Diary: Adapting

DIARY: The battle to balance my days is getting easier as I adapt to morphine instead of methadone. I no longer get the slight 'high' I got from methadone and is the hardest part to adapt to. This gave me a full morning to work solidly before the depression sets in. This slight 'high' is the equivalent of what most people call normal. I don't have that morning reprieve anymore but my afternoons are no longer hell. One bonus is I don't feel the need to use heroin as much. I have gone nearly 2 weeks without it since I went through a bad patch of using when I first moved over to morphine. I am going to use this weekend and I have to admit, I can't wait. After that I am going to reduce to once a month and then once every 2 months. One of the biggest worries for junkies is money. Even though I work, the depression and some personal problems has made me use for short periods where I have wasted savings, blown large payments or borrowed to fund the using. This always puts financial pressure on us at a later date. The move to morphine from methadone had me using too much and now without any significant income for the last month, it is getting very uncomfortable. Luckily though a few big projects have dropped and this week starts a good period for me. Over the several few months, I should be clearing some nice dollars and will get my financial state back in order. A few people have emailed me about my morphine dose so I hope this answers any future queries. If you are given morphine for pain, you get dosed at about 10mg. For people suffering terminal illnesses, that dose slowly goes up as you tolerance increases and the pain gets worse. For others, morphine is highly addictive so the withdrawal process is very much a reason not to prolong treatment or increase the dosage too much. If you get addicted, you're a junkie and there are many people who never used heroin until they were treated with morphine. An average size person could take about 10-30mg as their first dose but anything over that would probably kill them. I take 600mg+ each day which just stops me going into withdrawal like methadone would. For those who don't know, substitution treatment just replaces heroin with another opiate. I am still addicted to opiates but heroin carries such a social stigma that some governments will do anything to avoid giving out heroin as treatment. Opiates incidentally are relatively non toxic and I could safely take heroin/morphine 3 times a day for the rest of my life with no physical damage. Heroin is like Aspirin in that it is being rediscovered. Once demonised and removed from nearly every countries' PBS(except a few countries like England), heroin is now starting to become a potential miracle drug for depression and drug addiction. Addicts who have been given free medical quality heroin in 8 different countries has proved without doubt the it is the most effective drug to get addicts clean. One day heroin will be prescribed to heroin addicts in most countries except maybe the US. This would be the end of heroin epidemics and the illegal heroin trade which would allow millions of addicts to live normal productive lives and drop crime by an estimated 25% on average per country.