INTRODUCTIONCLASSIFICATION OF DRUGSin alphabetical order
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personal experience >>> drug addicts >>> interview 4 >>>Interview 4A: Hello. C: Hi. A: Would you be so kind to answer some questions? C: Ask me, I’ll tell you everything I know. A: Well…how… C: You know what they say – curiosity killed the cat – everything began with curiosity. A: How did you find out? Did your son tell you about it? C: …Maybe it is better for him to answer this question. Who (towards her son) offered you a cigarette of marijuana for the first time. B: …I was just curious. A: A friend? A girlfriend? B: …there were a lot of people. A: How long did you smoke joint? B: I don’t know. I smoked it and smoked it but then it got boring – one and the same stuff – so I decided to try something new and stronger…Heroin makes you feel much better than if you have smoked joint…you can try smoking joint two months after you’ve started taking heroin but you can’t compare those two feelings…you don’t try heroin, you just start taking it… A: How does it feel the first time? B: It’s marvelous. I can’t describe it. A: And when you take the second, the third, the fourth dose, etc. – is the feeling the same? B: Oh, it feel good but you can’t compare it with the first time…but from sniffing you go to folio and then comes the syringe. A: How did your parents find out? B: When money started disappearing from the house…I sold two TV sets…people started coming home to ask me pay out my “loans”…I tried to hide it and I succeeded… for a certain period of time but when walk all day around the house with sweaters, shirts – anything with long sleeves – and it summertime outside, then… A: Do you feel guilty that you have tried drugs at all? B: Of course, I do… A: You want to give them up, don’t you? B: Yes, I want. A: Where do you think you’ll find the proper treatment? B: In a communa, may be, I don’t know, somewhere where there are people who can help me get rid of this nasty habit, because I can’t do it alone. A: How do you see your life in the future? B: Like every normal person sees his life. A: …without drugs? B: Of course…I would be so much more cautious than those, who have never taken drugs…when I look at my child I’ll find out right away whether he or she is taking drugs…I would be much more vigilant than the other parents…I would be able to save my child…this is what I live for, to have a child, a wife, a family…to enjoy life, although here in Bulgaria life is not exactly what real life should be but it’s a life after all. A: Who made you search for therapy? B: …some time ago I met a girl, who was also an addict, who received treatment here in the hospital. She offered me to come with her to an appointment, which she had with some guy…I was curious so I went. We went to a place, where a lot of parents have gathered. Later I understood that they meet there every Tuesday. These were parents, whose children gone to communas in Spain, Croatia and other European countries. C: It is something like an association… B: They help people, who are, for example, very poor and they can’t afford some of the medicines, which they’ve been prescribed. A: So, having in mind all of your experience, what do you think – rich or poor people get addicted? B: From the lowest scum to the richest… A: What made you, personally, try the first time? Did you have any disappointments or it was just curiosity? B: It was curiosity…it came suddenly as a wave from two boys, with which I liked to hang around…the first time, we were about 15 boys, after the disco ended up, we hid behind a caravan and tried it. We sniffed it. Then all of us started vomiting. A: And from those 15 boys how many… B: All of them are addicts now…I heard that two of them decided to give up heroin. One of them even went to the “gypsy neighborhood”, on purpose, and didn’t buy any heroin...I couldn’t believe it, because I considered him to be a hopeless case. A: Do you keep in touch with those of your friends, who are addicted? B: No, I try to avoid contact with them. A: Have you (towards the mother) talked with parents, whose children are in communas somewhere in Europe? C: Yes, we have. They are very satisfied with the conditions they are offered for rehabilitation. A: What was your reaction when you saw that your son was taking drugs? C: I was horrified. He was walking, in the summer, in the house, with long sleeves, with the clothes he wears in wintertime. His father told him nothing, but I pulled him aside and made him show me his veins. I could not believe my eyes – on these wide veins there were so many marks of injections that… A: What about you? Do you decrease the dosage? B: I try but I already take high doses. But I can’t stop taking, not until I don’t get into the hospital ward. A: What can happen if you can’t find yourself a dose? B: I can kill a man, I can do