DRUGS!
Scared yet? Expecting me to shit on addicts with the tired old trash of being lazy, weak-willed, or lesser-than?
Fuck that.
We all know how much stigma there is around the topic of drugs and addiction. It deserves to be spoken to. For education first and foremost.
So… Fair warning about this one – there’s lots of pretty serious stuff in here that will get very real, because we’re talking about a pretty serious subject.
As many reading The Pickup Truck Diaries series already know – I’ve lived a life and a half. I often joke about being 1730 in “ADHD years.” And so in order to do the topic justice, I’m gonna be as honest and as open as I can about my experiences and what I’ve seen firsthand, all for the sake of education.
Consider this article as a warning of sorts.
That means you should bail now if you’re not capable of holding it together for a serious topic.
Y’all have been warned.
So where were we?…
Ah, yes.
DRUGS!
Even such a nebulous term as “drugs” often evokes fear and discomfort in straight-edged folks. Often those very same folks who would have no problem drinking themselves silly under the right contexts!
One thing that a lot of people don’t seem to realize is that alcohol, AKA ethanol, is actually considered a drug in and of itself. So maybe we should start there. It’s one of the more interesting ones that acts as a depressant in smaller doses, and a stimulant in higher ones. (I learned that tidbit back in a Psychology 100 lecture over a decade ago!)
Now, my family has a long and storied history with that particular drug, one that goes back to the 1940s with my grandfather – a sixteen-year-old kid that lied about his age to go fight in World War II against the nazis, and who then went to fight in the Korean war after he came back to a devastated post-war economy and couldn’t find work.
After two wars, he did what many combat veterans do – who come home to regular life after killing people and seeing friends die.
He promptly drowned himself in alcohol to numb the pain and self-medicate through shell shock and PTSD. And many still live like my grandfather did, as bar room heroes, or in passing around a two-six of hard bar with their war buddies behind the wood pile.
He’s long-dead now, but the intergenerational effects and traumas of alcoholism can’t be ignored. There are many families all across the world that struggle with the demon of alcoholism, because it never just affects the people doing the drinking. In addition to the horrors of the cycles of physical, mental, and emotional abuse, it slowly destroys the body over time to boot, as many drugs often do.
As a direct result of my grandfather’s general shittiness as an alcoholic, my own dad chose to be a teetotaller for the majority of my life. That means that he rarely ever drank outside of a single glass of wine on special occasions. I’ve always respected him for that choice, even if it was the old school hard-line: “All drugs are bad” approach that doesn’t know much about the harm reduction model.
Ironic that I no longer drink much myself these days outside of a week of craft brews once or twice a year for my Magic: The Gathering show, eh?
Sometimes things really do come full circle!
So why preamble all this drug stuff by talking about alcohol and alcoholism?
Well, the mechanisms of addiction are often the same, no matter what drug or substance is doing the addicting. I could of course show you the charts and graphs that rate the levels of addiction via each drug, or rant and rave about the process of rationalization when it comes to addicts arguing why they’re “fine” and have it under control.
But instead, I’m simply going to tell you that addiction usually involves filling a void or numbing out uncomfortable feelings. And men are by and large worse off for numbers when it comes to doing this, due to western society’s toxic levels of masculinity, the emotional stunting of many men, and the pervasiveness of weekend alcohol culture being viewed as fuel for good times.
Often, addiction comes from a place of vulnerability. Does it feel good to get drunk or high?
YES, of course it does. And the good feelings serve to mask any negative emotions or voids a person might be experiencing. Addiction comes from making a habit of numbing oneself out to escape reality or emotions. The addiction part fits in when a person needs to frequently or constantly be drunk or high as a form of escapism from normal life and the feelings that come with it.
We often visualize the late stages of addiction when we visualize it – the people living on the streets doing anything for the next hit of whatever’s hardest and will ensure a good high.
A great example of how it becomes normalized is the post-breakup drowning of sorrows, normalized by our western society. Don’t know how to process your feelings? Drink until they go away!
“But what fucking authority do you have to talk about this shit? How dare you lecture us, McRae!”
Fair point.
I guess I should come clean and say that my only authority comes from my own lived experiences.
See, part of my dad’s good nature is that despite being very clean-cut himself, he clearly wanted to help people who struggled with addiction. I don’t know whether to call it a passion project or philanthropy or what. And coming from a small logging town, there was no shortage of substance abuse.
Even from a pretty young age, I was exposed to the effects of hard drugs on a myriad of men and women in my life.
