Getting clean the hard way

Maybe a few of you reading this blog stumbled on here when you were looking for information about heroin or addiction. Maybe you or one of your family members is struggling with some of the very same things that got me here in prison and you are looking for help.

In one of my first posts on here, I said I was genuinely glad I got arrested because it probably saved my life. Getting locked up is what it took for me to get the needle out of my arm. That is the good news.

Now the bad news. Here is the truth, if any of you reading this are thinking of quitting an addiction or maybe thinking if you don’t quit you might end up in prison, I suggest that you find a way to quit on your own. Ask for help, go to rehab or the hospital, have someone lock you in a room if you have to. Before you start, do it right and stock up on advil, immodium (if you are addicted to opiates) to ease the discomfort, and anthing else that you think can help too. Read up on your addiction and what to expect in withdrawal, don’t use your addict friends as your source of information either. Have some gatorade and sprite in the house, get some soup and crackers and then just tough it out. And once you get through that week or couple of weeks of hell, don’t go out and use again and be right back where you started.

Because looking back, I can say with all honesty detoxing in county jail is a very bad experience. In fact, it’s probably one of the worse ways to go about it. You will pray for death more than once during that experience but chances are, you won’t die, you will just wish you could.

For starters, it’s freezing cold in county jail. They keep the cells very cold, maybe 65 or so, at all times, the AC blasting, because it helps sober up the drunks and it keeps belligerent fools from fighting and acting aggressive. When I got arrested I had on shorts, a tank top, and sandals. No socks, no underwear. And they don’t issue those to you in county jail.

You get a jumpsuit and shower shoes. You have a thin, hard mattress, and a thinner blanket. If you want to purchase your own t-shirts and underwear and socks, you can, if somebody deposits money on your commissary account. But this takes time as you only get to go to the store on one day a week, and weekends is closed. So let’s say like me, you are arrested on Tuesday, and on Wednesday you call family, and they mail a money order the next day and it gets there on Saturday. My day for store was Friday, so that means I had to wait another week, so in total I was there 11 days with no underwear, sock, t-shirts, no toothpaste or toothbrush, no deodorant.

That was 11 days of going through withdrawing in the worse possible conditions, cold, uncomfortable, stinking, dirty, sweating and chills non-stop, with the craps and sick to my stomach and nobody there really could have cared less. The beverages in county jail was milk at meals and water from the tap. That’s it. Not cold water, not koolaid. Not even bad coffee was available.  You get woken up for breakfast at 4:00 AM, even though you probably just finally really fell asleep 2 hours before. It’s loud and noisy all the time, too, not to mention having to deal with a bunch of f’d up folks in there on a day to day basis who want to fight over any little thing, and freaking out because in the midst of the misery is the realization that the next stop is prison and that fact keeps smacking you right in the face.

So, if any of you are thinking of quitting (like I was pretty much every day of my addiction) do yourself a favor and accomplish it now, on the outside. Don’t wait for the Jail Rehab plan that I chose.

In closing, here’s a little bit of addict trivia for you – they supposedly call it “going cold-turkey” because of the goosebumps a heroin addict gets when in withdrawal. For those of you who haven’t experienced it, it’s really shitty, first you are sweating and then your flesh is all goosepimpled up, like a cold turkey carcass on ice, so turkeybumps really.

Peace ~ Texas Magnum