Comfortable and Furious

The ABC’s of Hard Drugs

With the economy in the toilet and socialism on the horizon, you find your paycheck stretched thinner each week. Your weakening dollars persistently go towards boring things like gasoline, food, and your dreadful family. Before your dwindling savings account is redistributed, a brown man takes your grape picking gig, and we’re forced to fight them over here why not take some of that hard earned cash and treat yourself for a change? To some juicy, juicy crack cocaine.

Carrying on the tradition begun last year by Wax and Erich ,  let’s move on to the next substance abuse lesson.

Take a moment to learn about The ABC’s Of Hard Drugs:

Anhydrous Ammonia:
A quality ingredient found only in the finest meth kitchens from Luther, OK all the way to Trimble, MO! Add this to your ice and make $20 more on the gram. Anhydrous is the stuff that gives meth its subtle laundry detergent taste. Usually only two ways to come across this organ dissolving delicacy though. 1)Be a farmer. 2) Rob a farmer. You think siphoning gasoline is risky? Try sucking this shit out of a tank while an angry farmer fires buckshot in your ass.

Bender:
Your mom, your 10-year-old niece, your boss, all in close contact with one another as well as with all area hospitals and jails. Not knowing you’re in the rundown Rose Petal Inn two miles away under the name Pat Magroin where the Columbian maids are starting to think you’ve got a bit of a drug problem. If you were a little white girl, they’d have called off the Amber Alert by now. It’s been five days.

You struggle with whether to keep your cell phone on so you can order up another fix or whether to keep it off to keep your nosy wife and kids at bay. Not to mention GPS tracking concerns. By the time you reappear alive, your loved ones will wish you’d been undergoing torture in a tranny clown’s basement dungeon.

Coke-Face:
Not only do you suck up blow like a Hoover, your face looks like the front of a vacuum cleaner. You may even sound like one, given the wheezing between the gaps in your huge looking horse teeth because you can’t breathe through your nose. You’re fidgeting through the club with a face that is an attractive combination of the old school Joker and Ted Haggard and it’s only a matter of time before you too give in to gay drug sex.

Dogs:
These things fucking suck. How convenient for the lazy idiot cops that a German Shepard can sniff out the tiniest amount of drugs in a 4,000 square foot mansion. Scumbag vice police would’ve had to surrender in this retarded war long ago if not for these goddamn animals. If dogs only knew the abject sociopolitical and economic failures of the nation’s Draconian drug war, whereby America now has a higher percentage of its population in prisons than any other country, bar none, and their own integral part in it, maybe they’d stop fucking barking at people at the airport.

Ephedrine:
Because of those scheming crankster gangsters you can’t even clear your sinuses without three forms of ID. Mules are now mapping out all strategic truck stops and cigar stores in their 100-mile radius because one box of pills can trade for a gram of dope. It’s now actually possible to be arrested for having Sudafed on your person. Some tweakers, lacking other ingredients, have chewed these nasty things whole hoping for the same buzz they get from the final product, meth. Instead, they find themselves in the ER on a defibrillator, thereby suggesting that a combination of lithium, ether, fertilizer, and battery acid is necessary to prevent overt health problems while using.

Family:
The long-suffering victims of your pathetic lack of willpower. Don’t believe in the War On Drugs, eh? Tell that to these poor bastards. Yes, you could make a reasonable argument that money is funneled into failed forced attempts to reduce the trade and people with diseases are locked up in zoos with rapists and murderers, but what good does that do for your family when you haven’t bought anyone a Christmas present in eight years?

Medicine cabinets will be emptied first, bank accounts second, and living rooms third. You’re incapable of doing your people favors because you possess nothing and your skills have been whittled down to good scoring techniques. With drugs, not basketballs. Your daughter can’t afford to take gymnastics. Gymnastics! They don’t even have to buy any equipment, dickhead. Your brother hasn’t seen you sober since 1997. Sometimes you help your 4th grade cousin with his paper route and he throws you a Hamilton. And by throw, I mean he tosses it to the ground and you scramble to grab it.

