, but I feel like I can watch a historically accurate dramatisation of true events, and be emotionally moved, but yet also stay true to my values: condemnation of nationalism and Donald Trump's undiplomatic rhetoric; and peacefully protesting against war and opposing racism, wherever I see it.

Tags: #politics

This is a story about mass consumption...

"I need to stop drinking so much" I think to myself ridiculously frequently. Alcoholic drinks are very fattening and I'm not doing enough exercise. A combination of a sedentary job, depression and a physical injury, have conspired to give me every possible excuse I need, to spend my spare time in a state of intoxication. Banks grease the wheels of commerce - so we are taught in economic theory - and alcohol is the oily lubricant for every kind of social situation imaginable: births, weddings, celebrations & commiserations. I doubt the United Kingdom would achieve a fraction of its productivity, without the motivation of knowing we can have a beer or a glass of wine, when the working day is done.

It should come as no surprise to you that having lived on the ragged edge my whole live - an adrenalin junkie and extreme sport enthusiast - I would turn every knob and dial up to "11", give it 110% and to take things TO THE MAX, yeah!

The UK's chief medical officer recommends that I drink no more than 140ml of alcohol per week, which is 20ml per day. A conservative estimate for my current alcohol consumption would be 100ml per day, which is 5 times the recommended healthy limit. Each week, instead of drinking 140ml, I am drinking 700ml at least.

I have 3 pints of 4.8% strength beer after work, with my colleagues. An imperial pint is 568ml, and 4.8% of 568ml is 27ml. My daily allowance is 20ml of alcohol, so a single pint of beer already exceeds my daily drinking allowance by 35%. By the time I've drunk all three pints, I've had 82ml out of my weekly allowance of 140ml - 59% gone in a single social outing, and just 41% left for the rest of the week.

I have a bottle of wine at the weekend - a two glasses on Saturday, and a glass with my Sunday lunch. Wine bottles contain 750ml, and wine is around 13% ABV, so therefore that adds up to 98ml more alcohol, on top of the the 82ml I already drank, making a total of 180ml for the week - an excess of 40ml versus my recommended weekly allowance, which is 29% more than I'm supposed to consume.

The reality is that I easily drink two pints of beer or ⅔ of a bottle of wine each day. 14 pints of beer contains 382ml of alcohol. 3.5 litres of wine contains 455ml of alcohol.

Does that make me an alcoholic, you must be wondering.

My psychiatrist accused me of being an alcoholic, to which I replied "pish and fibble; what flabbergasting nonsense". We can do some easy calculations, to work out if I am an alcoholic or not.

Let's take the worst-case scenario where I consume 100ml of alcohol per day. Ethanol is metabolised at a constant rate in the human body. That is to say, the quantity of blood in your alcohol-stream does not follow some kind of exponential decay calculation. Assuming I drink for 4 hours each evening, by around 6am in the morning, I'm completely sober. This means that I'm stone cold sober for 13 hours out of 24, which is 54% of the time. This simple mathematics shows that I'm not an alcoholic, quod erat demonstrandum.

My psychiatrist is clearly not capable of recalling her basic medical training, which would have taught her that alcohol is metabolised by the liver in a completely different way to more complex molecules. Very specific proteins and enzymes are required to chemically decompose inorganic (i.e. invented in a laboratory) medications. We can do a simple test, to again prove whether I'm an alcoholic or not.

Again, taking the worst-case scenario where I consume 100ml of alcohol per day, if I was to abruptly stop drinking alcoholic beverages, we should expect me to exhibit alcohol withdrawal syndrome within a few days of sobriety. Assuming that I suddenly ceased all alcohol consumption, I should - at the very bare minimum - get shaky hands and other physical symptoms that would prove that my body has become physically dependent on alcohol. The fact of the matter is that I can stop drinking for 2 or 3 days, and suffer no ill effects beyond a psychological craving for intoxicating liquor. This simple test, again shows that I'm not alcoholic, QED.

Despite the failings of my highly qualified physician - my psychiatrist - who has specialised in the alteration of brain function through the blunt instruments of psychoactive medications, she unarguably stumbled upon a truth in amidst her lazy and untrue accusations of alcoholism: I do drink too much.

Another definition of an alcoholic or an addict, is somebody whose life is adversely affected by drink or drugs, but who does not respond to the negative consequences in a rational manner. If you put your hand in a fire it hurts, right? So, why would you put your hand in the fire again? The perverse behavioural pattern of continuing to act in a way that is undeniably harmful, has also come to be recognised as another definition of alcoholism and addiction.

One only needs to consider the question "why do people smoke?" to see that there is grey between the lines. Smoking is expensive, makes you smell, stains your teeth and makes your mouth taste unpleasant to any non-smoker whom you kiss [with tongues and stuff] - these are the immediate consequences of smoking tobacco. In the medium term, smoking will give you a revolting phlegmy cough as well as literally burning enough cash to purchase a reasonable quality second-hand motor vehicle, or enjoy several foreign holidays. In the long-term, emphysema and lung cancer will bury smokers in an early grave.

It's oft-quoted that "the liver is the only organ in the human body that can repair itself" but this is patently untrue. Chronic cirrhosis - scarring of the liver - will not heal itself. Conversely, many drug addicts who have overdosed and been declared "brain dead" have gone on to make full recoveries, despite a consensus of medical opinion that life support should be withdrawn. The BBC commissioned Louis Theroux to make a series of documentaries about life in Los Angeles, and the episode entitled "Edge of Life" recorded the 'miraculous' recovery of a man whose brain was deprived of oxygen for at least 12 minutes, which is well beyond the limits of what we believe any human to be able to withstand.

Many of those who have been unfortunate enough to be a victim of a stroke, will go on to recover the ability to speak, walk and recover other functions that were lost as a result of brain injury - this is underpinned by the inherently plastic nature of the brain. Plasticity does not mean 'made of plastic' - it means adaptable to change, including the ability to recover from trauma.

An alcoholic may easily consume a litre of vodka per day - perhaps some 400ml of alcohol - which would equate to 2,800ml of alcohol per week. Given that the recommended weekly intake for a man or woman is just 140ml, alcoholics - of whom there are very many - consume at least 20 times as much alcohol as they should do, according to the UK's top doc.

It seems unsurprising that somebody who drinks to an incredible level of excess - where they are intoxicated from the moment they wake up to the moment they lay their head to rest - should sustain an injury to their liver, rendering the organ irreparably damaged.

This essay does not seek to argue that I would not benefit - in terms of my physical and mental health - by abstaining from alcohol consumption. However, one must be mindful that drinking is endemic in UK culture and to be a non-drinker would impose significant societal pressures and judgements upon me. I have, in the past, been falsely accused of being a "recovering alcoholic" merely for the reason that I chose to be teetotal for a period of over a hundred consecutive days. I decided to be alcohol abstinent for a competitive challenge - one of my best friends had completed a period of 100 days of sobriety. In the end, I beat his sober-streak by 20 days.

If you're concerned about your alcohol consumption, drug habit or the quantity of psychoactive medications that you guzzle into the cavernous hole in your face every day, then you should simply ask yourself this one question:

Are you shovelling more and more mind-altering substances into your body each day, or have you found a steady quantity that satiates your want and need for intoxication?

While you fret about eating a 'balanced' diet and being 'healthy' you forget that for 4,000,000,000 years, organisms - just like us - have had to cope with a world that's too hot, too cold, too acidic, too alkaline, too oxygen rich, too carbon-dioxide rich, too sulphurous, too contaminated with arsenic & other toxins, and generally fucking hostile to anything that we define as 'alive'. Humans inherit all of the many abilities to deal with everything from the icy wastes of the frozen poles to the dry & scorching sandy deserts.

