Confessions of an eBay Opium Addict

One person chronicles his addiction to drugs in general, and opiates in particular. Interesting read:

Columbus Day almost killed me.

I woke up avalanched under a junkyard of pain, my body a trap of torn nerves and trashed organs. An oily rash of sweat had soaked through my pillow and into the mattress. I was coughing, confused and crazy with anger. A throbbing, deep-pink chemical sunburn covered my face; my bowels were spitting hot mercury. I slid out of bed and dropped to the floor, the weight of a snarling mountain gorilla bearing down on me. I saw myself in the mirror as I fell. I looked puffy.

Outside, the sun was terrifying, while the hiss from a neighbor’s dancing sprinkler got in my head and pissed me off so much, it felt as though my blood had become flammable and would ignite at the next insult. I made it to the car and somehow drove one block down to the mailbox, expecting the Priority Mail package from my eBay dealer to save me.

Two things struck me about this article. First, you can buy poppy pods on eBay? Wow; I had no idea they were so easy to acquire. Apparently they are valued for floral arrangements. I've looked at a couple pictures, and I don't know what people find beautiful in a dried up bulb, but there you have it. I'd love to meet the grandma who buys 150 of these things for $1 apiece to make crafts for her church bazaar.

The second is, this guy has a long, long history of drug abuse. I used to buy baseball cards at the grocery store, but he was wandering the Cold & Flu aisle sampling pills. His history raises more questions than it answers. Such as, was he trying to escape a horrible home life? Was he just bored out of his mind? Or is it simply a result of genetics, a person doomed from birth to become an addict?

I had a whole anti-drug war message I was going to attach to this post, but I just can't word it in a non-cliché way. So take the article for what it's worth. I don't think it has much value in the larger debate, but I'm sure someone read it and though OH THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

Comments

I am reading my RSS feeds like a good little boy this morning when suddenly a subscription I had long forgotten is bold with new posts!!!

I like the new design.

Thanks. I'm still getting used to it... it's a little orange ;) There are some cool new features that I got when upgrading. Mostly paged archives and paged comments. And this spiffy new comment form that uses some ajaxy stuff. The comment post doesn't quite format the comment properly until you reload, but that's minor enough I'm not going to bother fixing it.