The Incarceration Cure?

Locking Up The Chemically Dependant

BIRMINGHAM-The gavel lifts and slams, papers are shuffled, signed, placed in a folder, and a bailiff instructs a twenty-two year old African American male who is seated temporarily in the juror box with other Jefferson County inmates awaiting a hearing in Circuit Court.

Having pled guilty to a possession charge, Roy listens to the bailiff explain the process of entering the Alabama Department of Corrections' Processing Location, Kilby Correctional Facility. Serving a year and a day actually becomes around three months when tallying time off for good behavior, and is defined as "you'll be there for a minute," by those handcuffed to each of Roy's hands.

Roy's mother is in the courtroom, self-conscious about the tears streaming down her cheeks, watching the judge with a desperate look. It's as if she is waiting for the judge to suddenly pull back the papers he has just signed that will send her son to hell with monsters. Maybe he will rewind everything, and even take back what he said to her son that had shaken her to the very core: "Well, obviously you don't like getting up and making a sandwich whenever you want, Son - I guess you just don't like freedom. You didn't even try to go to support group meetings, did you? I don't really think you can be helped. And Alabama wants you off its streets."

Entire Article HERE

If We Could See

When you get high, you’re not the only one affected.

I’ve heard so many people state “I became another person” on whatever drug that they let overtake them. I know I did. So how can using only affect you?

If we could literally see “getting high” like a glowing, toxic gas, we would better see it touch others, and perhaps stop using because we would never want to see that toxic though beautiful gas touch our loved ones.

Because it’s obvious we would never stop abusing substances simply for our own good. If I was concerned about my health, I would have never started an addiction.

But if I literally watched it reach out and touch others . . . . and looking back, I realize, I already have, you know?

Still did I stop getting high?

At least emergency room doctors would know what’s wrong from the start.

Flickr Tags: methamphetamine,crystal meth,drugs,drug abuse,drug addiction,addiction,recovery,NA,meetings,support,group,groups,group meetings,recipe,how to make crystal meth,how does it feel to be high,high,getting high,snort,smoke,injest,bang,intravenous,no good drug addict,druggie,dopie,dope,fiend,tweak,sketch,party

This is a fairly close depiction…. Sketching My Addiction?

Find Something Strange In Junior's Room?

Maybe it is something a careless friend who gets high dropped, as you have been told.

But then you remember the extreme mood swings . . . the missing money . . . a couple of nights when you are absolutely certain that your kid didn't get a wink of sleep and was still going strong the next morning . . . falling grades . . . losing interest in things he once enjoyed . . . . Well, what else can you look for?


Here's Some Paraphernalia For Thought

Methamphetamine, Crystal Meth, Meth, Ice, Cheeba, Chicken, Glass:

If Junior is experimenting with meth, he is either snorting, smoking, eating, or banging (intravenously using) it.


Snorting
Look for pieces of cut up drinking straws or even rolled up dollar bills used to snort. Also look for razor blades or even residue/traces of powder on his license or hard plastic ID card, as those are used to "chop" the drug into a finer powder.


Smoking

If he is smoking meth, look for either a glass pipe with a round bowl at the end or aluminum foil with burnt residue tracks on the dull side and/or black soot on the  shiny side. Also look for black sooty stains on the fingertips and clothes. This will most likely happen with both the pipe and tin foil, unless he is using a glass pipe with a butane torch (in which case, you can possible find his equipment faster than he can throw away the aluminum foil).



You can also identify meth on aluminum foil or in a pipe - it will be brown to white with a sparkly, crystallized shine like flecks of tiny diamonds.

Banging
If he's shooting up meth, look for syringes, small bottles/cups of water and/or bleach, burnt spoons which may have been bent for more steady control above the lighter flame. The thing is, if you suspect your kid is injecting drugs with needles, then you have been in denial for a very long time. Normally, addicts do not begin with needles.

I started my addiction with pills, as did many, many addicts. Smoking pot is a starter point for many. But needles? That's like the ultimate way to use drugs and is an addiction all its own. I have known addicts who would bang water when they ran out of their DOC (drug of choice) because it actually eased the cravings to shoot up something. Junior didn't start at the finish line, Mom. Wake up. It would be like entering a go-cart race with Dale Earnhardt's #3 Nascar ride.

BUT.... if you are pretty sure he's shooting up and you honestly have seen no indication of any other form of drug use, do not ignore the signs just because I say it cannot happen a certain way. Everyone knows teenagers are actually an alien species possessing the bodies of the young until age, what, 25? So who can really know? (Smile) 

Many drugs are kept in small, zipper-lock baggies. The tiny baggies can be clear or have any number of designs or characters on them. For instance, popular gram-size baggies used in Alabama to distribute Methamphetamine and Cocaine have the  red and blue Superman "S" printed on them in a repeating pattern.




Pot, meth, cocaine and even pills are kept in the tiny bags - which actually can cause Junior to be charged with distribution of a drug if it is in more than one bag (of any size)- you know, a gram of meth split up into five small baggies weighing .20 grams (twenty sacks) is only divided that way in order to turn it (deal drugs).

If you have any questions pertaining to drug abuse, contact me at
h2oforthegaslit2009@hotmail.com

What Are Withdrawals From Ice Like?

So, my connections hit a temporary "drought" of sorts, due to a huge bust that had been making its way into Alabama from Texas. We'd be down for about a week and a half, probably, they had said. There was no ice to be found anywhere, and the gnawing in the pit of my stomach spelled out a fear that, for me, was every bit as frightful as the fear some people experience when faced with losing everything they own or even when first hearing that our nation is going to war.

