No, it's a blog of my experiences. I just didn't know about the 15 post thing.
I just wanted to know if others felt the same way.
Here's the sort of thing I'm writing about:
Honesty.
As soon as you discover that someone’s an addict, throw the concept of honesty out the window.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS AN HONEST ADDICT!
The first step is that they’ll lie and come up with any excuse that pops into their head to explain why they’ve spent so much money and why they need to borrow money.
I must confess that in the early days I believed that my son's pay-as-you-go mobile phone did need more credit on a daily basis and I never really thought about the fact that the fuel consumption of his car had trebled.
Next, they sell everything they have of any value:
If an addict has something that’s worth £500, they will eagerly sell it for £50 if it means they can get their fix that day.
The next step is stealing:
If you live with someone that you’ve discovered is an addict, then gone are the days of casually leaving money on the kitchen table.
Don’t leave cash about your home and then wake up the next day wondering if you had or hadn’t left it where you thought: it will be in the addict’s pocket or the dealer’s pocket.
When you’ve stopped leaving money about and the addict has sold everything he or she owns, the addict will start to steal other household members’ possessions to sell.
Again, it will be a case of: “Perhaps I didn’t leave it there.”
Once they no longer have access to cash or articles of value in the home, they turn to stealing from relatives such as grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
When the relatives finally accept that their relation is a lying, thieving drug user and halt the flow of income, the addict will start stealing from other places.
First on the list of ‘other places’ will be their so-called friends.
Addicts don’t have friends; all they have are fellow addicts who are equally dishonest. It’s almost like a perpetual crime: my son would steal from his addict friend one day, and the next day his addict friend would steal from him.
When the addict’s ‘friends’ are no longer a source of income, they move farther afield: my son’s finest (not) moment was his being chased by two security guards for over half a mile because he had stolen a frozen joint of meat from a shop.
Honesty simply has no place or meaning in the mind of an addict.
The sooner that someone who lives with an addict accepts that, then, there will at least be some form of honesty under the roof.
If a drug user tells you it’s the morning, look at your watch.
If a drug user tells you it's raining, look out the window.
When you get to the stage where you’ve forced your family addict into seeking help and they return from their appointment proudly waving a urine test result that says they haven’t taken any form of drugs for a month, be honest with yourself; has the addict shown the symptoms of drug usage recently?
If you think they have been using drugs, believe yourself and ignore the test results. For less than £5 a drug test cheat can be bought on the Internet.
The drug users that can afford these cheats sell them on to other users for anything up to £20.
There is no such thing as drugs and honesty.