Mood:
blueNow Playing: at giving out serious WARNINGS
Topic: Drugs
To Those On The Slope
An Open Letter To Chipper & All Those Many People Like Him
THIS IS MY HEARTFELT MESSAGE to all those of you who are dabbling with heroin. I know there are many of you. To use Chipper’s words (the title of his blog) you are playing with fire.
Heroin is not called a hard drug for nothing. “Hard drug” means an addictive one. Heroin feels remarkably soft and mild. And warm and friendly and strangely fulfilling. That’s where its deceptive nature lies. Hard drugs are hard precisely because they feel so soft. Because you can (in the beginning) use pretty much as frequently as you choose without feeling many ill-effects. This “use me, use me — use me more” should set off alarm bells. Life on heroin isn’t living. Heroin eventually replaces life.
If, say, you’re doing 2 days out of every 3 clean (my friend Chipper’s 72-hour rule) you’re living two-thirds of your life clean. Are these clean days any less valuable to you than the ones you use on? Are your clean days so very intolerable? If so, the heroin is getting to you already. Trust me, you don’t want it to get to you any more.
Until it truly “got” me, got right under my skin, hooked me with its formidable chemical bonds, I honestly had no idea quite how addictive this stuff really is.
Quit Smoking clinics often compare nicotine to heroin. Frankly, this is just to make tobacco smokers feel better about their habit. For there is no comparison. Ever seen someone with their head down the toilet because they need a cigarette?
Well, then!
Kicking heroin, well and truly stopping for good and turning your back on it, the world you took it in and everyone you know is just about the hardest thing anyone could ever achieve.
That is why that angry guy Jamie keeps shouting on your blog, Chipper. Because being “clean” is a hard-won state to be in. You’re two-thirds of the way there, yet you don’t seem to appreciate this.
There’s nothing glamorous about a helter-skelter ride that ends in the pits, believe me. An addiction to hard drugs is about as much fun as a bus ride along a main road — with a five year-old child at the wheel. You’re putting your most base and childish instincts in control. But the grown-up you must face the pain and the consequences and the wreckage this causes.
If you CAN stop now, you MUST.
If you CAN’T, you must at least admit that you do have a problem.
Otherwise you might just look back to this time and see this new direction you’re hurtling along in as the worst wrong turn you ever took in your life.
