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Who is a "I only use on weekends," or "It hardly ever interferes with work," or "I can quit, it's only psychologically addicting, right?" or "I only snort, I don't base or shoot" "It's this relationship that's messing me up." Many of us are still perplexed to realize how long we went on, never getting the same high we got in the beginning. Yet still insisting and believing - so distorted was our reality - that we were getting from cocaine what actually always eluded us. We went to any lengths to get away from being ourselves. The lines got fatter, the grams went faster, the week's stash was all used up today. We found ourselves scraping envelopes and baggies with razor blades, scratching the last flakes from the corners of brown bottles, snorting or smoking any white speck from the floor when we ran out. We, who prided ourselves on our fine tuned state of mind! Nothing mattered more to us than the straw, the pipe, the needle. Even if it made us miserable, we had to have it. Some of us mixed cocaine with alcohol or pills, and found temporary relief in the change, but in the end, it only added to our problems. We tried quitting by ourselves and sometimes managed to do so for periods of time. After a month, we imagined we were in control. We thought our system was cleaned out and we could get the old high again, using half as much. This time, we'd be careful not to go overboard. But we only found ourselves back where we were before, and worse. We never left the house without using first. We didn't make love without using. We didn't talk on the phone without using coke. We couldn't fall asleep; sometimes it seemed we couldn't breathe without cocaine. We tried changing jobs, apartments, cities, lovers - believing that our lives were being screwed up by circumstances, places, people. We blamed anything outside of ourselves for our problems and our unhappiness. Perhaps we even saw a cocaine friend die of respiratory arrest and still we went on using! But eventually we had to face facts. We had to admit that cocaine was a serious problem in our lives, that we were addicts. Reprinted and adapted from C.A. Storybook, entitled "To The Newcomer" pages xv - xvi.  Feel free to sign whichever one you want. I am trying to keep them seperate for a reason. If an entry concerning this page ends up in my Card Shop GuestBook, I will move it here. 
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