The ubiquity of alcohol represents the antidote to the curse of becoming self-aware; the torment of perceiving our own mortality; the torture of realising that life is fucking bullshit, and we all die alone. If we don't go crazy we'll lose our minds.

I do not seek to dissuade alcoholics from seeking treatment, nor do I encourage anybody to recklessly endanger their health. I would hope that any reader who has been able to follow the thread of my thesis to this point, would be able to see that I'm mounting a robust attack on those who seek to perpetrate alarmist & sensationalistic nonsense, onto a populace who have been harmlessly intoxicating themselves since well before any form of any recorded history.

If you are teetotal, I applaud you and I advise you to maintain your alcohol-free existence, but you probably possesses some characteristics that predispose you towards abstinence, not shared by your brethren who imbibe intoxicating liquor. Please; do not smugly think of yourself as morally superior.

By happy accident, I never addicted myself to nicotine, so I look upon smokers with a detached sense of amazement that tiny quantities of a plant alkaloid - in the order of a grain of salt - can induce antisocial behaviours in those who are in the vice-like grip of nicotine: a chemical compound whose psychoactive properties are formidable. I apply a cool objective reasoning that I am able to enjoy, to other addictions that I do and do not partake in.

It's Friday, and in the time that it has taken me to compose this essay, I have consumed 35% of my weekly alcohol allowance.

Cheers!

Tags: #alcohol

This is a story about succession planning...

The British have always liked hot drinks.

Coffee shops were terribly trendy in the late 1600s, having been launched in Oxford before springing up across London, where ships that brought the crop of beans to English shores found many willing patrons for the roasted, ground and brewed end product.

Tea symbolises imperial Great Britain. The Indian town of Darjeeling - formerly part of the British Empire - is synonymous with the tender leaves that citizens of the United Kingdom douse with boiling water, infusing bitter plant alkaloids into the hot liquid. "Put the kettle on" are four words that will be said in millions of homes this evening, despite the stimulating effects of caffeine.

Cocoa beans have given rise to hot chocolate, also known as drinking chocolate. Even a small UK food & drink shop will offer all manner of flavourings for hot water. Nestled in amongst the other things that my fellow Brits would categorise as 'hot drinks' I found something that I think of as a powerfully concentrated and flavoured spread, ideally enjoyed on toasted slices of bread - a jar of Bovril beef extract.

The flavour of Bovril is closer to Marmite and Vegemite - or any other brand of yeast extract - than it is to beef, in my opinion. How exactly they "extract" Bovril from a cow is something that I don't really want to think about. I suppose it's a macroscopic version of what they do with microscopic yeast - microorganisms are just the same as cattle really... eating, shitting, reproducing and not doing much else.

In this Bovril-drinking Northern city, conspicuous by their absence are people with skin tones darker than my own and women wearing headscarves. I formerly lived in a region where the population is 46% Muslim. Surprisingly, the Bengali shopkeepers have no issue with selling pork and alcohol to those who are not forbidden - for religious reasons - from eating swine flesh and imbibing the intoxicating liquor created from fermented fruits and grains.

In this unfamiliar part of Northern England, there are innumerable drinking establishments in my local vicinity, as well a vast number of hot food outlets where a bacon or sausage "bap" can be procured as a traditional breakfast snack.

India - before she was partitioned in 1947 - was a nation where Muslims would respect the holiness of cows in the Hindu culture, and reciprocally the Hindus would respect the Muslim rejection of pigs as unclean animals, and alcohol as an addictive intoxicant that places a heavy burden on any society that permits its consumption.

Modern global society still holds strong religious views on the treatment of domesticated animals and the brewing and consumption of alcohol. When we examine the historical evidence using the scientific method, we can see that cows and pigs would not exist today as we know them, without human intervention spanning many more thousands of years than even the oldest religion. Furthermore, we can see that humanity has been intent on its own intoxication throughout the history of civilisation. The Mayans were chewing coca leaves at least 3,400 years before Islam had its golden age, and vastly predates Hinduism and Judaism. Ergo, we must conclude that excluding beef, pork, alcohol and other things from our diet and habits of consumption is a relatively recent 'fad'.

The Chinese are the biggest per capita consumers of pork, while America and the developed nations hoover up vast quantities of refined coca leaves in the form of white powder cocaine and rocks of freebase cocaine, known as crack. Opium, morphine and diamorphine (heroin) are endemic worldwide. Caffeinated beverages - hot or cold - are guzzled by the globe. Alcohol is cheaper than bottled mineral water from desirable brands like Evian or Perrier. Yet, only in the North of England - so far as I know - do people consume a hot drink made from Bovril.

I hate being spread thin. I'm adaptable and I can be sent all over the globe to work with people who observe different cultural traditions. I am relatively worldly-wise enough to not commit a faux-pas, such as eating food before sundown in front of those observing the Ramadan period of fasting. I can pretty much figure out whatever you want me to do, if you're paying me enough and you're not open to persuasion that your ideas are probably terrible in their original unmodified form.

Why have a dog and bark yourself?

Now I find myself juggling the essential task of finding a doctor who will keep me supplied with the medications that I have become physically dependent on, while also settling in a new home in an unfamiliar city. I must also meet the demands placed upon me in the pursuit of enough money to eat, service my debts and give myself more security and freedom of choice.

I'm withdrawing from Xanax (alprazolam), Valium (diazepam), Ambien (zolpidem), zopiclone and Lyrica (pregablin). All of these drugs work in a very similar way - mimicking the brain's own 'brakes' and calming neural activity. These medications cause a chemical called GABA to be released in the brain, block the brain from recycling any unused GABA, or imitate the 'signature' of GABA itself. The overall effect is tranquillising, stress relieving and aids sleep, but the withdrawal is quite the opposite. In fact, the abrupt withdrawal from any or all of the medications listed can cause life-threatening seizures.

I must juggle social drinking - alcohol is a mandatory social lubricant in most UK culture - with the need to use alcohol as a form of self-medication for the stress I'm under. I also use alcohol as a substitute for the powerful psychotropic medications that my body has become dependent on, like heroin addicts kick their habit using methadone. Alcoholics can break free from physical dependence using benzodiazepines such as Librium (chlordiazepoxide). I'm doing it the other way round, because I know I can stop drinking - I plan on doing so in October, when I will use the excuse that I'm going teetotal to raise money for charity (a.k.a. Stoptober) - as I have done successfully before.

How I ended up with so much on my plate is not really my intended subject of this lengthy diatribe, but in my dark and difficult moments, I am facing a clusterfuck of competing demands on my time and energy, while also dealing with panic attacks and a general feeling of uneasiness and discontent; a false perception of threat, danger and imminent disaster.

My perceptions are not completely warped. Earlier this year, both my kidneys completely failed. Very recently I narrowly escaped homelessness, bankruptcy, destitution and destruction. Unpleasant feelings are a harbinger of a genuine medical emergency - I am detoxing myself without the supervision of a doctor or nurse, while also working full time.

I've skippered yachts and kept my crew safe in stormy weather; I've led groups safely up and down dangerous mountains covered with snow and ice; I've become blasé about near-death experiences, because I've now had so many. I don't think I'm exaggerating or being hyperbolic when I say that I'm facing my life's toughest challenge so far.

