Apart from my experiences with low doses of pain killers and Valium I have been drug free for almost 18 years. So what does this new world look and feel like? Parallels with sex addiction are the first thing to come to mind. When I was a few years clean I had issues with compulsive sexual behaviour, the main offenders were porn and talking dirty with girls online. This wouldn’t have been an issue except I would lose myself in it and lose hours of time, this left me exhausted and often dehydrated. I would come out of a sex binge feeling remorse. I had a friend in NA going to SLAA so I went along. I thought addiction was addiction and I had crossed the same line with sex as I had with drug addiction. I took the same approach that had gotten me clean and went to SLAA meetings and listened to people that had had more experience in recovery than me. I tried to do what they said but failed, not masturbating EVER! was too much for me. Still, I continued to do meetings most weeks and after a while I discovered I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t able to live up to this ideal that had been preached in the meetings and by my original sponsor.
I got a new sponsor and continued meetings for about a year. I wasn’t able to stay abstinent from my bottom lines of porn or talking dirty in chat rooms, but the frequency I did it and the duration I did it for both decreased. I went through my steps with my new sponsor and when we got to the ninth step he suggested writing to all the girls I had harmed that came up in my fifth step. I wrote the letters and I actually wanted to send them, but when I checked my motives I could see I really just wanted to touch base with them so I could try and fuck them again. So I thought it best not to send them and just read them to my sponsor. I did this and nothing really momentous happened, but over the following six months I lost interest in any recovery from sex addiction and just considered myself a bit of a failure at sex addiction recovery, but what I didn’t really notice until another six months was that I was no longer losing time or doing anything I didn’t want to. I had lost all shame and guilt around my sexuality. It was such a subtle change because my sex drive hadn’t reduced at all, I did everything I used to do I just now only did it when and for how long I wanted to.
It was success beyond my wildest dreams. The recovery was much more complete than with drugs and alcohol. With drugs and alcohol, I still needed to abstain from substances but with sex only the negative parts were removed. It was like being able to drink a few nights a week and take heroin on the weekends and live a manageable life.
Now facing the possibility of allowing myself to take psychedelics it feels very similar to that. I get to keep all the fun drugs and just not use the shit ones. Alcohol can stay off the table because I do believe I am allergic to it and one drink will set off the phenomenon of craving, there is science to suggest that the alcoholic’s body synthesis alcohol differently and it creates a physical craving for more of the same. This Makes sense with my own experience the last times I drank, it did not feel like a depressant as it should, but made my anxious and want more. And ever since my first drink I can’t remember ever enjoying just one or two drinks. I never liked the taste, I only wanted the feeling, and always wanted more. The other big reason I still need AA meetings is if I don’t do at least one AA meeting a week I lose my organisational skills, from my limited research this is probably related to a lack of dopamine. AA talks about ‘restless, irritable and discontented’ as your state before the insanity of the first drink. These words still pretty much sum up how I feel if I don’t do meetings.
To a normal person heroin is automatically off the table, but this was a drug I loved. I could consider a Burroughs like existence marinaded in opiates until old age. I’m sure I could get a taste for it again but the pain killers I have had over the last ten years I have enjoyed them less and less. Tramadol is the strongest and reminds me the most like heroin. I had shingles and had to take Tramadol for a few weeks. I think I enjoyed shingles more than anyone in the history of shingles, comfortably numb I didn’t miss a day of work and thought how easy life was without having to feel. After two weeks the pain stopped so I stopped the drug and had mild withdrawal symptoms for the first time in over ten years.
I have had tramadol a number of times since for neck and back pain, but only ever for a day or two, and every time I take it gets less and less enjoyable. It’s the same with Valium. Back in the day I used to abuse benzos and take large amounts with heroin. 4-5 years into recovery a doctor prescribed some Valium for a back spasm I had. I was very nervous to use it because of my history with it, but it was fine and helped a lot with the pain. Since then I looked forward to night airline flights so I could take a couple pills and get a bit stoned, but that has worn off now too. What was so enjoyable now is very mehh. I’m not sure why I changed. I’m not sure why these drugs that had such strong emotional hooks and now have no appeal, but it’s not just me, most of my friends with over 15 years of recovery also have no problem with pain or sleep medication. Still, I respect and fear where these substances could take me. They have great utility for pain and sleep difficulty but not for recreation and certainly not for opening the mind and re-wiring my brain as is the objective of my psychedelic experiment.
For the same reason cocaine and meth is off the table. I think they hook too easily into the addictive pleasure receptors and they don’t seem to have any therapeutic value. It’s interesting as I write this from someone that used to be so enamoured by the world of these drugs, I feel almost nothing. I have no desire to have my feelings numbed. I want to live, I want to feel. The prospect of taking LSD and opening up my senses and feelings is exciting and this brings me back to the parallel of sex addiction. Imagine if I can take these substances and remain in recovery. It’s so paradoxical to me that I can be in recovery from addiction and yet still get out of it on psychedelics. And there are a lot of psychedelics, I can imagine possibly going to psychedelic festivals, tripping balls in outdoor dance parties, maybe I will find like minded people that want to take psychedelics to expand their mind and consciousness and are against uppers and downers like me. This is a very exciting adventure.
Red Pill Recovery 