I saw the thread and thought you might be my former roommate. But you’re not. That makes me happy. Welcome, a little belatedly, to the boards.
That’s a perplexing question, because the crack house was something I never would have found until I was looking for it. But once I found it, it was painfully obvious.
I was buying in Daytona, and there was a corner in the “bad neighborhood” (basically found between the decent places along the beach and the decent places where the mall and the famous Nascar racing track are - literally just 2 streets from a major intersection) where people would hang outside some convenience store (I have no idea if it was actually open).
It was an open air drug market. If you drove by with your window down, somebody would nod to you and say something along the lines of “what’s up?” If you said, “You got a twenty?” (i.e. $20 dollars) he’d come up to your car and make the deal. Sometimes, he ask, “you want hard?” (meaning, do you want crack rocks, as opposed to really cheap dirt weed or powdered cocaine). Generally, they’d just assume you were looking for crack, and you might have 2 or 3 guys sticking their heads into your window trying to get your money.
That’s how I started. Eventually, one guy gave me his phone number (clearly, I was a better customer then most. For one, I had more money, offering $20 when someone else might only be giving $10 - there really wasn’t any negotiation as to quantity, at least as I did it), and I’d meet him at his apartment, down the street from the open air drug market (well, this happened after I got confused when he said to meet at the local Checker’s fast food place. I went to the one near the nice neighborhood, but he meant the one in the ghetto. After that, he told me where he lived so I wouldn’t get lost).
Telltale signs of a drug site are people loitering outside a convenience store in a poorer, downtown neighborhood (ironically, these tend to be within a few blocks of the police station). You’ll also see people riding bikes around the adjacent streets - they are on the lookout for cops. The people doing the loitering are going to be making eye contact with drivers passing by - especially if their driver side window is open. And, for socioeconomic reasons that are far more complex then the scope of this thread, most of the people are going to be Black.
I give you Gold for a year, and this is what it takes to get a welcome?!
Sheesh…tough crowd. 
I’ve said it once already, but I’ve got to say it again. You have a ton of heart and two tons of guts to be posting this and fighting your problems. I’m learning a lot too, and that thing about people who smoke crack also holding down a normal job/life is a revelation. Thank you for posting this!
I have another question for you. You’ve talked about going through rehab and attending a recovery group for lawyers, but are you currently in therapy? Seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist or counsellor one on one?
I’m asking because I read these posts:
and
and I think to myself that I might have posted this twenty years ago in my teens. I never actually saw a shrink, because that wasn’t an option in the 80’s in the small rural towns I grew up in. Talking it out with friends helped, though. It helped a lot, but looking back on it, I could have saved a lot of time and trouble if I’d gotten some professional help. I wasn’t actually mentally ill, and I don’t think you’re at all mentally ill either (In fact, you strike me as very, very sane.), but if I’d talked it over with someone who had some idea of what I was going through, it might have helped more. It might help you a bit.
Congratulations on kicking a horrible addiction. You should be very proud of yourself.
Do you ever watch the A&E show Intervention? And do you know if your drug dealer ever got busted?
That’s something I occasionally think about when I go about my daily life. How many seemingly “normal” people are doing all sorts of shocking things when alone or behind closed doors? The mind boggles.
Although my stint in rehab didn’t immediately work, with regard to my drug use, it was amazingly beneficial as to lots of psychological baggage I was carrying regarding childhood sexual abuse and the divorce of my parents. I was downright eager to talk, and worked through lots of issues at that time.
Clearly, I didn’t work through everything (I think mental health, like physical health, requires continual maintenance), and I strongly believe in the benefits of counseling. I’ve thought about finding someone local, if only for an occaisonal “tune-up”, but just haven’t gotten around to it. Right now, I’m living the best life I’ve ever lived, so I’m not daily struggling with depression or drug issues.
This isn’t to say I’m complacent about my recovery. I’m still very much a work in progress. But I get a lot out of my weekly meeting with other recovering attorneys, and I really enjoy the dinner a group of us have each Tuesday night. I’m continually amazed at how a topic will come up that will be relevant to what I may be thinking about in my own life. Still, I appreciate your suggestion; it’s certainly not something I’ve ruled out.
I have not seen the show. I really get kinda’ creeped out by real in-depth discussions of hard drugs (I realize that this thread sort of contradicts that statement, but I figured you guys were worth it). I once saw a 48 hours investigation where they showed a guy smoking crack on air - the crackling of the pipe (as an aside, that noise is why it’s called “crack”) turned my stomach.
Interestingly, though, the subject of that show once came up at a support group meeting I was at. Most of us agreed that the show was horrible for us to watch. Some, though, absolutely loved it. And one guy said it really bothered him to learn about new drugs he’d never done (to which I offered the classic George Carlin observation, “Do you ever notice that there are no recreational drugs taken in suppository form?”)
As to your second question, I have no idea what happened to that dealer. The book Freakonomics has a chapter on why most drug dealers live with their moms (long story short: it’s a poorly paid profession, except at the highest levels of distribution). I suspect he doesn’t have much money, and he isn’t living much of a glamorous life. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was arrested, but I doubt doing a little time would change his ways.
