How Music Brought Me Through a Heroin Habit
I used junk to cope with breakups, underemployment, and various other disappointments
It’s a sweltering early-August evening in 2013. Outside the window of my new psychiatrist’s blissfully air-conditioned office, Manhattan is sweating through the middle of another long, hot summer.
A spectacled, besuited, diminutive, goateed man in his mid 40s, my psychiatrist is one of Columbia University’s leading addiction researchers and has spent the last fifteen minutes clutching a small whiteboard and drawing out diagrams of synapses and neurochemicals in dry-erase marker. He’s talking to me, yes, but he seems aloof, far away, like a professor in a lecture hall. Trying to match his level of dissociation, I look out the window at Madison Square Park and think back on the past seven weeks.
“I understand why you probably wanted to use —
heroin is the most powerful anti-anxiety drug there is.”
It’s my second day out of rehab.
I’d spent the better part of that summer — forty-one agonizingly slow, harrowingly introspective days — at Ambrosia Treatment Centers’ Port St. Lucie, Florida facility, scrawling self-analytical prose in a notebook, reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian over and over, and vying for control of the TV remote with the five or so twentysomething-year-old guys with whom I shared a ranch-style house.
My doctor discusses the medicine I’m to start taking next week. Vivitrol, the brand-name version of the opioid blocker naltrexone, is supposedly a foolproof way to keep me off of heroin. He prescribes me pill-form naltrexone to take until the Vivitrol arrives. The naltrexone will make my stomach burn, that whole first week out of treatment. And my doctor neglects to mention that Vivitrol, which I’ll get once a month for the next eighteen months, is a shot in the ass of a powder mixed with a gelatin-like substance. It leaves a rather sizable lump, which smarts for several days.
But the physical discomfort doesn’t matter, at least when compared with heroin withdrawal. In fact, nothing could be as bad as withdrawal: sweats, chills, shakes, watering eyes, diarrhea, cramps, vomiting, and a very special kind of pain — the kind that crawls over your skin, aches in the marrow of your bones, even makes your teeth hurt. It’s sisyphean: you have to do junk every day just to feel normal, to get right, lest you go into withdrawal. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
And besides, I’m out of the woods, for the most part. I’m out of rehab, in AA, about to start an intensive outpatient program, and on meds that wouldn’t let me get high even if I tried. And hell, I think, at least I’ll finally be able to play guitar in peace while I’m living at my mom’s apartment. At least I can still play music.
I’ve been playing an instrument for about as long as I can remember. My father, a classically trained percussionist, started me on drums at seven or eight years old, and I’ve been sort of hooked on music ever since.
From my childhood through high school, I did pretty much anything one could do, musically speaking. I went to band camp; I played in local community orchestras and regional bands, both with and without my dad; I competed for statewide ensembles. I became utterly engrossed in music. I taught myself guitar and bass. I joined a slew of bands and played everywhere from Carnegie Hall to the lowliest Rutgers University basement, sometimes running the shows, themselves.
At college, I ceased my formal study of music but continued performing. I practiced guitar for hours on end, writing an EP (which I would end up selling and promoting on the 2010 Vans Warped Tour) and a full-length record before I graduated.
Saying I was “into music” would be a drastic understatement. Music gave me focus; it made me goal-oriented. Thinking back, now, it probably did me a world of good, developmentally speaking.
I suppose music also brought me to heroin.
I was twenty-two when I first tried heroin — or junk, or smack, or dope, or diesel, or whatever you want to call it. I remember the moment so vividly. December 2011, right before I moved into New York; a friend’s house — I was there to record an acoustic version of a song I’d written in college. While I was tuning up, my buddy pulled out a glassine envelope with a golden-brown powder inside and told me what it was. He asked if I wanted to try it. I only hesitated for maybe a second or two.
I’d tried a palette of substances in college — LSD (once), mushrooms (twice), coke, pain pills, benzodiazepines — but I never developed a habit beyond smoking pot pretty frequently, and smoking maybe five or six cigarettes a day. Unlike a lot of the kids you may read about these days, as the nationwide heroin and prescription pill epidemic grows to unmanageable proportions, I didn’t “graduate” to junk from painkillers like Vicodin, Percocet, and Oxycontin. To say that would imply consistent usage, but that wasn’t the case.
Immediately, I fell in love with the drug. I wanted more. I started buying individual glassine envelopes from my friend. The high was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It was as if every aspect of my burgeoning anxiety disorder was muted, negated.
That year, 2011, had been especially jarring for me. I’d started the year by touring with a band. Then, I spent a month in a Massachusetts studio, recording a thirteen-song opus of a concept album, on which I played most of the instruments. But the album floundered and, after spending a summer working at a pizzeria where I was subject to casual racism — like the time I was told “they got your uncle up there on the TV!” the day after Osama Bin Laden was killed — I found myself in a dead-end internship at a now-defunct media company.
I remember my first panic attack, at that office in August of 2011. I remember stepping onto the balcony outside the office and frantically smoking a cigarette, trying to calm myself down.
After I left the internship, things got worse. I was in a disintegrating relationship, the depression and anxiety I’d been experiencing were becoming overwhelming, my prospects of employment looked decidedly grim, and I’d just about worn out my post-collegiate welcome at my parents’ house. At the moment I encountered serious adversity for the first time in my life, I stumbled into heroin.
I moved into Manhattan, and for the next year, I let addiction circle me like a shark, gyring ever closer. I scaled up my usage to cope with breakups, independence, underemployment, and various other disappointments.
The first time I realized I had a serious problem was January 1st, 2013. I’d gone into withdrawal at a New Year’s party, having made some resolution to, well, stop doing heroin. I’d never felt anything like it. I spent the next few days in agony. I was so sick that first night, I’d actually scream from the pain as I writhed in bed, sweating and quaking. My bones felt like they were splitting open inside me. A ceaseless stream of tears rolled down my face, but I wasn’t crying.
When I picked up again, it was like coming home, like wrapping myself in a warm, etherizing blanket. From there, full-on addiction was merely an inevitability.
Over the next six months, my consumption grew to ten bags, or a “bundle,” a day. I became hopelessly addicted; my days became a never ending quest to make just enough money for a bundle and the subsequent trip to Bushwick, Newark, or the Upper East Side so I could pick up. Once I did, I’d hole up in my room, play guitar, gorge on Ben & Jerry’s, and write papers for college kids to make more money to spend on junk.
My daily trips to procure more heroin became rituals. On the subway out to Dekalb Avenue or 68th Street-Hunter College, I’d listen to the same records over and over, and I became conditioned to associate certain albums with my usage. Polyenso’s One Big Particular Loop and Alkaline Trio’s My Shame Is True became the soundtracks to my addiction. To this day, I’m triggered by those records; one song, and every feeling, every memory from my time as a junkie comes flooding back.
Early that year, I’d joined a band, but the guitarist/founder stopped calling when he realized I was a junkie. How could I blame him? His brother had died from the stuff, and he could no longer trust me after seeing a bag of smack fall out of my pocket.
Without an active musical project to pursue, all I could do was sit in my room, crank up the ‘verb on my shitty combo amp, and write. And what do you think I wrote about? I’d churn out self-pitying, junk-soaked lyrics like, “Nod off at dinner / Live my life half awake / Never quite knew what soul was / Guess I’ve got none to break.” My art became a morbid imitation of my life: my guitar slurred with reverb, and soon, all I could write about was doing heroin and the prospect of dying.
By June, following a self-destructive relationship and another messy breakup, along with a period of unemployment, I had reached a personal bottom. I went to my family and asked them for help.
I spend four days a week going to the Center for Motivation & Change in midtown Manhattan. The treatment is called dialectical behavioral therapy, and it involves a lot of group dialogue and mindfulness-type meditation. The psychologists at CMC are attentive and seem genuinely interested in what we in the day program have to say. It’s pleasant, if not a little tedious. We keep track of our moods, our cravings, our worries.
Day program only sort of gels with the regimen of proscriptive, dogmatic Alcoholics Anonymous meetings I’ve begun attending. While the folks at CMC espouse open-mindedness and understanding through dialogue, my compatriots at the one or two meetings I attend daily seem almost religious in their practice of total abstinence and their reverence of the so-called Big Book. But this doesn’t stop me from making friends in the twelve-step program, and I end up with something that resembles a routine: day program in the morning and afternoon, AA in the evening, and, almost always, a little diner near the West 4th Street subway station for one or two cups of coffee afterward.
In my downtime, I hang out at my mom’s place in the Village. I look for jobs online, read, and play guitar loud enough to be sure I’d get a complaint if most of the neighboring apartments weren’t under construction. I clean out my former apartment and move whatever meager belongings I’ve got back to my parents’ house in Jersey. Sometimes, when the people I met in Florida reach out to me on Facebook, I thumb through my notes from rehab.
There’s a list of songs in there. It’s bulleted alongside “Reasons I Can’t Believe in a Higher Power” and a litany of fruits and vegetables a visiting nutritionist said we absolutely needed to buy organic. I’d jotted it down over the course of my tenure at Ambrosia, this shopping list of songs I’d meant to download upon my return. The artists listed are all over the place: Broken Bells, Don Henley, Machine Gun Kelly, Bright Eyes, G. Love & Special Sauce.
I didn’t get to hear much music in rehab. We’d listen to the radio during van trips between the cluster of houses in which I lived and Ambrosia’s treatment center, or on trips to and from local NA or AA meetings. But unless one particular tech, Tommy, was driving, all we got was top 40 radio. Apart from that, there wasn’t any music to be heard unless one of the few patients who’d brought a guitar was playing, or unless one of those guys decided to lend me his guitar for the afternoon.
This stunted ability to make or listen to music dismayed me. Music was such a dominant facet of my life, I wasn’t used to not having access to it; I needed it to center myself, to retain my sanity while I was kicking heroin. So I made do. I wrote lists of the music I needed to download when I returned home. I started harmonizing to the top 40 hits we’d hear in the van. I borrowed a guitar from anybody who’d lend one to me, including one kid, Randy, a twenty-year-old Myspace-scene kid with arms adorned by Pokémon tattoos.
In exchange for letting me use his guitar, Randy asked me to teach him a few tunes by bands like Brand New and Taking Back Sunday, meaning if I wanted to work on a song or just play some familiar ditties, I had to suffer through Randy’s ham-handed attempts at forming power chords for at least an hour. I didn’t actually mind teaching him; the minor annoyance of helping him learn a song or two was nothing vis-à-vis the prospect of not being able to play music at all. Randy eventually got kicked out of Ambrosia for his complicity in a scheme run by some of the other patients to smuggle Triple C into the residences.
I think part of me knew the only way I was going to keep it together was if I held a guitar once or twice a week or if I occasionally crooned a harmony to that awful Daft Punk and Pharrell song when it played through the van’s radio. All the forced feelings, the introspection, the pitiful scrawling of whiny answers to the exercises I was assigned, the twelve-step ideology, the constant sharing — it might’ve proven too much for me to handle without the diversion music provided.
In my more optimistic moments, though, I’d like to think music might’ve played some part in other addicts’ therapy — not just my own. I’m not the first person to acknowledge the relationship between music and addiction. “Many addicts talk about ‘using’ music interchangeably with drugs, listening obsessively to music during periods of abstinence,” says Tsvia Horesh, an Israeli registered music therapist who’s written extensively about the application of music therapy in treating substance abuse. “Music fills the emotional vacuum they feel without drugs, drowns out overwhelming thoughts and emotions… Relying on drugs for these capacities, for so many years, they are unable to cope without external help, and music fills that need.”
Like the stereotype of the druggie musician, the notion of music having therapeutic value with respect to addiction is hardly new. And indeed, the comorbidity of mental health and addiction issues in musicians is well documented. Hell, at the very least, maybe having me around to play guitar and sing songs meant the other addicts at Ambrosia benefited from hearing some music every now and then. And if that’s the case — if hearing music helped the other addicts half as much as it helped me — could it be possible that rehab programs across the country are missing an opportunity by not incorporating music into their programs in some form? Could AA do with a literal song and dance to go with the rest of its show?
After a month and a half of day program at the Center For Motivation & Change and three straight months of twelve-step meetings, I’d just about had it with the whole “treatment” kick. Even though my circle of AA friends and my sponsor offered a wealth of support, I was ready to leave the “fellowship.” I convinced myself that, having been away from heroin for several months, given the short duration of my heroin problem, and considering the level of my usage (I never made it to the “shooting up” phase; had I, I would’ve doubtless had infinitely more trouble getting off junk), I could give moderation a go. Maybe I wanted to test the limits of Vivitrol; maybe I wanted to test myself, my body, and my willpower; maybe I just really wanted to be able to have a beer. In any case, I left both my outpatient program and Alcoholics Anonymous in the fall of 2013, found a job teaching the SAT to high school kids, and moved back out on my own.
I discovered that not all addicts are created equal, a point on which my opinion differs drastically from AA’s canon (The Atlantic recently published an incredibly in-depth exegesis on this notion). I was able to have a beer or two without feeling the need to down a bottle of whiskey. I could smoke a joint without experiencing the urge to pick up a harder drug. As it stands, I haven’t touched an opiate since June 21st, 2013.
I probably never would’ve made it through my addiction in one piece without music. All that hurt I had inside me, all that darkness and worry, I wrote it all out, song after song, once I kicked heroin.
To be sure, I’m incredibly lucky. I never experienced any lasting legal or social consequences, my treatment was almost entirely covered by my father’s health insurance, and I have a huge network of friends and family who continuously support me. Being able to reflect on my experiences from the other side of addiction is a luxury many addicts won’t get. I had to miss summer, one year; people lose their lives to this disease. I will never take that notion for granted.
In the end, music helped me retain my humanity, my sense of self, and my will to endure the travails of substance abuse. Every time I pick up my guitar, write a lyric, swing a drumstick, or hum a tune, I’m reminded of how music helped me exorcise the specter of addiction and wrest my soul from its maw. For that, I suspect I’ll always be grateful.
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Illustrations by Miko Maciaszek
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