Two Years Opioid Free: Cannabis and Compassion Brought me Freedom after 24 Years of Addiction

4 Shares

The years of working as a compassion provider have edged up to nearly a decade - and the plight to continue keeping patients in products hasn't been made any easier by the likes of 2020.

What has made life easier is the lack of Opioids – on 1/26/2019 a year ago today a decision was made to leave them behind. It could not have come any sooner as withdrawing during the historic lockdowns and quarantines would have been too much to handle.

As it is this year has brought a number of relapses to the world of addiction and recovery with the stress, angst, and anxiety all have endured. As a couple, Anne Mari and I fight our past dependencies together. As a family we are one of recovery – our bond is tighter than any you could imagine.

It was only 4.5 years ago that I encountered Anne Mari and her daughter Genevieve – an angelic 13-year old that was so stuck in her world of Autism, Epilepsy, and severe OCD. She was noncommunicative and seized most of every day – when her mom reached out for compassion back in 2016 she was just another parent needing help.

But, when I got to the house I now call home I didn’t meet just another child needing oil – I met Genevieve. To those that have followed her they know exactly what I mean in that sentence. I met an angel – one that had lost her biological father a decade earlier to the same type of drugs I was addicted to for cancer pain and had taken for decades – Opioids.

Many have followed our journey as a family that has together fought off a myriad of health issues with cannabis and hemp extracts – as well as the plant itself. Genevieve thrives now after living a life that was so limited due to her various severe diagnostics – she seized so often and for so long it caused her to regress all the way back to a young child developmentally.

Only the delivery of compassion and love changed that – and at the same time, it changed the person who brought it to her – the man she’s called Daddy for the last 4 years. Genevieve has been an instrumental part of my recovery and ability to beat Opioids. But this article is not one to go over the beauty of the Cannabis Love Story or the family it created – instead we’re digging deep into how the addiction started in my body’s chemistry. I started my opioid exit all the way back in September of 2017 and wrote about it at 4 a.m. in this blog.

I started young on those pharmaceuticals – and although never had an illicit habit with street drugs like Heroin or anything like that – the number of pharmaceuticals and type were immense. “Are these just for this month or a 90 day supply?” I remember a pharmacist questioning me one time when I picked up the Oxycontin, Oxycodone quick release, and the Fentanyl patches.

I was on all 3 of these powerful, and often deadly drugs, at one time. They were prescribed for severe pain as I had been paralyzed in 1995 after a brutal racing wreck and again in 2003 in the midst of cancer treatment in my first battle – with extreme peripheral neuropathy each time as my body woke back up the need to stop the pain was extremely real. Between that and the countless bones broken I always had an ‘automatic okay’ for pain medications – never was there a worry that I’d be in that group that gets cut off.

Most that knew me couldn’t understand what I was saying by the time it got dark out. “We try to leave by the afternoon Mike, I never come over after 2 pm because I can’t understand you brother,” a good friend told me when I lived in Hawaii – this was 2005. It wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up back then in a daze sitting in my wheelchair wondering who was there and why.

I remember the blur and blackouts I’d have – and how my doctor would write it off as some type of seizure activity when I would tell him that I forgot what had happened the week before or lost an entire day.

Not one time did that doctor say “I think I’m giving you too many pills. Maybe the 1080 5mg Oxycodone’s for breakthrough pain isn’t necessary with those 100 mic Fentanyl patches and the 80mg Oxycontin.” I remember a ton but I do not remember ever hearing that. What I do remember was a very interesting exchange on the phone last year with that doctor who has since retired. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know” were his words – and I accepted that apology.

As a researcher, the knowledge is at hand in regards to how easily a clinical trial can be skewed and how to target a conclusion – which means research is done knowing what you’re going to ‘discover’ as the study is being done only to create a product, drug, or something to sell. Purdue pharmaceuticals, we all know due to Federal Court findings and arrests, targeted a conclusion that stated their drugs were safe.

I had to tell that doctor it wasn’t his fault – he was only following the leader and the true drug peddler gave me Oxycontin back in 1998 right after it’s approval. I was his very first patient to ever use it, “Mike we’ve got a new drug that won’t make you sick like Morphine is, I’ll write you a prescription for it’s highest dose, I think that will help you.” Those words stick in mind and his voice I’ll remember forever. Yes, he helped me to start slowly unraveling life. As much as I held it together now and then – even for years at a time – that first prescription to Oxycontin started the addiction that came to an end 2 years ago today.

This photo was taken by Anne Mari on the Day that we met in August of 2016.

