Doctors prescribe Prozac and Paxil, MAOIs, NSAIDs, synthetic opiates like Ultram, pain-relieving and mood-altering drugs, and all without reservation. They say these drugs do not have the same high abuse potential, which is no doubt true, but we take them, and whether we realize it or not, we become physically dependent on these drugs just as we do with narcotics. Induce a foreign substance into your body for long enough and chemical dependence is inevitable. This is why doses are titrated up as we begin a new drug, and titrated down as we stop. We are advised not to stop taking any drug "suddenly."

Take Prozac, as I have, and you change. I did, and for a while, I changed for the better. I never had to increase my dose once we had reached the 'desired' level, I managed it carefully, I was more able to function, more philosophical, more able to abstract my problems, more generous. In fact, I was a lot like I was on Demerol, only less so. In terms of taking away my chronic anxiety and worry and depression, the truth is Demerol worked better than Prozac, and hey, it also got rid of the intense pain I get. One drug for two problems; it seems ideal ... dare I say, a good thing. With Prozac, I never had trouble getting a script, it came with refills, the pharmacist never gave me that "look," which you know if you've ever had to regularly fill a script for narcotics.

I understand the lovely Julianne Moore in Magnolia, who, when the pharmacist looks at her askance as she tries to fill her dying husband's script for Morphine, begins screaming, "You don't know my fucking life!" The pharmacist who, just the other day, so judiciously told me it was 'two days early' to fill my script for a narcotic and refused to fill it until that exact date, has no idea of what it means to spend months of your life hooked up to an i.v. in your own home. To lose part of your body to an ugly, ugly disease. To have to learn how to walk again. To move your toes in physical therapy and feel a jolt of pain so intense that you would rather die than continue ... but I did. I did and then I hiked cliffs in my native England, I rode a scooter in Greece, I learned how to tango. I overcame.

To me, Demerol is a drug that kills two birds with one stone: it both gets rid of my pain and gives me the sense of safety that I won't have to face pain alone. It is my hired thug. My protector and guard. That while it kills pain it also gives me a sense of well-being and peace seems to me, a good thing, not a bad thing.