Before they all died, my grandparents’ generation was the typical Ukrainian immigrant family. Slavs through and through. Pretty much every single member of the family two generations up from me would chain smoke even around us kids, and always had a can of cheap beer at the elbow. Drinking and smoking was baked into the culture of the extended family. So problems like my grandfather’s were heavily normalized and people like my father were made to feel weird for being teetotallers.
There are correlations between being in smoking and drinking households versus not in childhood. You can go ahead and google it if you’d like.
But alongside the typical vices of alcohol and tobacco in a family of Slavs, there was also the harder stuff reserved for the loggers my dad would frequently hire.
Having a big heart, he would often want to help people struggling with addiction, and there were many men who would cycle through our lives as employees of my father whilst struggling with addiction. Many of the same people from The Pickup Truck Diaries entry on Logger Gurus were some of these same men. Not that every person who worked for my dad had these problems, of course. Many were very clean cut like my father, so maybe his “do good or die trying” mentality rubbed off on some of us.
Addiction for these sorts of men would come in ebbs and flows. And a lot of that movement was based around partying on the weekend, due to the long hours loggers often work. Because what do you do after a week on the mountain? You go drugging and drinking with your buddies of course! And this is also baked into a lot of small mountain town culture as well. Softball fields, mountain biking, Skiing and boarding, they all came with their own drugging and drinking. Sledding with the boys, bush raves up the valley, it goes on and on.
I can’t count the number of times my dad would have to stop by a guy’s house on a Sunday or Monday to check up on them, or to give them a lift to work because they went a little too hard on the weekend and simply failed to show up. It happened in logging a lot more than when he had his foray into green bio waste recycling and composting, that was for sure.
Some of these same guys I would also eventually pick up on the way to work – later on when I started working for my dad myself alongside my brothers as an excavator operator or rock picker. (If you ever want to know where I wrote much of Central, look no further than rock picking.)
Some small-town locals, even ones who were better off in the industry, would at times disappear completely on various drugging and drinking benders for days or weeks at a time. It was baked into the very fabric of our lives like a set dressing.
Often, the stories would be similar to that of my grandfather – maybe there was residential school, or cycles of abuse in the family history, or at other times it would be serious accidents, or an intergenerational trigger of any sort. Death being so common back then, you simply never knew what the backstory was. Men in those times, in those days, just knew that for a little while, the pain would go away when you partied.
Oftentimes back in the 90s and early aughts, undiagnosed mental illness or mental health issues would be the root causes, I’d bet. And the drugs or drinking merely served as a form of self-medication due to the stigma of prescription drug use with the guidance and support of a psychiatrist. It was somehow more socially acceptable to go do coke on the weekends at parties than to take ritalin for ADHD, as I’ve maybe talked about a little bit in other articles in this series.
Every time – it would be this same cycle of shame with these men – my father or I would be apologized to, profusely, because the guys suffering from these addictions simply couldn’t control themselves. It came up especially with my father – as he was the only dude who seemed to actually give a shit about their well-being, even while battling his own demons of trauma and the intergenerational effects of alcoholism.
There’s a strange dynamic that occurs when a caregiver figure, even in the guise of a boss or employer, is your sole supporter trying to get you working and clean. Maybe one day when my bets play out, I’ll know what it’s like.
So even before I had ever tried drugs or drinking myself, I was inundated with the culture of it all, as you can see.
Work hard, play hard.
I can’t count the number of guys who got laid off or fired for simply not showing up enough times after a weekend, or whom came to work while still fucked up. My dad would frequently hire guys back because he desperately needed workers, but I have no way of ever knowing whether that was good or bad for their addiction, as many of them are dead now. We can’t ask them. We’re just left with the ghosts they left behind.
Hiring in logging was always tough.
Nothing but greenhorns and pickled old bastards, or family men. Want to make great money by working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for three to four months at a time? Every time a no-show happened, there was anger, but also sadness and a sense of pity. That’s because even when they had betrayed your expectations of what you needed from them, it wasn’t so cut and dry as simply “making good choices.”
The addiction had consumed their lives without them ever really realizing it, largely due to how slowly and insidiously it usually occurred.
So after seeing all that, how the fuck did I get into harder drugs? How couldn’t I see the patterns and cycles and avoid the same rotations myself?
Well…
I tried beer and alcohol plenty as a child, disliking the taste every time. It was a fun joke the adults would play on the kids here and there.
But when I was fourteen, I got drunk with my mother while watching a movie, off Smirnoff Ice, purely so I would have the experience and wouldn’t be completely naive later on.
I couldn’t believe how much I enjoyed the feeling of being inebriated. And it tasted GOOD, unlike the beer and other hard bar I had drank as a kid.
