I binge. I’m not a regular addict. My psyche med doctor is a drug dealer, basically. I’ve got boxes of Saboxtin and he keeps upping my dosage. He says if I don’t up the dosage he’ll drop me. I’ve been to three pharmacies who won’t honor his prescriptions. When I feel the need, I trade his dope for the dope I need.

I head down to Southwest Baltimore to the dope holes, vacant houses where it’s distributed. The lines aren’t as long at the dope holes as they are at the doctor’s office, and you only walk out with one kind of dope instead of six or seven. The funny thing is, you meet better quality people at the dope hole: nurses in uniform, cops in uniform, a doctor, a couple lawyers in their suits, all mixed in with the toothless junkies. They’re all cool except the cops. I don’t know if the cops are using or selling. But when they saw me the last time, they told me, “You say shit about this and it’s your ass. You didn’t see shit, got it?”

Yeah, I’ve got it.

A friend of mine got shot by the cops, three bullets in the leg. He wants to get off pain management but the doctor keeps telling him he has to up his dosage or he’ll lose his place in the program.

I have another friend who got shot in the shoulder in Afghanistan. He was in pain management and they kept upping his methadone dosage, which really freaked him out. He was depressed to begin with, but having to go to the clinic and stand in line with all the dope fiends really demoralized him. Now he sits at home and has heroin brought to him. The methadone’s free, government-paid, but you have to take more and go get it, get piss-tested, all that humiliation.

-William

A Partial Exhumation of the American Dream