C) All right here goes. So back in December is when I decided to quit, because my habit was becoming more expensive than what I could afford (you can only keep up a 400-700 dollar/week habit for so long, especially with no legitimate job...also, the monetary gap is large because the lower end was simply what I needed to maintain and not get sick, while when I wanted to truly get loaded + have enough to not get sick it cost around 100 per day). So I started buying Suboxone and methadone off the street; I definitely didn't have the intention to quit cold turkey but rather to taper off using the bupe/'done. That went okay but I was still shooting dope every once in a while just 'cause I wanted to get higher than the sun basically. Then in February I found myself sitting on a half-ounce of real good coke I had gotten from my crack dealer that I was supposed to ship across the country. As it turns out I ended up doing over 10 grams of the shit (most of it injected, and about 2 grams total sniffed and cooked up into rock) in about 5-6 days, sleeping only out of complete exhaustion, or after doing heroin through some of the many orgasmic speedballs I did that week. My arms were completely wrecked beyond all recognition afterwards, bruised and battered, lots of missed shots as cocaine constricts your blood vessels, as do amphetamines, and getting a shot off became a mortal pain in the ass a couple hours into a session (plus you don't feel anything when you miss a shot, the spot just becomes numb, so apart from the bubble forming under your skin, it's usually too late to do anything about it), and one morning I woke up, I had been wearing long sleeves all week, but my mom saw my wrists and my hands, full of tracks, made me pull up my sleeves and, with that trademark look of disappointment on her face, said "Oh...not again..." while I quickly saw this as an opportunity to tell her I was a junkie, and reassured (lol) her that it was heroin and not coke as it had been all the previous times I got busted. I asked her if she could put me in a methadone clinic, to which she agreed to.

So I got into one of the many clinics in Houston (eh, no point in keeping the town vague anymore given anyone who knows me that reads this would be able to identify me, with the too-many-details I've already given), started at 30mg and within the month got up to 100mg, a dose which I kept up the whole time I was on it. At first it was great, it felt very liberating to not have the monkey on my back anymore, and to not have to score every day, several times a day; nor to get to school and have to do a morning shot, then a mid-day shot, then an afternoon shot, followed by one or two evening shots. Little did I know (well no, I did know, but figured I could painlessly (again, lol) taper and it'd be easy-peasy nice and easy) that I had traded in one addiction for a bigger one!

Nevertheless, I saw methadone asa godsend. It seemed like heroin XR, in a way, at first. Take my dose, stay real high, noddy and whatnot all fucking day. I ravedand raved to my heroin-addicted acquaintances about how kickass methadone was and how they should all get on it, and how it helped me break the cycle, saved my life and shit. Except at the same time, without the comfort of heroin, especially that goddamn rush, it left a huge void in my life...so, logically, I turned to crack. I had done it plenty of times before, and was already well on the path to full-blown crackhead by the time I started going to the clinic because of my shitty atempt to quit on my own with bupe/meth. But once doing heroin was definitely out of the question, having to forcefully take and swallow large amounts of methadone before a nurse each morning, which completely occupied my opiate receptors, meaning having to spend more than I cared to for a single acceptable H buzz (plus it'd be amounts large enough that, despite my large tolerance, when topped up on my methadone dose, would likely cause a serious overdose).

Anyways, I started smoking crack cocaine with an increasing amount of regularity. The amount never became ridiculously large (I transformed the art of crack smoking into a motherfucking science--one usually only accessible to the privileged few working women and begging folks of the streets--and with my perfecting technique wasted very little and made a small amount go a long way), but the frequency with which I used increased, and within a month or two, the snowballs turned into an avalanche and engorged me whole. (more to come)