DOSE:

smoked

Crack

BODY WEIGHT:

80 kg

It started one night at a nightclub. I was 35 and had never really experimented with drugs. I met a couple of guys and asked them where I could get some ecstasy. They told me they had something even better, and offered to sell me some crack. I must've bought about 12 or so rocks and shared it with these 2 guys. It went OK. I didn't feel fantastic or anything, but it was fun smoking and talking shit.

The next morning at home, as I was talking to my mother (I was staying with my mother because my brother had recently died unexpectedly), a sudden wave of extreme sadness came over me. It was unlike anything I'd ever felt before, just black and hopeless. It didn't get better, so I just had to go sleep it off.

I wouldn't have tried crack again if it hadn't been for the fact that I was bored, I had no friends, and my life was going nowhere at the time. I had a small job making about $150 a week. On Friday nights I would go out alone, buy a couple of rocks, hook up with some crackheads from the neighborhood and just smoke in the car. I never really understood what made me do this: I didn't particularly enjoy the experience. It made my heart beat like mad, and the comedown was severe. But I have a tendency to get addicted. It's in my personality, and this is what was happening to me. I wouldn't say that I was addicted during the first couple of months. If my circumstances had changed and I didn't have access to crack, I wouldn't have thought about it much longer. But I was also now part of some sort of community, and it felt kind of good.

I think it was about 3 or 4 months into my weekend smoking binges that my habit started to become a problem. The comedown would be accompanied with an overwhelming feeling of guilt, mostly because of all the money I was spending on it, and the fact that I had to keep it hidden from my wife and my mother with all kinds of lies and subterfuges. I once almost missed my wife's birthday because I was in a crackhouse.

It was round about my sixth month of smoking that I got a proper job in another city. By this time I was regularly taking beta blockers before going out. My body always reacted with extreme nervousness to to the prospect of smoking, and quite often I got a big shit just before taking my first hit. By now I was spinning out of control. A part of me wanted to know where this road would lead, as if anticipating some sort of resolution or an answer to a big question. With every hit I expected something to happen, to get a sudden insight into the meaning of it all. But all I got was the desire for another hit. That was all. The promise of something, and then nothing but another promise. And I kept telling myself that I'll just take a peek around the next bend to see what was there, and if there was nothing this time, then fuckit, I'll stop.

In the new city I was making real money. But this place was dangerous, and looking back now I realise that I could've been killed on many occasions. I put myself into the weirdest situations, with the shadiest of characters, but always managed to get out alive. There weren't as many opportunities to get hold of crack here, and my cravings were strong. One day my wife was out of town and I made use of the opportunity to score big. I bought some powder and a big rock and made myself comfortable. I took the powder first, but being inexperienced with powder, I might have taken too much. I then took a couple of hits from the rock. The powder must still have been coming up at the same time I took the rock hits, because I started feeling horrible, and it was getting increasingly worse. I started to panic, and took a brisk walk outside, around the block, through the park. There was a complete absence of pleasure, just this feeling of utter hopelessness, despair and blackness. I came back home, had a last look at the remaining rocks, and flushed them down the toilet. That day was about year since I started smoking. Now it's more than a year later. I've never touched the stuff again.

There are days when I suddenly think about taking a hit. Just out of the blue. But I think of the times I crawled around on the carpet looking for little bits that might have fallen on the floor, the lies and deceptions, the guilt, the hopeless lows, that day I thought I was losing my mind.

I think there are many factors that lead to one getting hooked, and one of the strongest is one's social and physical circumstances. The other is personality. Not many have the privilege of packing up and moving away from old crackhead friends. If you're hooked, it takes superhuman willpower to get out.

Exp Year: 2005	ExpID: 67018
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 35
Published: Nov 4, 2020	Views: 6,142
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Crack (82) : Addiction & Habituation (10), Retrospective / Summary (11), Various (28)