When I Was Dating an Addict

When I was 22 I fell in love with a closet heroin addict.  He would

come to my apartment on 19th and Mission street in San Francisco,

the heart of the drug market of the city and be able to score any

drug that he wanted just a few blocks away on 16th.  One time,

he came back home with his shirt ripped up and he had fear in his

eyes when I met up with him. He played the victim and i played the

savior. He told me he was robbed and I believed him. I had no idea

that a drug sale was part of this robbery. He would fall asleep to

me serenading Sarah Mclachlan “Angel” to him. “Spend all your

time waiting, for that second chance, for the break that would make

it okay. There’s always some reason, to feel not good enough, and

it’s hard at the end of the day.  I need some distraction, oh a beautiful

release, memory seep from my veins. Let me be empty , oh yeah

weightless yeah, maybe, find some peace tonight, In the arms of

an angel…” little did I know that his angel was heroin and not me, but,

I was only 22 and I naturally gave men the benefit of the doubt.  He

was the same age as me. I took things at surface value because

his heroin addiction was just one of the many issues that I had to

deal with, but now listening to this song, I wonder how I couldn’t

have known better.  It takes experience I suppose to recognize addiction.

And now at 42, I have all that and more experience, too much experience

and street smarts that perhaps I wish I didn’t need to have.

The man that I find myself dating now is sick often.  He wakes up with
pounding headaches and doesn’t want to go to the doctor.  “you're not a
doctor, and you haven't lived with this your whole life. It's not meant to
be rude, but you've seen a small sliver of this. Cluster headaches and
migraines are a real thing” he says to me.
And frequent diarrhea and stomach aches and paranoia and social anxiety.
He can’t get through an entire movie without going to the bathroom feeling sick
twice during and he can’t get through hanging out in the park without the urgent
need to leave and go home to feel better.   And, we aren’t sexually active.
We’ve had sex once in 3 weeks. It’s early in the relationship, just a month
into a new thing that doesn’t have a lot of frequent contact so I feel like he is
reminiscent of other relations and other roads I’ve travelled before.  

It also reminds me of Walt Whitman’s character in Breaking Bad.
I almost stopped watching this show, 3 episodes in because his lies were
just triggering the shit out of me. I just could not empathize with his dying
of cancer ass regardless because the LIES just trump anything, even a life
or death matter.  Any relationship built of trust is what makes people WANT
to be at your bedside when you are dying, EXCEPT IF you lie to
their faces constantly, it changes the game entirely. Now, they feel like they
have the right to SPIT ON YOUR FACE while you are dying and even feel
justified to steal the savings from your debit card while laughing because it
becomes a vengeance game.  “I just want you to know that I am not naive
or stupid and I have worked with the stories of perhaps hundreds of men,
maybe thousands.” I told him. I have loads of experience “seeing”
things that I wish I wouldn’t have seen in my life. “I know you aren’t.” he says,
but I don’t think he know what I mean when I say these words. He told me
that he has never done drugs, and even asked me after I laid with him on a blanket
in the park kissing him after I did acid at a nightclub the night before.  “Can you get
high from kissing someone on acid?” which i calmly responded, no. There is no
such thing as a contact high from LSD, unless it is directly contacting the liquid with
the drug in it. Certainly not 24 hours after the high had been processed through my
body through dancing, peeing and sleep. NO such record of contact LSD high from
kissing exists. “You can only get herpes from kissing,”I joked, knowing that I had
already disclosed my herpes status to him before and that I really didn’t worry
about the contagious nature of my HSV  and neither did he because it had been
over 10 years since i had tested positive. I thought the question was incredibly
naive and even somewhat illogical for an intelligent person like him, however it
could stand to distract my suspicion that he could be addicted to any drugs
because of stated ignorance, but his symptoms certainly are reminiscent of
someone I knew before. .

Who is the addict in the room?

