Cocaine Recovery Quotes

There's a peculiar thing that happens every time you get clean. You go through this sensation of rebirth. There's something intoxicating about the process of the comeback, and that becomes an element in the whole cycle of addiction. Once you've beaten yourself down with cocaine and heroin, and you manage to stop and walk out of the muck you begin to get your mind and body strong and reconnect with your spirit. The oppressive feeling of being a slave to the drugs is still in your mind, so by comparison, you feel phenomenal. You're happy to be alive, smelling the air and seeing the beauty around you...You have a choice of what to do. So you experience this jolt of joy that you're not where you came from and that in and of itself is a tricky thing to stop doing. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that every time you get clean, you'll have this great new feeling. Cut to: a year later, when you've forgotten how bad it was and you don't have that pink-cloud sensation of being newly sober. When I look back, I see why these vicious cycles can develop in someone who's been sober for a long time and then relapses and doesn't want to stay out there using, doesn't want to die, but isn't taking the full measure to get well again. There's a concept in recovery that says 'Half-measures avail us nothing.' When you have a disease, you can't take half the process of getting well and think you're going to get half well; you do half the process of getting well, you're not going to get well at all, and you'll go back to where you came from. Without a thorough transformation, you're the same guy, and the same guy does the same shit. I kept half-measuring it, thinking I was going to at least get something out of this deal, and I kept getting nothing out of it

From the beginning of high school, all other substances were readily available and liberally consumed by my friends, who used weed and booze like an essential garnish for activities. Peer pressure was rampant with hallucinogens and cocaine. I experimented and hated the effects. Reality wasn’t the problem. I was.

I have done coke off the porcelain backs of public bathroom toilets, but mirrored trays lend some faux class to inhaling cartilage-eating drugs up your nose. The idea becomes alluring and a little more acceptable when mirrored trays are involved. "Excuse me, sir.. I will have some of that high class cocaine".

To get her husband back, Krista had to let him go and it killed her.

prominent spokespeople lecture us that cocaine is a drug with “neuropsychological properties” that “lock people into perpetual usage” so that the only way people can stop is when “supplies become unavailable,” after which “the user is then driven to obtain additional cocaine without particular regard for social constraints.

I think before I ever became an alcoholic, before I even tasted alcohol or tried drugs, I was already programmed to be this way. Before there was cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can’t get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.

In 15 years of working with teenage drug abusers, I’ve never found a single one who was what I’d call only a chemical addict. As powerful as many of the current market drugs are, especially cocaine and crack, I’ve never yet worked with an addict who didn’t have the inner emptiness. I’ve been in my personal recovery for 30 years and I’ve never met a person in recovery from chemical abuse who didn’t have abandonment issues in the sense I have defined them.

I couldn’t go on saying, “Let’s get a couple of grams of blow (cocaine) and write a song. Let’s get stoned before the gig. Let’s get stoned after the gig. I’m in town, where are the girls?” I was living the classic wild style, and that was no longer working for me. I’m not AA or anything. My ethic is that I work hard, do what I do under my own power, and at the end of the day, like everybody else in the world, I do what I can get away with. —Iggy Pop, rock singer

John Bradshaw, in his best-seller Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, details several of his imaginative techniques: asking forgiveness of your inner child, divorcing your parent and finding a new one, like Jesus, stroking your inner child, writing your childhood history. These techniques go by the name catharsis, that is, emotional engagement in past trauma-laden events. Catharsis is magnificent to experience and impressive to behold. Weeping, raging at parents long dead, hugging the wounded little boy who was once you, are all stirring. You have to be made of stone not to be moved to tears. For hours afterward, you may feel cleansed and at peace—perhaps for the first time in years. Awakening, beginning again, and new departures all beckon. Catharsis, as a therapeutic technique, has been around for more than a hundred years. It used to be a mainstay of psychoanalytic treatment, but no longer. Its main appeal is its afterglow. Its main drawback is that there is no evidence that it works. When you measure how much people like doing it, you hear high praise. When you measure whether anything changes, catharsis fares badly. Done well, it brings about short-term relief—like the afterglow of vigorous exercise. But once the glow dissipates, as it does in a few days, the real problems are still there: an alcoholic spouse, a hateful job, early-morning blues, panic attacks, a cocaine habit. There is no documentation that the catharsis techniques of the recovery movement help in any lasting way with chronic emotional problems. There is no evidence that they alter adult personality. And, strangely, catharsis about fictitious memories does about as well as catharsis about real memories. The inner-child advocates, having treated tens of thousands of suffering adults for years, have not seen fit to do any follow-ups. Because catharsis techniques are so superficially appealing, because they are so dependent on the charisma of the therapist, and because they have no known lasting value, my advice is “Let the buyer beware.