anything, because I’ve no control of myself…I go crazy…I start jumping around…I can even hit my own mother, although I’ll never do it, when I can control my actions. A: What is the period, in which the abstinence occurs? B: It depends, if you are already taking high doses like me – 7-8 hours, if you take smaller doses – 10, 12, 24, 48 hours – it depend. Or if I have taken my dose in 12:00 p.m., when I wake up in the morning at about 8, I can bear not more than an hour. Then I start sweating, I can’t move because my joints hurt, when I sit I feel uncomfortable, I am nervous, as if something is crawling all over your body…it is worse than insanity. A: Do you think that if you get through all the therapies, which you can undergo, you won’t become an addict once more? B: No, I won’t because I know what it feels like. I’ll not try even once because if I do, there is no turning back. A: Have you seen someone, whose situation is much worse than yours? B: Of course, I have. I have seen a guy, who swallows 30 pills of Diazepam and then injects himself a hyper-dose and he still can’t “touch the sky”, if you know what I mean. If I take 30 pills of those alone I’ll die on the spot. A: Where do you find heroin from now? B: From the “gypsy neighborhood”. Some give money and order it from a mobile number, but this way is too expensive. A: So what do you pay for it? B: I buy it on little lumps, one lump is about 2 dollars…you can find it also as a powder, but this form is about 4 times more expensive…not to forget that I also need some money to eat, although I don’t eat a lot… C: There no fat “junkies”, are there? B: Some of them are. C: But most of them lose weight, don’t they? B: Yes, that’s right…you know (towards us), each morning I get up with one and the same thought rambling in my head – how to get my dose, who can I cheat, where can I steal from to get the money and think I would hardly be able to keep going like this much longer…My mother understands me, and gives me enough money to buy my dose, to live a normal life, otherwise, if I hadn’t taken my dose, I would have flipped by now, to wait for this “motivational group” or what ever it is called… A: Is this your first time in such a group? B: Yes…but they have previously prescribed me some medicines, which should have some effect, but they are very expensive. If I buy them to keep me healthy for 5 days (I mean I won’t feel the abstinence syndrome) I’ll spend the same amount of money, which I will spend to feel OK, using plain old heroin, for a whole month…people should help drug addicts, we are not savages, sometimes we are even more humane than normal people…when someone sees one of us on the street he would abuse and curse him as though we are not humans at all. When I don’t have any need for heroin I won’t start fighting as one drunkard would…the person cannot do anything about his dependency unless someone helps him…when he is on drugs there is no way he can be violent… A: Some say, that it is just the other way around. According to them sometimes such people have robbed other people… B: No, that is not true. I took my dose just couple of hours ago – do I look strange, abnormal or violent to you!…such robberies do not occur on purpose…for example if I steal from my mother to buy a dose, after I take this very same dose, I’ll start shaking, asking myself why did I had to steal from my own mother…But this is because I can think – I took my dose – I am not in crisis. C: Your conscious comes into play… B: Yes. But when you’re hungry for heroin conscious is totally forgotten…it is the same thing with those, who suffer from cancer and have to be given morphine to relieve their pains…we take heroin otherwise we’ll go crazy. A: Have you seen one drug-addict play a trick no another just to take his dose? B: Yes, even mugging…for example if I have bought my dose and I met another abuser, who doesn’t have enough money to buy his dose…if he can beat me to take my dose, he’ll take it…but it is usually not that simple, very rarely you’ll see someone, who would give up his dose so easily, even if he is 2 m high and all full of muscles, I still wouldn’t give it up without a fight…I’ll swallow the dose if I have to but I won’t give it to him… A: All right…What do you think about legalization of drugs? B: I think that only soft drugs should be legalized, like joint, because in this way parents would be able to keep track of their children not to replace those drugs with something harder such as heroin and stuff. Now kids smoke joint secretly from their parents, but soon they got bored of it and try something stronger…you can’t develop dependency towards joint…it is true that it kills some brain cells – you can’t talk properly, you can’t pronounce long and complex words and so on… A: All right, I think this should do it. Thank you very much for your help. B: Anytime. A: Good bye. B: Bye. |