Glass:
Yes, it’s another name for methamphetamine but more generally, we’re talking about the glass pieces people blow and shape to fire up their stash. You have 12 of these, all handcrafted and yes, decorated and shaped like dragons and swans. It’s an OCD hobby derived from your hands needing something to do while your brain is registering a new thought every three seconds. You blow more glass so you can smoke more dope so you can blow more glass so you can… Tricking these things out is a lot like putting primered flames on your coffin. This is more a tweaker pastime as crackheads just bust a narrow rose vase they sell at ghetto gas stations, stuff it full of Brillo, and get down to business.

Heron:
Smack. Junk. Black Tar, Taliban Tammy. Whatever name it goes by this stuff is old school. Hollywood was feasting on the H while your great grandpa was battling Germans in Dubya Dubya Two. Heron (Heroin) remains the most dangerous drug out there as it seems like there’s a hair of difference between a cool buzz and a fatal overdose. You can be functional and keep your job for a while banging, but make no mistake …your ass will be dead broke, all the time. If your boss is down with you sporting the same stained, stanky khakis and decrepit moccasins to work each day, go for it. You can take anyone’s Lean Cuisine from the company fridge around lunch time. That’s what they’re there for, evidently… Coats and purses too.

Inpatient Treatment:
You’ve stolen cars and held pistols to peep’s heads but now you’re groveling to an abusive counselor regarding a sleeve of Fig Newtons that showed up somehow in your pillowcase. You’ll probably leave with some bizarre sort of PTSD requiring you to keep a supply of plastic cups on hand for urination for the rest of your natural life.

During Empowerment Group this afternoon you’ll dab tears from your face while recognizing the similarities of a leathery 45-year-old grandma’s list of “Unmanageables” to yours. You’ll give her a hug while nine people whoop and clap. You feel like you’ve developed a profound bond with Gary No-Teeth but in seven days you’d sooner run into traffic than have to pass him on the sidewalk outside of this place.

Job:
You might still have one. But how dare they ask incisive questions about two more unscheduled days off because yet another grandmother in yet another city fell in the bathtub and is in intensive care? How dare they ask how she’s doing, requiring you to even remember the lie, told while searching through the carpet for something to smoke 20 minutes after 9:00 yesterday? Why don’t they stop hassling you?

I mean, you don’t know where your PC went. It was here when you left on Friday!

What do you mean you can’t use the drive-thru window as a pillow?

Oh, I see. Wilburn lost his fingers because in my sleepless haze I turned the bandsaw on while he was cleaning it? Whatever you say there, Chief!

Knuckling Down:
You’re a runner. You don’t have the ingenuity or resources to slang yourself, but more importantly you don’t have a shred of willpower. Each week you’re pawned off to a new, more disrespectful James Spader, dangling a carrot sprinkled with crack in front of your face while a Japanese businessman waits in the next room. This job is more stressful and labor intensive than manning the sour cream gun at Taco Bell. And it pays less. You’re a middleman of middlemen and you put yourself in harm’s way several times a day just to stay high.

You have to drive an 8 ball across town on expired tags because you have nothing left of value they want except your ability to take the fall. And now that they post detailed county arrest records on the internet you can’t even flip if you’re busted because your dealers know the time, the place, and the unlikelihood of you being back on the street hours after getting pinned with 11 different baggies all marked with different dollar amounts. It’s not like they posted bail for your disposable ass. You’ll be forced to eat your wire at gunpoint before getting two to the chest.

LSD:
Meh. Nothing to write home about from prison really, but it’s registered a funny story or two. Remember the one about the kid in the hospital who thinks he’s a glass of orange juice and can’t be moved or he’ll spill? Or that LSD is mopped up by the nerves in your spinal column giving you that acidic sensation. Or that after a few hits you’ll carry on an actual, genuinely intelligent, conversation with a cartoon character? That’s all bullshit. LSD just makes you laugh a lot and say retarded shit that makes your buddies think you’re a gaywad.

Meth:

What kind of fucking alien shit crash-landed on an Iowa farm in 1971, had its chemical components copied by biker scientists, and was meted out to Section 8 apartment complexes throughout the heartland? Unlike weed, shrooms, heron, coke, or even crack, meth has no organic properties. It’s the margarine of dope…the CGI of drugs. Or it’s just some meteor drippings not from or intended for this world. This shit has the same effect on the average Joe that earth’s orange sun had on Clark Kent.

