Addiction, Recovery, and Smoking in the Truck Yard

There's guys here who's job it is to drive around in a bobtail (the front part of a tractor-trailer) and pull trailers away from doors so drivers can pick them up, and they move trailers around the yard. There are generally two or three on a night. They are mostly back, forth and all around; but sometimes they find a little hidden nook and they park and sit there. Maybe they're napping, perhaps smoking the ganj, or jacking off, I don't know, don't really care. I just wish that tonight they would do what needs to be done up here and skeedadle on out of here. How's a girl supposed to get stoned around here with all these lurking employees?

I know that at least 90% of the people who work here get stoned. I mean I'm the "security" guard so I smell it wafting from guys' open car windows all night as they come and go. But I also know that there are plenty of people who will justify doing something themselves and then rat out someone else for doing the exact same thing. I admit that part of the draw is the amount of risk involved. For that short time, as long as it takes for me to rummage through my purse, find whatever I brought to smoke that night (sometimes a pipe and some bud, sometimes a blunt), and wait for the coast to clear before I sneak outside to stand in the shadow and smoke, I'm not thinking about time and the hours to go before I can leave this place to live the part of my life I wait all the rest of the time to live. For ten to twenty minutes, I am 100% in the moment.

I dropped another five mg last Wed. before my weekend, thinking that would give me a few days to adjust before coming back to work. Well it's taken a few days to register with my body and I just started to feel crappy last night. My eyes were constantly dripping and my nose was running. I rubbed my skin raw around my nostrils having to use the cheap, brown handpaper rolls to wipe my nose all night. I haven't bothered trying to wear eye makeup; I have to wipe the drip from my eye so often, it wouldn't last long at all. The only good thing about going down on the M-done is that I start to lose weight faster. I rarely have an appetite when lowering my dose and I begin to have more and more energy as I go down. I just hope I can get past the last five mg this time w/out using.

Part of my problem is that I am fed up paying fifteen dollars a day when my dose gets this low. By the end we're paying over three dollars a mg which is way more than the cost of any street drug I've ever bought, that's more than frickin' oxy's. It wouldn't be so annoying if the clinic we go to now wasn't so disorganized and unproductive. We are supposed to have a certain amount of counseling when on M-maintenence and although there are counselors employed there, they spend the majority of their time filling out paperwork, answering phones, and manning the reception room. There are no groups, like men and women groups or even the basic HIV or policy groups. I hardly even get piss tested and I've never had a treatment plan done in over a year at this clinic. If they actually had all the requisite services available I may not be so opposed to paying the fifteen no matter my mg dosage.

The best clinic I went to was my first one in Greenfield, Massachusetts. When we started there, southern Vermont didn't have its own clinic yet. Neither did, I beleive, Chesterfield, New Hampshire. Granted, Greenfield CSAC had been around for a while, so they had had time to work out kinks of the sort Keene Metro is dealing with today. But honestly, when you think about it, does it make sense to have to go to a special clinic to get methadone? If people can pick up a methadone prescription at the pharmacy for a pain diagnosis, why can't we pick one up as addicts, most pain patients are addicts anyway. Same with oxy's, vicoden, percocet, morphine - all over the pharmacist counter, but not methadone. I think this has to do partially with the fact that authorities in the fields of law enforcement, addiction treatment, and mental health have decided that addicts need to show how hard they are willing to work for sobriety. This method adheres to the belief that addicts are inherently weak, indulgent people who need to learn discipline and values. Perhaps one reason addiction is so rampant in our society is because the way we judge addicts and approach recovery is all wrong.