To prevent myself from venturing down the ever-alluring opiate path as I had in Atlanta, I started taking Suboxone®. A friend of mine in hospital management had recommended Suboxone, so I took his advice. I knew the buprenorphine would fill up my opiate receptors and prevent me from going hog wild on pills again. And so it did… sort of. I snorted Adderall® and drank vodka instead.
In July of 2012, after more than five years on Suboxone®/Subutex® and Adderall®/Vyvanse®, my shrink sent me a letter saying he was no longer seeing patients. I may have been the only patient to get such a letter; after all, I’d owed him money for some time. I was later told by my pharmacist, a close friend of my shrink, that they both knew I was full of crap. No surprise there; I knew I wasn’t fooling anyone – it’s just that I no longer cared. In fact, I had quit caring long ago.
I tapered off the Subutex over a period of almost two months; I thought my gradual tapering would make it painless, but it did not. Lacking both health insurance and work ethic, I lapsed into a deeper depression as I’d predicted in a self-fulfilling prophecy upon quitting the prescription drugs. I went to a few AA and NA meetings but did not manage to put together more than a few days clean & sober, usually one or two weeks at most.
