Toxic Blood: Drugs are Bad
Chapter 12
Every time I think about my parents and drug use, I cannot help but think of Mr. Mackey Jr., the school counselor in South Park. “Drugs are bad, M’kay?”
If South Park had existed when I was growing up, I am pretty sure that would have been a staple statement for my brothers and I, and it would have been perfect for mocking our parents’ attitude towards drugs. They frequently delivered trite variations on, “Drugs are bad. Don’t ever do drugs.” That was it.
My parents never specified how drugs were bad, or gave specific reasons why not to do drugs, because they were so invested in insisting that they knew absolutely nothing about, had never been around, had never done, and never would do, any drugs. My parents did not even drink coffee or alcoholic beverages. The stiffest thing in the house was plain black tea, at least until Younger Brother started throwing drunken teenage benders in the livingroom, but I will get to that later.
I believe I was in first grade when Mother had a “nervous breakdown”. It was so bizarre that it stuck with me very clearly. With no prior indication of trouble I knew of, she spent a week hiding in the back of the master bedroom closet, curled up in a ball. I looked in on her a couple times because I wanted to understand what was wrong and wanted to help, but when I did, she screamed hysterically and was clearly beyond the help of a small child. Father told my brothers and I to leave her alone, and that she would be fine in about a week. Even he was avoiding the closet and giving her the space she needed to recover from whatever she was going through. He seemed mildly irritated about the inconvenience of having to take care of us by himself, but otherwise was unconcerned.
I was not old enough at the time to understand that nervous breakdowns do not have predictable symptoms or an easily predictable recovery time. Mother certainly did seem hysterical and beyond reasoning. That was obvious. I also had a very strong desire to believe my parents were honest, so until my late teens I was unwilling to question whether or not I was being told the truth. Still, it was very strange, and a lot was obviously left unexplained and open to conjecture.
Contacting a doctor was never mentioned, but that was nothing unusual. I had had strep throat twice so far in my young life. The first time I do not remember at all. I was not even school age yet, but I remember being told on numerous occasions that I was sick for multiple weeks before my parents took me to the hospital ER. When I was young, Mother would often mention this to strangers and acquaintances, unprompted, bemoaning her troubles and looking for sympathy that she and Father did not have the cash to take me to see a doctor, so they were forced to wait until they feared I would die. The second time had been much more recent, but they still waited a week after I came down sick before taking me to the doctor.
We now had a trusted family doctor, and around the same time as the “breakdown” my parents started seeing a marriage counselor, so despite the family history, seeking professional help was clearly not out of the question. If it had actually been a “nervous breakdown” as Father said, it seems reasonable that he would have called a doctor, or better yet, a psychiatrist, about his wife hiding and screaming in a closet, but that did not happen. Instead, Father was a pillar of confidence that she would be fine, and that it would take about a week.
There were a few other things going on that were impossible for my parents to completely hide, but at the time I did not have the life experience to connect them to the “nervous breakdown”. Most notable was the fact that Mother and Father’s marriage was troubled, to the extent that the word “divorce” was being thrown around, but there was never any reason or context given to us children. All they would say to us was that they were trying to make the marriage work for our sakes, because they did not want the three of us to have to deal with a broken home. They were unified in their silence regarding the reasons they were contemplating divorce. They started seeing a marriage counselor, a practice they continued for many years.
Older Brother and I later compared a lot of notes about this time in our lives. We both remembered the closet incident the same. One week, dismissed as a “nervous breakdown”, and then both parents going about their lives as if it had never happened. There were not even any changes in routine or behavior to help Mother heal from underlying mental illness or avoid triggers that might cause her to have another “breakdown”.
“Nervous breakdown” is a colloquial term for becoming unable to handle the normal activities of life, which can be triggered by a wide array of unrelated mental illnesses or stressors. As a result, they do not have consistent symptoms or follow a predictable timetable. Considering that she wasn’t just overwhelmed, but incoherently hysterical, it is beyond unlikely she would have bounced back a week later like nothing happened. What does follow a predictable timetable, and you can potentially just bounce back from, is hard drug withdrawals. Eventually Older Brother and I developed our own theories about what drugs and why the withdrawal happened.
Mother had recently gotten a stable job working as a secretary. After getting that job and before the “nervous breakdown”, she was always going on and on about how amazing her boss was with great pep, pizazz, and energy. As in, she had more energy and enthusiasm and confidence than I ever saw at any other point, and the primary recipient of that energy and enthusiasm was a boss that her children had never met. He was not a family friend. Father was not welcoming him over as some wonderful new influence on their lives. Instead, Father was rather brooding every time the man was mentioned.
I cannot say for certain that Mother had an affair with her boss, but it is certainly not out of the question.
I cannot say for certain that Mother habitually did cocaine or some other speedy drugs with her boss, but it is certainly not out of the question.
Several things happened at around the same time. Mother and Father started seeing a marriage counselor, Mother took steps to change bosses within the company where she worked as a secretary, Mother had her “nervous breakdown”, and afterwards Mother was significantly less peppy, and significantly more scatterbrained.
The refusal by both of my parents to be honest and open, or really, to explain anything that happened (as if we were incapable of noticing that things were happening), left a lot of room for speculation. It impacted my life and the lives of my brothers, so of course we thought about it, wondered about it, and speculated about it. We tried to find a scenario that fit what we remembered, to find some explanation for all of it. Mother and Father did not need to go into all the minutia of it given our young age, but outright denial, lies, and obfuscations did not help either. There is a middle ground where you can be honest with your children about the big things, and maybe, if it comes up again when they are older, be honest about the little things too. “Don’t do that,” has a lot more impact and legitimacy if you can explain your experience with it, and why it was bad.
Even after Mother changed departments and was no longer working under her greatly admired boss, she stayed in touch with him. I think I was about 10 or 12 when Mother asked me if I wanted to go with her to his wedding. I had not been to a wedding since I was a small child, and Mother had spoken very highly about him when she worked for him, so I agreed.
Mother had not mentioned her former boss much in years, but after I agreed to go to the wedding, she talked him up like he was some sort of radiant messiah. She played for me some Christian propaganda commercials he had voiced in, one of which provided an altered metaphor comparing non-Christian thought to trying to jump a camel through the eye of a needle, finishing with something to the effect of, “I don’t think that’s going to work.” I could not believe what I was hearing, and especially how much Mother praised it, absolutely glowing with admiration for his conviction of belief.
Father used passive-aggressive comments and disapproving glares to make it clear that he did not like the man or approve of Mother having any contact with him. But, when asked directly, Father had only nice things to say about Mother’s former boss. This was a completely normal type of contradiction for my overwhelmingly non-confrontational father, so the mental gymnastics were familiar territory. Given my predilection to taking my parents at their words, I dismissed and ignored the gnawing discomfort caused by Father’s actions.
Both Mother’s and Father’s behaviors were disconcerting, but I had already agreed to go to the wedding, so I went. It was as fundamentalist Christian as a wedding can get. We were seated on the groom’s side. Mother knew absolutely no one else there, and other guests kept looking at us like they were confused as to why we were there, leaving me with a depressingly familiar feeling that I was not welcome and did not belong. The only person who seemed happy to see us was her former boss, who was all glowing joy and hugs with Mother for the couple minutes they directly interacted.
If Mother stayed in touch with him after the wedding, I do not remember her mentioning it. I am sure Father was much happier for that.
As far back as I can remember, Father was a teetotaler. Aside from his prescribed depression medications, I never saw him do drugs, smoke, drink coffee, or even drink a glass of wine or beer. I am all for people choosing for themselves what they do and do not want to imbibe, but he imposed this teetotal existence on Mother as well. I saw her drink a glass of wine once, at a dinner party his sister threw. Nothing happened, but Father bullied her about it when he thought no one was within earshot, severely chastising her for enjoying one glass of wine, because “you know how you get.”
That was the only time in my life I ever heard Father or Mother say anything that even implied they had personal experience with drugs and alcohol. It was a particularly easy lie to maintain. All they had to do was deny everything and feign complete ignorance.
When Diana first started dating Older Brother, Mother and Father welcomed her warmly. Diana is slightly older than me, and her parents were significantly older when they had her, so most of her cousins were about the same age as my parents. She had grown up seeing how prevalent drug use was in their age group and social circles, which were similar to the ones my parents would have been in. Diana was firmly of the opinion that it would have been impossible for my parents to never be around drugs in their teens. Even if they had not personally done drugs, they would have known people who did, and therefor would be at least passingly familiar with how drugs work and how drug use impacted people they knew. Their declarations of complete ignorance were, frankly, as plausible as claiming they had never ridden in a car.
Diana learned about the “nervous breakdown”, the forbidden glass of wine at a dinner party, and a lot of Mother’s other bizarre and neurotic behavior. Her personal theory was that the “nervous breakdown” sounded like severe withdrawals from cocaine or something similar, and most of the other oddities, memory lapses, and erratic behavior over the years could probably be explained by LSD burnout.
Rather than just speculate about it, Diana decided to ask Mother and Father directly about their drug use, pointing out that she knew a lot of people their age with similar socio-economic backgrounds. They responded with indignation and anger, maintaining their insistence that they were of unparalleled ignorance about drugs and alcohol. After that, as far as they were concerned Diana was a terrible influence, and they thought Older Brother should break up with her. After all, there was no worse crime than confronting them about one of their lies.
I actually did grow up with no real exposure to drugs or alcohol except through school drug awareness assemblies and the natural accumulation of common knowledge. I did not feel inclined to try any drugs. Very few of my friends used drugs, and those that did never used them around me. I did not care about fitting in with the “cool kids”, so it never even occurred to me to do anything like drugs to try and fit in or seem tough. I never went through a teenage rebellion stage. I never even had a beer until shortly before my 21st birthday.
And yet, by the time I was 21 I had at least a passing knowledge of the main attractions and pitfalls of alcohol and commonly available drugs. My parents insisted they were so completely ignorant of drugs and alcohol that they could not say a single thing about them except, “They’re bad.” It might have been an easy lie to maintain, but it was not a good one. Given their backgrounds, it would have been factually impossible for them to be as ignorant as they claimed. That is not how human society and culture works.
Despite that, I have had people mistake me for a habitual drug user, most often when I was dressing in a punk rock aesthetic on a regular basis in my 20’s. The moment I started dressing punk, Father jumped to the conclusion that I was doing drugs, despite his assertions he was so ignorant of drugs he should not have known any of the “signs”.
I love chocolate, the darker the better, including chocolate nibs and baking chocolate. So, when I was finally out of my parent’s home, I happily enjoyed on average one bar of fancy dark chocolate every day. After about a year I had given myself mild theobromine poisoning, but of course I did not know what that was, or why I started having trouble keeping food down. Theobromine is the chemical in chocolate that is bad for dogs and cats. It is also bad for humans, but we have a much higher tolerance for it, so most of the time it is not a problem. However, if you eat enough dark chocolate, consistently, over a long enough period of time, you can overload your system and give yourself theobromine poisoning, which is exactly what I did. As a result, I started eating like a bulimic and had heartburn constantly.
After I began having trouble keeping food down, Diana’s mother suggested it might be the chocolate that was making me sick (her father was allergic). I was desperate enough to try just about anything, so I stopped eating chocolate. It only took a couple weeks for me to be able to eat normally, but the damage had been done and I was skeletally thin. I was naturally born with a body that at that age allowed me to eat anything without putting on weight, so despite my best efforts at eating as much high calorie food as possible, I remained severely underweight for several years.
I did not yet know the medical term for what I had done to myself, but I did tell my parents about the chocolate making me sick, and that it was why I had lost weight. They accepted that explanation with a wise nod, because of course it was a great idea to give some crazy and difficult to verify excuse to explain the side effects of drug use and/or an eating disorder. They had explained away Mother’s problems as an indefinite “nervous breakdown”, and been willing to offer excuses to Younger Brother, so they extended the same courtesy to me to my face. Behind my back, of course, was a different story. They knew full well what was really going on. My parents lie about anything that might get them in trouble or put them in an unflattering light, so of course they assume everyone else does too.
When I was living in San Francisco, I think many people who gave it any thought assumed I was an ex-heroin addict. One friend who was an ex-heroin addict flat told me that he did not believe me. He just said, “I can tell.” I am not sure if it was the mohawk and punk clothing, or something in my behavior or speech patterns, but he was not the only one.
Honesty is very important to me. If I was an ex-anything addict, or even a current one, I would openly admit it. Drug abuse is a serious problem, and it is one that can only be solved through open discourse. Hiding behind taboos only serves to prevent people who need help from being able to seek out or find that help. Obfuscating the realities of drug use creates damaging stigmas and stereotypes, and makes it harder for young people to make informed decisions about their own use of drugs.
It does not bother me that people might have thought me capable of drug use, but it does bother me that people did not believe me when I said I had not done them. It bothers me that they thought I was lying to them about it, that they thought I was the sort of person who would not admit it.
And yet I am willing to say that my parents were flat out lying through their teeth about their own drug use. And no, I do not consider myself a hypocrite for that. No one who thought I was a heroin addict could tell me any specific reason they believed I was lying. I can, do, and have, given very specific reasons why I am certain my parents, and later my brothers, were lying about drug use. I do not know for certain what specific drugs they took, and I freely admit that, but there is no reality in which my parents could have trotted through life in such complete ignorance.
I very much enjoy a good drink, but I am not fond of being inebriated, and my body has generally responded poorly to what few inebriating substances I have taken during my life.
My very first experience with a deeply inebriating substance was Vicodin, prescribed to me for pain management when I had all four wisdom teeth pulled in my late teens. I was not living at home at the time, but I needed someone else to help take care of me post-surgery, to make sure I got my medicine on schedule and ate when I needed to. With no other viable options, I arranged with my parents to stay with them. The two days immediately following the surgery are mostly a blur, but I do clearly remember that my pain was not managed, and I spent a lot of time throwing up.
Mother never did admit to me how it went down, but Diana was able to tell me exactly what happened once I was coherent. Mother called her in a panic on day two, asking for advice because I was complaining about the pain, puking so much I could not keep down anything, including my medicine, and my medicine was seriously depleted.
Diana asked her what antibiotics I was taking, and if Mother was following the prescribed dosage schedule. Mother did not know off the top of her head, so she read the label. It was not an antibiotic. It was Vicodin, one or two pills, to be taken every 4-6 hours as needed for pain, not to exceed six pills in any 24 hour period. Since I was complaining about the pain, she had been giving me two Vicodin horse pills every 4 hours (12 pills in 24 hours, or 2x the maximum dosage), running through a significant portion of the bottle in less than two days.
If I had not been puking so much, she probably would have killed me. But instead of being sensible about reading the instructions on the bottle, my “drugs are bad” mom was shoving all the pills down my throat that she could manage. I guess since it was prescribed by a doctor, she figured it was perfectly safe to attempt an overdose?
Diana chewed her out, told Mother she was at risk of killing me, and told her in no uncertain terms to not give me any more Vicodin. Mother followed Diana’s instructions, and within a day my head was clear and I had stopped vomiting. I was also acutely aware of the fact that my pain levels did not increase one iota for the lack of Vicodin. Apparently, I am one of those people it does not help.
Diana and her parents were a wonderfully sane influence regarding drugs and alcohol. They believed in moderation and responsible use. They also believed most drugs were a bad idea, but they had actual reasons for believing that, and acknowledged that if you were going to do drugs, you should at the very least do it responsibly. I had alcohol for the first time at their place, and the first time I got mildly drunk it was on rum cake Diana and I made together. I did not like beer when I first tried it (and I still greatly dislike IPA’s), but I did like cider and wine. I also liked Irish whiskey and scotch, but not bourbon whiskey, and I loved the taste of rum.
On my 21st birthday, Diana and Older Brother hosted a very modest birthday party. Diana was attending UC Davis, so the three of us and another friend went on a pub crawl in Midtown Sacramento. I received a free large and strong boat drink at each place we went, so I was pretty well sloshed before the four of us returned to Diana and Older Brother’s apartment in Davis. I was too drunk to make good company, so Diana and the other friend, who she had not seen in a while, were busy catching up in the other room. That left Older Brother and me alone in the livingroom.
Most of the night is, frankly, lost to me, but my brain did hold on to a few details with amazing clarity. I remember kneeling on the livingroom floor, staring at a small antique yellow glass filled with rum, watching how the liquid stuck to the glass and slowly oozed down the inside. I remember the smell of the rum, and how it no longer tasted as delightful as it had before. I remember Older Brother telling me, “C’mon! Have a little more. It’s Your Birthday!” I remember him filling the cup repeatedly, even though I did not want more and tried to tell him so. I remember crawling into the bedroom on my way to the bathroom when I realized I was going to puke. I remember sobbing in the shower, vomiting into the drain, while cold water ran over my naked body, crying and miserable. I remember waking up the next morning, staying curled in a fetal position, unable to eat or drink anything other than dry toast, feeling like death warmed over.
At the time I thought Older Brother was my best friend.
Diana later told me that Older Brother had given me half of a Costco handle of rum, on top of the drinks I had enjoyed while we were out. She and our other friend had no idea he was giving me any alcohol until I came crawling past heading for the bathroom. I do not remember it, but I vomited all over the bathroom. From what I was told, our friend came very close to punching Older Brother over his mistreatment of me.
I am generally not the sort of person to let myself be pushed around, but I am also not surprised that in this particular case I was pressured into drinking vastly more alcohol than I wanted. First, I was already very drunk. Second, he never let my glass get empty, so I genuinely had no concept of how much I was drinking. Third, I had never been truly drunk before, so I had no experience dealing with it, and no tangible awareness of my boundaries. Fourth, I had self-confidence issues that manifested in some areas of my life, but not others. Last, but certainly not least, I believed Older Brother was my best friend, so I trusted him completely and did not believe he would do anything to hurt me.
After that, just the smell of rum was enough to make me retch. Twenty years later, I could finally handle the taste of rum, but I do not think I will ever enjoy it again. Alcohol poisoning can do that to you.
When I was living in San Francisco I realized that I was allergic to smoked marijuana. On the couple occasions when I attended parties, or the rare instance of seeing a band perform, there were always at least a few people who lit up indoors. At one particular party, I ended up talking with a couple of guys who were simultaneously praising the benefits of smoking marijuana and decrying the evils of smoking cigarettes, while getting significantly baked. I was put off by the preaching tone of their conversation, but only knew one person at the party, so I stayed where people were willing to include me.
I accepted the joint whenever it passed my way, and I proceeded to get stoned for the first time in my life. It was not fun. I found myself babbling, feeling like a complete moron, and eventually sobbing because of the unfiltered idiocy coming out of my socially anxious mouth around people I had never met before. I also ended up with a migraine before I left the party.
Most of my adult life I have gotten migraines without auras very rarely, maybe once or twice a year, usually with strong phonophobia. It takes them a day or two to develop, and a day or two to go away. The migraine I got at the party set in very quickly, was more generalized, and went away after about a day. When I told people that I thought the marijuana might have given me the migraine, the typical response was that that was impossible. Marijuana is a miracle drug, and it helps with headaches. It certainly was not going to give someone a headache. It was also very common to be outright scoffed at for even suggesting it was possible to be allergic to marijuana. Clearly, I was imagining things…
Only I was not imagining things. I was not around marijuana frequently, but when I was, usually at parties or concerts, I always walked away with at the very least a bad headache. I did not directly smoke it again for more than a decade because I hated feeling stoned, but second-hand smoke alone was enough to give me a headache or a migraine.
I was in my late thirties before I was willing to try smoking marijuana again, and that time it was not to be sociable or to get stoned. I was at the worst part of my chronic illness, and desperate to try anything that might give me relief from the pain and other symptoms. A friend who was visiting had a marijuana prescription and offered me a bowl to see if it might help. I knew I would probably get a migraine from it, but I was willing to take that risk if it might provide relief for my ongoing symptoms. It did take the edge off, but it also gave me a killer headache, so in the end I decided it was not enough help to be worth it. About a year later I got stoned with another friend for the same reason and had about the same reaction.
Fast forward a few more years, and marijuana became legal in California. I was staying with a friend whose daughter was severely disabled and smoked marijuana habitually to help manage her symptoms. She was conscientious of my allergy and tried to be careful about exposing me to secondhand smoke, but mistakes happened and I was mildly exposed on a fairly frequent basis. I did not consider it a big deal until one day we both failed to notice that the window between us was open a crack and I got a few good lungfulls of strong secondhand smoke before closing the window completely. I was rewarded with my first ever migraine with visual auras.
I was still desperate for something that might help take the edge off the chronic pain, so I tried CBD oil, to no effect. There was strong evidence that marijuana could help with my kind of pain, and also that CBD + THC was much more likely to be effective than CBD alone. I was not willing to trade one kind of pain for another, so smoking was not an option. However, it also was not necessarily the THC I was having an allergic reaction to, so I decided to try marijuana tincture and gummies.
I still do not like being stoned, but I do regularly take marijuana tincture, especially the kind that has a very high ratio of CBD. It is not a cure-all, but it does take the edge off the pain. It is also anti-inflammatory (and therefor of treatment value), so my doctor is very much behind me taking it. The dosage in the tincture is predictable, so I can take enough to help, without taking so much I feel stoned.
When I first came down ill and was still trying to figure out why my body was falling apart, the first thing doctors tried to do was symptom management. Chronic pain was the most obvious, and theoretically addressable symptom, so they immediately prescribed me Tramadol. If you are not familiar with it, Tramadol is a synthetic opiate which at the time was touted as highly effective and extremely unlikely to cause addiction.
In my case, they were full of shit on both counts. It did next to nothing to help the pain, and physical addiction was immediate. Literally, when the very first dose was wearing off, I started acting like a junky in need of their next fix, twitchy, anxious, distracted, the whole nine yards. I did not like that feeling, but was desperate for relief from background pain that was on average between a 5-8 on the pain scale. Pain spikes went up to a 10, which for me means the pain is so intense I cannot speak, breath, or move. So yeah, even though it did not help much, and it made me feel terrible in other ways, initially I kept taking it in the hopes that it would become more effective when my body was used to it.
After about two weeks I gave up. It did not help, made me goofy and high, and I hated the feeling of physically needing it. So, I just stopped taking it and went through three days of flu-like withdrawal symptoms.
I realized at that time that I was lucky I am not prone to psychological addiction. Because I did not psychologically addict, I just suffered through the physical withdrawals, and that was it. Instead of craving more, I actually cringe thinking about taking Tramadol, or really any opiate. Between the Vicodin debacle, and then the Tramadol, I am fairly certain opiates, even synthetic opiates, just do not sit well with me, and are not effective anyway. When I was approaching my 40’s, Mother told me that Father is probably allergic to opiates, so I might be too. I have no idea when or under what circumstances he would have taken opiates, because they refuse to talk about anything like that, but there it is anyway.
The next prescription drug they offered for pain management was Gabapentin. It is most often prescribed as an anti-seizure medication, for neuropathy, and for people with chronic pain from spinal and nerve injuries. The most common side effects are extremely minor, like dry mouth, but in rare cases it can cause psychosis (usually listed as “anxiety”, “memory problems”, and “strange or unusual thoughts”). It is one of those drugs that you have to build up dosage on, take completely consistently, and wean yourself off of. Sudden changes in dosage, or very high dosage, increase the risk of dangerous side effects.
I thought I had found the holy grail of medicines. My average pain went from a 7 to a 3 overnight. The relief was palpable. I could easily walk without my cane, had more energy, and felt like I could face my life again. I may not have had any idea what was wrong with me, but some relief was very welcome. We increased my dosage to about 1/3 of the maximum, and I was meticulous about setting alarms to make sure I took it every 8 hours around the clock.
For about six months it worked wonderful. But I still did not have a diagnosis, and my symptoms were continuing to worsen, so we adjusted my medication. Shortly after that, I started to get the psychotic side effects. I am as capable of anger as anyone else, but I found myself constantly angry and irritable, and randomly considering how I could kill strangers around me or cause random mayhem, things that I had never contemplated before.
I did not feel like myself anymore, and I did not like it. It was not worth it. I would rather be in pain than not be myself. I had worked too hard over too many years, and finally felt happy and secure with the person I was. I was not going to let a drug force me to be someone else, even if that drug did have a tangible benefit.
It took me nearly a month to safely wean myself off the Gabapentin, and I never looked back except with sadness that of course I had to be in the minority who got the really bad side effects.
The doctors did not have any alternatives to offer me, so after that I was left with only alcohol to take the edge off the pain. It was hit or miss, but sometimes I could get a little relief by having a couple ciders or glasses of wine. I could usually tell very quickly if it was going to help on any particular occasion, because if it worked as a pain killer I did not get buzzed. Instead, I was more clear-headed than normal.
Since alcohol is inflammatory, and therefor negatively impacts my overall health, it was far from an ideal solution, and one that I could not use on a consistent basis. Once I started using marijuana tincture, I finally had a solution that was also of benefit to my overall health. It may not be anywhere near as dramatic a difference as with Gabapentin, but even a small relief to chronic pain is welcome.
Not all drugs are bad for all people. No drug is good or effective for all people. We all have different needs, different biology, different allergies and tolerances, and different predispositions towards addiction. I may hope to avoid any and all opiates in all circumstances for the rest of my life, but for a lot of people with chronic pain they are a daily blessing that makes life bearable. Other people use them to self-medicate their way through a painful life, or just enjoy that feeling of being high. Some people lose themselves in addiction, but not all, and there would be a lot fewer if we treated it as a social problem, rather than a criminal one.
“Drugs are Bad.”
It is nice and neat and clean, but it lacks any and all depth or awareness. Life is more complicated than that. “Drugs are bad, except when they are not,” is much more accurate. My advice is to understand exactly why you are taking a drug, even if that reason is just to have fun. Understand the risks. Understand your personal boundaries, and do not let other people push you into violating those boundaries. Be analytical about it. Do your personal cost/benefit analysis. If the drug is prescribed by a doctor or psychologist, make them talk out the cost/benefits with you, including alternative medications. It is your life, your body, and ultimately you who has to live with the effects of the drug, good and bad.
Have children? Do not be a hypocrite like my parents. Teach your child how to weigh the potential benefits and drawbacks, and talk to them about your reasons for your opinions. That way, instead of blindly knuckling under to social pressures (either “Do it” or “Don’t do it”), your child has a prayer of making informed decisions. If young people are able to consciously understand why they do not want to do something, they are much more likely to be able to resist when pressured to violate their boundaries. If they do try something, they are also much more likely to be able to process what was good or bad about it, and feel able to talk to you if they need help or advice.
Younger Brother started bringing alcohol into the house when he was in his mid-teens. I have no idea who was buying it for him, but there was usually at least one giant plastic bottle of vodka in the closet of his room. The whole family knew it was there, and Mother decided it was OK for him to do that because she “would rather he did that at home than somewhere else where he could get hurt.” This did not change until Diana teased him about plastic-bottled alcohol being garbage only fit for cleaning wounds. After that he had very large glass bottles of almost-as-cheap vodka tucked in his closet.
Around the same time, Younger Brother also started holding drunken teenage parties in the livingroom. When the whole family was home.
Mother’s only condition was that they keep the volume down, so the rest of his family could sleep. For the most part they obliged, because, well, that was pretty amazing for them to be able to hold drunken teenage parties any time they wanted with only one, very minor condition attached! Once in a while we had to go ask them to turn down their music, but that was it. They could get as drunk as they wanted, and then Younger Brother’s friends would all pile into their cars and drive home.
I do not know how many times I heard Mother justify it by saying, “at least he isn’t driving home drunk from a party somewhere else.”
She and Father were lucky none of his friends ever got in an accident driving home drunk from the party at their house!
I do not know if he, and by extension Mother and Father, were providing the alcohol, but at the very least, by providing the consequence free drinking location, Younger Brother was no longer a social outcast. Through drugs and alcohol, he had found friends and social groups where he felt included.
According to Mother’s Sister, Mother’s drug of choice as a teen was psychedelic mushrooms. Diana had long suspected that Mother exhibited signs of LSD burnout, including long term memory loss, neurotic behavior, and an often scatter-brained way of approaching everything. There was no way that Mother was going to answer truthfully, so when we had the opportunity to talk to Mother’s Sister at Younger Brother’s wedding, that question worked its way into the conversation. My aunt laughed and said Mother and Father had done every drug they could get their hands on, but magic mushrooms were Mother’s favorite.
Unlike my parents, who live their lives in a constantly changing web of lies, Mother’s Sister has always been honest with me. So, I trust her. It is also the explanation that makes the most sense based on my parent’s actions, actions that consistently contradicted their words.
There were two other incidents I witnessed with Younger Brother that make me strongly suspect that he was doing more than just alcohol, even if alcohol was his primary drug of choice. On both occasions, Mother and Father went along with whatever explanation he gave, or even offered their own, so he did not have to admit to drug use.
One evening, Younger Brother came out of his room, nearly incoherent with pain. He writhed around on the floor in agony, occasionally saying that his back hurt, but mostly just that he hurt. I thought we should take him to the emergency room immediately. Younger Brother managed to say that he did not want to go. Mother and Father looked at each other, and then said they could not afford an ER visit unless it was absolutely necessary, and instead he should take some Advil and see if that helped. So, they gave him Advil, and we all waited, watching helpless as he writhed around on the floor in obvious agony.
At the time I had no personal experience with severe pain, but I did not doubt his pain. Even now, after everything I have been through, I do not doubt his pain. There is a visceral quality to sudden onset, severe pain, and I do not doubt if he was registering an 8 or 9 on the pain scale. I kept asking our parents to take him to the doctor, but they kept wanting to wait. After a couple hours, the pain subsided and he went to bed.
Without any attempt to diagnose the problem through a doctor, my parents decided it must have been his back, that he had a slipped disk, or something like that. Yep. That was the ticket. Bad back.
I am not saying teenagers cannot end up with a slipped disk. It happens, and it is serious, and it can cause absolutely excruciating pain. However, if you have a slipped disk, you are unlikely to be moving around on the floor, rapidly changing from fetal to prone, rolling over, and generally quickly moving through all possible positions hoping to find relief, for multiple hours.
When I have thrown my back out (as an adult), I tried to move as slowly and as little as possible, and once I was able to get in a position where I was laying on my back, I stayed there because even small movements were made of pure molten agony. Father had a bad back, and his behavior when it would go out mirrored my later experience. He would gingerly and slowly make his way to the floor, lay on his back, take a large dose of anti-inflammatory medication, and try to move as little as possible.
Younger Brother’s behavior was as far from the behavior of someone with a bad back as you can get. However, prior to MRI’s, having a “bad back” was difficult or impossible to objectively diagnose, and also a fantastic excuse for him to get out of any physical activities he did not want to do anyway. Otherwise, it had no obvious impact on his life. He still did all the physical activities he was interested in doing, and without any changes to make those activities easier on his back. He still lifted things with his back, rough-housed with his friends, and spent most of his at-home time sitting hunched in front of a computer or video game console. Miraculously, while we were both living at our parent’s home, he never had another fit of trouble from his “bad back”, or whatever it was.
It could have been something other than drug use that caused his pain and fit, but it definitely was not a bad back. The fact that my parents contrived that excuse for him meant they knew it was something neither he, nor they, wanted to admit to, and drugs is the most obvious thing fitting that criteria.
The other occasion happened when we were visiting one of my Father’s sisters in Virginia. We used to see her regularly when she lived in Berkeley, but after getting her law degree she got a job in D.C.. It was the first time we had seen her since then, and it was a big deal for the family to be able to take a trip across the country, see her, and also visit some touristy locations.
In the middle of the night, Younger Brother woke up everyone else in the house in a panic. The panic was causing him to have trouble breathing, and he had broken out in a rash. He sincerely thought he was dying.
Now, you might expect that any normal, caring family would immediately rush their child to the hospital. As you can probably guess by now, that did not happen. I was once again the only one saying we should take him to the doctor. Mother initially considered it for a hot second, but Father said it probably was not necessary, and set about trying to get him to calm down. For someone who claimed complete and total ignorance of drug use, he sure was confident about how to get someone to stop panicking from a bad trip! Someone suggested it might be a bad allergic reaction, so he was given a couple Benadryl.
After some time, Younger Brother calmed down. His breathing steadied, and the rash started going away. He looked sheepish. We all went back to bed.
Following up on the allergy suggestion, the next morning Mother and Father questioned Younger Brother about what he had eaten the day before. They finally fixated on some almonds he had had that evening, several hours before the incident. It must have been a sudden onset nut allergy! Mystery solved! He had trouble breathing, was flushed, and had a rash, so anaphylaxis it was!
So, according to my parents, anaphylaxis can successfully be treated by a couple of Benadryl and some smooth-talking to stop the panic. There was no trip to the doctor for a firm diagnosis. There was no concern to prove that nuts were genuinely the problem, or if it was something else. If it had been anaphylaxis, and they were wrong about nuts being the source, that would have meant he was avoiding the wrong trigger, and at great risk of an even stronger (and potentially deadly) reaction. There also was no concern for obtaining an epi-pen for him, in case of accidental exposure.
Still, that was their story, and they were going to stick with it! Younger Brother proceeded to avoid all nuts or nut-like items, including peanuts (a legume), and seeds (macadamia nuts, pine nuts, sunflower seeds). If he got slightly flushed or had trouble focusing, he would blame it on some unknown and accidental exposure to “nuts”, but never again had a particularly note-worthy reaction. I guess it was worth it to maintain the ruse, because when I saw him a decade later, he was still avoiding nuts and all semi-similar-seeming non-nut food items.
What that told me was that he had not bothered to do any real research into what a tree nut allergy was, or how to be careful about it, which seems insane to me if you believe you are prone to anaphylaxis from tree nuts. I do not doubt that the nut allergy is in his medical record, but (for good reasons) all that is required is to simply fill out the “allergies” box on a form. He might even have an epi-pen for it now, based solely on his declaration of the allergy.
When Older Brother started drinking, I was roommates with him and Diana. She came from a house where they had a liquor cabinet full of nice to very nice bottles of assorted hard liquors, some of which her parents had been sipping out of for almost 40 years. It was bizarre to her that she could not keep alcohol in the house, but when she tried it would quickly disappear. Early on, Older Brother would not buy his own alcohol, but he would drink whatever she bought. By the time they married, she could not even keep cooking wine in the kitchen. It might be safe for a week or two, but if he had just one sip of wine or beer, he would not stop until every last alcoholic liquid in the house short of rubbing alcohol was gone.
Older Brother could not handle his liquor. Sometimes he would just sit in a corner and get drunk. Other times he would try to fight imaginary enemies and break things in the apartment. Usually, he got mean. Over time, though, both Diana and I stopped tolerating him when he was drunk, so Older Brother usually got into the alcohol when we were not home.
We lived together in Davis, California, and then in Santa Rosa, California. Despite the distance, he networked with friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, and after he and Diana married, he started going to drunken and drug-filled parties that were hours from our apartment. At first Diana went to a few with him, and I came along for one camping trip. The highlight of the camping trip was most people pooling money to buy magic mushrooms, and the person sent to get them disappearing with the cash. Other than that, it was alcohol and, for me at least, awkward conversation.
Diana was not thrilled about Older Brother running off to those sorts of parties, in large part because she had been there and done that and had no interest in doing it again. They were married, and, she thought, trying to make a future together. At the same time, she was not going to tell him what he could and could not do, or who he could and could not be friends with. She did not try to stop him, but she did let him know how she felt about it, and that it was an especially terrible idea in his case because he was incapable of controlling himself when inebriated.
When he walked out on the marriage, he did so when Diana and I were not home. He took everything he wanted, including things that were very obviously not his, among which were some of my clothes and bedding, and Diana’s jewelry and antique book collection. He also murdered our goldfish, so after that I had no interest in seeing him outside of helping Diana serve him divorce papers.
It was a great many years later before I saw him again. Older Brother admitted to being an alcoholic, but insisted he was a functional alcoholic. He really was not, but he had gotten better at pretending to be functional when he wanted to. One of the more egregious examples of his status as a non-functional alcoholic happened when his significant others insisted that he get a job and he started driving for Uber. However, most of the time he was going to the liquor store, buying whatever he wanted, driving off to a quiet spot, and drinking all of it when his significant others thought he was working.
Sadly, this sort of crippling addiction runs in both sides of my family, not that I knew that until I was in my late 30’s. Because of my chronic illness, I pinned Mother down and told her I needed to know the family medical history. I had grown up very removed from any other relatives, so if my parents did not tell me (they did not), no one else could. This is particularly insane because the family medical history included a propensity for colon cancer starting in the 40’s. At no point before this had my parents mentioned that I would need to screen for colon cancer, if I, maybe, did not want to probably die from it. If I had not developed a chronic illness, I am sure I would still have no idea.
Along with the other medical details, Mother grudgingly told me about addiction and mental illness among relatives outside my immediate family. The exact drugs vary from person to person, as do the exact natures of the mental illnesses, but there are a large number of relatives on both sides who have such problems. Mother was familiar with and shared with me many of the details. The only one I had heard about previously was one of Father’s brothers. When I was a child, I was told he started using drugs in Vietnam, and it “ruined his life.” End story.
Which brought me flying back to my parents’ stonewall insistence that they knew absolutely nothing about, had never been around, had never done, and never would do, any drugs, or even alcohol.
Fucking bald-faced liars without a leg to stand on.