The demands placed upon me in my day job seem unreasonable at the moment, but I was desperate for fast cash. I was drowning and I was thrown a lifeline - beggars can't be choosers.

Friends who have submitted themselves to the mercy of the state seem to have suffered greatly from the trials and tribulations of dealing with compassion fatigued bureaucrats. A great many nurses and doctors have told me that I'm 'entitled' to live at the expense of the government - i.e. my fellow citizens - because of the taxes I have paid in my life, and because my mental illness disqualifies me from being 'fit for work'. To put work as my priority, ahead of treatment is something that none of my doctors want, but equally there's a long queue of people who would prefer to sit at home smoking cannabis and playing on their Playstations, rather than flipping burgers or scrubbing toilets for the minimum wage.

Like concentrated beef extract, I'm intense; I'm focussed; I can achieve a lot very quickly. The terrifying truth is that the world applauds anybody who exhibits bipolar behaviours... what happened to all those 'overnight successes' and 'one-hit wonders'? They spent all their money on fast cars, beautiful women, drugs & alcohol, and the rest they just wasted, is the oft-repeated quote.

Once you've figured out a winning formula, all you can do is teach others to follow in your footsteps. If you can train an army of mini-mes to do the grunt work - the heavy lifting - then life becomes more sustainable. Only a fool repeats the same behaviour, expecting different results.

And so, I desperately need to find my successor - somebody to fill my shoes and shoulder some of the burden, allowing me to recover and stabilise, rather than being trapped in a cycle of just repeating things that I've done before a thousand times.

It's hard to find somebody who's willing to do a shitty job, and it's hard to find somebody who's able to navigate their way through the piles of shit and find the better way of doing things. I might be that diamond in the rough, but that doesn't mean it's a great idea to get me scrubbing toilets or flipping burgers, even though I will do if you ask me, pay me and I'm desperate enough.

Having a desperation-driven economy, with most of us spread thinly - stressed out and always on the brink of breakdown and ruin - is a terrible, terrible thing to do to people.

Hunger will drive ingenuity and industriousness, but it's not a sustainable strategy, no matter how much Bovril you have to eat and/or drink.

Tags: #career #addiction #drugs #mentalhealth #bipolar

This is a story about a peaceful death...

Try this at home if you like: it's impossible to hold your breath until you pass out. Even if it were possible, your conscious decision to hold your breath would then be overridden when you were unconscious, so you would start breathing again.

Don't try this at home, because it's dangerous, but it probably won't kill you: if you take a plastic bag with no holes in it, and tape it around your neck so that no air can get in or out, pretty soon you'll start to hyperventilate. You're going to panic, and you're going to know that the plastic bag is stopping you from getting the fresh air you need, so you're going to tear a hole in that plastic bag. It's possible you could control that urge until you passed out, and then you'd soon die of asphyxiation, but if you remain conscious you'll find that the urge to take a breath of fresh air is overwhelming.

You'd think that it was a lack of oxygen that was causing this panicked desire to take a breath of fresh air, but you'd be wrong. What governs your overwhelming desire - panic - to take a breath after you've been deprived of fresh air, is something called the hypercapnic alarm response. It's actually elevated levels of CO₂ that are causing your brain to say "oh, shit, I'm about to suffocate".

If you were going to gas people to death, you could use chlorine. Chlorine gas will burn the lungs from the inside, when inhaled. The chlorine will combine with water in your lungs, to make hydrochloric acid, which will cause fatal internal chemical burns - your lungs will be so damaged, they're rendered useless. The pain would be excruciating, as the chlorine attacks your lungs, throat, larynx, eyes and other parts of your body that have some dampness. Death would be slow and painful, as you struggled to breathe with lungs that were being disolved by acid.

If you were going to gas people to death, you could use a nerve agent, like sarin or venomous agent X. These potent nerve agents interfere with muscular control. Without control of the muscle of your diaphragm, you are unable to breathe in and out. Dying with a nerve agent, you would be fully conscious of the fact that you couldn't breathe: that is to say you couldn't actually suck any air into your lungs, even though you desperately wanted to. You may lose other muscular control, and drop to the ground, twitching, but you would be fully conscious until you asphyxiated. More of a painless death than chlorine, but pretty awful to be unable to breathe in and out, even though you want and need to.

If you were going to gas people to death, you could use pure nitrogen. The air we breathe is 78% nitrogen, which is inert and innocuous. Food manufacturers fill your bags of crisps with pure nitrogen. So, if we breathe nitrogen all the time, how can you use it to gas people to death? Well, obviously in a room that's filled with 99% nitrogen, there's hardly a trace of oxygen - certainly not enough to keep you conscious and alive. Worryingly, the brain has no way of knowing that it's not getting enough oxygen, so you'd just pass out and asphyxiate rather unexpectedly. You'd start to get confused as your brain was deprived of oxygen. Your ability to think would be so impaired, you'd never figure out - through logic - that you were suffocating, before you passed out and died. In a way, you'd die stupid and ignorant.

If you were going to gas people to death, you could use carbon dioxide. CO₂ is readily available in the form of fire extinguishers. An over-zealous demonstration of a fire extinguisher in a small unventilated room, could leave you gasping for air, which is the effect intended on a fire: to deprive it of oxygen. You might unwittingly deprive yourself of oxygen. In a death chamber filled with CO₂ you would be hyperventilating - gasping for breath - until you eventually passed out and then finally asphyxiated after a few minutes. This to me, is the very worst kind of death. With the nerve gas, you'd want to gasp for air, but you wouldn't be able to. With nerve gas the other effects on your motor functions would be a distraction, as you twitched uncontrollably on the floor. However, with the CO₂ you'd be hopelessly sucking in lungfuls of gas, but feeling a rising sense of panic as you were acutely aware that you were in the process of suffocating. For most people, it would be the worst two or three minutes of their life: a terrible torturous way to die; cruel and unusual.

I've spent plenty of time in the high Alps and been to the summit of many mountains over 4,000 metres, which is about 13,000 feet. This altitude is classified as being "very high" which is the grade below "extreme". At the summit of Mont Blanc the percentage of available oxygen drops from 21% to 11%, which is roughly half what you normally breathe. You can breathe twice as fast to try and compensate, but there's a limit to the speed with which your body can absorb a lungful of oxygen. If you're breathing twice as fast, your body has half as long to absorb the available oxygen from that air. I know what it's like to be gasping for air, when my muscles were burning with lactic acid because they've not been able to get enough oxygen. I know what it's like to be slightly lightheaded and giddy, because my brain is not getting all the oxygen it needs. However, if you sit still and calm, lower your heart-rate and your respiration rate, you can soon get the oxygen levels in your blood back up to a safe percentage.

Deep sea divers know that to panic could be deadly. Panic is a fight-or-flight mode where your heart-rate and breathing increase, getting your blood full of oxygen so that your muscles can use it if you have to make a run for it. However, with only a finite amount of compressed gas to breathe and the necessity to ascend to the surface slowly, it's imperative that divers maintain a relaxed metabolic state, to preserve the precious oxygen in their tanks. To swim like crazy to the surface might mean you can take as many deep breaths of fresh air as you like, but bubbles of nitrogen in your bloodstream will have nucleated, and they will cause excruciating pain as they work their way through your body and can even kill you if they reach the brain - this is called "the bends".