She realized with shock now that her current husband also had a mistress. Her name was cocaine.

Bottom lines are addictive behaviours that we make a conscious choice not to repeat. For example, a recovering cocaine addict would create a bottom line that they will not use a mind- or mood-altering substance to deliberately get high. A recovering sex addict might create a bottom line not to watch pornography or not to have sex without any emotional or spiritual connection. Bottom lines are a symbol of our intentions and are very useful at a practical level to address addictions. In many recovery communities, twelve-step fellowships and addiction rehabs, there is also a concept called ‘top lines’.

Speaking of distortions of reality, I would guess that it was probably sometime around 2011 that I started noticing that the love of my life always carried bottles of Angostura bitters around with her, hidden in her purse. Maybe you are familiar with this concoction, maybe not. Bitters are a staple of every bar—a potent proprietary blend of herbs, spices, and alcohol that, when added to certain cocktails, both deepens and brightens the flavor profiles of those drinks. Bitters deliver such an intense taste sensation that you don’t need much of the stuff—just a dash. But Rayya wasn’t using the bitters to brighten up a cocktail—because she didn’t drink cocktails, because she was sober. And she wasn’t adding a few drops to some nonalcoholic beverage, either, as people sometimes do. No, she was just straight-up drinking the stuff, before, during, and after every meal—on the rocks—often downing an entire bottle at a time. And Angostura bitters have an alcohol content of 44.7 percent, which is equivalent to most vodkas, whiskeys, rums, and tequilas. Now, I know this doesn’t make sense—that somebody who claimed to be sober was also drinking every day—but that’s what Rayya was doing. She was doing this, mind you, while she was still telling her story of sobriety at twelve-step meetings (including Alcoholics Anonymous meetings) and also writing a memoir about her victory over substance addiction. Soon the bottles of Angostura bitters started showing up everywhere—not only in her purse but also in her suitcase, in the fridge, on the kitchen shelves next to her boxes of cereal, in the glove compartment of her car. She even kept bottles of bitters—multiple bottles—at her friends’ houses for when she came over to visit. (We all kept finding them in the weirdest places for years after she died.) She always had to check her luggage when we flew, because she wouldn't go anywhere without a significant stash of these magical little bottles. I never questioned any of this, because I never questioned anything Rayya did back then, because I essentially saw Rayya as a godlike figure who was always right about everything. Nevertheless, she did once tell me that a doctor had “prescribed” the bitters to her, to help her digest her food and to take the edge off her chronic stomach pain. Now, I don’t know what the doctor actually said, because I wasn’t there. I do know a few things, though. I know that, a few years later, Rayya would also tell me that a doctor had prescribed cocaine to her (don’t worry; we’ll get to that story eventually), so she may not have been a reliable narrator on such matters. But I also know that Angostura is what’s commonly called a digestif—which is exactly what it sounds like: something that helps with digestion. The mixture, in fact, was created in 1824 by the German surgeon general of Simón Bolívar’s army, who prescribed it to his troops in Venezuela to ease their stomach problems. Angostura bitters, in other words, were indeed once used medicinally. Then again, so was cocaine.

Attentive readers may remember that I had started attending twelve-step meetings when Rayya was on cocaine and my world was falling down around my ears. You may also remember that I’d hated every minute of those meeting—although I did take some notes. You may not be surprised to learn, then, that I had stopped attending those meetings as soon as I could—which in my case meant: as soon as Rayya stopped using cocaine and started being nice to me again. Because all my problems were solved after that, right? I mean, why should I have to attend a recovery program designed to support people whose lives are affected by the addictions of others if my “other” wasn’t acting out in her addiction anymore? And why should I have to attend meetings for sex and love addiction when I was actually getting love again, from someone I was devoted to? Anyhow, I’m way smarter than most people, and I had quickly breezed through all the literature—so I figured that I basically understood all the principles of these programs and had learned all I needed to learn. Obviously. So I had walked out of the rooms of recovery in late October of 2017 like, Thanks for all the information, everyone—I’m all set now! Nice meeting you! I’ll take it from here! Except that I wasn’t all set, because I have never been “all set.

