What caused me to make the decision to stop was where I found myself after several years of daily using with brief intervals of sobriety. After each interval of sobriety I went back to using just as I had before. I do believe it was progressive, that the end result was always worse as time went on. So, my decision to stop. My decision to stop was made at a point when I had been smoking meth all day everyday for about two months. I had gone over a year using meth everyday when I was first introduced to it, but, as I mentioned, this condition of using was progressive, so I reached the same point in less time as time went on. The ‘point’ was, in a word, despair. The dope wasn’t giving me the effect I required to feel okay. My mind and body had adapted to the influx of chemicals and built up a tolerance. I felt outcast from society. I felt alone, on the outside of my life, watching a junkie kill himself slowly. I had only the people I was using with, my girlfriend at the time, and my dealer. I was in school, studying web design and could not manage my time to complete assigments and exams. Drugs were my only priority. My day was overtaken by an obsessively concious attention to satisfying my need for more dope to satisfy the craving. The craving, maybe I should describe as best as I can in hindsight. I felt comfortable whenever I had dope on my immediate person. If it was at home, I was okay with the fact that I had a stash, but could never commit to anything that would impede my ability to fill a bowl and smoke myself back up. When I was amped on dope I was totally self-consumed. Anything extraneous to myself didn’t matter. I was like a giant that could only see his own self and was unaware of the villages and people below him. My plans, my priorities became the only thing important and I was consumed by the present moment. The past, the future were not relevant in the slightest. Sometimes, if I my body became tired, which usually only happened after atleast 30 hours without sleep, I could sit still on a couch, my pipe close by,and remain still unaware of time or space or thoughts or anything else. Just stoned. Music and tv were particularly interesting in these times. The craving was always based in my mind, not my body. My body always felt ready to go, and was hard to slow down, even after several days awake. My mind was what demanded more dope. The more dope I took in, the longer I went without sleep, food, or blinking. The longer I went without satisfying these basic needs the worse I felt, which required more dope. My mind would be affected greatly from the lack of sleep and food which felt like my brain was mush by the end of day two. I would sit at home and smoke more and more dope until my mouth was dry and tasted like chemicals trying to reactivate my brain to make some sense of my situation, to try to find some motivation to do anything other than sitting around trying to get high. When this became monotonous, I could see the futility of my efforts. As the dope lost it’s effect, reality would come crashing in and I would get intense observations of the devesation I was causing in my own life and the lives of those who loved me. Depression would set in as a heavy undertone to everything. The world seemed rainy and black. This was a place without sleep and without the ability to sleep to make it go away and the inability to put the pipe down to make sleep possible. Eventually I would pass out and wake up at a time unpredictable to me. If I had dope, I would immediately get high again to start my self up and start my day. If I didn’t have dope, the question would arrise as to whether to get more. This was a very difficult decision to resist giving in to. The prospect of life without dope at this time of total dysfunction and morning grogginess was grim. Even if I could wait out the compulsion to get more for a few hours or even a few days, life soon seemed dull and boring without the chaos and raw energy of another blast.
That’s the craving and scenario as best as I can describe it.
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