By Maximillion Alexander
I had just started work for the morning at a Melbourne Central coffee stand when I heard that my best friend Luke had died. We had been close friends from the day I met him in a boot camp therapeutic community a year prior and we shared many similarities. But when we left rehab I had managed to stay clean, while he had teetered in and out of "recovery". I will never forget that unbearable feeling of being torn three ways, between tending to his partner Danielle’s anguish as she screamed hysterically into the phone, between the frustrated glares of the customers lining up for their morning coffee fix, and between my own desire to run far away, anywhere but behind that coffee stand, out into the street and even into the arms of the same drug that stole my best friend in that moment. I couldn’t find the words for Danielle, so I feebly told her I was there for her, and I’d call her as soon as I had a chance to speak.
As I made coffee after coffee, my mind kept going back to the last time I saw Luke in the musty lounge of the inner-city halfway house he shared with 12 otherwise homeless men. He was a few days into his Suboxone withdrawal, splayed across the tattered pleather recliner, detox sweat lining his brow, his legs jerking from time to time as we tried to make light of the situation. I reminded him that when he felt well enough I would again drive him to 12-step meetings, and he’d proudly be able to identify as “clean” to those he felt didn’t accept him while he was on Suboxone. This was my attempt to keep his eye on the prize. Little did I know that his desire to identify as “clean” may have been what killed him in the end.
The night I’d seen him a few days prior I’d dragged him to the local Collingwood NA meeting at a nearby church. During the intermission, the chairperson called out the obligatory clean-time countdown, as group members stood to acknowledge their respective times spent clean off all drugs and alcohol. The meeting was chaired by a gruff, portly middle-aged ex-bikie who was a well-respected member of the local fellowship.
“Is anyone clean three to six months?” he announced to the church meeting hall full to the brim with recovering drug-addicts.
A few members stood to the applauds of their fellow NA members.
“One to three months?”
Another group of members stood proudly to the cheers of the group.
“One to 30 days?”
The room cheered yet again.
“The newcomer is the most important person in the room. Is anyone clean one day?” The room fell silent as the gruff meeting chair scans the room.
One teenage guy stood, a kid in a white Adidas tracksuit and a gold chain. The room clapped and a group member behind him patted him on the back. He looked chuffed as he received his white Just For Today key-tag.
“And has anyone used drugs today, or is anyone on drug-replacement?”
I looked over to Luke who is considered to be a part of this category, having been on Suboxone for months. I’m unsure if he’ll own up to being on “drug-replacement”, a category of people who are generally looked down on as still on drugs by those in NA. Sometimes he owns it, other times he’s known to shrink back into his chair.
He sighed and stood. He was the only one. The room clapped, he received his obligatory pat on the back. The chairperson chimed in “Welcome!- Not many people own up to that.” I was proud of him, but as he sat back down all I saw on his face is a look of shame.
After the meeting we sat on a bench outside, shared a cigarette and debriefed.
“I gotta get off this Suboxone shit Tom. I hate how it makes me feel about myself. I hate not being clean.”
I reminded him again that there’s "no rush," that people "can have a good quality of life on Suboxone®."
(or pharmacotherapy" or OST/ORT/MATOD/OAT and other new acronyms it changes to that just means opiate replacement.(We'll stick to Opioid AgonistTreatment (OAT)for arguements sake)
“Besides the way you use smack” I reminded him, “it’s better to be on Suboxone than to be dead. You've been naloxone’d 5 times this year man, don’t forget.”
And it’s true.
He had been resuscitated by the ambulance five times between leaving 'O House' and going on Suboxone.
But my reminder wasn’t enough.
Within a day of that meeting, Luke had been to see a doctor and received a script for diazepam and the staff at the halfway house cleared him to do a home detox while living on-premise. It was against their policy, but they made an exception given his pleadings, and the fact he had Danielle and I as support, and I was taking him to regular 12-step meetings.
Six days later, on his pay day, Luke was found dead on the top story of an inner-city projects car-park. When a passerby saw his legs sticking out from between two cars, he rushed
Illustration: D ROQ SQUILLIONAIRE
to find a doctor from the community health clinic nearby, but it was already much too late. He was already blue. They estimated he had stopped breathing at least 20 minutes prior.
