Mood:
not sureNow Playing: More Cautiously than I used to.
Topic: Drugs
DETOX CENTRE
ON MY WAY TO A FRIEND’S place earlier (yesterday, on New Year’s Eve) I met a working girl I know who was after an early “punter” (it was only 4pm) but everyone down there knows her). She’s the one who gave me the Chinese-Indonesian-Vietnamese-Tagalog-Hindi-&-Thai-speaking mobile phone I’m using at the moment. She was off to a “crisis emergency detox” at the time.
Now I’m not going to name names as what I’m about to tell you did happen about 3 or 4 years ago. But there are facilities, open to all and London-wide for crisis intervention and drug detox. These are self-referral facilities. (“Intervention” doesn’t carry the more American sense of “verging on felony kidnapping-type affair”.) As I said this facility I applied of my own free will to go to takes drug addicts of all descriptions (in London, that means heroin and crack).
I was the only one in there (at the time) not addicted to crack (I did do it but infrequently, perhaps a couple of times a month) and I had the bad luck (as I saw it) to have to share a room with one guy coming off crack but not heroin (he slept like a baby the whole time) and another on both but I believed he was exaggerating his habit a the meagre methadone they gave out seemed to get him stoned. I had to get extra meds as the doses weren’t holding me. In both the places I’ve been I was prescribed extra meds. I’ve had the dubious honour of being “most clucking ‘client’” as they call us nowadays.
My best memory of the crisis detox was watching Gladiator on their wide-screen telly. All being in detox and feelings running high we watched the film in silence, in a darkened room. The hairs were prickling on the back of our necks…
My worst memory was the snotty psychiatric nurses from the “staff bank” (nursing agency). In hospital they dish out drugs like there’s no tomorrow. Anyone diagnosed bipolar or psychotic who gets wound up enough to lose his temper gets wrestled into a five-point restraint, has his trousers forcibly pulled down and is injected IM with haloperidol, flupenthixol or whatever the chemical cosh of the moment happens to be. These staff came here with, fair enough, its no caffeine at night policy. But they tipped lavender oil on our pillows and encouraged us to sip camomile tae as if these things, which only affect the impressionable (in my opinion) will have any effect at all on a system scrambled by heroin and crack. I’m sorry but that’s ridiculous. The only effect herbal teas can possibly have on a withdrawing addict is a negative one — in that as I say they lack caffeine which can make an anxious person even more wound up. I found the “no meds except blind methadone” policy ridiculous. They could have given us chloral betane and zopiclone to sleep. And they could have given me something a little better than charcoal biscuits when, due to withdrawals, I was sick everywhere. Charcoal mops up toxins from the stomach. No toxins were there. I was detoxing from intravenous heroin. The charcoal just gave me black diarrhoea next morning.
Unwaware of their particular way of doing things I began to feel quite ill in the night. My eyes were running. Constant yawning. I felt not and cold all at once. I had the pouring sweats. Everyone told me I was in withdrawal (half the place was up at 3am because nobody could sleep) and at first I didn’t believe them because on a (then) £40 a day habit I’d taken about £7 worth of heroin at 7am and 50mg of methadone before coming in to the centre. These together, I hoped, would hold me till 9am 24 hours later. No such luck. By 4am the methadone was no longer holding me at all (heroin, which keeps you “straight” for 8-12 hours, had long worn off). Wanting to be direct and honest with the staff I had told them exactly what I used each day and what I’d taken. (Many addicts exaggerate up to get more meds, but what’s the point in that, I reasoned, if you’re there to come off?) The night staff refused to believe I was ill for quite some time. They even queried what I was talking about when I told them I was hot and cold at the same time (a classic withdrawal feature).
What had not been explained to me was that because this place is a self-referral crisis centre — “clients” arrive with no medical papers confirming their addict status — nobody can give medication until the “client” is in blatant withdrawal, which can mean feeling very uncomfortable indeed. People have died in prisons/etc having lied about their status hoping to get stoned on the meds for “an easier time.”
A couple of other events occurred during my 3-day stay to give me rather a low view of the place. I don’t want to slag the place off too much because, as I say, this all happened about 3-4 years ago and much could have changed since then.
What all this did show me was that I wasn’t “ready” to quit… If I do end up in rehab again, at least I know now what questions to ask about the regime…
