Codeine, Pt. I

Espousing the use of mild opiates


I got addicted to codeine in the first three months of moving to Bristol. I didn’t become a hopeless and pathetic opiate fiend - it was only a five pill a day trip - but by the time I moved out of the first share house I‘d managed to cultivate a healthy dependency, enough to set my mind spiralling into a drug hungry depression whenever I wasn’t numbed by downers.

It all started when I found eight boxes of expired pain killers stashed at the back of the medicine cabinet of my landlords flat. This was after about a week of living there. God knows why he had such a stockpile, the guy was certainly no pill popper; he was more of a clean living, semi-autistic. I imagined he’d undergone some hideous surgery, and had opted to persevere with the pain rather than use the nerve numbing depressants doctors had thrown at him, perhaps as some pointless sadomasochistic sacrifice to whatever misguided belief about weakness he had...


djb.