From: pez@manhattan.com (Gizmo)
Subject: Mine Enemy Grows Older Right Along With Me!
Date: 1996/06/15
newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard

Heres something to chew on.  It's not new.  It's not my theory,
but you don't hear about it much.  It goes like this.

Only someone who has been clean for a while, (say more than a
couple of years at a time) can know what this is about.

SCENARIO

You've been clean for five years lets say.  All is well, and your
doing great.  Your plugged back into some kind of straight life
and your doing good with it.  Then you have a fall.  I don't mean
just a one or two shot slip, I mean a decent fall.  The kind of
fall that gets you using daily again.  For oh, lets say, at least
a couple of months.

Ever notice how very quickly you end up physically and
"psychologically" or internally if you will, not only right back
where you were before the five years you have been clean, but
actually even worse and much faster than it took to get there the
last time?

It's like, even during the "clean years," the mechanism of your
addiction has been advancing almost as though you were using all
along?  "Mine Enemy Grows Older."  (I seem to remember this being
the title of a book about heroin thirty or more years ago?)

Over the years, I've had a number of "falls."  And I'm always
amazed at how fast I can get right back to where I left off.  Not
just the increased tolerance, that seems to happen faster, but
just the overall feeling of having "lost it" again.  "Lost it"
fast man.  You know, the "out of control" feeling.  Out of
control even though your not really doing enough dope for a big
habit.

I mean you would think that if you have been clean for five
years, that a couple of shots of heroin would be more like the
very first couple of shots.  In the sense that back when you
tried it for the very first, second or third time, you could
really take it or leave it easily.  True the first time.  But not
anymore..

Something worth remembering when contemplating a bit of fucking
around again.  Perhaps this why they say the older you get, the
harder it is to recover from a fall.  The above, explains a lot
about why it would be harder.

Gizmo 

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