Most people have a funny story about drinking underage for the first time. It usually involves being sneaky, often piss-poorly, and getting sloppy drunk because you don’t know your tolerance or how to pace yourself.
Sugary drinks are the worst – because teenagers like the taste of sugary crap over the taste of actual alcohol. So first drunk experiences often involve brutal hangovers as well due to the high sugar content.
Now, I know that the drunken hijinx of teenagers is another topic entirely, but we have to acknowledge the role that alcohol plays in our society as it pertains to accustoming people to live entirely for the weekend.
In the days of ancient egypt, slaves were fed fermented grain drinks as food to keep them pliant. In the modern day, the weekend is a release that our western society yearns for. We normalize kids getting fucked up on weekends to escape the doldrums of life.
But I grew up in a small logging town, which in the early aughts was a full-blown meth town.
He’s dead now, but we even knew the local town drug dealer by name, and the RCMP was friendly enough with him because it allowed them to keep an eye on the supply and movement of crystal meth and other substances without the interference of gangs and organized crime from the nearby city. Outside the usual biker gang affiliations here in BC of course. Good guys as far as I knew as a kid. I loved playing with the arcade cabinet in the shop.
The unfortunate thing about drugs is that dealers often count on the addictiveness of the drug itself to ensure return customers. There’s a reason for the common saying: “The first hit is free.”
This also usually leads to a spiked supply.
Much like most opioids are now laced with varying levels of Fentanyl for cost and power, back in my teenage years, weaker drugs were usually spiked with harder stuff to get teens hooked to ensure lifelong dependence.
That means the first marijuana joint I ever procured via my brother was laced with Crystal Meth.
Talk about a deep end, eh?
Contrary to what I was told about the effects of marijuana, the day I decided to experiment with weed, I instead encountered a fifteen to twenty minute period of frantic acceleration of my senses that ended up with me puking up brunch in the sink.
One of the things that saved me from being hooked immediately was my ADHD, hilariously, as my inverted brain chemistry softened the blow, I think.
I was scared of drugs for a long time after that, forgoing weed entirely in lieu of alcohol because I was paranoid that anything I got would be laced with more meth in those small-town logging days.
So of course in grade eleven, I picked up smoking, almost entirely from the flavored cigarillos like Blackstone Cherries and Primetime Grapes. It was a common bar occurrence, where you would pick up smoking to go out with your buddies for smoke breaks at the pub or bar to prevent people from getting jumped while all alone. Some of my own Logger Gurus always had a Blackstone Cherry hanging out the sides of their mouths at all times. Kind of how I look with a joint, hilariously. The Letterkenny cuts run deep in my lifetime. (If you love my redneck charms, you’ll love Letterkenny.)
There’s a good reason why flavored tobacco products are banned in dry herb form and the governments here in Canada are pushing for vaped nicotine to be flavor-free as well. It hooks kids like candy, literally. The one year I worked with at-risk youth, flavored nicotine vapes were the de facto drug of choice right next to chronic marijuana use. And poppers, which were bong hits of tobacco mixed with weed.
As a teen, I also drank heavily via binges, preferring again the sweeter drinks like coolers and cocktails and later the harder stuff that would work quicker and more efficiently. As I worked for my dad on and off in the trades, it was easy to wear work clothes stained with black moly grease, topped with a visi-vest. Then, you’d grow out your facial hair. That way you could simply buy booze yourself without getting checked for ID. The sketchier bars would let the same trick slip by. It worked flawlessly in a town of loggers, boarders, skiers, mountain bikers, and climbing dirtbags.
I was extremely careful to hide my smoking and drinking from my parents as best I could, which was easy as I was often just getting drunk while raiding on World of Warcraft in lieu of going out to many parties. But I also meticulously planned out my smokes so as not to get found and ratted out by my younger brothers or peers. I’ll never know if my brothers knew and were just chill about it or not.
I eventually quit smoking when I turned nineteen or twenty, by chain smoking a pack of menthols while walking around the block of my neighbourhood – until I puked in a bush and correlated the smell of cigarette smoke with the taste of vomit. The same year I started harder drugs, ironically.
But I had also at that point moved in with a younger kid who had never really lived on his own before. I considered him a friend at the time in addition to a roommate, even though we no longer talk now. When things go nuclear, that’s usually how it goes.
I had started smoking weed again by that point, but I would buy it from my roommate’s friend who I knew early on had a problem with harder drugs like Ketamine.
It always happens faster than you expect. That’s where it spiralled quickly.
