The worst thing drugs did to your relationships?
Guzzo
8,611 Posts
After reading Edith Damn's money friendship thing I'm wondering if people have lost friendships (or worse) to drugs.Been dealing with something like this for a while and the shit is straight up heartbreaking. It's hard to watch someone just wreck themselves and know there is nothing you can do about it.For those of you that have gone through it how did you cope?
Comments
sorry to hear that, how did you handle the situation?
I called 911, they came and took her away, her mom lived in a SRO in the tenderloin and was useless as far as setting up a service, so Julie and I did. Her friends came buy and took everything they could carry away saying "Brennan would have wanted me to have this bike, dress, books." My girlfriend Sheilagh moved into the room cause she was living above a bar on Haight Street and the motorcycles were too loud. But the vibe in the house was too creepy after that, no matter how much sage Julie burned and we all ended up moving out.
And like a month before she offed herself, another friend of ours od'd in the house and Brennan basically had to resucitate him and was like "how dare he use drugs in our house, blah, blah, blah."
so in short, although i feel bad for her, i was, and remain, generally kind of pissed that she came in to our lives to drop dead and cause problems.
yeah, this is part of why i valued my friendship with the deadbeat friend because i was with an addict/alcoholic for a few years and had a lot of stress as a result of horrible things happening often and also felt guilt at failing when i attempted to thwart inevitable trainwrecks. my friend was always there for me to make me feel better. i finally gave up and ended it this year and things were starting to be normal and satisfactory again...until this money shit popped up
I see saba's habit of blaming the victim goes back many years.
have some real life experiences and get back to me.
when friends have problems, you try to be sympathetic and help. it is aggravating, but you ultimately love the person.
but, when you find yourself in that situation with a relative stranger, and handling the extremely sensitive occurance of their death, i would have a variety of emotions- and, sympathy and aggravation seem completely fair.
regarding saba's point- yeah, there is a sense of anger towards her for her overindulgence in drugs, which is a choice that she made. So I don't think he's really blaming a victim so much as viewing addiction as the result of poor choices. I don't let any anger I had tarnish the memory of what a good friend she was though.
Lost 5-6 friends to heroin.
My closest childhood friend wound up in an Institution For The Criminally Insane and effectively ruined his life.
Long story, short(er) we got him into a cold shower, ended up giving him mouth to mouth with one of those little units that lifeguards use, and then helping him drink a bunch of sugar water. Eventually he came to. He continued to use and I stopped trying to help.
Flash-forward; earlier this year his band topped a few Billboard chart's and have a video that is getting frequent MTV and Fuse rotation. The last time we spoke he was coming out of a bathroom at a mutual friend's party with a nice, white crust around both of his nostrils, looking like his eyes were going to pop out of his head.
He tells his young fans, "Feeling the energy of the crowd is the only high that matters. This is what keeps me sober."
He is, of course, a liar and a piece of shit.
I can get with this. The one guy I lost last month, when I think of him I forget at first that he even od'ed.
Then after a month or two, one night she put eye make-up on that went from her eyelid to her eyebrow. I think she must have been on drugs to look in the mirror and think she looked OK. It was some raasclat Elvira shit. It was the first 2 seconds of seeing her like this that made do a complete 180 on the way I felt about her.
You may think this made me as shallow as a petri-dish, but hey, this picture painted >1000 words in a millisecond.
relax, because you said "Real world experience" i mistook your comment for laserwolfs comment that i was "blaming the victim." My bad.
Its hard to keep track of who is who when basically everybody flips me shit over even the most inocuous posts.
Its crazy man. Ive been clean for a minute now. Smoke a little weed, and drink once in a blue moon, dont fuck with the hard shit anymore. But ive been thinking a lot about my past and how fucked up shit got. Some real crackhead shit that made my sober friends run for the hills. Which i honestly cant blame em, cause if i was in there shoes i wouldn't fuck with me neither. But its hard to try to win these peoples trust back.
Drug abuse, especially with dope, always just kind of looms around you. No matter how long you been clean or where your life is at, it just might come out the woodwork and bite you on the ass. It just sits in the back of your mind and never really goes away. Just waits to prey on your vulnerability. So if you have friends like that, you have to always remember that and understand that. You can turn your back on a person, but you cant turn your back on a drug.
But support and acceptance helps people to get clean and stay that way. I wish some of my friends stuck around when it got rough, but they left and made it made it harder for me to kick. Not that its there burden, but my real friends stuck by me and helped me get better. So if this person means a lot to you, go the distance with them and really try to help. Understand that it isnt easy and kicking is not an easy battle. There will be relapses, there will be anger, but stick it out and be supportive. It could save a life.
One thing I don't do is blame the user for my life.
This statement fits perfectly with all the other times you have laughed and made fun of someone who died.
I have never seen you express the least bit of concern for an other human being.
Instead you make jokes minutes after a plane crashes. Blame soldiers for Bush's policies. belittle the lives of Americans and Iraqis who have been killed. Make jokes on people who are trying to deal with a drug abusing brother. The list goes on and on. It does not contain one redeeming comment.
Why don't you go to the bridge collapse thread. I'm sure you have lots of good jokes to share there.
That's as bad as it got for me.