Feel the need to spank it for 48 hours straight? Smoke some shards. You say a water break is part of an 11 hour dismantle and rebuild session on a Chevy 383 370HP/455TQ Vortec engine with forged Tri-Level Pistons? You pussy. Bang some fire in your arm and get back out here and help me figure out a way to pry open this ball bearing. It’s no wonder people launch themselves out 4th story windows on meth. If you can have sex for three days straight without stopping to eat so much as a tic-tac why wouldn’t you believe you can fly too?

Niacin:
Just another failed body-cleansing tool. At least this one’s fairly cheap and didn’t require you to pawn your brother’s DVD collection to get it. Cause of course, damage control is usually done after you’ve blown your paycheck. So, they tell you to take a bunch of Niacin with the intent of speeding up the release of toxins from your kidneys. Apparently, it’s supposed to smoke out the fugitives camped out in your bloodstream because Niacin burns like a motherfucker. It turns your skin red too. So that during your UA, the sniffer dog of usage detection, not only will you drop dirty but you’ll feel like you’re having a heat stroke.

Outpatient Treatment:
Just your presence taunts the in-patients. Your soda, the brandishing of your cell phone, your jingling car keys. All connections to the outside world that these losers lost access to cause they were too stupid to lie during their Substance Abuse Eval. You get to come and go as you please when they have to get up at 5:30 A.M. and cook each other breakfast. And ironically, you’re still getting high. In fact, given that you’re probably still not Serious this time you could make great connections and possibly even fill some orders.

Paranoia:
This is the one that separates the men from the boys. Sure, weed gives you paranoia; no doubt about it. The intensity of the paranoia however is so materially different from the X files your mind is flipping through after being up for a few days that it’s commonplace for meth and crackheads to ask burnouts for safe harbor. The wild and colorful parade of completely fleshed out characters chasing the sketched tweaker would be too much even for a Guillermo Del Toro movie.

As a true hard-doper you will create entire premises about who is after you, even mentally outlining backstories for the principal threats. You keep hiding and re-hiding your shit because a car honked four blocks away. You think your hair will get you a possession. You’ll end up tethered to a toilet while clinging to a bottle of Clorox, so that at the first sign of plane in the sky, you can flush everything and pour the bleach over your head.

Quitting:
Given that most people don’t quit of their own volition we’ll drop those pretenses right now. You get busted. If you’re white and just notched a possession, generally you get some treatment options. Drug courts are the new 90 days in jail. Good for the criminal justice system. Seriously. Just be aware though, that abstinence needs to arrive swiftly and certainly. Who cares if you couldn’t get out of bed the day before without at least a chopped up Oxycontin pill? You better find the tools to stay clean by morning, dipshit, or they’ll yank your deferment.

You’ll hear often in treatment that it’s not about not using drugs, it’s about recovery. Yes, abstaining of course, but really developing healthy living skills and learning how to handle life’s stressors. It’s about appreciating riding a bike again and balancing your checkbook. Forget about the loin-churning, mouthwatering cravings you’ve developed over two decades. You need to figure that shit out on your own, fuckface. Oh, and here, pee in this. We got your PO on line 1. Really though, if you are quitting of your own free will, good luck. Your kids… will probably still remember you, man.

Rock:
Add a little baking soda to your stepmom’s little white secret, a dash of water, maybe some cinnamon, and then go ahead and add five more years to your sentence. Crack rock. Oh, you scourge of urban decay, you neighborhood-wrecker. The stuff that’s been sending bruthas’ up the river since Red Alert was laying mad beats for the Zulu Nation. Why don’t we just airdrop a couple tons of this on countries we’re fighting with like we did in Brooklyn in 1981? Then just let the insurgents start sucking our soldier’s dicks instead of shooting at them. Sadly, for all the disparate consequences associated with rock, baseheads could get twice the benefits for half the jail time if they’d only get accustomed to speed.

Sucking Dick:
The most viable career option for the late level crackhead and a top brick in the ..but I’ll never do that! addiction pyramid. A modern touchstone of the hard drug trade.

You’ve unloaded any possible material trinket with but a single circuit of technology, including your 13-inch B&W and your analog alarm clock. Now it’s time to get by on raw, slurpy talent to keep the party jumping.