I just found out that in Denmark, where most of our bacon comes from, they euthanise pigs using CO₂ which I find distressing, thinking that pigs have the same hypercapnic alarm response that we do. The pigs spend 4 minutes in a chamber filled with CO₂ and then they are unconscious or they have asphyxiated. They don't feel their throats being slit, which causes a massive drop in blood pressure, immediately rendering the brain as good as dead. However, I want to know if those pigs spent some of those 4 minutes, hyperventilating, panicking, trying to breathe in and out enough to not suffocate... hopelessly.

Genocide, ethnic cleansing, euthanasia and to some extent, animal slaughter, all raise questions about the suffering in the final moments before death. If I was going to rank the ways I'd choose to die, this would be my choice:

1. Massive laceration to the carotid artery - the drop in blood pressure would cause instant unconsciousness, and death would swiftly follow
2. Diamorphine or fentanyl overdose - while this effectively kills through respiratory arrest, which is the same as asphyxiation, you would almost certainly die quickly and painlessly, unconscious
3. Nitrogen (or other inert gas - e.g. helium) - to breathe this gas until you lost consciousness would require a certain amount of steely resolve, to not tear off the bag or mask. Completely painless, but requiring 2 or 3 minutes that would be psychologically unpleasant.
4. Potassium cyanide - this would produce a relatively swift and certain death, but there may be some minutes of pain and discomfort

The poisons arsenic, ricin and strychnine, along with the nerve agents botulinum, sarin and venomous agent X, would all have undesirably slow or indirect ways of killing you - for example, inhibiting your ability to breathe. To die by these deadly agents would be most undesirable, given the suffering in your final moments.

Point blank gunshots to the head can miss major blood vessels and parts of the brain that control your vital organs, and as such, very many people have survived attempted suicide using a gun. This is probably largely to do with Hollywood portrayals of suicides being committed by putting the gun in your mouth: liable to result in the bullet missing the spinal cord and anything else important, and just leaving a hole in the back of your head/neck. Painful, but not fatal.

Therefore, without the assistance from a person with anatomical and surgical knowledge, to sever your carotid artery, and without the access to the controlled (illegal) substances of diamorphine and fentanyl, your best option is to obtain a canister of wine preserver gas, a large plastic bag and some duct tape. Filling the bag with the gas, you would place it over your head, top up the gas as much as possible and then tape it airtight around your neck. You should lose consciousness within minutes and die soon after that - completely painlessly. A home remedy to euthanise yourself.

Many dentists who commit suicide breathe nitrous oxide - laughing gas - through a mask until they lose consciousness and asphyxiate.

The problem with a home made pill cocktail - opiates to stop your breathing and benzodiazepines and Z-drugs (zopiclone, zolpidem) to keep you unconscious - is that your stomach needs to break down many many pills and for their contents to enter your bloodstream rapidly, without you vomiting. Augmenting with alcohol may increase the ability of the opiates to stop you breathing, and assist in keeping you unconscious, but there is a fairly big time window where you might be discovered and there are a number of variables that make the result more unpredictable than is acceptable, if you've made the final decision to euthanise yourself.

As you can see, those who are thinking about ending a life have much to consider, even if it's just a pig to make bacon out of. I would prefer my pigs to be killed with pure nitrogen gas, than pure CO₂. In actual fact, even though the halal practice of slitting an animal's throat looks barbaric, it's very humane, for the reasons explained above - it would be my first choice, for myself.

Gas chambers, animal and human euthanasia - you're welcome.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about habituation...

What a surprise! There's a small glass of wine left in the bottle today. How did I end up missing that? I normally drink the house dry, every single night. I've stopped buying gin, Pimms and other spirits, to avoid the temptation of a strong early-evening drink, to take the edge off the day; the nightcap that sends me to bed completely sozzled.

I'm not saying I've become some pious teetotaler who rather too proudly proclaims their abstinence, as if it makes them a better person somehow. I respect former alcoholics who know that once they pop they can't stop, but anybody who chooses not to eat or drink something because of their beliefs and values can bloody well keep it to themselves.

The French - during a water shortage - put up public notices saying "SAVE WATER: DRINK WINE". I fucking love the French.

I've been having my rocket fuel antidepressants for a few weeks now, but I'm sleeping 14 hours a day and I'm almost completely incapacitated by depression. The doc told me to take two pills a day, so I'm taking four, trying to speed things along a bit. The timing could not be worse. I need to be up and about, earning money, enjoying our all-too-brief British summer. Instead, I'm in bed with the curtains closed.

The friend who challenged me to 100 days of sobriety now takes 3 day breaks from drinking. I can't remember the last day where I didn't have any alcohol. Probably when I was in hospital, or maybe the day of the London Marathon, when I momentarily relapsed onto the really hard stuff: supercrack.

Perhaps that's one of the main reasons why I'm still depressed - it was only a month ago that I was convinced the sound of helicopters and yelling crowds, was an angry mob and the police, out to get me. Paranoia like that is awful. Supercrack is a Hell of a drug.

What a year. Starting well with a contract for Lloyds, but then suddenly my foot was numb and swollen. By the time I made it to Accident & Emergency, my whole left leg had swollen up. Acute kidney failure meant two weeks on dialysis and an operation to put a 25cm long rubber tube into a vein in my groin. Managed four days work then lost the contract - too sick to work. My flatmate had buggered off and owes me thousands of pounds in rent & bills; made a complete mess of my spare bedroom. Nobody knew why my foot was numb and I couldn't move it very much, despite being poked and prodded by various doctors. I was taking huge doses of opiates to manage the pain, and had to endure horrible withdrawal - nausea, cold sweats, diarrhoea - when I decided to try and get off the painkillers.

Gawd knows how long I've been taking Xanax and Valium for. I probably need a benzo detox. Opiate withdrawal is unpleasant but benzo withdrawal can kill you.

But, one step at a time. I'm going to try and only drink half a bottle of wine tonight. She wants to drink early and then stop; I want to drink late and then go to bed. It's going to be a test of my willpower, which is severely compromised by alcohol.

If tonight goes well, I'll try and do three consecutive days with no booze; see if it helps my mood. I'm sure my liver will thank me - it's already pretty busy trying to process all those chemicals I put into my body; all those pretty pills.

It's true, the more someting is ubiquitous, the harder it is to abstain from it. I hadn't dabbled in drugs for a decade, when the Dark Web brought a drug superstore right into my living room. Little packages of joy coming through the letterbox, allegedly. It's easier to get booze though. If you really have the thirst for it, you can nip to your local convenience store or even have it delivered to your door in London, 24 hours a day.

They tell recovering addicts to delete all their dealers' numbers from their phone; avoid friends who are still using drugs; change your lifestyle to avoid reminders of the places you used to use drugs. But what if you only ever did drugs on your own? What if you never met a dealer in your life? What if you could never forget the steps to access the Dark Web?

Why am I so hard on myself when I'm dealing with so much? Addiction, hospitalisation, psychiatric wards, mental health conditions, painful injuries, money worries, people owing me lots of money, need to get another contract, need to get a new flatmate, need to fix stuff up, need to stabilise and get into a sustainable position.

Alcohol's probably the most health-destroying drug; the most dangerous to quit if you're dependent; the most ubiquitous; the drug I've been abusing for the longest.

One step at a time.

Tags: #alcohol #drugs #addiction #mentalhealth

This is a story about leading an insulated life...

Just in case you think I've been sniffing solvent-based glue, I'm not advocating giving booze or fags to newborn babies. I am - however - suggesting that our academically gifted, with their busy lives of music practice, homework, extracurricular studies, cultural, museum & historical sight visits, mock exams pretending to give a shit about charity & community service and being dragged off to France or Germany in the interests of practising for their exams: all in the interests of an immaculate university application... this has created vast numbers of insulated children who know little about narcotics except one lesson they did where they wrote names of drugs on a blackboard, when they were 13.