In the coroner’s report, the doctor who found him mentioned that Luke looked “otherwise healthy, like someone who hadn’t used for a while.” And he was right. Luke hadn’t used heroin for months while he was on Suboxone. In fact the only time he wasn’t injecting heroin was when he was on Suboxone. It’s obvious to me now that from the day Luke left rehab it was largely Suboxone that was keeping him alive. It was Suboxone that allowed me to have those precious few good months with my friend. We had some really good times. He was funny, loveable, laid-back with a really quick, dry wit. And I cherish those last few months we had together. I miss him dearly to this day.
Throughout that period of recovery with Luke I was seemingly incapable of expressing emotion. I found it difficult to grieve, to cry, and to express any form of hurt. But the day of Luke’s funeral, as I helped carry his coffin and felt the weight of my best mate on my shoulder, and as I heard the sound of Danielle’s impassioned cries as she pleaded to the Gods,
“Please don’t take my boy! Please don’t take my baby boy!”
My tears flowed for the first time in years.
As tragic as the loss of Luke was to me, it wasn’t the first time I’d lost a best friend to heroin. My close friend Mitch and I met in a short-term detox facility some years before Luke. Mitch was a large man, both in stature and girth, and he carried an even larger personality. I was immediately pulled towards Mitch’s manic, buoyant and infectious personality, and that cheeky smile. We were both diagnosed Bipolar type 1 which we laughingly referred to as “Think Ya Jesus” Bipolar, and our mutual diagnoses caused us to bounce off each other in a loud manic cacophony nobody could contain.
We went on to use drugs together for a number of years, but there were many times we also helped and encouraged each other to get clean. The best years I had with Mitch were when both of us were on Suboxone. Sure we were far from paragons of clean-living, but our mutual decision to seek Suboxone treatment turned our daily heroin habits into at the very most a fortnightly pay-day dabble. There were even periods we both went up to six months without using, and if one of us was messing up, we were careful not to bring the other down. It was during these three years of relative stability that I found myself secure housing, entered professional employment for the first time in my life, fell in love and returned to university where I completed most of my units with a distinction average. Mitch also improved by leaps and bounds, managed to stay out of the psychiatric units for up to a year at a time, and returned to higher education. This from a pair of bipolar disordered daily dope fiends seemed almost a miracle.
Mitch always had a much stronger desire to get off ORT than I. He spoke a lot about his desire to go scuba diving in Thailand with his partner, and how much his ORT dependence was a barrier to his newfound wanderlust. So when I called him on the phone one afternoon and discovered he’d already jumped off his 6mg dose of Suboxone and was nearly through the ensuing two week withdrawal, my words were only of encouragement.
“Good on you Mitch!
When you get to 3 months with no Sub and no heroin, and I’ll jump off Sub too. Then we’ll both go to Thailand!”
The last time I saw Mitch he called me over to rescue him from the latest big technological drama he was facing. He often called people over to soothe him through his technology induced panics. At one stage his family were called over to discover he’d relocated all his electrical kit, TV, Hi-Fi, computers to the front lawn while pacing frantically while lamenting that nothing was working anymore. Never mind.
However this trip to Mitch’s was over the rather benign and legitimate issue of an internet connection that was cut off owing to an unpaid bill. I explained to him what was going on, told him to quit being a three-toed South American sloth and get off his ass.
I also commended him on how well he was doing without Suboxone. Neither of us had used heroin for a number of months, but he was the first one to take the plunge and jump off his drug-replacement. And I had a lot of respect and admiration for his chutzpah. I never thought he’d get to one week, let alone five weeks without Suboxone or heroin. However there was one telling moment that gave away his underlying vulnerability, a moment that in hindsight I wish I paid more heed. As I sat on the computer he looked at me intently with devious grin, and without saying a word I knew what he was about to ask.
“Tommy boy. Do you … ? “ He cut himself short, and gave me the look we’d given each other hundreds of times before, the cheeky wry look a heroin addict gives one of his kin when he wanted us both to go and score together.
I feigned ignorance.
“Do you what Mitch?”
“Ahhh don’t worry.” He dropped it.
And that was the last of it. I left shortly after, but I left with a niggling worry in the back of my mind.
The next day I logged onto my Facebook after work, and was faced with the fateful news. Mitch had been found dead in his flat earlier that day. He’d collapsed in the doorway between his lounge and his kitchen, having just sat at his kitchen table to inject a dose of heroin far too great for a person with no tolerance. I had little doubt about what he got up to that fateful day. Many times we’d driven to that seedy Western suburbs bus-stop together to score, driven back to his place with excitement and frantically mixed up our bounty together on that same kitchen table. Only that time he did it alone.
Illustration: D ROQ SQUILLIONAIRE