How quickly the dragon of addiction began to roar through Rayya’s blood—demanding what it always demands: more, more, more. Soon Rayya went from needing one morphine pill a day to two pills a day to three a day, to one pill every hour, to two pills every hour, to clusters of pills at a time—until, within a matter of a few weeks, she was yelling into the phone to her doctors, “This shit doesn’t fucking work on me! You gotta give me something stronger, or I swear to fucking God I will go out there on Fourteenth Street and find something stronger and shoot it right into my fucking veins—and don’t think I don’t know how!” So then they gave her methadone. And then they gave her fentanyl patches (“something stronger,” to be sure), which worked beautifully until they didn’t—until her addict’s brain became resistant to the powers of even this most formidable and dangerous of drugs. That’s when Rayya had the inspired idea to add a bit of cocaine to the mix, “to give me a little bump and help me stay awake”—and she bought her first gram of coke in nearly twenty years and put it right up her nose, to tremendous and obvious relief. Was that when she officially lost her sobriety and sanity? Or was it the next night—when she shot the remainder of the cocaine into her arm (“better than the nose, as always,” she said) and then chased it with a few morphine pills, then downed a handful of muscle relaxants just for good measure, and then informed me as she was nodding off into oblivion that “a hole just opened up through our bedroom ceiling and my ancestors are rolling in, four layers deep”? Was that the moment of relapse? Or had it started long before the cancer even appeared? Had she fallen off the wagon many years earlier, when she decided to start drinking and hide it from everyone? Or had she begun sliding back into addiction when she had stopped going to twelve-step meetings because she got annoyed with all those “rigid bitches” in the rooms, and because she didn’t want to work a program anymore? Or had her decline begun even before then, when she stopped letting people know how much emotional pain she was in, and decided to keep her suffering a secret from those who loved her? Or was it all of that combined? Does an avalanche happen suddenly, or does it begin with the first flake of snow that sticks to the edge of the mountain?

Did I completely lose my mind that night in the spring of 2017 when she commanded me to give her some cash so she could buy that first gram of cocaine—and I did it, without hesitation? (In my weak defense, she had looked me straight in the eyes and told me, “This is the exact amount of cocaine that will last me until I die, trust me. I’m just gonna need a tiny amount of coke each day, to keep me from falling asleep in my soup because of the opioids. Trust me, I know how to do this. It’s better if we only risk buying it once—that’s why we’re getting such a large amount.”) Or was I a total goner a few days later, when she told me to go to the ATM again and get more money so she could buy more cocaine (an eight ball this time), and I did it? Or was it the morning I walked down to a “harm reduction” agency in Chinatown and registered myself with the City of New York as an active intravenous drug user so I could get clean needles for Rayya—because I was determined to keep her safe and free from infection, even as she was dying of cancer and shooting cocaine and opioids into the veins of her feet, her hands, her neck? And also because I wanted her to see what a good girl I was, what a loving and accepting girl, what a generous girl? Or did I abandon myself completely the first time I suggested that perhaps she was becoming addicted to the cocaine, and she told me I was a “needy fucking crybaby” who needed to “back the fuck off from talking about shit you don’t even fucking understand,” and I stuck around after that for more abuse? Or was it when she and I (who had never once had an argument, in seventeen years of friendship and love) suddenly started fighting every day, as I begged her to look at me again like she used to, to touch me like she used to, to speak to me the way she used to? Was it when I started sobbing, ‘Where did you go, where did our love go?’” Was it when I started hiding in the bathroom at night, weeping on the floor (again with the crying on the bathroom floor!) while she hid in another bathroom, grinding down her cocaine into a finer and finer powder?

Rayya had delivered a perfect death blow—because she, of all people, knew just how to kill me. She knew exactly where my deepest insecurities were hidden. She knew I’d received messages since childhood that my “emotional bullshit” was too much trouble for anyone to deal with. She knew I was terrified that I would always drive away the people I loved by being too needy, too clingy. She knew I’d spent most of my life trying to show people only the “good parts” of me because I was sure that if they saw the pain and fear and need that lurked below the surface, they would find me repulsive and reject me. She had in fact witnessed the most unlovable parts of me, and had once seemed to love them. But now she was telling the truth: I was disgusting, and she hated me. And it was with that wicked, blistering sentence—“I wish we’d never gotten together”—that Rayya had taken the last bits of my broken heart and ground them beneath the heel of her motorcycle boot, pulverizing me into grains even finer than cocaine. Grinding me down until there was nothing left of me. And that was exactly what she’d meant to do to me—for daring to confront her.