Conversation with an Opiate User in a Steam Room

I had an inspiring, impromptu discussion about drug use with a guy yesterday in the steam room at my local "European Style spa."  

The steam room? You might ask. Well, yes, I believe in living as relaxing a life as possible and then finding ways to escape from that relaxing lifestyle. To achieve and maintain that, you have to get lucky and work very hard, but that's a topic for another time.

Meanwhile, for less than the cost of an Equinox gym membership, I can flee 7 days a week to the steam room, sauna, jacuzzi, and then, say, spend an hour or three napping on the recliners in the "quiet room" at 4PM on a Thursday. The "quiet room" was also the name of the boxy cell at Reiss 4, the mental ward at St. Vincent's, where they locked up unruly patients who needed to calm down.

Last night, the steam was piping hot, but the lights were set too bright. There was one other person in there, and I asked him if I could dim them. He had to pull his earbuds out of his ear to say, "sure."

"Ha, I've been here many times, but I've never seen anyone with an iPod!"

"Yeah, well, I can't be alone with my thoughts for too long, " he said.

"Ah yeah," I went on, "this is actually the one place I come to shut off the soundtrack and sit with my thoughts."

We talked about the differences between the sauna and the steam room. He didn't like the long, slow sweat of the dry heat vs. the instant return-to-the womb effect that the steam provides. "Yep you gotta work for your sweat over there."

I went on about my spa philosophy. "I am, I think, getting better at doing the whole circuit. Now I try to do one or two cycles in here, then 15 minutes in the sauna, then come back. Just depends how badly I need to detox. Although I also come here as often as possible, period."

He instantly responded to the word "detox" and said, "Oh well right now, that's part of the plan. I am trying to get completely clean."

So it began.

***

He is a well traveled, successful TV producer and photographer, and he has a prescription pill habit that he is trying to eliminate from his life.

Notice: I am veering away from using words like "addiction" and "recovery" or mentioning exactly which drug he is "hooked" on. Our conversation started using those terms, and at first we fumbled through some distinctions about the relative harms of weed vs. opiates vs. coke, but it quickly went to a much more productive place.

I said, "what I'm learning is, it's all the same, we're just using various substances to treat some kind of pain or problem."

"Yep, it's all based on some stuff that happened when we were, like, five years old" he said.

I was eager to change the tone of the conversation in a more uplifting direction and also couldn't resist the chance to frame this conversation in the mind of Dope Stories.

"Dude," I said, "you gotta check out this new podcast I started called Dope Stories. We just interviewed a professor from Columbia, Dr. Carl Hart, who, like, instantly helped reshape the way I think about all this stuff." He seemed interested. The heat pumping out of the pipes added a physical challenge to the discussion, but we kept it going.

"What's your thing?" He asked.

"Crack. Well, freebase, er, ya know, whatever you want it to call it."

"Oh yeah, I've never tried that one. Coke, yes, but never crack."

"Well yeah," I said. "It's sort of the same thing really. I just like to cook it up and smoke it instead of sniffing it."  He understood.

As the steam hissed and the smell of eucalyptus circulated, my new acquaintance and I continued to talk; he was sitting with a towel wrapped around his waist and the aforementioned MP3 player in his hand, I was sitting bare on top of my towel and a bottle of water, as per my usual MO. Meanwhile two guys walked in wearing bathing suits. The conversation we were having about drug use didn't skip a beat, but these two guys didn't stick around much longer to be a fly on our wall.

"I think we scared them away," he said, laughing.

I was laughing too. "Yeah, not exactly surprising that two guys who wear a bathing suit to shvitz were not able to take that one."


***

Then he explained the nitty gritty of his journey so far: This was day one of his detox--he was going "cold turkey" off a daily pill habit, and he had already unsuccessfully tried to kick the habit at a place called Cri-Help, which he described in familiar-sounding terms (see the above link about my institutionalization) as places where drug users are confined in a location like criminals, smokers penned off into a corner, no ability to use the phone or internet while getting off the dope. A recipe for failure.

Now, he was trying a new program that involves his being accompanied for several days by a "sober living partner" and seeing a therapist two times a week while he goes through the toughest part of physical detox. I will try to get the name of the program from this man (just as I got his permission to share this story), because it sounds to me like a potentially great "recovery model."

He explained to me that although he was doing well in his life, he saw the amount of pills he was using as a hindrance to achieving the next level of success. "When I realized, going on a business trip, that the first thought in my packing routine was figuring out how many pills I'd need for the duration, I knew I ought to make a change."

"You got this," I told him, "I think you're clearly taking the positive steps to get rid of the habit. You should be proud of where you're at so far with it."

I tried to explain to him how I interpreted Dr. Hart's philosophy. I told him I thought Dr. Hart would consider him an example of the vast majority of drug users, whose lives are interesting, if not also inspiring.

This man is not a "highly functional functional drug user" as the soon-to-be-antiquated language goes. That is a back-handed assessment which now seems absurd and diminutive to me. He is a straight-up productive, happy, upbeat guy who pays his bills and maybe even occasionally enjoys traveling and sports.


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He is a tennis player too, and to relate the discussion with Dr. Hart back to our shared sport of choice, I told him how Hart stated that Andre Agassi, in his book, reported a negative interpretation of his own experience with crystal meth that didn't correspond to the reality. The proof that meth's harms are exaggerated, Hart asserted, was partly evidenced in Agassi's ability to maintain a career in professional sports despite using the drug. Agassi handled his business and played tennis matches all around the world.

"Well," he countered, "at the time, he was not doing well on the circuit, his ranking suffered..."

"Maybe true," I said, thinking about it now more critically, "but I think Dr. Hart would say that was the consequence of whatever emotional or psychological phase he was going through, rather than a direct product of the drug use."

I think it felt good for both of us to just be able to talk through this stuff like intelligent, rational adults, rather than prisoners of a binary thought system.

Here was a guy on "Day 1 of Detox" from prescription opiates, the type that everyone automatically accepts to be "highly addictive." Was he sitting off in the corner of some room, cowering, shivering, hating life? No. He was taking appropriate measures to replace his reliance on pills with healthier things like spending a Saturday evening in the steam room and then getting a massage. What did you do with your time this past Saturday evening?