Drugs-- Yeccchhhh

More than a decade AFTER I had given up drugs

Maybe you're one of those people who only reads DWT for the drug and rock'n'roll stories I sometimes blurt out. Get ready for a blurt. I woke up on drugs today-- for the first time since the '60s! A little tiny bit of background: when I was in high school my parents pushed me into working during the summers. I wound up taking a job upstate with some then-unknown doctor in Millbrook, NY, digging a sewer ditch. It was really disgusting. But the doctor was Timothy Leary and years later I was able to hire him. I was then booking the lecture series at my college, Stony Brook, and I had him come speak. I picked him up at the airport and took him out for dinner before the speech and drove him back to the airport afterwards. He rewarded me with some very pure LSD, the first I had ever seen. I put it away for an appropriate moment-- which turned out to be a Jefferson Airplane concert. Oh, I wound up really loving acid. I did way too much. And it was definitely a gateway drug to the worst drug ever: DMT. My drug use ruined my relationships and even impelled me to drop out of school. Eventually I kicked the evil demon and got back on track. Now I don't use drugs. Period. The desire went away in 1969 on the India-Pakistan border. It was like a miracle.

Until last Monday night. More background: If you read my travel blog you might recall how I picked up dengue fever on a trip to the Yucatán last year. I rented a house in Mérida and got dozens of mosquito bites. Somehow the bites precipitated an outbreak of some kind of hives... and it's been 4 months now and-- damn, are they itchy. For 3 months I tried to get in to see the undisputed best tropical disease specialist in America. She's like a guru; you have to prove you really want to see her before she agrees. Anyway, long story short: I have no tropical diseases and she's passing me along to an immunologist. But, she suggested I try a benadryl first. The name scared me. She assured me they were harmless. That's what pushers say about heroin.

More background: my best bud, Roland, had a tooth pulled a few weeks ago. His dentist gave him 20 powerful painkillers. Roland doesn't use drugs. The painkillers almost wrecked his life. I called the dentist, got into a fight with him about overprescribing dangerous drugs and told him I was reporting him to the Dental Board of California. But that's nothing compared to my friend Emily, who I had to check into a rehab center recently. Her Doctor Feelgood had prescribed Lexapro, Oxycontin, Codeine, Ativan, Valium, ambien, and Lyrica and she's a strung out basketcase unable to function.

How could a doctor do that to someone? I always hear the same lame excuse: the patient will go to a different doctor and get it. Why don't these doctors lose their licenses? My tropical disease specialist didn't prescribe anything. She just told me to get some non-generic, over-the-counter benadryl and pop two, three times a day and see if the hives would go away. I was skeptical. But I bought a pack. I looked at it for 2 or 3 days and Monday night I felt daring... and took one. I woke up the next morning (yesterday) and wrote a letter to my doctor:

Yo, Doc!

Well, a little good news and a little bad news on that Benadryl idea. First the good news: it worked. Last night was the first night in 4 months when I didn't wake up a few times in the middle of the night scratching myself. And the hives have been at bay all day today. I feel like a new man-- at least in terms of my skin.

Now the bad news: I'm never taking that again! No wonder Americans seriously consider voting for sociopaths like Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney! I just took one pill before bedtime and I was lucky I could navigate the staircase. I felt like my heart was skipping beats when I finally laid down. Then I passed out with the TV on. It sapped all my energy and I woke up dried out and in a daze. I normally wake up by 4 or 5 and feel refreshed and get right to work writing. Today I woke up in a fog and couldn't make my mind work. I felt just terrible-- like something awful had happened to my brain. I was 2 hours late and looked at the computer screen and had nothing in my head but a haze. I did some laps and that snapped me out of it eventually.

Is that the price you have to pay? You take medicine to make the itch go away and you lose your mind? Is that what getting old is all about? I sure hope the immunologist has some different trick up his sleeve, although I have a sinking feeling he won't.

Wondering why I mentioned Santorum and Romney in the letter? It took Romney many months and tens of millions of dollars to defeat, as Andy Borowitz put it today, "a mental patient in a sweater vest." And Romney had to reinvent himself as a far right cartoon character in the process. Memories, at least for the next half year, will be made of this-- drugs or no drugs: