I have few choice words on this subject. I’ve mentioned in the past that I’ve had many habits. Alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, rich foods… in my past, I rarely denied myself such indulgences. Even to this day I still smoke, and I rely on medication that is addictive. BUT, things have changed. For one thing, I don’t abuse my meds even though they are schedule II narcotics.
I think my story with addiction began when I was 13, and my father died. I would steal his old cigars and smoke them, and as my mother became a drunk I would also take her vodka when she didn’t notice.
By 15 I was smoking a pack a day thanks to how I grew up pretty fast. I was over six feet tall, and I had a full beard. At first I didn’t think too much about it. Life was generally difficult and I was a typical “at risk youth.” As they say in asshole parlance.
I would go out at nights and make trouble, I’d carry a switchblade and wear a leather jacket. Like some sort of depressing version of James Dean. I think I started smoking to boost my confidence. People look cool when they smoke, and it helps you relax. Since I had lost all my friends when I migrated, and I didn’t really have a functional family I was often alone. I needed a bit of confidence to function.
I went through the usual stages of just about every biographical article of writing regarding kids on the margins. From the petty crimes to getting groomed by a creepy man, to the weird and messed up abusive situation in my home. My mother would often go on these business trips and leave me alone for several days at a time. These were probably the better days since I could move freely around the apartment. It also taught me self-reliance. I think that’s why I was able to survive when I moved out.
It wasn’t until I was 18 that I became a real alcoholic. Before that I would just have a little bit to drink on rare occasion, but this eventually changed. I believe the best way to determine if you’re an alcoholic is to examine how quickly you finish a bottle. If it takes less than a week, then you’re a functional alcoholic. If it takes a single sitting, then you got a drinking problem.
As such, at 18, I developed a drinking problem. I never liked beer, and I don’t think anyone truly does. I think it’s like my cigarette problem, people just do it for cultural and social reasons in order to look cool. You can tell by how insecure people get when you say that you don’t like beer. If you say you don’t like tea, then people don’t care. But with beer people always feel challenged to justify themselves.
Either that or they’re insane.
In my case, I was a wise alcoholic, I went with the most obnoxious beverages possible. If it had bright colours and tasted like candy flavoured petrol, then it was a drink of choice. From strawberry absinthe to Cointreau. And if I was low on cash I’d just mix some coke with either whiskey or vodka. It was usually Canadian whiskey since it was not only cheap but also way better than the upper shelf brands like High Commissioner or Famous Grouse.
The most high quality drink I ever had was French brandy. It was given to me by my next door neighbour. A kindly burglar who brought it as a housewarming gift. I suspect he couldn’t fence it, but nevertheless it was a thoughtful gesture. I liked him a lot. His smile was as black as the night, and he always wore athletic clothes. He also taught me how to do credit fraud on the internet.
One day he disappeared. Just left town overnight. Not sure what ever happened to him. But he was a good man.
I think the real issue with addiction is not that people want to feel good, but that they want to feel normal. I was self-medicating. At this point I had several undiagnosed neural conditions brought on by brain damage from my less than ideal childhood environment. I struggled to perform basic tasks, and I felt like I was constantly in pain. I also heard voices and sometimes hallucinated. Only thing that stopped it was alcohol.
Then one day, I met a new neighbour. He had just moved in. Turns out he was a drug dealer and a gangster, and my future employer. I would do oddjobs for him as a “runner.” A runner is a low level gang member who generally performs taskwork. In my case I would often do errands, move liquor, help keep his drug den in shape and sometimes security work.
I never saw the darker side of his business thankfully. But it was there. I met his arms dealer, a crooked government worker who sold weapons as a side hustle. I also knew he was a legbreaker, and that he would do collections. One rule I always followed was to never owe money to a criminal. It’s bad living.
So at this stage I began to explore the wonderful world of marijuana. To most people, this drug isn’t addictive. Although it can cause depression if you use it too much and too often so that you’re not metabolising the THC properly.
However in my case it was addictive. Because without it, I was a miserable alcoholic. I was part of what the locals called “The A-Team.” And it referred to the half a dozen people who would stand outside of the liquor store in the morning and wait for it to open. That was the general indicator that you were a town drunk.
But thanks to gang work I was able to get a good supply of whatever that was on offer. The place I lived had very harsh anti-drug laws, so you generally only took what you could get. In the US people have all these words like “Kush” and “Sativa” and “Haze” for all the different strains and what have you. But in Europe? Our drug culture divided weed into two categories: Green and brown.
Green was normal dried plant matter smoked much like tobacco, brown was hash. Hash was more popular for a number of factors. For one thing, we had a large migrant community from the Arab world, so some of them had black market connections, this meant hashish was the drug of choice. Easier to transport and conceal from customs.
Moreover, unlike plant matter you could store it in more diverse ways without having to worry about bugs and mold. A good merit for any contraband is how well one can fit it into a hiding spot.
I didn’t know much about our supply chain, but I think the stuff came from my home town because my former boss once mentioned having to travel by train to move it. The place where I grew up was a famous mob town, and if you had the connections you could find large smuggling networks reaching across the Mediterranean and the Caspian seas. Moving everything from weed to tourists and hippies, to military-grade explosives from crooked army men in former Yugoslavia.
I still remember living on the outskirts of that town, and how around every couple of days or so you’d hear a distant boom reminiscent of Irish documentaries from the 70s.
But alas, all good things must come to an end. My employer found a listening device in his living room. A police bug. It looked a bit like a black box the size of a fist, and inside was a SIM card. They could dial the number and it would transmit everything on the other side.
Then after a while, cops would begin to hassle me and ask me if I knew the guy. I would obviously lie to them, as any democratically minded citizen would, and warn him of what’s to come.
