One of the first things that Jim and I did once we had both reached our stable dose of methadone, after paying off all of our outstanding bills, both legitimate and not, was move as far away as possible from the locale that almost proved to be the scene of our undoing. Just as quickly as we were able to move, we both got rid of our jobs, and found brand spanking new ones. Obviously, we felt very strongly that the only way that we would ultimately be successful with our recoveries was to make a complete break from the lifestyle that ended up getting there. We, literally, needed to start all over again from little more than nothing, other than our strong belief that we could succeed with this in the end.
Surprisingly enough, this ended up being easier than we expected. Paying off our rather large debts that we had managed to collect over our most recent habit, ended up not taking as long as I had thought this would. Its bloody amazing how much disposable income we ended up having available to us once we no longer needed to spend anywhere from $1800 to $2600 each month to feed our habits. I started MMT in February 2006, while Jim followed me about three months later. By October of the same year, we had managed to pay each and every last penny off that we owed.
Without exception, all of the legitimate businesses that we had outstanding debt with were thrilled to accept our money. In fact, so were all of our dealers - we rotated through three separate individuals at this time in order for us to purchase what we needed on any given day. For the most part, all three were pretty dependable connects although around the time that we both started MMT, London was in the middle of a bit of an opiate drought. Even with these three, it had started to become more and more frequent and difficult to find opiates on a daily basis. This had started to bother me as obviously having to endure every increasing periods of withdrawal was by no stretch enjoyable.
Also, our main connect had started to lose track of the picture, and had begun treating us with disrespect, and had begun to take us for granted. For close to two years, we had purchased from him 240 8mg dilaudid pills - a third of his legitimate script - each and every month, without fail. Now, if we take the time to do a brief bit of math, this translated into a substantial amount of money. He sold his pills for $15/piece if one was to purchase them singly. He would give you a bit of a break when you bout a couple, selling them at two for $25. Now if you happened to have $100 at your disposal then you could get ten pills for this amount. Now, obviously, for the most part, Jim and I tried to buy these pills in bulk. There rarely were no more than maybe a half a dozen smaller purchases throughout the month. Now, one would thing that if one of his customers was buying 260 units monthly that perhaps he would be able to cut them a bit of a break, but sadly no. He charged us groups of ten - sometimes on the very rare occasion groups of twelve - which translated into 26 groups of ten units each, charged at $100 per group, which adds up to $2600 each and every month!
When I say that we were regulars, I truly mean that we were indeed that. I am in no way attempting to inflate our use, and in fact, am extremely ashamed and embarrassed even sharing this info, as it paints a pretty distasteful picture of what we allowed our addiction to become before we were finally able to put the breaks on it. Now for just over 24 months dealing with him, we never deviated far from this number. We almost always paid in advance, and always paid cash - no bartering or asking for them up front, etc. If we did have to request a front, it was rarely for more than a few days. Now, I get why he didn't want to cut us too sweet a deal as he had begun to rely on our money each and every month. Who wouldn't want to receive this amount, especially considering there was no work needed at all whatsoever in getting it? No hustling, no nickel and dime sales, less traffic coming and going to his house because he didn't need a dozen or so more customers minimum to replace the two of us.
Towards the end of us dealing with him, he started to act illogically and then some. Paranoid much. He started to see people in his bushes and trees in his garden, and all that tends to accompany this sort of mental breakdown. Funny what a hardcore amphetamine addiction can do to you! And he had a raging one at that. Old story of him starting to spend more money on this than the amount of money that was actually coming into the house! He still was getting our full funds and obviously still more from other sources, but it never seemed to be enough. He actually was about to raise his selling prices - which one tends to have to do when your new girlfriend is pocketing a couple of hundred of your units on a regular basis! This starts to add up and negatively affecting one's bottom line! I was prepared to even deal with this, but when he started to get mean by holding our addiction against us by playing little games of pretending that he was down to his last two pills, etc, well I quickly started to lose my patience. Suddenly, the thought of him even fronting something to us was no longer going to be an option, and when he did decide to be all magnanimous, it literally became a joke. On a number of occasions, in the dead of winter when our truck was in the shop having a new engine installed, he had us walk 45 mins to his house, and when we got there, he was prepared to front us no more than three pills. WTF? Proverbial straw, anyone?