Over the course of a mere four to five months, both of us made a series of bad choices that ended with our picking up a ketamine and MDMA habit. Being in such close proximity got me involved in greater drug culture too, and I fluctuated between the club and underground rave lifestyle, hitting up electronic shows while snorting white mystery powders and/or MDMA, and also doing Ketamine and other drugs like Acid and Coke. I never touched opioids, I think. Thank fuck.
What you’re never told in programs like DARE is all the “in-between” points of drug abuse.
For example, after I’d go to some underground rave and do a bunch of MDMA and dance until dawn, I would have entire DAYS that were complete write offs due to feeling like absolute dogshit. I’m talking about some of the worst depression I’ve ever experienced, as somebody with diagnosed clinical major depression and a mood disorder.
Not to mention the psychological effects of hearing whispers and other such things after certain types of benders, which was scary as all hell. Especially having a family history of Schizophrenia or some such 60’s shit. I started the process with my roomie, but went off on my own after a while and only realized how deep it had gotten and how quickly by seeing his mirror image next to me.
And of course there was the money. Drug addictions always come with huge price tags, and by the time I kicked my roomie out, he had sold his iphone and the like to cover his use.
I wasn’t in the scene for long, maybe for six months total, juggling between a number of former friend groups. But in those six months, I experienced a whole lotta hell. The ups were never worth the downs. And I wonder how many brain cells I nuked overall. I’m a savant already, but how much smarter could I have been? Your brain develops until about twenty five. Should that be the true age of drug laws? Fuck if I know.
Because the problem wasn’t with the mere act of doing the drugs.
The problem was with the lifestyle of craving that developed – the same weekend warrior binges that I had watched the loggers of my childhood endure. I stayed in school at UBC. I worked as a cook. But the clubbing on Fridays into drugging at raves evolution? It had already taken hold. It simply wasn’t sustainable. For every fun weekend evening I had at an EDM show or rave, there would be weeks of panicking about finances, or entire days worth of hangovers.
Not to mention the actual effects of the drugs – when I did Ketamine I became a fucking drooling zombie. I was at the bar a few weeks back and some acquaintances were raving about falling down K-Holes.
Having been down a few of them myself, I can’t stress how fucking stupid it sounded. You literally become a drooling mess, because Ketamine is a fucking horse tranquilizer.
Between the financial costs, the time and energy costs, and the ever-descending spiral of addiction, I only woke up when the roomie had hit rock bottom. Having dropped out of school, being financially desperate, and living in a horribly overpriced basement suite in a terribly unaffordable city, I ended up calling his mom and forswearing any and all connection between him or his buddy after a particularly sketchy bender of mine.
I ended up calling his mom and my own parents on the same day to tell them we had a problem.
I then went hard the other way, the same as my father – abstaining from everything aside from alcohol as if it weren’t the exact same thing. I reacted with anger to anything drug related for years, not even touching pot for a long time.
I think part of that process was due to shame.
I was ashamed at being so stupid as to fall into the spiral, even though I know now that it’s not necessarily the fault of the addict as to becoming addicted. Feeling good is addictive as all hell. Of course you can fall victim to the cycle. It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
In reflecting on that time, it makes sense why. I didn’t have many friends, and connecting over a “thing” can often feel like a lifeline away from being alone and lonely. It can feel like an escape from the shittiness of the life you might be trapped in.
So ultimately, what did I learn in those six months of spiralling?
Well… Firstly, we need to solve root problems, instead of papering over the issues by numbing oneself out. I’ve heard lack of connection is the root cause of addiction. When the answer is just to feel good or to stop feeling, there’s a red flag that should go up. Why are we spiking our dopamine to avoid dealing with our feelings or issues? How are we using drugs to avoid real life issues that could be solved with professional help like counselling instead?
Additionally, I think I learned about the dangers of being entirely devoted to any one thing. Having been addicted to all sorts of things over the years – from World of Warcraft to hard drugs, to junk food and cigarillos, stepping back can give a sense of perspective.
It gives the space to ask questions – Am I literally craving the weekend every week to get fucked up as my sole passion? Am I constantly using all day every day to avoid being sober? Am I trying to flee from my day to day life or responsibilities?
Now, I’ve come a long way since I first “got out” – whatever the fuck that means, largely because I see addiction as the enemy, and not the person suffering from addiction. While I’ve performed my share of interventions over the years, especially as an educator watching my ex-students fall down some of the same holes, I also see the value in things like harm reduction models rather than being stuck in the: “Nope, it’s all bad, no matter what” model.
