The Power of No

As part of my prescribed medicine regime, twice daily I take a quarter tablet of a drug called Metoprolol. Part of the pharmaceutical family known as beta-blockers, I’ve now been put on these things for life, after drinking myself into a state of atrial fibrillation a couple of months back. The pills slow the heart down apparently, which means I now get out of breath climbing a short flight of stairs. Guess I’ll just have to put off the jogging routine that I’ve been meaning to take up for the last 20 years. Shame.

Anyway, I went to my pill box the other day to retrieve one of these quarter tablets, only to find that it had crumbled into white powder, probably as a result of my ham-fisted attempts at pill splitting. Me being me, the first thing that occurred to me was to snort it through the nearest available dollar bill. I didn’t, eventually, sink to such depths, but kind of had to dab it with a wet finger until most of it was gone. This episode put me in mind of the great American stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, who happened also to be an unstoppable needle-using junkie. The subject of much police attention as a result of both his unfettered drug use and the scandalous content of his routines, Bruce was subject to many a raid. On one occasion, bursting into his backstage dressing room, the cops were confronted by the sight of a hypodermic needle laying on a table next to a pile of white powder. ‘What’s that powder, Mr Bruce?’, the alarmed officer had asked. ‘It’s aspirin, sir’, came the quick reply. ‘Whaddya got a needle for then?’ Bruce, a natural born grifter, had to think fast. ‘I can’t stand the taste!’, he cried, before being carted off again to the watch house.

For me, drug use has formed more what I’d describe as a ‘backcloth’ to my antics in the addiction game. I mean, a vivid, gaudily painted backcloth for sure, but not the intense, pressing, debilitating concern that alcoholism has often proved itself to be. In that regard, I’m lucky. Back in the bright, sunlit, acid-drenched day when drugs were all fun and giggles, I remember being distinctly afraid of one substance in particular, which loomed over my crowd of friends like the spectre of death itself: heroin. I’ve taken heroin a few times and, to be completely honest, it didn’t really agree with me, a thing for which I am eternally grateful. I’ve seen at first hand, and on more occasions than I care to remember, the total destruction that this terrible drug can bring to a person’s life. I avoided this fate only because of some of heroin’s handy side-effects, which may include a terrible, all body itching that desperately needs scratching, combined with an urgent need to vomit loudly, and for hours on end, into any nearby receptacle. Talk about taking the recreation out of recreational drug use.

But on one important occasion however, I did enjoy it and it was that experience that convinced me to never take it again. Unlike the rough, street-based ‘skag’ or ‘brown’ favoured by my increasingly desperate friends, this stuff came in a small glass vial pinched, I imagine, from a hospital or chemists somewhere. Pharmaceutically pure, upon taking it, this magical liquid instantaneously transported me into a world that I have no wish to revisit. A place of peace and blue crystalline clouds, my body suffused with overwhelming feelings of comfort, harmony and eternal love. It was, to put it frankly, an intensely beautiful experience and one that I vowed never to have again, for I knew that, if I did, I would surely lose myself forever.

‘Man refuses heroin’ is hardly a headline, but in the labyrinth of my addictive mind that refusal counted for a lot. It still does. It meant that, even in the face of almighty temptation, I was able to say, ‘No’. I was able, somehow, to see the danger for what it was, and of course it’s telling that my decision to never take the stuff again came about as the result of what you could call a positive experience, not a negative one. The pain didn’t stop me, the bliss did.

And I think that this is an important point that those of us in recovery would do well to recognise. A persistent theme of these posts, and my thinking on sobriety in general, is the notion that we have within us a nearly indomitable will to survive, and that will makes itself known to us in any number of different ways. I say, ‘nearly indomitable’, because I recognise very well the full emotional collapse that can bring about a suicide. It’s a sad reality that we can be beaten and that, ultimately, there are occasions when nothing can save us. Immense will, strength of character, evolution, biology, God, all these can, at times, be overturned and rendered helpless.

But nonetheless, the will to survive is an unimaginably powerful motive force and it resides, on a base evolutionary level, within all of us. This sounds obvious enough I suppose, but isn’t it the obvious things we most often forget? Certainly at my lowest point I pretty much (but not quite) forgot about it and that, most likely, would have been that.

For Lenny Bruce, our wisecracking comedian above, that’s how it turned out. Beset by legal problems, harassed by the police and mired in heavy drug use, he was dead at 40, killed by a shot of heroin, his body discovered next to the hypodermic needle that had delivered the terminal dose. At some stage in his downward spiral, he stopped taking care of himself, and the person he was suddenly became an afterthought. It’s in these critical moments that life can be lost, quite literally in a heartbeat.

We say ‘yes’ at our peril, and I have done so many, many times, but it’s the ‘no’ that makes us who we are. The negative, ironically, that creates the positive. Brave is the person who stands before the great riches of instant pleasure that drugs can bring, and turn his head away. But we are that person and we always were. Nothing can hurt us anymore. We just have to say the easiest and somehow most difficult word in the language: No.

Photo by Jonathan Gonzalez on Unsplash