the last time I quit drugs...

The last and final time I kicked drugs, it took three months and some other crazy stuff happening around that same time to finally bring me to the point where I was fully ready to quit using heroin. I wanted off the damn merry-go-round: the "horse ride" just wasn't any fun anymore. I stopped usingfor good in March After I got out of jail, I chose to go back on a methadone maintenance program, where I have remained... because it works. It miraculously causes the addicted junkie body to stop craving heroin as well as other like-minded opiates.
Unfortunately, even though my life took a sharp turn for the better that month - and has got progressively better and better with each month since - in the cynical minds of some people (mostly 12-Step program devotees) I am still not actually "clean". These people have been brainwashed to the point where they can't allow themselves to think of it as any sort of "medicine" - they're programmed to think of methadone maintenance as "just substituting one drug for another". They don't acknowledge the changes in my life...and that's why I avoid Narcotics Anonymous and its cultish followers like the plague that they are...at least to me, in regards to their thoughts on my life.
I know better. Methadone doesn't put me on the nod, or give me drug-high euphoria. (This is the main reason it just "doesn't work" for some people; they they seem to just be too disappointed that it's not the same feeling as the drug they're trying to stay off of with it.) It put an end to my hustling daily for cash. There was no more ending up on the hospital OD ward. No more clashes with the law. No more sticking needles in my arm. No more heroin... No more Dilaudid... No more 80 mg oxycontin.. No more 100 mg morphine... nada! These are not drugs they are damn nine-to-five jobs. A seven-to-nine job, actually. Fuck it, in all truth it's a 24/7 career. I got into drugs to escape reality and expand my mind: opiates are a one-way trip into a boring, ordinary reality - and one with the constant process of get money, score dope, get money, score dope being just a bit too much like the Straight World of consumerist credit-card-shopping-addiction workaholism. (Cocaine is very much the same way...but thankfully, it's much easier to quit that one. this however is another story for another day)

Methadone gave me a new lease on life - which was more like a property deed than a mere lease. This wasn't about switching one drug for another. It was about trading one lifestyle for another. This was something that no spiritually-based recovery program was going to give me. All the NA people offered me were hours spent in meeting rooms talking about the drugs I wanted to be using but wasn't...that, and some vacuous, vague promise that a "Higher Power" would set me free if I just wrote down a long list of all the fucked up things I ever did. It sounded so Santa Clausish to me: "make a list, and check it twice", and along will come God to make you Be Nice." And take away all need or want of drugs. It sounded fishy to me...and I wanted - NEEDED - an answer, not promises and hopes and wishful thinking sessions. So I told the NA recruitment wonks to get fucked, and went to the methadone clinic.

After I was on a stable dose of methadone for a few months, and my body quit feeling the sickness and the craving, my mind no longer felt the terrible crushing boredom that had always ensued before when I'd tried to quit "the life" - because now there was something else - I am still not sure exactly what it is yet but when I do know I will let you know... if I had to hazzard a guess it would have to be my boys. One day I looked at them and finally decided that i was going to see them grow up. period.

I was finally in a position where I actually, honestly didn't want to touch an opiate, instead of living in a life where I would have to spend every hour of every day reminding myself that I shouldn't have dope because dope is bad for me. There's quite a difference there.

I am back to using computers alot more than I did while I was using.
I now boot up my computer instead of "booting" a shot of junk.
The only thing computers and heroin have in common - besides being so utterly addicting - is that people who are into both of them are called "users".

Coincidence?
Who knows?