Let me disabuse you of a myth. There has not yet been a drug invented that is instantly addictive. If a doctor was to give a child an intravenous injection of diamorphine (heroin) - as many paediatrics will do in hospital - then it's certain to be an experience that the child will vividly remember with reverence. Ok, so the dose is selected carefully, but this is mainly so that the child doesn't vomit, experience unpleasant itching or suffer a respiratory arrest.

Now, let's disabuse you of another myth. Cannabis is harmless. The most insulated child's first opportunity to try drugs will be at university. I was so insulated that I thought "spliff" was a drug. It's spliffs - cannabis cigarettes - that are so dangerous, because they are often mixed with tobacco, leading to nicotine addiction and death through smoking-related diseases. Nicotine addiction is widely regarded as more addictive than heroin addiction.

Now, let's study two drugs, and compare why their chemical similarity is the polar opposite of their potential for addiction. Crystal meth, known more correctly as methamphetamine, should be well known to you as a highly (but not instantly) addictive drug. Ecstasy, known more correctly as 3,4-Methylinedioxymethamphetamine (a.k.a. Molly, Mandy, Adam) is taken by millions of party-going young people throughout the UK, especially at university where a night of drinking could cost £20 to £40 and upwards, but a dose of Ecstasy will cost around £3. You would have thought that the drug's low cost would create an addiction epidemic, but taking a drug with friends on a Friday or Saturday night, to attend a nightclub for little more than the price of the entry fee, is a far more enjoyable experience than living homeless smoking a meth pipe. There is also a peer group at school and university, who identity problem drug users and try to help them in a peer-to-peer manner.

The most dangerous group of drugs in the world are prescribed medications: benzodiazepines. Prescribed for acute stress or anxiety disorders, within 3 months, the body is physically dependent on the medication and stopping taking it will cause seizures and even death. If we're educating our children properly, we need to teach them that medicines are just as dangerous - if not more so - than street drugs.

While we're on the subject of prescribed medications, Adderall and Ritalin are prescribed to children for ADHD. Ritalin is more addictive than cocaine. Adderall is amphetamines.

Furthermore, Oxycontin and Oxycodone are prescribed for pain management, but these are powerful opiate medications - like heroin, morphine and opium - and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has not given a license for these medications to be prescribed on the NHS. NICE's decision saved the UK from a widespread disaster. Just because you get nicely packaged pills from your pharmacy, doesn't mean they're safe to eat like candies. Americans who became hooked on Oxy quickly figured out that heroin is far cheaper, which has given rise to the tragic opiate epidemic in the USA, which knows no class boundaries. Honour roll students are dying in similar proportions to suburban hoodlums.

What about cocaine? There's a reason why dealers market cocaine as "social" or "sociable". Cocaine tickles the reward centre of your brain, but it still needs external stimulus. On a night out on cocaine, every attractive girl/guy is looking at you, everybody thinks you're witty and funny, you're controlling the room with pure charisma. In fact, in a room full of people on cocaine, everybody is talking over each other but they only hear what they want. That drug-induced self-confidence might sweep somebody off their feet, or it could even stray into the realm of sexual harassment because your brain converts "no" into "yes". Taking cocaine in isolation is insanity... it's not a solo drug.

But what about crack cocaine? School kids should definitely learn about crack so they don't at least waste it. Cocaine is water soluble, so it can be drunk, swallowed, snorted, plugged (look it up) or injected. Crack can only be smoked and doing any of the aforementioned will have no effect. But seriously though, crack is one of only a handful of drugs that can lead to isolated drug-taking, which I explain the dangers of later on.

Of the mind-altering trippy drugs, ketamine is the main one to avoid, given that it's addictive and gives you bladder ulcers. LSD, mushrooms (psilocybin), DMT, Salvia and Peyote (mescaline) have very limited addictive potential.

The drugs that kids should be quite rightly scared of are the ones that can be quickly habit forming and are enjoyable in a non-social context. These are:

• Nicotine (inc. cannabis as gateway drug in spliffs)
• Heroin (inc. Oxycodone/Oxycontin as gateway drugs)
• Crystal meth (inc. Adderall & amphetamines as gateway drug)
• Benzodiazepines (when procured on the black market in large quantities)
• Ketamine
• Crack cocaine
• Supercrack

That's not a very big list, is it? You would have thought that drug addiction would be much less of a problem if that list was correct, but the story goes like this:

Good little Oscar went to a top university, fluent in French, Grade 8 piano and having given up every Saturday to helping little old ladies cross the road. Being able to name any piece of chamber music within 2 notes, and having memorised every placard of every museum, National Trust and English Heritage sight, plus recite the kings & queens of England backwards while holding his breath, he failed to make Oxford or Cambridge who don't want rote-learned fact regurgitators with mild speech impediments where their natural accent has been beaten out of them by a home environment so sterile that it could be used as an operating theatre. With 30 GCSEs (all A-stars) and 10 A-levels (all As) Oscar went through clearing in order to study underwater basket weaving at Luton former polytechnic, where he nearly choked on his own vomit when he saw a fellow student with tattoos, piercings, an ironic T-shirt and smoking a cigarette. She was female, and he later realised he had ejaculated in his underwear, having been forbidden from talking to girls, watching TV or unsupervised Internet browsing.

Finding his shyness and good manners endearing, and slightly out of pity, Oscar received an invitation to a party that evening.

Providing much merriment for the partygoers as he spluttered on a spliff. He then started giving everyone hugs in his deeply unfashionable clothes, when he was seduced into taking Ecstasy by a girl. The ejaculation retarding effect of the drug helped him to lose his virginity in an not-unrespectable time of 80 seconds, having penetrated the girl who he felt certain - at that moment in time - was the most beautiful in the world, and he would marry at the first opportunity. When the drugs wore off, he was surprised to discover she was 18 stone and missing several teeth.

By the end of his 3-year degree course, Oscar no longer had a healthy respect for drugs and died young, because of blood-borne diseases, transmitted through shared needles. His family did not attend his funeral, feeling they had given him the best possible start in life.

"Drugs are bad", "just say no" and other messages that suggest that sudden death or addiction may occur from drug experimentation, are pedalled in our 'better' schools, which has created generation upon generation of politicians who perpetuate the "punishment, not treatment or education" policies. Now with the advent of the Dark Web, a curious person like myself can find themselves with an addiction that never would have happened, had I been allowed to experiment with drugs in a peer group who were not equally insulated.

If we really wanted to curtail the tragedy of young lives cut short by drugs, we would end the two-tier strategy, where some children are streetwise while others receive an education that has limited use except to further an insulated academic career.

My [then] closest male friend who I've known since 2001, been on holiday with 3 times and even rubbed sun cream on his back, treated me like a completely different person - as if we had never even met and I'd spat in his soup & tipped his drink on his head - when I admitted I had a drug problem. This is what the private/independent/public/grammar schools and the league tables are producing: dangerously insulated and prejudiced children.

It's a pipe dream, to introduce schoolkids to the first-hand effect of drugs in a controlled environment - but the rate of psychoactive medications and drugs we consume shows no sign of abating.

Who do you trust? The doctors dishing out the pills that have created a heroin epidemic in the USA, the guy who's 10 years older than your 15 year old daughter who says "this won't hurt a bit" as he injects her with heroin, or the education system that can empower your children to make their own informed decisions?

Tags: #drugs

This is a story about dance, trance and magic plants...

On the left hand side of the picture above, we see drugs that are considered to be medications. That is to say, they are considered to have some useful function in the practice of medicine. On the right hand side of the picture, we see drugs of abuse. Drugs of abuse are considered to have no useful function at all, and have been made outright illegal in all contexts.

In the middle of the picture are pills that are sometimes considered medicine and sometimes considered drugs. Probably the best example I can give you of such a dichotomy is ketamine (not pictured) which is well known as a horse tranquilliser. In fact, ketamine should be better known as a general anaesthetic, and the drug of choice for paramedics to treat pain in victims of traumatic injuries, for example in the aftermath of a road traffic accident.

Dihydrocodeine is an opiate, and opiates are analgesic. Analgesics don't cause numbness, but they do increase pain tolerance. With enough analgesic, you could saw off your own leg and feel everything, but you wouldn't care about the pain. Anelgesics are painkillers. Dihydrocodeine is a painkiller.

Tramadol is an opiate, therefore also an analgesic.

Zopiclone, Xanax, diazepam and etizolam are in the hypnotic/sedative/anxiolytic category. Zopiclone will help you have a good night of uninterrupted sleep and wake up without a drug hangover: it's an excellent sleep aid. Xanax is a fast-acting, short-lived tranquilliser: it's great for stopping panic attacks, and might be useful if you're suffering a bout of unbearable stress and anxiety or struggling to drop off to sleep. Diazepam is a long-lived tranquilliser that's good for longer term management of stress and anxiety. Etizolam is a result of prohibition: it's an imitation of diazepam that used to be legal to sell and possess as a 'research chemical'.

MDMA is the abbreviation for 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (and yes, I did just write that without having to look it up) which is more commonly known as Ecstasy, molly, mandy or generally as 'pills' in a clubbing/rave context. It's a stimulant and empathogen: it stimulates empathy. Its peak effects last 6 to 8 hours, but takes about 12 hours to wear off completely. The experiences can be very profound and long lasting. MDMA is extremely draining on the serotonin system of the brain, which can lead to a form of delayed comedown, coming days after taking the drug.

Crystal Meth is the commonly known name - thanks to the TV series Breaking Bad - of methamphetamine. It's a very powerful stimulant with effects lasting 12+ hours, and it disrupts sleep long after its desired effects have worn off. The more astute reader may notice that the final part of the chemical name of MDMA is the same as the chemical name of meth. As you might expect, there are similar effects: loss of appetite, increased energy and decreased need for sleep. However, while MDMA stimulates empathetic behaviour - hugging etc - meth tends to stimulate rather more hedonistic behaviours, such as fucking and masturbating to pornography. However, both drugs - being amphetamines - cause a man's dick to shrink to a little nubbin that's no use to anybody. Polydrug abusers might use sildenafil (Viagra) or other erectile dysfunction medications in conjunction with meth, in order to sustain a decent hard-on.

Spread out on the kitchen counter top, there's probably about £300 worth of drugs.

MDMA is extremely cheap, coming in at circa £10 per gram, which is enough for 5 very strong doses. Far cheaper than getting drunk in a pub or a bar. Pound for pound, MDMA represents excellent value.

Crystal Meth is the most expensive, coming in at about £100 per gram. Because of the crystalline form of the drug, it's far harder (although not impossible) to cut it with other things. Cocaine has an average street purity of less than 20%, because it's so tempting for every person who handles the coke in the chain, to cut it a bit and increase their profits. All white powders look the same, and numbing agents - like baby teething powder - will give the numbing effect that cocaine has. Crystal meth is generally pretty pure. It's usually smoked or injected. You do not want to mess with this stuff.

Diazepam is frighteningly cheap. 100 pills containing 10mg of diazepam each, will set you back £30 or maybe even less. The price has fallen drastically, from £1 a pill, to now 30 pence. It's important to remember that diazepam is a benzodiazepine, and the benzodiazepines are physically addictive. You can die if you take a load of diazepam and then stop taking it. It's not something you should mess with.

Xanax, by comparison, is very expensive. Because it's convenient to be able to take it and not be spaced out the next day, it's become America's favourite tranquilliser. The Rolling Stones might have sung about Mother's Little Helpers - referring to Valium - but now the housewife's choice is Xanax. Physically addictive, blah blah blah.

Zopiclone is nice and cheap and works really well without nasty side effects. The only problem is, becoming too reliant on it for sleep. At some point, you have to stop relying on pills and alcohol to get to sleep, and learn natural ways of making sure you can drop off and get your precious 8 hours. Try blue-light filtering glasses, not having any screen time after 10pm and sleeping with your smartphone and other electronics in another room, so there's no temptation to pick them up and start looking at Facebook or whatever.

Tramadol and Dihydrocodeine will take you on the journey to opium, morphine, fentanyl and diacetylmorphine (heroin). The cheapest opiate of all is heroin, because of the simple economic law of supply and demand. People fucking love heroin. I've smoked heroin on a few occasions and I enjoyed the feeling of carefree sleepiness, but I never got a rush of euphoria like I imagine you must get when you inject. I've never injected drugs. One should be mindful that the vast majority of new heroin addicts in America started their journey with opiates prescribed by their doctor - oxycontin, for example - and then moved to heroin because oxy is prohibitively expensive. Tramadol and codeine are pretty cheap, but they're also very weak compared with morphine and heroin.

There's no need to be afraid of any of these drugs in the sense that they're not going to leap down your throat and cause you to instantly become an addict who's prepared to murder your entire family for 50 pence, so you can have one more tiny little hit. These drugs are not like Venomous Agent X, which can kill you almost instantly if you absorb even the tiniest amount through your skin. You do not want to touch a pin head sized amount of VX nerve agent, but you can safely handle Ecstasy pills, shards of ice (crystal meth) and all of the other drugs pictured, and you will come to no harm at all.

Taking these drugs once, or even twice or three times, is very unlikely to result in addiction. You may enjoy the sensations; the experience, but it's quite possible that you might find the effects of the drug to be extremely unpleasant. Certainly, MDMA can be very intense and the intoxication of tramadol can be alarming. Interestingly, the calming effect of the benzodiazepines is often the best treatment for a 'bad trip' that you very much want to end. Sadly, there's no 'off' switch for most drugs. It's like when you've had too much to drink and you're throwing up: you wish that you could stop feeling so sick and that the room would stop spinning, but there's no instant fix.

To have this vast array of drugs just lying around, seems to invite disaster and is a risk in terms of the illegality of possessing so many controlled substances. Are you going to ring the police? Do you think I should go to jail? Is it right to ruin my life, because we should follow the law to the letter, even though the law is an ass?

To address the second concern: doesn't this invite disaster? I've had enough disasters in my life. I've reached a point where I'm rather sick of the drama and the near-death experiences. I'm rather sick of the paranoia and the comedowns. The drugs don't even work any more, because my brain has become so used to powerful narcotics. My brain is literally saying "you've been doing this shit for far too long". I'm almost at the point where drugs bore me.

Right now, I need tramadol, because I'm in a lot of pain because of my leg injury. The zopiclone will be handy when I run out of pregablin, which I'm using to sleep through my pain and discomfort. Having Xanax and diazepam lying around is never a terrible thing. At least benzos are a lot cheaper than a bottle of wine or two, a lot less fattening and a lot less liver damaging. It is a slippery slope though, and it is easier to get hooked on benzos than it is to become an alcoholic, because there isn't really a hangover per se, with the benzos.

