My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

I'm not demonizing it, sure it can help many, but it is not a panacea. In Norway, we have a problem that people in the methadone program ask for more than they need (due to tolerance, you pretty much have to just ask them) and sell the excess to people who don't qualify for the program. In some years there have been more methadone overdoses than heroin overdoses. Even in the legal program there are overdoses.

Pregabalin/Lyrica, I think. It's a seizure medication but as it was explained to me it increases the amount of signal your nerves can take, or it slows the signal, and that reduces pain. It helped me in the past but it makes you tired.

This hit like a train.

I was Jack in highschool, addicted to heroin, destroying my family for 4 years. In and out of rehab. At one point my mother chased me through her house with me holding a needle full of heroin over her head, she had caught me using in the bathroom, I didn't want to let the hit go.

My mother died a little over a month ago, brain cancer, from diagnosis to death it happened in 5 months. Reading this brought back a lot of my guilt and reminded me of how futile my family felt trying to help.

Last week a highschool friend died, fentanyl od, he was never into opiates in highschool. I had no idea how serious it was. I had seen him at a wedding a couple months back and he mentioned that he got into fentanyl pressed pills for a period, he said he felt bad for judging me so hard in highschool, he never thought he... I cut him off and said "but your clean now right?" And he gave me this disappointed look, and said yeah. I just moved to a different subject, now I think he might have been asking for help, like how did you kick?

In the throes of addiction, the only thing that made any difference was that I decided one day to buy an ounce of mushrooms. I brewed them all into a tea and put it in my fridge. I drank mushroom tea for basically a week straight. I didn't do anything special, friends visited, we played video games and talked, but eventually I reflected, for the first time I actually saw myself from the outside, I saw what I was doing to my family and friends and it was like a switch flipped in my mind. Physical or mental addiction didn't matter anymore, it just didn't make sense to use. It's all I can really say that helped me, when you are an addict the best cure is gaining perspective because it is so hard to pull your head out of that hole.

> As for why you and your father seem to have been spared by that... if I may ask, did you two have access to mental health care and use it?

Well, we've had health insurance for my entire life so I guess we had "access" to it, but as far as I know my dad never used it, and I didn't see a psychiatrist until I was 26 (and I wasn't drinking much before that, certainly not enough to be considered an alcoholic). He certainly didn't have access to it until he finished school, growing up in a relatively poor family.

I think at least in my dad's case, he saw how much his dad's alcoholism screwed things up, and decided that he was going to try and avoid that fate no matter what, sort of using his dad as an example of "what not to do." As I was growing up, I think I saw my dad drink a grand total of four glasses of wine, all of which were done on different New Years events, and never enough to get "drunk" or anything like that. As he's gotten older (and as his kids have all grown up), he's relaxed on that a bit and I will occasionally see him drink slightly more frequently, but I think that habit of sobriety has been somewhat ingrained into him at this point.

> I don't think it's fair of you to use quotation marks when the person you are responding to didn't use that language.

Which everyone who reads it can clearly see, and understand that I saw that kind of language as a possible response to my question of "why?". I wouldn't say thats any kind of trickery on my part.

> Not is it productive to misinterpret his comment as perpetuating a tired trope and then launch into an emotional rant against something that literally nobody here is supporting.

Theres an irony to saying I "misinterpreted his comment" and then immediately doing the same to mine. It wasn't an "emotional rant", maybe a bit of a rant, but I'm not going to apologise for that. I'm not sure which tired trope I'm perpetuating.

> and the rest...

I think you're missing my point. Perhaps, to use your own words, I could even go further and saying your misinterpretting it and launching into an emotional rant.

My point isn't that people can't change their circumstances, or that self improvement is pointless. Its that so many factors govern these things that its a fantasy to believe anyone is in complete control.

You're not depressed because you just are and theres nothing more to be done, nor are you depressed because you make yourself depressed. Hence why I argued to keep asking why, if you truly believe that your depression is caused by yourself, ask why you would do that to yourself, and keep doing so until you find the true reason.