For example, whilst rare, I’ve seen many of the same old loggers from my youth switch from hard drugs to marijuana as a form of harm reduction, de-escalating by slowly softening the sorts of substances they’re using. While many of them have since passed on, there are at least 2-3 instances of folks who were able to clean themselves up by switching from coke or heroin to weed.
Sometimes it just takes baby steps, you know?
I’ve softened my own stance as well – smoking weed pretty much exclusively and cutting out even alcohol from my day to day life. It always throws people off when I’m drinking diet cola or red bull at a bar, but I’m still going outside for vape breaks.
I think I’ve decided that something you can grow yourself is much better than something brewed up in a lab and spiked with fentanyl. God knows the mortality rates of drug toxicity have been terrible here on the west coast in recent years.
So where does that leave us?
Where do we go from here?
I have to admit as per usual that I don’t have all the answers. But I also despise the academic approach of problematizing things without often offering solid solutions for those problems.
So what can I say about drugs that hasn’t been said before by people far smarter than me?
Well, I think first and foremost, we need to stop demonizing addiction. It happens. You can become addicted to anything. I was just as addicted to World of Warcraft as I was to smoking or to ketamine. And stigma is one of the biggest reasons why people don’t seek help when they do realize they might be struggling with addiction.
But that’s been said before, so what else?
Well, harm reduction is much more successful than trying to quit cold turkey. I was able to quit all my stuff cold-turkey by using anger and hatred of those things to stop me from doing them. But how unhealthy is that at the end of the day when you have to start hating things to not fall prey to them? Then you just become embroiled in an all-or-nothing lens that simply doesn’t work well for everyday life.
It’s more about balance and knowing when addiction has thrown your life into chaos.
And ultimately, I want there to be ever-more conversation about these things.
If my stupid mistakes as a younger self can be useful to help keep people away from drugs that might ruin their lives, I would rather have that conversation than not. I want to be able to look somebody in the eye and tell them exactly how my mistakes played out, and why they should avoid making the same poor choices so they never have to worry about battling addiction in the first place.
How can we teach people about the long-term harms so they can spot the signs earlier and easier? How can we destigmatize addiction so that people aren’t afraid to ask for advice, help, or assistance in kicking bad habits?
Recently, I’ve seen lots of content creators and platforms banning and stigmatizing drug use, everything from nicotine on up. How many people does this ostracize and push out of the zeitgeist who have different lived experiences to the majority? How many addictions then become silent killers, eating away at people’s lives because they have nowhere to even start the conversation about it? And no, I’m not just mad that my TikTok I made while smoking – of happy feel-good shit got taken down.
I want to be able to look somebody in the eye, and tell them not to use hard drugs because it literally makes you stupider over time and often reduces you to either a drooling mess or an angry rage-face. I want to be able to look a kid in the eye and tell them to avoid flavored tobacco and nicotine products like the plague because once you start, it becomes increasingly more difficult to stop. I want to look all the men I knew, and know, in the eye and tell them to stop using substances to numb out the pain and trauma. To use my life-story to help people avoid making the same shitty mistakes I did.
So yes, my ultimate answer is: “Don’t do drugs.”
But there are a dozen caveats to that. And the nuance is often lost in the stigma.
Is a person smoking weed all day, every day from dawn until dusk? Or are they only having a smoke on a Friday night? There are varying scales to everything, and it’s often hard to determine where the line is between a habit and a problem.
I’ve put a lot of bad shit in my body, and I’ve suffered for it.
So the question becomes: “How can I use my experience and platform to help people?”
Addiction shouldn’t be seen as a personal issue, it should be seen as a disease, one that neurodiverse people like me are much more inclined towards as a form of self-medication. I’m tired of hearing people either slander drug-users, or rant and rave about the benefits and boons of drug-use with nothing in-between.
So maybe we won’t fix the issue of drugs and addiction in a single day, but at least we can try to have a conversation, and pray the world is willing to keep it going. If only to fight for the memories of those who have succumbed to addiction in entirety, and who may not be around to tell their story anymore. Many of my Logger Gurus deserve that conversation, to tell their stories.
It’s tough, but it’s a discussion we need to have, and I refuse to suffer under the stigma of my past mistakes when this life could be a tool to help somebody else. And don’t dare call me brave, or avant-garde, or any of that shit. People have been living this garbage for decades, whereas others have been advocating for forever. I’m just one prick out of many.
Now… I’ve waffled on for far too long. If you want a sneak peek into my process, I wrote this sober and edited it after smoking weed, so points for style, right? I thought it was fitting for the subject matter.
“Drugs are bad, m’kay?”
Now, let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRae
