As the legal drinking age in Alberta was eighteen at the time, unlike my native Ontario's nineteen, I was also able to begin drinking seriously at the same time. Now that's a pretty lethal combination — a steady diet of acid and booze does not do much for one's mental health. It's been known to have a detrimental effect on your cognitive abilities.
Thankfully, I had enough sense to realize this. I decided a change of scene would be healthy and caught a red-eye flight back to Ontario after six weeks. Sitting on the plane, strung out, hung over, and unable to sleep, I looked out the cabin window to see the sun rising like a ball of red fire and momentarily thought a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere in Northern Ontario.
I was so far gone that it took me almost five minutes to recognise what I was seeing. Wiser men than me would have taken that as a sign that changes should be made. But unlike my contemporaries, who began to change their habits as university approached and the real world beckoned, I became more deeply entrenched.
For the next fourteen years I continued to work on keeping myself comfortably numb for as much of the time as possible. People who work in the arts are hard drinkers and live hard anyway, so my behaviour didn't seem as outlandish as it would have in other circumstances. I had also learned how to make sure the worst of my excesses weren't on public display.
If I was always slightly stoned it was no big deal because I was doing my work and getting things accomplished. But I was beginning to bottom out without realizing what was happening. Even after the summer of 1992, when my behaviour became so abhorrent that I lost all my friends, it took me two more years to realize I had a problem of any sort.
My stroke of luck came about via circumstances most others would look upon as bad fortune. At other times I have written about having reconstructive knee surgery in 1992 that resulted in my contracting sympathetic dystrophy in the left leg. After two years of living on Tylenol 3 (30mg codeine tablets) and hashish to deaden the pain, I reached the point where I was desperate for help.
From the knee down, my left leg had turned gray as the circulation decreased. As a thirty-third birthday present, a friend arranged for me to see an acupuncturist. Thankfully, the woman I went to see was extremely generous as well as gifted. My leg was going to require extensive work and would take weeks of sessions, time I would not have been able to afford to pay for, so she didn't charge me for the treatments.
Article comments
1 - chantal stone
an amazing success story, thank you for sharing this Richard.
2 - JELIEL³
Very good article, but I have problems with this sentence.
People who work in the arts are hard drinkers and live hard anyway, so my behaviour didn't seem as outlandish as it would have in other circumstances
People in the arts who are hard drinkers and live hard have failed BEING in the arts and instead are BEING an artist. Sure I drank and partied a lot but a true artist lives more intensly than regular people, but not necessarily harder. But I never touched drugs and I live in Montreal, drug distribution center to North America.
3 - John Spivey
There are so many ways to stay numb and so many excuses. Powerful account of your life, Richard. I hope for continued healing of the wounds and for your personal success as a human being.
4 - Sister Ray
Do you feel like you were addicted to LSD?
5 - Richard Marcus
Sister Ray: I apologise for taking so long to reply to your comment. I think I was more adicted to getting high than any paticular means of achieving that aim. Certainly I would crave the high that I obtained from taking acid, and when I came down I would want to get it back, but the same could be send for any substance I use during the time.
I needed to not be in the world that I was in, and anything that would take me away was ideal, so I maybe wasn't technically adicted to acid, although, or any particular substance at all. It was the escape that the highs offered that I was adicted to.
Does that make sense? I think I know what you were curious about, whether acid is technically adictive, and I think perhaps we need to look at the question, and not just for acid but all substances, from another angle. People get addicted to the sensations caused by the drug, not the drug itself. I thank god I never did heroin because the high is supposed to be amazing and I might never have come back.
But coke is supposed to be this horribly addictive drug, but I never enjoyed it, so never became addicted to it.
It's the same with my pain medication. I take morphine on a regular basis, three times a day, but I hate the sensation of the high it induces (which makes me grateful that I know longer experience it) but that doesn't prevent it from working as pain medication. In times past when I have had to utilize morphine, I have never had any difficulty stopping because I don't like it. Perhaps because I'm using it for a specific purpose and not recreationaly that also changes my perspective of it.
Anyway, I guess that was a longer answer than what you expected, but it's the closest I can come to answereing. Again I apologise for my delay in responding.
cheers
Richard