Drugs:

Be good at your drugs- Tim Dillon.

I’ve always been bad at doing drugs, but nobody can take away the fact that I tried. I’ve smoked, I’ve snorted, and I’ve popped, but drugs and I never got a long too well, regardless of how many times I made myself do them to fit in in college. To put in perspective just how bad I was at doing drugs, I went to the hospital off of my first line of cocaine. Being the white little ball of testosterone I used to be, at eighteen I was so excited about doing coke for the first time, that I started headbutting my friend in excitement.

As it turns out, that’s a really stupid thing to do, and I ended up getting rushed to the hospital where I got six stitches on my face. 

Like any kid who leaves his life of Winter jackets and bad college football in the North, I did a good amount of coke my first year of college. Now, everyone who's done coke knows that there’s almost nothing worse than a coke hangover, and mine were especially unpleasant. Around the time I started doing coke, my anxiety had returned to levels I had not experienced since early childhood. Every Friday morning, I’d wake up after getting four hours of sleep to cocaine and anxiety fueled panic attacks that were so bad, Sidney Gottlieb would have studied them if he had picked up the chance. On one occasion, I had a panic attack so servere that I went to the doctor and was misdiagnosed with a life altering condition. 

Picture being hungover as a wedgie is developing on your butt from the exam table paper on the chair that’s in every single doctor’s office across America, and having a doctor tell you that she believes that you have a blood clot in your heart, and explaining to you that your life is going to be a lot different going forward. After hearing this life changing news, I got a ride to the emergency room (on Uber) where my driver tried to subside my further anxiety after this diagnosis, by telling me that he also has blood clots, and it hadn’t affected his sex life all that much. After getting my heart tested for two hours, as it turned out, my panic attack going into the initial family-practice doctor’s office was bad enough for a licensed medical professional to believe that something was wrong with my heart. Even after all of that, I still tried doing cocaine one more time for Mardis Gras. 

Boy, do I regret many of the things I did in my first twenty-one years of life. 

It’s been over five years since I’ve done cocaine, and many since I’ve done any other drug (well, at least the ones I wouldn’t want my Mom to know about for that matter). My days of popping pills and listening to lo-phi beats while berating my Twitter feed with unfunny content are over. The last time I even smoked semi-decent weed a couple of years ago, I wound up in a ball cradling myself to sleep and muttering it’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real. As a person who’s had to work on his anxiety problem, I’ve learned that it’s best to mitigate things that cause me to suffer. I’ve become quite comfortable being, in the words of my friend’s little cousin, a fucking fag. 

I’ve seen all kinds of things play out when it comes to drug use. I’ve seen the craziest kids I know flip their entire lives around and become devoutly religious, high-earning professionals. I’ve seen friends of friends OD and die off of one bad batch of a drug they were trying for the second time. I’ve seen men with families blow their kid’s college tuition money up their nose. I’ve witnessed drug-fueled relationships for better or worse, I’ve watched people struggle to keep afloat in the crashing waves of addiction, and I’ve told a lot of people rolling face on Molly that I love them.

The Tim Dillon quote at the beginning of this chapter speaks to what I’ve observed through witnessing adult drug use. Being good at your drugs doesn’t mean that you are a fun person to do drugs with, or that you don’t bug out, it means having the capability to do those things, while also not becoming a problem to yourself and the people around you. I have friends who live in apartments filled with more asbestos than old Cold War-era bunkers because they allocate a significant chunk of their limited $4,000 earnings to cocaine and Doordash. They might be fun when they’re coked up, but I would not consider them or their quasi-addiction to be attributes of a person who is good at their drugs. The people I know who are good at their drugs do them somewhat often, but on no consistent schedule and usually pair them with a big event. 

When I hung out with a guy rolling two points of Molly, who was brimming with excitement talking about the joys of being a young parent? Good at his drugs. When my friend takes a comfortable dose of shrooms and walks around his city occasionally on a warm Spring day? Good at his drugs. When a guy who hasn’t touched coke in four months opens up his face into a bag in Scottsdale for a vacation? Good at his drugs. When Aaron Rodgers pays a shaman in the Amazon Basin to take him on a spiritually-guided-ayahuasca hike before training camp starts? Good at his drugs. When a PhD candidate drives two hours West to get a little taste of meth because her adderall prescription is out and America is in a shortage? Well, actually, that one is a little more complicated. 

Watching someone have a borderline-drug-problem in college is somewhat normal, but after school, things start to get a little sad. Not as sad or pathetic as I can imagine regular, on week-day drug use is seen as in your thirties, but there’s certainly a stigma. Whereas going up to a girl at a bar and waving a bag of coke in her face is a college mating call, in post grad life, it probably won’t be met with much success (unless she’s anorexic). People still love drugs and they are still present, but they are more common for events. People love making drugs an experience, and they use holidays, concerts, reunions, and planned vacations as an excuse to get really fucked up in an Airbnb while still giving off the aura of maturity and class. The majority of a postgrad bar isn’t doing key bumps in the bathroom, but if you show up to any city on St. Patrick’s Day, it will be white and green for a few different reasons. 

While I certainly have no plans of doing coke or xanax in the future, I don’t think I’ve thrown in the towel on drugs in general. The doors for shrooms and Molly are still open, and when I get a little bit more comfortable in life, I can see myself doing each of those four or five times a year. Everybody is different when it comes to drugs and how our bodies react to them, and there’s definitely something to drugs being a much better look on rich people compared to light-beer drinking, yo, can you just throw me five for that Uber? Saying guys like me. 

For what it’s worth, you’ll know when you have a drug problem, and nobody can help you until you want the help. We use substances to escape our issues that will still be there when we sober up, but I’ve found addressing the root of our evils to be, while challenging, more valuable in practice. Since quitting drugs, I’ve never looked back on a night and wished that I had done any, not once. I also want to mention this, because I think it’s really important: the way popular movies and TV shows illustrate sober people isn’t necessarily true. Yes, sobriety is an everyday battle for the people in my life who are now sober, but they aren’t these absolutely miserable, decrepit skeletons who mope around dark alleys drinking coffee and cursing the world. A lot of the sober people I know? They are significantly happier now than they were railing lines and drunk driving home from Applebees on a Tuesday. Sure, everyone wants to be the king of the ‘Bees in the moment, but much like the reign of Nero, the life of a flawed king is only fruitful for so long before you attempt suicide in incredibly awkward fashion. And before I forget, to the people I still owe money from coke all those years ago, you’re never going to get it.