Compounding disaster
Somewhere along the way, I subscribed to the popular school of thought that assumes that marriage is the perfect answer to an addict’s state; that marriage turns and addict’s life around and causes him or her to ‘Settle down’. I won’t belabor the unfortunate results of that experiment. I took this piece of worldly wisdom on ‘Blind faith’ and took the plunge. In the process, I jeopardized the lives of both the girl I chose to marry and the daughter we had together. This, more than anything else, proved to me that the world has no answers to a drug addict’s predicament.

We took an inordinately long time to realize that divorce was the only sane option. The trauma of having lived with an addict is not something that she can live down, and she refuses to believe that I may have changed. We were together for eleven years – hellish ones for her, she assures me, and I believe her. Also, she is a staunch Hindu, and cannot stomach the fact that I have ‘Converted’ to Christianity.

There was an unfortunate side effect to this whole business of repeated and prolonged stays in rehabilitation centers – it was a lifestyle I became used to and comfortable with. To the point, in fact, that I finally became quite insecure and ill at ease outside of an institutional setting. I would spend as much as six months to a year in any of the centers that I frequented, seeking the approval of its counselors and administrators.

Only after many years of this limited existence did I begin to understand that it was my inner being crying out for the love and acceptance of a family. This, of course, can never be found in any place that deals with emotionally sick and unstable people on a professional basis. Even today, I know people who have been bitten by this bug, and are unable to tear themselves loose from the futile hope of finding emotional fulfillment in an institution.

You might wonder at anyone harboring such a hope at all, but it’s really not too difficult to understand. You must understand that an addict’s real friends and family become alienated from and even hostile to him (or her). The measure of goodwill and ‘Last chances’ allotted to each of us is finally depleted. As long as drugs retain their deadly hold, this does not matter. However, only a couple of days of abstinence reveal the intense loneliness and hunger for companionship festering in each addict. Realization of this usually comes only after every single door to normal relationships has been slammed shut and hermetically sealed, with every bridge burnt to ashes. Without drugs, the hunger for companionship makes us look for it in the unlikeliest places.

Knocking on Hell’s Door
In my ‘Career’ of self–destruction, I had progressed from relatively low–key stuff like ‘Ganja’, ‘Charas’ and minor sleeping pills to heavy drugs like barbiturates, brown sugar and other narcotic substances. As usually happens when the disease of addiction remains unchecked, I finally graduated to the needle. Things went rapidly downhill from that point onward.

The syringe became my only friend, and the sole object of my loyalty. The last pretenses of a normal married life went out of the window – it became my wife’s thankless task to drag me from one institution to another in her desperate attempts to wean me off intravenous drugs. Within a year of continuous injecting, I found myself in one life–threatening situation after another. I developed deep venous thrombosis in both my legs, and was at constant risk of a heart or brain stroke. As a life–saving intervention, two separate doctors strongly hinted, I would eventually need to have either or both my legs amputated at the groin. I also had regular epileptic seizures, sometimes in the middle of crowded roads.

There is no end to the various theories about the root causes of addiction to lethal substances like drugs and alcohol. Psychiatrists, of course, believe that it is a sign of mental instability that can be chemically corrected. Sort of like fighting fire with fire, or trying to drown a flood. Physicians, it seems to me, attempt to treat it as some form of hormonal imbalance. Disciplinarians like my father continue to believe that it is a simple matter of willpower deficiency. Moralists say that it is a symptom of moral degeneration, while sociologists treat it as a manifesting symptom of overall sociological decay.

Religious hard–liners (those of certain Christian extractions included) have their own angle – they are convinced that addiction is the result of noncompliance with some set of ritual abracadabra or the other. In the course of being subjected to their various ‘Remedies’, it became eminently clear to me that none of them are even close to the truth. The theory that made most sense to me for a long period is that it is a disease of the emotions. However, no form of psychotherapy had ever made a dent in my craving for drugs. When human emotions are warped to a severe enough degree, reason becomes redundant.