Studying my DOC
I don't even know what the point of this post is, mostly just babbling. Perhaps someone will have something interesting in reply?
I guess I'm just a nerd at heart, but ever since quitting drugs I have become keenly interested in actually learning about their effects on the body, particularly meth since it was my DOC. It's almost like learning about my drug has replaced the actual drug. So often what I find is information and lots of well-intended misinformation that is caught up in a lot of politics and scare-tactics to frighten people who are thinking about trying drugs. It's hard to find any real solid information that wasn't written to scare people away.
When I read some of this stuff it worries me though. Say you have a kid, 15 years old perhaps, who is curious. They read this stuff (or maybe learned it from their DARE officer) and it does not scare them off, or at least not enough. So they try it. All the info they read does not really prepare them because a lot of it was intended to scare them away. They find out drugs are kind of fun and now not only are you fighting their desire to have fun but also a perceived lack of credibility on the part of authority figures.
And I can't help but think I'd rather have a cleaned-up druggie teach kids about drugs than have a cop teach them. A cop can tell me a lot of reasons to stay off drugs. A druggie makes the story real. Here I am almost 4 months since I really honestly quit (2 months since last use) and I still have sores on my scalp that won't heal. A cop can tell me how dangerous it is, but he can't tell me about the terrifying hallucinations and the crash after a week spent high with no sleep, about how miserable it was to take my physics final while crashing. About how I looked out the window one night and swore there were about 600 cops, 3 helicopters, and 50 drug dogs out looking for me. It was a hallucination.
I also know I'm not the right druggie to teach kids about it because I still look back at some of those incidents and laugh. Drugs are horrible but... damn. I had a lot of fun doing them.
The problem is that when reading about it occasionally I actually want some. The good news is that I have cut out the people I know who still use. Deleted their numbers, changed my own number and have no way to contact my old dealers now. And it never lasts more than a few minutes. I think about heating up the pipe, rolling it between my thumb and fingers so the meth doesn't burn and I can almost taste it in my mouth. Reading about snorting it makes my eyes water. I'm glad I never used needles, gawd knows what would happen then!