What I ultimately found utterly repugnant in dealing with him was the rude and disparaging way in which he had started to treat us the last six months of our doing business with him. In hindsight, I know now that this treatment wasn't specifically directed at us alone, but that also, is so not the point because I felt that we should never have been lumped into his "loser pill popping" customer that he had always loathed and despised. Firstly, he wasn't someone that we had just recently met, but an actual friend of ours going back just over two decades. We also were in no way associated with his brand spanking new 21 year old junky girlfriend, who he had gotten when he traded in his high school sweetheart, who was also the mother of his three daughters. Ashley sure knew what side her bread was buttered on thats for sure. She played him beautifully, especially seeing that the prize at the end of his tunnel was his monthly script of 720 pills each and every month. Just her presence meant that each month, it could literally be assured that a good 200 pills would come up missing. You could also be assured that she would hotly deny having any knowledge of where these missing items might happen to have ended up. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to do the math on this one, that is for sure! Anyway, long story short, both Jim and I got ourselves to MMT tout suite! Didn't even take the time to look back, either.
At least he has now gotten his karmic reward, three years later. No time like the present is my saying and as I've mostly been a pretty patient person, I had been in no rush for him to get his just desserts. As I mentioned earlier, another reason for his anger and bitterness three years ago was a direct result of his massive speed addiction. This would most definitely still be an issue today for him, if he was even able to afford it to be! Unfortunately, his lovely girlfriend has managed after all these years of getting him good and hooked on his pills. Prior to this, he never, ever bothered to touch them as they had been his means to an end for him being able to buy piles and piles of speed!!! Now as many of you are all too aware, once both partners in a relationship start sharing an opiate addiction, it replaces pretty much anything else of importance. As its an expensive addiction, once hooked, some decisions need to be made. Most people find it hard to carry out two addictions full time once opiates are thrown in the mix, and its really not much of a surprise that rarely anything else is able to beat opiates. All or nothing generally.
Anyway, this is pretty much all that I'm able to type tonight so I'll try to finish the rest of my story before the end of the weekend cause its just too, too much. Briefly, we ended up running into the darling couple a day ago, and to say that both of them are in grave need of choosing a different path to take, would be the understatement of this century. He was beyond sick with withdrawal and to be honest, I'm not even sure why unless he's already managed to go through his monthly allotment of pills. If true, then this would truly suck, as I know from years past that he'll not be able to refill his script until February 6 at the earliest, still a good two weeks from now.
TO BE CONTINUED...
Surprisingly enough, this ended up being easier than we expected. Paying off our rather large debts that we had managed to collect over our most recent habit, ended up not taking as long as I had thought this would. Its bloody amazing how much disposable income we ended up having available to us once we no longer needed to spend anywhere from $1800 to $2600 each month to feed our habits. I started MMT in February 2006, while Jim followed me about three months later. By October of the same year, we had managed to pay each and every last penny off that we owed.
Without exception, all of the legitimate businesses that we had outstanding debt with were thrilled to accept our money. In fact, so were all of our dealers - we rotated through three separate individuals at this time in order for us to purchase what we needed on any given day. For the most part, all three were pretty dependable connects although around the time that we both started MMT, London was in the middle of a bit of an opiate drought. Even with these three, it had started to become more and more frequent and difficult to find opiates on a daily basis. This had started to bother me as obviously having to endure every increasing periods of withdrawal was by no stretch enjoyable.
Also, our main connect had started to lose track of the picture, and had begun treating us with disrespect, and had begun to take us for granted. For close to two years, we had purchased from him 240 8mg dilaudid pills - a third of his legitimate script - each and every month, without fail. Now, if we take the time to do a brief bit of math, this translated into a substantial amount of money. He sold his pills for $15/piece if one was to purchase them singly. He would give you a bit of a break when you bout a couple, selling them at two for $25. Now if you happened to have $100 at your disposal then you could get ten pills for this amount. Now, obviously, for the most part, Jim and I tried to buy these pills in bulk. There rarely were no more than maybe a half a dozen smaller purchases throughout the month. Now, one would thing that if one of his customers was buying 260 units monthly that perhaps he would be able to cut them a bit of a break, but sadly no. He charged us groups of ten - sometimes on the very rare occasion groups of twelve - which translated into 26 groups of ten units each, charged at $100 per group, which adds up to $2600 each and every month!
When I say that we were regulars, I truly mean that we were indeed that. I am in no way attempting to inflate our use, and in fact, am extremely ashamed and embarrassed even sharing this info, as it paints a pretty distasteful picture of what we allowed our addiction to become before we were finally able to put the breaks on it. Now for just over 24 months dealing with him, we never deviated far from this number. We almost always paid in advance, and always paid cash - no bartering or asking for them up front, etc. If we did have to request a front, it was rarely for more than a few days. Now, I get why he didn't want to cut us too sweet a deal as he had begun to rely on our money each and every month. Who wouldn't want to receive this amount, especially considering there was no work needed at all whatsoever in getting it? No hustling, no nickel and dime sales, less traffic coming and going to his house because he didn't need a dozen or so more customers minimum to replace the two of us.
Towards the end of us dealing with him, he started to act illogically and then some. Paranoid much. He started to see people in his bushes and trees in his garden, and all that tends to accompany this sort of mental breakdown. Funny what a hardcore amphetamine addiction can do to you! And he had a raging one at that. Old story of him starting to spend more money on this than the amount of money that was actually coming into the house! He still was getting our full funds and obviously still more from other sources, but it never seemed to be enough. He actually was about to raise his selling prices - which one tends to have to do when your new girlfriend is pocketing a couple of hundred of your units on a regular basis! This starts to add up and negatively affecting one's bottom line! I was prepared to even deal with this, but when he started to get mean by holding our addiction against us by playing little games of pretending that he was down to his last two pills, etc, well I quickly started to lose my patience. Suddenly, the thought of him even fronting something to us was no longer going to be an option, and when he did decide to be all magnanimous, it literally became a joke. On a number of occasions, in the dead of winter when our truck was in the shop having a new engine installed, he had us walk 45 mins to his house, and when we got there, he was prepared to front us no more than three pills. WTF? Proverbial straw, anyone?
What I ultimately found utterly repugnant in dealing with him was the rude and disparaging way in which he had started to treat us the last six months of our doing business with him. In hindsight, I know now that this treatment wasn't specifically directed at us alone, but that also, is so not the point because I felt that we should never have been lumped into his "loser pill popping" customer that he had always loathed and despised. Firstly, he wasn't someone that we had just recently met, but an actual friend of ours going back just over two decades. We also were in no way associated with his brand spanking new 21 year old junky girlfriend, who he had gotten when he traded in his high school sweetheart, who was also the mother of his three daughters. Ashley sure knew what side her bread was buttered on thats for sure. She played him beautifully, especially seeing that the prize at the end of his tunnel was his monthly script of 720 pills each and every month. Just her presence meant that each month, it could literally be assured that a good 200 pills would come up missing. You could also be assured that she would hotly deny having any knowledge of where these missing items might happen to have ended up. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to do the math on this one, that is for sure! Anyway, long story short, both Jim and I got ourselves to MMT tout suite! Didn't even take the time to look back, either.
At least he has now gotten his karmic reward, three years later. No time like the present is my saying and as I've mostly been a pretty patient person, I had been in no rush for him to get his just desserts. As I mentioned earlier, another reason for his anger and bitterness three years ago was a direct result of his massive speed addiction. This would most definitely still be an issue today for him, if he was even able to afford it to be! Unfortunately, his lovely girlfriend has managed after all these years of getting him good and hooked on his pills. Prior to this, he never, ever bothered to touch them as they had been his means to an end for him being able to buy piles and piles of speed!!! Now as many of you are all too aware, once both partners in a relationship start sharing an opiate addiction, it replaces pretty much anything else of importance. As its an expensive addiction, once hooked, some decisions need to be made. Most people find it hard to carry out two addictions full time once opiates are thrown in the mix, and its really not much of a surprise that rarely anything else is able to beat opiates. All or nothing generally.
Anyway, this is pretty much all that I'm able to type tonight so I'll try to finish the rest of my story before the end of the weekend cause its just too, too much. Briefly, we ended up running into the darling couple a day ago, and to say that both of them are in grave need of choosing a different path to take, would be the understatement of this century. He was beyond sick with withdrawal and to be honest, I'm not even sure why unless he's already managed to go through his monthly allotment of pills. If true, then this would truly suck, as I know from years past that he'll not be able to refill his script until February 6 at the earliest, still a good two weeks from now.
TO BE CONTINUED...
1 comment:
Alot of times people think that because you spend money with that person everyday for months or years on end that there going to be a "real" friend.
Most of the time its your money they want and the conversation they have with you is only for show.
Its a fucked up games really. Here you are giving your money, however you got it, giving it to someone day in day out and then when you call on a favor and there no money things are VERY different!
Good for you for getting on MMT. I hope its still working out for you and your partner!
Word of advise remember where you meet them.
If you meet them in the program or going to score drugs chances are they will NEVER be "real" friends!
Stay Up!
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