Eventually he got knicked on drug charges, and I never saw him again. But a while later I got to know some other people. A more direct source. I found out that in the northern half of our village, there were other guys dealing. I had heard about it before, but never met them. Apparently there was some territorial disputes between our people and their people, but that was beyond my paygrade, and with our outfit being dissolved, there were no issues making deals with these people.
Or so I thought.
Remember when I said I had a personal rule about never owing money to criminals? Well… I did end up owing money to these guys, and it turns out they were part of the Afghan mob. But not before what I believe was several months of getting very high on very strong hash. This wasn’t like the dry Lebanese stuff I usually smoked, this was like war hash. The insanely potent hash the English speaking world only encounters when they’re serving abroad. So I was happily funding the Mujahedeen, one puff at a time.
So aside from my humanitarian efforts of helping bring independence to Afghanistan, my life was pretty nice at this point. I completely lost track of all sense of time, and to this day I got no idea how long this period actually lasted. But I remember it couldn’t have been longer than springtime and summer, since it was always sunny outside.
Problem was though that I made a rookie mistake. The connection I’d made with these guys was visiting a neighbour when I met him, so he knew where I lived.
That’s how he ended up robbing me and extorting me. I’ve probably written about that before so I won’t repeat myself. Point is: It happened, and I learned a valuable lesson about how and when you should involve yourself with the affairs of international organised crime.
So, once more, back to alcohol. At this point many years have passed, and I’d been an on and off alkie for almost 10 years.
The reason why I began smoking so much hash and acting recklessly with the Afghan mob was because of how I was dealing with loss. My now ex wife had been deported. I saw the government put her in a black car, and then I never saw her again. This is what made me bleed inwardly. This is why I didn’t care about things like personal safety or whether or not the economic wing of the Taliban knew where I lived. I didn’t care about anything.
So I would just sit at home and fire a BB gun at crudely drawn pictures of cops, waiting for my life to pass by.
I had nothing, I was broke, I was a miserable drunk, and it seemed like life was hopeless. You might think I had hit rock bottom. But I hadn’t.
Rock bottom came when I went to the liquor store to buy a comically large three litre bottle of cheap Italian wine. It even had the wicker basket at the bottom, and red candlewax covering the cork. It looked like something Super Mario would drink.
I was no stranger to wine. It tastes just as awful as beer, but at least it gets you drunk. I could easily finish a box of wine in a single sitting. But this wine? It was some kind of old country Sicilian wine, the kind of wine skeevy ancient pagan style wine that Romans drank during street orgies.
This wasn’t like that other middle class wine that would sometimes be on sale, with the picture of the elephant on the side that tasted a bit like sour beer, this was Italian goomba wine that the Don sips on while he tells Luca Brasi to go whack somebody. The kind of wine that could only truly be enjoyed by someone who is in equal parts familiar with tuxedos as they are with antisocial personality disorder.
The sort of wine that can only be had by a true Italian, who do not merely speak the words of the Italian idiom in some shallow and scholastic manner, but who also comprehends the intricacies of the accompanying sign language.
It didn’t just get me drunk, it was like drinking battery acid. It burned my stomach, made me sick like a dog, and made me throw up horrible deep red bile that looked like the visceral special effects from a cheap Hong Kong Action film.
That is when I hit rock bottom. All I can remember from that evening is a brief flash of myself lying on the floor, staring at a puddle of my own insides.
I had one more drink with a nice meal following that. And by drink I mean whiskey bottle. And by nice meal I mean vandalising a police station.
But, one week later? I was in a psychiatric hospital finally getting the meds I needed to function properly. I never touched a drink ever again. Aside from one exception involving a misleading beverage label written in Spanish. But that was only a tiny bit of alcohol, and I was fine.
And that’s why I’ve been sober for almost 3 years now. It’s thanks to the meds. Without them, I’d probably be dead or in jail. Now I’m a real citizen, with clean clothes and a nutritious diet.
And if there’s any moral to the story, then it’s this: Addiction isn’t a choice. Nor is it a crime. And especially fuck those AA losers who say it’s a disease. Addiction is a wound. An open, festering, bleeding wound that turns dignified human beings into zombies. Addiction is unfair, and punishing, and corrupting. It makes you lose touch with who you are and why you exist. Living with addiction is like living in a burning building.
Because sometimes you can’t save everyone from a burning building, and when that’s the case, when you feel helpless at seeing such suffering, then it’s easy to tell yourself stories. To make up narratives and characters about junkies. How they’re all getting what they deserve. How the cold streets, the shitty neighborhoods, the violence and the police atrocities is a natural fact of life, and how they only got themselves to blame.
But I stress to you, this is nonsense. Every addict, no matter how obnoxiously repugnant, self-destructive and miserable, is a suffering human being who lacks the resources to get their shit together. Yes, they lie and they steal and they’re unbearable to be around, and it’s perfectly reasonable to, on occasion, hate their guts. But they still have a working mind, and moments of self-awareness, and shame, and remorse.
They still have a soul and every bit of potential to be a dignified human being. All they need is for someone to break that pattern for them. To get a lifeline. To have some opportunity to get away from the suffering that they’re trying to escape. If you give that to an addict in a way which is genuine, and that truly puts them on the path to a better life, then they will have every possible motivation to maintain such a life.
And I’m not talking about the insincere bullshit that’s done by social workers and judgmental parents, where you expect an addict to recover outside of clinical conditions working some demeaning menial job and act like you did them a favour just by trading one misery for another. I mean something real, and meaningful, and I’m not talking about money either.
I just mean that you need to give people the opportunity to be part of a community, to feel valued and respected for what they give to that community.
If you just see some vulnerable person that you think you can trick into pushing a mop throughout a lifetime of poverty and exploitation, then obviously any sane person would prefer drugs.