The MDMA and the meth should probably get flushed down the loo. I'm too old to go clubbing/raving, and the crystal meth tips me straight into a hypomanic episode and turns me into a total sex maniac.

The dihydrocodeine will gather dust in the medicine cabinet, as a strong painkiller, in case I ever have a nasty injury again and the doctors are dicks about giving me prescription drugs to relieve pain. I do think that doctors in America have been foolishly over-prescribing opiate painkillers, because they believed the marketing of the pharmaceutical companies.

I'm sure you think that this cornucopia of chemicals is crazy. I'm sure you think this deluge of drugs is deranged. I'm sure you think this mass of medications is madness.

However, it's fucking hassle having to get a doctor's appointment, wait for the allotted date and time, and then persuade the doctor to give you what you want and need. There's every chance that the doctor may end up sending you away empty handed. Far better to have your own well-stocked pharmacy cupboard, and have whatever you need whenever you need it.

Of course, the nanny state is there to protect us from ourselves, which is why we arrest people who are about to climb mountains, don't we?

Prohibition has failed spectacularly, because it has created highly efficient black markets. Prohibition has failed spectacularly, because it has needlessly ruined lives of otherwise law-abiding citizens. Prohibition has failed, because the middle classes take just as many drugs as poor people, but the rich middle-class people are very rarely prosecuted. Prohibition has failed, because drugs are just as widely available as ever, and the main beneficiaries are corrupt customs, corrupt police and organised crime gangs. Prohibition has failed, because it fails to acknowledge the inescapable fact that people are always going to make, sell, buy and take drugs, no matter what the law says. Prohibition has failed, because it makes people paranoid and exacerbates mental health problems. Prohibition has failed because it directs money that could be used to help the tiny proportion of people who struggle with addiction, instead of using vast amounts of resources to persecute ordinary law-abiding citizens, who just want to smoke a bit of dope or take a pill when they go clubbing on a Saturday night.

You know prohibition has failed spectacularly, when the government makes mushrooms - which grow naturally in the ground all over the UK - a Class A drug, in the same category as crack cocaine and heroin. Are you fucking nuts? Are you fucking telling me that we should stuff our prisons full of people who picked a fucking mushroom in a fucking field?

Imagine this conversation:

Prisoner A: What you been nicked for?

Prisoner B: Murder. What about you?

Prisoner A: I picked a mushroom

That is quite genuinely the situation that the government introduced into UK law. I'm being quite serious here. Mushrooms are considered just as bad as crack cocaine. I wonder what the government were smoking when they made that insane decision.

As we know, when a government bans a drug, then clever chemists create another one that's almost identical. In America, they have a law that makes analogues illegal, so only whole new classes of drugs can get around their laws. All kinds of obscure chemicals - legal highs - burst onto the scene thanks to America's attempts to get clever with prohibition.

The UK government has gone a stage further and attempted to ban anything that has a psychoactive effect. That means that we're all 'in possession' of illegal drugs, because our bodies are stuffed full of chemicals that are psychoactive. It also means that drugs will simply get sold in 'kit' form: mix the ingredients at home and hey presto! There's your drug of choice. People will always find a way around the stupidity of prohibition.

The fear that has been stoked up by these terrible prohibition policies, has created a squeamishness about being able to have honest open conversations about drug taking. We should be well informed, not ignorant. We shouldn't be paranoid about being persecuted by the authorities. You have to be fairly brave to stick your head above the parapet. A lot of corrupt officials make a lot of money, through the ongoing boom times of the black market. There is an insatiable demand for drugs - and there always will be - which is why there is so much resistance to making drug taking into something that's safer, regulated, quality controlled and a well understood problem, rather than something cloaked in secrecy and hampered by stigma.

I've had problems with addiction in the past, but it makes me a stronger more well-rounded person, to have been through that ordeal and to know what difficulties are faced by people who become ensnared in the traps that have been set for them: draining their bank balance, destroying their health, and driving them to criminality. Why can't I talk openly about my experiences? Why do I have to be anonymous, hiding away with other 'dirty' junkies, in church halls where we self-flagellate for our 'sins' and hang our heads in shame.

Obviously I've had enough of prohibition, but I've had enough of being stigmatised and shamed into silence and anonymity too. I've had enough of people's wilful ignorance, when it comes to drugs and the lives of drug users. I've had enough of ridiculous horror stories and misinformation.

Perhaps you didn't even read this far, if you're the kind of person whose mind I'm trying to open, but perhaps you did, because on the face of it I'm an educated middle-class white professional man, working for prestigious companies in seemingly important roles. You can't quite imagine me smoking heroin, can you?

I'm challenging your preconceived ideas. I'm making you question what you thought you knew, and what you thought was obvious and without exception.

Tags: #drugs

This is a story about family...

I was born in Aberystwyth, Wales. This is the first house I lived in. We moved around lots when I was growing up - I went to 8 different schools - so I don't really know where to call home. For me, home is where I make it: I have a grab bag in my apartment in London, with a tent and a sleeping bag. I'll survive, but there isn't a family home I would visit ever again. Homelessness is the only option.

I was wondering to myself earlier whether I'm a misanthrope or not. I certainly dislike the stress of rush hour travel and battling crowds. You must wonder why I live and work in London, where it's so densely populated, but I find that it has amazing people, food, culture and lots of jobs for my skills and experience. I live by the river and it's actually pretty quiet down on the Isle of Dogs, as is the Square Mile, where I often get contracts.

I've decided that I don't hate people, but a lot of people seem to hate me. Changing schools so much is disruptive to a child's life. Instead of learning how to make friends and become popular, there's little point if you're going to get yanked out of some place you're happy with and dumped somewhere else. It's fairly obvious that the more disrupted a child's environment, the more they will retreat inwards, in search of some stability and consistency.

Bullying was a big feature of my childhood. It was a daily feature of life until I went to college. It's easy to make a child into a bullying victim: just give them something that marks them out as different. Take a look at the way all the children in school are dressed and make sure you dress your kid differently: turn-ups on their trousers, a jumper when all the other kids are wearing blazers, Clarks shoes when all the other kids are wearing Doc Martens. If they're a girl, dress them like a boy and vice-versa. If they're a boy, make them ride a pink bicycle with ribbons on it. Et cetera, et cetera.

My parents' only hobby was drug taking. In their imagination, there were fucking unicorns and rainbows everywhere and everything they said was profound and important. In their minds they were hard working and intelligent. In reality, they were sat around in a dirty house, dribbling like morons and unable to say a single syllable that was understandable. Their brains were intoxicated by drugs and alcohol and they were antisocial: preferring to spend as much time as possible alone indoors with their drugs.

I'm not sure if my parents are misanthropes, but they sure as shit don't have any friends. They have each other and they seem to think that they're the two smartest people on the planet and everybody else is thick as pig shit. When I feign snobbery and arrogance, it's easy because I just imitate my parents. They used to talk about friends and colleagues behind their back. I would get in trouble if I ever let slip a "mum says..." which taught me about two-faced hateful nasty people.

It's kind of fun to gossip behind people's backs, but having been the victim of social exclusion, bullying and also witnessed the nasty nature of horrible people who say mean things about people behind closed doors, I now try to stop myself. I'm not getting up on my high horse and saying I'm morally superior: I just mean to say that I have strong feelings about it, as it's affected my life. It's almost as if I was the one who suffered for my parents' desire to be hostile to everyone.

There I am. It's fairly obvious from those murderous eyes that I'm pure evil and had been plotting to do all sorts of dastardly deeds, while I was a sperm and an egg.