When I examine my own addiction and take ownership of it – something a recovering addict should do in order to truly heal – I have to look back to when it really started. I was 11 years old and racing dirt bikes and took a spill that broke a wrist and ankle at the same time – I needed crutches but couldn’t even use them. I remember being alone scooting myself to the bathroom – mom was at work – I stopped and grabbed the bottle that was on the kitchen table and literally chewed on 3 of the pills the doctor gave. It was codeine – the chemical balance of my brain changed as I chewed down the rest of that bottle over the following week.

Now, most won’t think much about what happened when they were 11 years old – most definitely an addict isn’t going to tie together what they did as a kid to alleviate pain from broken bones to what they did as an adult addict right? Wrong. My addiction was to pharmaceutical pain medication so when digging that event at such a young age wasn’t the first. My addiction inventory of use brought me all the way back to age 9 – I went to the dentist to get a cavity filled and he told me about how nobody used Novocain when he was a kid. “We didn’t get shots, we just got the drill,” he said.

So, being a young strong kid I wanted just the drill and away that dentist went. Within a minute I was screaming and in ran my mom who was beyond irritated at the fact I was just drilled on without a shot. Immediately the dentist, being that this was the mid 70’s, opened his cabinet and pulled out some pills “take one of these, no, take two”. That was my first introduction to Codeine – an opiate.

The road to recovery always comes with obvious signs of addiction

Some may think that is meaningless but it’s far from it – when our MU or Delta opioid receptors gain access to external or ‘Exo’ opioids or opiates they start replicating – we end up with more receptors than we need. Then a secondary action occurs that causes us to want opioids whether we have a craving for them or not – our body slows in producing the B-endorphin that lands on both these opioid receptors once we introduce external opioids. The receptor was meant for the human endorphin – and it’s powerful.

How come the person just shot in the gut sits up and tells you who did it before they die – yet the person who just stubbed their toe can’t talk at all? It’s all in that B-endorphin – the more pain we have the more of it pours throughout our body and literally numbs us. All we need is one use of external opioids and we start messing with that whole system – which makes us want more.

It’s no surprise when I go into my annuls of addiction I find that shortly after the dentist’s visit at age 9 I had another one at 10 – and I asked for the pills and got more of them. I remember counting them and ‘saving some’.

But here we are in January of 2021 all these years later and looking all those years back to times of paralysis to the now – it’s been an incredible journey. Being a cannabis compassion provider has always come with its bumps in the road. I can’t count the number of times I’d break out the Oxycodone 15mg tabs that were prescribed for Bone Metastasis during a 3.5-year cancer battle and take them because I just couldn’t handle the emotions of it all. The pain wasn’t the issue as far as physical but watching as people suffered and literally begged for the mercy of the plant was often more than I could take psychologically in the beginning – when compassion died often I dosed with opioids.

Over 3000 boxes went out to people in need during the first 3 months of the Pandemic Lockdowns

I have to admit that to myself and to the world as I move forward into a new era – a powerful and bold virus has taken the world into its grips. It’s chewing up people’s mental and physical health and spitting it out like it simply does not matter. The compassion of the past and the experiences of it seasoned me to handle what went down in 2020. I don’t believe any other recovering addict would have handled the ‘100,000,000 milligram giveaway’ very well without the mountain of tears I’d cried and seen helping the masses over the last decade.

As this day comes to a close I think about the number of articles I was going to write on my 2 year anniversary – all of the different subjects to cover – and I realize that there’s an entire year to go over them. We’ll start slow by looking back at how the addiction truly started. It’s important to backtrack and see where an issue began – if we don’t it’s really easy for that problem to pop back up and be a real ‘pill’ – I laugh as I use that pun. In the height of my addiction if I was to have only taken 1000 pills in a month it would have meant someone didn’t count right – it was closer to 2000 pills a month.

“You eat enough pills to sedate an elephant – I’m here to make you stop” an addiction specialist once told me when I was in an out-of-state hospital with nobody around to back up ‘my need’ as I called it. This was in 2015 and I was on the road as a compassion provider and also had 3 stage 4 cancers so I was pretty sick and had to take a lot of breaks in odd places.

I remember being discharged from that hospital in Washington and quickly getting on Amtrak to head back to pill friendly California where my oncologist was – and I literally went back to a Cancer Treatment Center I swore to myself I’d never step foot in again just to get a prescription along with validation from the pain management specialist who told me that I should “never listen to anyone but her”.

Boy was she a horrible judge of character – addicts are all liars. I’m very very happy to be in recovery and two years in – so far away from that start date but not so far as to get cocky. 2020 taught me a lot – one lesson was that nobody lives forever.

In memory of all the badass mofo’s who should still be here – all of you thought you were invincible. The pills kill and if they don’t get you they’ll lead you to an even grimmer reaper.