For me, coming down from that exhilarating height was always as bad as the take off was good. As soon as the rush reached its apex and began to subside, withdrawal started to set in, followed by feelings of despondency and despair driven by the diminution in my brain’s stash of dopamine. It was my own personal version of the space shuttle breaking up into pieces and slamming back to Earth. It is the simultaneous drives to recreate the ecstasy of the monumental rush and to escape the emotional death grip of the crash that churns the obsessive-compulsive need to continue to use coke. And it’s a Sisyphean cluster-fuck. With each successive hit during a using session, the high gets a little lower and the low gets a little higher, as the brain’s available inventory of dopamine is progressively depleted, until all that’s left is depression.
Not having a clearer sense of what to do with the rest of my life, I figured that law school was a reasonable option and registered to take the LSAT (Law School Admission Test). The night before the exam I decided that I could inject coke one time—after all, it was only 7:30 p.m. By the time I quit for the night, it was 5:00 a.m. the following morning. Shockingly, I didn’t do very well on the test. But I did use the experience as a learning opportunity of another sort.
I would never again shoot coke unless I had heroin or some other opiate/opioid or a benzodiazepine such as Valium as a neurochemical parachute, allowing me to float gently back to earth rather than crashing face first. Shortly thereafter, I transitioned to preferring heroin alone, though I remained open to the occasional speedball. For a year and a half, I lived like a vampire, using till the sun came up, confined to long-sleeve shirts in public even in summer. My senior thesis, and with it my Planning and Public Policy degree, went unfinished.
When I was first introduced to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in graduate school, the DSM was in its third edition. I was dumbfounded to learn that unlike multiple other drugs—opiates, alcohol, barbiturates, tranquillizers, etc.—there was no category for substance dependence (the then DSM equivalent of “addiction”) for cocaine. Until the crack epidemic of the 1980s started ripping apart the lives of individuals, families, and whole communities like a Category 4 hurricane, the prevailing belief was that cocaine was psychologically, but not physically addictive (as if there was a definitive separation of mind from body that made for any meaningful difference between the two).
Anyone who had ever done an appreciable amount of the drug knew otherwise. My master’s thesis (which was completed) addressed this topic, arguing for the addition of a category of “substance dependence” for cocaine in the DSM. It was an easy argument for me to make. When DSM-IV was published in 1994, it was there—professional expertise having finally caught up with hard-boiled experience.
The road from junkie to graduate student was circuitous and full of impediments, beginning with an arrest for the criminal sale of a controlled substance in January of 1983. My habits were expensive and I funded them through illicit manufacturing and sales. There is an inverse correlation between active addiction and judgment. As my addiction advanced, my judgment declined and with it, my attention to detail. Mail order was part of my business. It was a very different time and sending drugs through the mail was not that uncommon. I sent a large package to someone in New York who came recommended by a friend I had known since childhood and with whom I had done plenty of similar business. Little did I know that the person on the receiving end of this particular package was a cop.
Ironically, I had already made the decision that I needed a lifestyle transplant. I had dismantled my business infrastructure and was planning to move back to New York within the month. My relocation was expedited when the cops arrived early that morning with weapons drawn to wake me up and execute the warrant for my arrest. I had planned on driving back to New York; instead, I took a plane and had a police escort.
Between the time of my arrest and sentencing in May of that spring, I don’t remember breathing much. Encased in prolonged stress and anxiety, I experienced physical symptoms of trauma, including elevated pulse rate, edginess, muscle tension, insomnia, and when I did sleep, I had nightmares. I went through the full gamut of emotional and psychological trauma symptoms: shock and disbelief, anger, irritability, sadness and hopelessness, worry and fear, difficultly concentrating, feeling disconnected and wanting to withdraw from others, along with unabating guilt, shame, and self-blame.
During my presentencing interview, I was asked whether I had a “drug problem.” “No” I answered unequivocally, mobilizing my most deferential and diplomatic persona. “Sure, against my better judgment I sent a few packages as a favor to friends who had requested them, but it’s not like I have a problem with using drugs myself.” It was a line of denial, minimization, and bullshit similar to many I would hear years later as an addiction treatment professional.
I received “lifetime” probation, meaning that the length was indeterminate. After five years I was eligible to apply to have it terminated, but the decision would be based solely on the judge’s discretion. If there was anything remotely positive that came out of my bust, it was that I had to change the course of my life; it was not an option not to.
After a couple of unsatisfying jobs in (legal) business, I came to the realization that since most of us have to spend so much of our waking time for so many years doing whatever it is we do for a living, if I wasn’t fundamentally okay with my chosen vocation, I’d be setting myself up for long-term discontent. I figured that since I had a degree in psychology, I should try to put it to use.
At about the same time during the end of the summer in 1984, my girlfriend and I got married. Even though I was from Long Island and she was from northern New Jersey, we met in psychology classes at UC Santa Cruz. For months, even before we met formally, we were drawn to one another, tuning in to each other’s presence across a cavernous lecture hall in a class of over two hundred students, though neither of us had any inkling of the other’s attraction. For me, it was physical attraction; whereas she described intrigue with this long-haired hippie-like character who casually strolled in late, took a seat right in front of the professor, and matter-of-factly posed questions and interjected comments.
We were friends for two years before anything romantic evolved. She grew up the hard way, in a challenged and challenging family, and demonstrated a phenomenal resiliency, growing far beyond her upbringing. From the time I could remember, I was programmed to go to college. She had been actively discouraged from going to college. She did it almost entirely on her own, and after several starts and stops across five schools, she became the first person in her family to graduate from college.
She was not an addict, and never used like I did. She had a core of honesty and integrity that I marveled at, but could only aspire to. We had planned to move back East together prior to my arrest, and surprisingly she still came, leaving her own master’s program in vocational counseling at Cal State San Francisco in the process. I absolutely adored her, and in the aftershock of my self-inflicted trauma, I would have been lost without her, and whether or not she was aware of that, she was extremely intuitive and likely sensed it. Knowing me in all the ways she did, joining me in New York was either an act of pure mercy or a desire to see some of the potential that she saw in me actualized, or some of both.
We got married during Labor Day weekend, and the following Tuesday I started as a diagnostic caseworker at St. Mary’s Family and Children’s Services, a residential treatment center in Syosset, NY, for latency-age and adolescent boys from all over Long Island and the five boroughs of New York City. I got the job in part because they saw me as a diamond in the rough that they could train, and in part because I was willing to accept the $12,500 annual salary—even in 1984, that was a near poverty-level wage.
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