On the flip side, for the opportunistic John, a hummer can be had in most American cities for $20-40. However, the John is under pretty heavy time constraints in a Houston alley at 3am where a gangbanger strolling by just might turn the tables and make that John blow him. For free.

Tomorrow:
Oftentimes, the worst day of the week for the true drug addict. Some have the luxury of sleeping it off, even though their next tomorrow usually mandates more degrading hustles. For you though, there will come a point today when the realization of your horrific situation settles in. A lot of times it’s after waking up from a 45-minute function shutdown nap.

Holy fucking shit! I told my boss I was in a car accident and broke my spine and I’m quad and couldn’t make it to work. How am I going to talk my way out of that?! Your wife and kids are still waiting for you to return with the Benadryl from three days ago and you don’t have the money for another night at this motel. You have 16 voicemails on your phone you now have to listen to during your devastating comedown. At this point it’s best to just start drinking away the guilt and worry, right….NOW!

UA:
As mentioned, Niacin is one of many failed antidotes to the contaminants swimming through your veins, souring your kidneys, and betraying you in a little Dixie cup you once sold at your lemonade stands during better days. The job UA is usually fucking cake. You don’t even have to use your own piss because nobody goes into the room with you. Some have been known to get by with a syringe of Mountain Dew, kept warm by their sweaty taints.

A clean correctional UA is a little more difficult. If your usage is four days old or more you might be able to drink some of that overpriced shit like Urine-Luck™ and pull it off, as long as your corrections officer doesn’t mind that your piss is neon, smells like sulphur, and has five times the Creatine content than it’s supposed to. But if you’ve used in the past two or three days, you might as well own up to it before dropping, as a preemptive stab at mercy. Cause I think my PO has sucked enough dicks in his lifetime to know the difference between a real one and a floppy roll of pink latex with a metal spout on the end.

Vicodin:
You get a tooth pulled. Your dentist prescribes the pointless IB 800. You quickly start crying in front of him, railing about the pain and how you don’t know how you’ll ever sleep with such a gnawing throb for the next several days. He thinks you’re a faggot but whips up a scrip for good ole Vicodin.

You don’t care what he thinks and spit the gauze out on your way to CVS where you eat two Baby Ruths and a box of Milk Duds while waiting for them to fill your prescription. You get your bottle and down five before even leaving the pharmacy.

The rest of the night, you delightfully scratch every square inch of your body as the opiates seep out your pores.

Weed:
Pfft.

X:
Or Ecstasy, baby. Yet another threat to your freshman daughter’s purity. And she’s conscious during sex on this, so you can’t even get mad. This is like the wine cooler of meth. Marketed to college kids, there’s some speed, sometimes some opiate mixed in, some LSD, and a little bit of ketamine, maybe that shit that Somalians chew. People admit to just wanting to be touched and felt while rolling on E. Can you home school for a BA yet?

Yay:
Cocaine. Just the smell makes you shit your pants with gastrointestinal anticipation. You make coke calls to grade school teachers because the endorphins released always bring along their friend, nostalgia. You believe everyone feels as good as you right now. And if they don’t, you want to spread out rails, even though this is the worst drug to share since you know you’ll blow through it before midnight, knocking back another one every 20 minutes.

You sit on a bed with a buddy and a bunch of licked CD cases, making bullshit plans to take a trip to New York next month or start school again. You converse excitedly, interrupting and talking over each other, until it all runs out and the thought of choking out another word is agonizing. Around 6 A.M., The buzz is gone, your nose is clogged, and your heart is beating out of your chest while chirping birds serenade your crippling depression. The horrible, horrible comedown is an exact 180° of the high you felt last night.

Zzzz:
Stealing this one from The ABC’s Of Drunkenness because it’s an integral part of either addiction. You haven’t had REM sleep in weeks. The few times your body forces you to crash always come with flashing images of the activities right before you started getting high. It’s probably some strange indication of guilt. If you do find rest, it’s at the most inappropriate times. The maintenance man at work has to jimmy open the lock of your stall because you’ve been sprawled out on the can for two hours. You pull picket fences behind your car as you start to nod off while merging into highway traffic. You go through life seeing movements out of the corner of your eyes and sometimes you swat at them.


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