Withdrawals were coming. I could taste them, smell them, and dread them in a way one dreads entering a courtroom in order to be sentenced after a guilty verdict. I didn’t want to go through it. I didn’t want to stop using.

The routine had become second nature to me. I was definitely a meth junkie, and though shameful of the fact many times, escaping into that little glass bowl at the end of my pipe wiped away all the guilt and anxiety of neglected parenthood.

But this time it wouldn’t matter how hard I searched. Everyone was out. A strange and complete drought had come to Alabama, and I had never been one who was able to “put back for a rainy day.” Oh, I had tried to before, just for times like this, but I always ended up smoking it, wanting to be higher, wanting more and more until finally I ruined relationships further due to meth psychosis and having been up way too many days without sleep.

The meth I had just ran out of was very strong, and it carried me throughout the night and into the next morning while I picked through the carpet in the floor of the room I had smoked in, searching for just another crumb, another decently sized shard of crystallized peace. The cravings for more had set in hard.

If I didn’t crash soon, I would find myself hysterically crying and cursing, throwing a fit that could not be justifiably termed "emotional breakdown." I searched for a pill, anything to placate the gnawing fear of being without.

It’s so incredibly unbearable. I wanted to be knocked out, but my body was not tired yet. And there was a faint hope that someone somewhere would find some more for me to buy or deal out in order to have some of my own. I remained in this state for about half a day. Then I dropped.

When crashing after a four or five day stretch with no sleep, it’s as if I am in a coma. Nothing really wakes me at all. If I am aroused, it is only to a slightly coherent state where nothing makes sense to me. “Mama, the house is on fire,” would be answered with “Okay, sweetie, but not for too long because you have homework to finish.” That deep crashing sleep lasts, for me, about 12 to 15 hours.
.
After that, there is a period of normal sleep, lasting about 2 to 5 days. I can wake normally, eat, understand things during that 2 to 4 day sleep time, but I am so drained and drowsy that I want to do nothing more than sleep. And of course, faced with the knowledge that I have no dope, sleep is preferred to being awake.

About the fourth or fifth day without crystal meth, I abruptly awake in the middle of the night, my kidneys burning, perhaps because I am dehydrated, perhaps because I have laid on them for five days without getting up and moving around much. My spine is tingling with an uncomfortable twisting sensation and every hair on my body is standing on end.

I just want to go back to sleep, but cannot. I’m awake. And nothing helps. I need a sleep aid. I search the house for something, anything, and come up with a nighttime allergy medication that helps induce sleep. I take as many as I can find, about 6 or 7, and wait for the blissful waves of sleep to engulf me and save me from the twisting grip something has on my spine.

Cold sweats grip down into my bones, it seems, and I try not to think about anything because the anxiety and outright fear creates monsters of problems within my worrying mind out of anything I dwell upon for very long.

Faces of people who love me and want me to love them again flood my mind and before I drift off to sleep to be free from this wave of withdrawals, I cry hard and long for my children. I think about how they must feel. I think about the time I have wasted, the looks on their faces when they want me to spend time with them but I am too busy looking for my next high.

After the long cry, I am off to dream about the same things, though now they are horribly twisted into unreal pictures in my dream world, pictures of my daughters drowning and me not being able to save them.

I have always believed in God. I have known Him from the very earliest memories I have in life. I have known Him in a personal, friendly, Fatherly way for as long as I can remember. And His enemy knows this. His enemy loves to plague me with things, and I suppose I make it easy for him to, considering the ways I choose to live my life.

So, interspersed with the “my kids are dying and I sit helpless” dreams, come the occasional “there’s something evil in the room it must be Satan he is here growling and holding you down” dreams.

About five hours into the allergy medication induced sleep, the dreams have made me wake up fully, and I cannot get back to sleep. Kidneys burning, no position comfortable, spine screaming and twisting, mind racing. Just a few more days, I pray. Just a few more.

What then - the depression? Will the cravings end? How long will this go on? I know enough about withdrawals to know that some doctors mark the length of post acute methamphetamine withdrawal for up to two years.

Did I dream that? No, it is so, as crazy as it sounds. My God, why did I ever start this horrible, frightfully terrible relationship with crystal meth? I would smoke more right now, even in the middle of this epiphany! But what on earth could I have been thinking with that first taste of hell?

I start to blame everyone from the President on down to the mayor of our little town for allowing such a horrible epidemic to find its way to our country. Still, I know I am the one to blame for having tried it. I know it is my fault that I am in the uncomfortable, strange, frightening, sad, hopeless, sick position I am in.

And I know it is going to get worse. I know that very soon, I will feel displaced, out of my own skin, and fully awake to enjoy every hideous moment.

And if the person who had originally handed me the straw to snort a try of it years and years ago could have instead shown me this day, I would have ran away screaming “No!" And I would have never searched for an escape from the beautifully welcoming small problems I once believed I could not handle sober.

Veronica Scores a Gram

          

     This is Veronica.  A couple of years ago, if she had just known what crystal meth was really all about, she would have never found herself sitting alone there, trying to live through a shrieking moment of the
"WHAT THE F**K DID I JUST DO FOR THAT GRAM?!"
realization.



Maybe the next time she sleeps with someone to get high it will be easier for her to cope with afterward. And then the next time after that, and the next time. . . Hell, pretty soon, there won't be much Veronica left anyway, so it'll probably be smooth sailing for her conscious from here.

Besides, now Veronica has that little baggie and it's screaming her name - only this time, she dreads the new realization that she doesn't seem to be looking forward to getting high as much as she did this morning. This time, the escape will have to help get her through the new way she acquires an escape.

Too bad she didn't get some info about meth years ago. Too bad she didn't

find the answers. . .