"My girlfriend" is how my dad referred to my mum. He made me call him and my mum by their first names. I wasn't allowed to call them "Mum" and "Dad". There was open hostility towards me, as if I had planned to ruin their drug binge and screw up their easy carefree life; as if my birth was some pre-meditated malicious atrocity. That's a pretty freaky thing to accuse a small child of.

What else do I know about myself?

Well, I was lonely. I was so desperate for secure, loyal friendships, that I would get very overexcited when I got to spend time with friends. I was super intense and hyper: I had to pack in all the friendship I could, when the opportunity presented itself. Sleep was always of secondary concern to maximising the time available, so it was exhausting seeing me for the short intense bursts that my parents permitted.

A number of my childhood 'friends' were the children of people my parents deemed good enough to hang out with occasionally, because they liked to take drugs. My parents made all objective judgements of people based on whether they liked drugs or not, rather than on personality or intellect. My dad rather styled himself on a man known literally as Mister Mean, who charged his wife and young children rent to live in 'his' house. What a cunt.

The biggest event in my life was the birth of my sister, when I was 10 years old. Parents are supposed to be outnumbered. Children are supposed to grow up with brothers and sisters. It's fucking abusive to have lonely isolated miserable children. Guess what? Children like playing together. Children like being children with other children.

It occurred to me that we spend so much of our time and energy trying to get children to act like adults, which is disingenuous and bound to lead to frustration and misery all round. If you want adult company, go make friends with people your own age. Kids need to be kids, which means play and socialising with their peers. Punishing a child for being childish is abusive.

Yeah, I'm banding round the term 'abuse' quite freely and easily. I'm sorry if there's a very specific context in which you find that English word acceptable, but it has a definition that you're at liberty to look up in the dictionary if you need to. I'm calling things abusive, because they've had life-altering negative effects on me and caused prolonged periods of abject misery. If you've fucked up your child's chances to form meaningful, secure happy relationships and partake in society as a well-rounded individual, you've really fucking abused a kid, OK?

This is turning into a bit of a "poor me, poor me" whinefest, but it's the background of the who am I type stuff I've been thinking about. I know it's horribly egocentric, but tell me, which pill do I take to just forget about this stuff and move on?

"Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man" -- Aristotle

Finding myself unable to get along with my peers and finding my parents to be disappointed that I wasn't born as a grown adult independently wealthy Victorian butler, I eventually found that friends' parents and some teachers were very nice to me. Having been raised to act with 'maturity' many adults found my good manners and strong communication skills to be charming. While I could do nothing right at home, I found that the adult world was mainly about kissing arse and saying intelligent sounding things at the right time. Naturally, my peers saw me as aloof and arrogant, which I guess I was.

It's easy to see how I got a head start in life: because I was lonely and isolated. I played on computers when others were playing with their brothers, sisters and friends. When I went to my first job interview, I wasn't intimidated because I felt more comfortable in the adult world than I did with children. When it came to making a good impression at work, people judged me on the fake image of maturity that I projected. In short: I seemed more grown-up than I was.

We're all a little insecure, but I desperately wanted loyal friends and a loving girlfriend. That lifelong damage that you do to a kid when you fuck up their childhood, means that they feel unloved, they don't know how to make friends, missed out on childhood sweethearts and feel distant from their peers. That shit carries over into adult life. Where's the confidence, the gregariousness, the outgoing nature? Where are you going to get that stuff, if all you know is bullying, isolation and disruption to your life that destroys every friendship you've ever cherished?

Every time I've been clingy, intense or a little too full-on... that's coming from that hole that was left in adolescence, where most people are swigging cider in the park and having fumbling trysts in the bushes.

But, I've also been affected by drugs. I'm not afraid of drugs. I don't have a healthy fear and respect of drugs, unlike people who've never been exposed to them. I'm in the situation of having in-depth knowledge of drug taking, but I'm surrounded by educated middle-class professionals who know nothing about drugs (except that if you inject a marijuana you will immediately murder a grandmother to steal her money).

It's crazy to think that the spotty, nerdy unpopular awkward geek who was bullied as fuck, took amphetamines and lost his virginity at the age of 15. Is it crazy? Well, a lot of people think drug taking is cool. It's seen by some simple-minded fools as an act of rebellion. Idiots see themselves as being part of a counter-culture movement, when they make themselves dumb and apathetic, spending their money on a trillion dollar commercial industry, never actually doing anything revolutionary or productive because they're sitting around indoors dribbling and babbling incoherently.

Doesn't it seem only natural that with insecurity and isolation, I would follow in the footsteps of my parents? It sounds like I'm blaming my parents for my addiction, but I'm not (directly). The debate about free will and our ability to make choices, is a complex one. 

"Boring! We've heard all this!"

Yes, but I'm retelling. I've been through Hell and I'm trying to understand everything myself. Through my writing, I'm coming to terms with a mind-boggling amount of experiences that I have to slot into place, in order to make sense of the world and where I fit within it. Life is not black & white; good & bad. I can't simplify things to the point of simply saying I'm a "bad kid" like my parents seemed to decide from very early on. Blaming myself for everything has gotten me nowhere.

No apology or even discussion was forthcoming from my parents, so it's up to me to figure everything out and make the correct judgements based on the evidence and rational investigation of the facts. Yes, it's nice and easy to jump on any one particular thing that seems to be the 'smoking gun' pointing to the fact that I must be an evil little shit sent from Hell to terrorise the world, but there comes a time when that story really doesn't stack up.

I've been wondering why I do a lot of looking back. I have very little control over the future. My future is bound up in the hands of decision makers, who will either give me a role that I'm qualified and experienced to do, in order to get the cash that's needed in this bullshit capitalist society. Otherwise, my life will be ripped to pieces by the vultures that prey on anybody who doesn't fit the mould.

Life's definitely a lot easier when you're not penniless, sick, homeless and addicted to drugs, but it's not as simple as that. What's your purpose? Who are you? What's your identity?

Being a vagrant is actually a fairly strong identity. There is something cool about being half-dead. There's something attractive about the hollow eyes, pale skin and skinny body of heroin chic isn't there? If you don't belong to a sports team; you weren't one of the popular ones at school; you aren't trying to get as many letters after your name as possible; you haven't conflated your professional and private identities... then who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing?

Drugs neatly encapsulate both identity and reward. Instead of getting small dopamine hits by bragging about your promotion at a dinner party, you can get a big dopamine hit by staying at home and taking drugs. Also, you feel that you 'belong' to a special club: you learn to identify other addicts and you feel a connection to them... a sense of belonging.

If you can roll a joint and you have weed, you'll have 'friends'. If you have enough money to buy cocaine, you'll have 'friends' and you'll want to share it because you're not an addict, right? Except you are.

I found - by accident - that drugs gave me the self-confidence that had been stolen from me by my parents. I was able to chat to girls. Pretty much most of the time that I had sex, it was on speed (amphetamine), mushrooms (psilocybin) or Ecstasy (MDMA).

Eventually, I discovered - through dangerous experimentation - a drug that was so powerful that it was a far superior substitute for my abusive ex. She was no longer needed. She was abusive, mean, selfish and unpleasant and I was very glad that the spell was broken, even though it cost me a period of addiction and a lot of money. I wasn't strong enough to leave her, without the drugs.

Now, I'm all cleaned up. I'm a good boy.

But, I'm left wondering about that whole purpose & identity thing.

Tags: #childhood #parents #divorce #drugs #addiction