The End of My Addiction

said I had never injected myself with anything and never could, she responded with the classic AA rejoinder, “Yet.” If you said you never drank in the morning or never fell into some other drinking trap, the old timers said, “Yet.”
    At Marworth several physician and pharmacist patients agreed that the anesthetic fentanyl was “the Rolls Royce of drugs.” One of the deadliest, too.
    One physician patient was a codeine addict, and he had contempt for alcoholics. “How can you drink that foul-tasting, foul-smelling stuff?” he said. He was not a bad fellow, in fact I got on very well with him, but he was grumpy and a bit of a snob. He always dressed in designer clothes and he regularly criticized my rumpled shirts and jeans: “You’re such a distinguished guy, Olivier. How can you wear that crap?”
    I said, “Do you realize where we are? We are in rehab. It’s not jail, but it’s not very much higher up. We’re not exactly going to a black-tie gala.”
    When I said hello to this guy in the morning, he always replied, “Another day in paradise.” And then he complained about how he could be on the golf course or taking a drive in his exotic sports car. He was very proud to be with the physicians, nurses, and pharmacists, rather than the general Marworth population.
    On paper, we were an impressive bunch, our résumés studded with credentials from elite universities and teaching hospitals. We had shown plenty of smarts and willpower in achieving these things, and like all addicts we had tried to use our wits to manage our addictions successfully. As one of the group said, “If we put the same dedication and ingenuity into our careers as into obtaining a drink or a fix, and using only so much at a time and no more so that it would not be noticed, we’d all have Nobel Prizes.” (Of course, nonphysician addicts and alcoholics will make similar claims.)
    The effort is often brilliant, but when it fails it’s a disaster. In a group therapy session one day, a pharmacist described an incident in his life and said, “I had some vodka, but only a little bit, so I injected myself with the vodka.”
    When it comes to self-injection, I am so squeamish that you would think I had no medical training. But my curiosity was aroused and I said, “I know vodka. I’ve drunk a lot, as I’m sure you have. What’s the point of injecting it?”
    Pharmacists know the half-life of everything in your bloodstream, how to spare the kidneys by injecting a drug in one way rather than another, and so on. He said, “If you only have a small amount of liquor and you drink it, it will be absorbed in your stomach and then diluted in your entire system, so you will feel no effect. If you inject it, the bolus gives you a concentrated high.”
    “Oh, thanks, that hadn’t occurred to me,” I said. Some people, I realized, might be even farther gone in addiction than I was.
    It was fascinating to see these smart people with all their calculations ending in disaster. Addicts all invent the wheel, only to lose their balance and crash, as this pharmacist did while stoned out of his mind on a motorcycle. Loss of control is part of the definition of substance dependency, and trying to control an addiction is like trying to drive a vehicle without brakes. No matter how smart you are, addiction pits you against yourself, and you cannot outsmart yourself for long. If it continues, sooner or later the addiction takes control. It frightened me to realize I could not outsmart myself with respect to alcohol and moderate my drinking.
    In this respect the medical professionals were no different from anyone else in rehab at Marworth, or from anyone I’d met previously in AA or other rehabs. When I was getting to know my first sponsor in AA, I complained that I didn’t see the point of constantly going to AA meetings because I had nothing in common with the construction worker from Brooklyn or the ex-con from the South Bronx. My sponsor said, “Don’t look at the messenger, listen to the message” and “Don’t judge, identify.”
    AA is full of wise sayings, and those are two of the wisest. Gradually I learned to listen carefully to what other alcoholics and addicts said. In rehab I attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings as well as AA meetings, and I also came into contact with many people with obsessive-compulsive disorders and binge-eating problems. Whether they were black or white, gay or straight, rich or poor, ex-cop or ex-con, I