When you decided to buy some crack, did someone tell you where to look, or did you come up with a scheme by yourself?
Did you just decide to drive around in a bad neighborhood and see if you could find some dealers?
Congratulations on kicking the addiction. You said you were in a support group: what percentage of crack users manage to kick the addiction like you?
Sadly, the first time I used, it was with my cousin, who had experience in such things (he’s about 10 years older then me, and had been a cocaine user for many years up to that point). Ironically, he had preceeded me to the rehab place I went to. As far as I know, he’s drug free now (we don’t communicate regularly, but I know he lives with his wife and kids in central Florida, and I hear generally good things through the family grapevine).
That I don’t know, although there are Narcotics Anonymous meetings all over the country, and these are full of recovering drug users. I suspect that for everyone who does get clean, though, there are lots more unable to find a way out.
Not to be snarky, but the issue isn’t crack per se, but cocaine. Crack (I’ve sometimes described it as freebasing; it sounds less lowbrow) is just a delivery method.
It’s interesting, though, to note the perception that crack has. I self-described as a “crackhead” in the OP because I knew it would be shocking; I don’t think “Ask the former cokehead” would have had the same response. Crack is readily identifiable as a skid row type behavior. Cocaine, though, seems to be less so.
Thus, the belief by some that crack users don’t have jobs. We hear all the time that celebrities and rich people end up with cocaine problems, and I don’t think we associate that with people pawning their possessions or debasing themselves for a high.
But smoking cocaine is merely a way to get a bigger high from the same drug. So, when, for example, Whitney Houston turns out to be smoking crack, it’s not that she’s suddenly become a skanky whore who’s sunk to the depths of depravity. If she was those things, then she was that way before she got to crack. Getting to crack was just about getting more high, because her tolerance had probably built up from ingesting cocaine through the nose.
My point is that lots of cocaine users will end up smoking it. Some will end up shooting it, too. That’s the insidiousness of cocaine; it’s a progressive drug, and the amount and intensity of use will just keep building. The task, then, isn’t to stop smoking it. The task, then, is to stop using it, period. Every day, there are people who renew the decision to do so. Every day, however, there are others who return to the same destructive vice.
Bro, my hats off to you. I too have smoked crack (fortunately only twice) and I can totally understand why it controls peoples lives. I have seen firsthand the destruction that it causes, and the lives that it destroys.
I have seen this more so with CrystalMethAmphetamine. I was born and raised in the middle of the desert in AZ where we had a lab in every other trailer that you saw. Drugs like this ruin lives - not only the lives of the abuser, but their families and friends, and the people that are affected by the bad decisions that are made as a result of the drug and what measures we go thru to get it.
I shudder to think of the hell that you went through as a slave to the glass dick.
I know my struggles that I endured in my experiences with Meth and and other chemicals.
Good on you for maintaining sobriety!
-Me
Glad your life is better.
Do you consider yourself an addict or an abuser? Do you still crave it? Do you feel that if someone laid out a line right now you’d be tempted to do it or could you walk away (or better yet, sit there) and not partake?
You don’t have to answer this if it’s too personal. But you noted that the reason you started using drugs is because you were depressed. And here you say that you’re no longer depressed. Have you done anything that alleviated the depression and/or do you do things that are preventative in regards to depression?
I’m not sure if you meant depression in the sense of just getting bummed out that things aren’t going your way or the kind of medical depression that people fight against. And I’m not even sure what the differences are between the two, to be honest. But since you noted it, I’m curious about what you think of it.
You’re very articulate and interesting and I’ve been fascinated by your responses.
I’ve never done, or seen, Crystal Meth, but I imagine the experiences are similar. I’ve also never heard the term “glass dick”, but that made me laugh. Actually, I used to construct pipes out of tinfoil - they were easy to make and easily disposable. The problem, though, is that tinfoil readily conducts heat, so I’d end up burning the hell out of my lips. I didn’t really notice it when I was getting high, but the inside of my lips would be burned the next day.
I’m a drug addict (in recovery). I still hear people go to meetings and refuse to make that statement, but in my mind, I think they are trying to give themselves an out for future behavior.
My addictive behavior crosses all boundaries, though. If I am into something (work, exercise, baseball when I was a young teenager), I am
into into 100%. Even before I used drugs, I described myself as an extremist. I was always all or nothing in my behavior (I’ve actually resisted taking up golf, even though I like watching Tiger Woods play it on TV, because I don’t want to become obsessive about playing the sport). I guess I’m pretty obsessive/compulsive, and that has lent itself to drug abuse.
I don’t crave cocaine, but I do periodically crave marijuana. Pot was always my drug of choice (still is). I can be around drinkers and not want a drink. But I have a very hard time being around someone who smokes pot and not want them to pack a bowl. I certainly couldn’t say no to someone who was passing around a joint (this sucks, too, because many people I meet with my political and cultural sensibilities are potheads).
If I was at a place where someone was putting out lines of coke, I’d immediately leave. For one thing, I’ve never met “casual” coke users. So if I was in that location, I was in a hard-core drug environment, and that means that behaviors are only going to escalate (how long before someone shows up with heroin - something I’ve never been around - and I’m tempted to venture down the next black hole?) Secondly, I just know myself too well - if people around me are using, then there is no way I could comfortably sit idly by and not be the highest person there. I’d eventually give in, just because I wouldn’t be able to tune out the obsessive desire to do it again that would be screaming inside my brain.
I’m someone who has dealt with depression all of my life. I actually think it’s a genetic thing; both my parent’s families have a history of depression, along with a history of alcoholism (my dad’s father and my mom’s brother are alcoholics. My mother’s maternal grandmother killed herself, and my dad was suicidally depressed at one point in his life).
Even as a child, I’d go through depressed states, where I’d sit alone in my darkened room for hours at a time. I still recall being about 8 years old, crying and staring at myself in the mirror, asking “what’s wrong with me? Why do I think about things that other people don’t think about?”
When I found drugs, I initially found a way to cope with depression. Getting stoned made me feel really good (I was actually convinced that I got higher than other people). The problem, though, is that drugs actually increase depression; after I sobered up, I was worse then I had been before I got high. So, more drugs, which leads to more depression. The effects worsened until I was suicidally depressed right before I eventually went to rehab for counseling.
The counseling was good for bringing me out of the worst aspects of my depression, and medication was helpful for regulating my mood. But, I wasn’t always faithful to the medication, and clearly fell back into depression when I got into the harder drugs (interestingly, I never fell back into the suicidal thoughts, though, although I suppose my actions were basically a passive form of suicidal behavior. There’s no doubt, though, that talk therapy really helped me to process a lot of the issues that had previously made me want to kill myself).
At this point in my life, I’m no longer on medications (I really don’t like the side effects), although I recommend considering medical treatment for those who are dealing with clinical depression. As I said upthread, my lifestyle is really a strong catalyst for keeping me in balance - it’s really hard to feel bad after a workout, and I definitely notice the endorphin rush when I’m done.
But that isn’t to say that I am “cured”. Recently, for example, I went through a depressive spell after I bought my new car (which I love, by the way). I think it was sort of a letdown after the high of making such a big decision. The key, though, is that I recognize it for what it is, and I don’t allow myself to wallow in irrational thoughts. When I go through such a period, I really just try and simplify what I’m doing. Don’t focus on the future (I’m an expert at “what if” ing myself into a complete funk); just focus on right now. One step at a time - sometimes, it really is that basic. I think having a predictable pattern of “usual” activities helps me, too, since going about these patterns eventually brings me back to my normal disposition.
By the way, none of this is too personal. By processing my experiences, I’ve been able to remove the emotional attachment that are tied to them. I can just describe them, as all of the shame, sadness, fear, anger, et al. has already beeb flushed (for lack of a better term) from my subconscious. If you can’t describe a moment in your life without crying, you are still emotionally connected to that trauma. Once you process that emotion, though, you can discuss it freely (I find the same thing with regard to my friend’s suicide, one year ago today. I’ve seen it many times with people who speak about loved one’s who are now dead. Eventually, they can reminisce about them without becoming overwhelmed with emotion; it’s not that they don’t still care about them, but it’s that they aren’t still consumed with unexplored feelings about their loss).
Thanks for sharing. You sound like a wonderful person. And incredibly hot-looking too! 
Atomicktom, as someone who has watched far too many loved ones struggle with crack addiction (and only one of them return from it), I found that I cannot read this thread. I got to about the third or fourth post, and was overcome with emotion.
So I won’t ask you anything, since I won’t be able to come back and read your answer(s). Instead, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve seen what a struggle it is to overcome something like this, and that you must be a hell of a man for having such success. Kudos to you for that, and for having the courage to come here and talk about it. fist bump
Link?
Sorry. Not possible, as I don’t show up on film (although there may be some artist rendering in an old Doper picture thread back in the day).
This doesn’t sound all that nice. Is it better than it sounds? If not, why does one want the next hit?
I’m glad you don’t think it sounds all that nice. It was certainly not my intention to romanticize the high.
At its best, though, I’d say the high is an intense rush of warmth over the body, coupled with an ehnhancement of the senses. I’ve read it described as orgasmic -that’s not really how I would describe it, but it is a wave of “pleasure” that courses through your extremities (I would be curious, though, as to how you would describe an orgasm; I wonder if a written description would do it justice).
The numbing sensation of the tongue is also a pleasent effect (cocaine is a numbing agent. That’s why you see the cops dap a bit on their tongue when testing a baggie; if it’s real, it will numb their tongue)
In reality, though, especially when considered in light of the paranoia and next day effects, it really isn’t all that great. At the point where you are hitting the pipe, though, I don’t really think you are rationally considering the benefits of it. Your body is reacting to a chemical stimulus, and it is craving another dose.
ETA: I think a lot of the desire for another hit isn’t necessarily related to how high you got, but to the dichotomy between that high and the low from coming down. It’s not necessarily that it was so great while doing it as much as it is really not great not doing it anymore.