I want to go back to him again today but...Have you ever resisted a hot guy trying to have raw sex?? It's difficult and challenging to do ONCE! The thought of it makes me feel a pain in my abdomen. I wonder if there is a way to play with him again but safely. I doubt it. he is like the devil rearing his unprotected head into my vagina without a condom! Busting past my thin layer of resistance and covering myself with my dripping wet desire for his cock.

a gorgeous abdomen was an understatement, i ran my hands across its seeming perfection. 6 pack and the pelvic arrow lines that point below the waist line to his cock...every 20 minutes he'd plunge a needle full of coke into the veins in his arms. I stared at his body while he talked to me about fighting as a bouncer, as a jiujitsu fighter...He was hoping i was a junkie and that I would try to mainline some coke with him (no way!), or fuck him w/o a condom (no way!) but i was donating my time to be with him really, to lay on his physique and try to unravel its story. he could be the hero in the new James Bond type flick...you would never know...i been with junkies who lost their top row of teeth entirely and whose faces looked like it was literally just skin and bones on a good day but this man was still beautiful and it fascinated me.

he paid me $75 and i stayed for THREE HOURS! (It’s usually $2-300/hr minimum) that's how hot he was. i had been sitting in my desk working on a grant app for the last 6 hours before that..I made him take off his shirt after the first hour. I ran my face along his stomach and licked that lovely crack of pelvis that I love on a fit, well chiseled man. I absolutely exploited his beauty in exchange for my companionship. I couldn’t understand how he could look so great and do as many drugs as he did. All his stories about training in martial arts 8 hours a day reflected in his body. I felt as if I could get a contact high sometimes from IV drug users because the energy of that high is so strong. Twice I have laid with someone who has shot up something and felt a blissful aligning between our chakras that was just as deeply satisfying to me who wasn’t using as it was to them. They were getting high off the chemical, and I was getting high off of their chemicals. It helps me to remind myself that not ALL drug addicts are ugly people who have nothing to give in return to the world.

Introduding Earth Kratom from Long Beach, California

Today, I'm talking with Earth Heart Kratom, co-owner Brandon Bryant is a spirit technician who has a passion and expertise in plant medicines based in Long Beach, California.

Brandon, Tell me about your new business.

I'm importing kratom concentrate. Mood elevators
seem to be kind of hitting right now, people are finding
that they are effective.
I already work with other plant medicine
modalities so this seems to be a natural
expansion. Our source
for it is from the Netherlands, they do the processing and concentration.
The Kratom plant is usually from
Indonesia, but the strain
we sell is from Thailand. I put my order in for our
first large shipments, I have the
capsules and tools and hopeful to start sales in about a month.  

Kratom isn’t a session based medicine,it isn’t a psychedelic, it’s sold like a Tylenol.You can buy it in vape shops in California right now. We want to sell it with online marketing through our yet to be developed website; right now we are just selling it to
people we know.  I’ve bought a website. The plan is to import it, weigh it, and capsule it.
I can test for fentanyl and other research chemicals, so I make sure that none of that is in there.

Ibogaine is a session facilitated plant medicine that has helped many
people get off of opiates, including Brandon himself.

What is the big difference between Kratom and other opiate
kicking plant medicines?

It is illegal to offer services with Ibogaine, so Brandon
feels this fact, plus the ease of distribution are two
reasons to get into Kratom as a business.
In a Scientific American article, someone had been
using 10 ml of Dilaudid, a very strong opioid everyday.
His wife found out he was injecting and so he started on
Kratom and the story is that
he never had any dope sickness/withdrawal.
When he finally went to
the doctor, he wanted him off the kratom. The doctor
wanted him off kratom because, this is America and its
not FDA approved. When they took him off the kratom,
he STILL didn’t have withdrawal. It has a lot of promise
for me, as a recovering opiate addict, i often fear if I ever
get into an injury accident, then what am I going to do.
Kratom could be an alternative for that. It does affect
the opioid receptors in the brain, but so does coffee,
sex and everything else worth doing. I think in the same
sense it can be addictive like coffee is addictive, but I haven’t
found any research aside from headaches
and crotchiness as side effects.

It's great for my irritable bowel syndrome, i find when work

gets stressful and i get an episode of stomach cramps,

if I take 500-600ml (one capsule). I don’t currently have
chronic pain, and advil wouldn’t really help

with IBS problems. OTC painkillers don’t really help with
anxiety or depression, but Kratom seems to hit both; it works like
a standard painkiller and a mood elevator.

How does it compare to uses of medical marijuana?
I haven’t seen that cannabis is as effective as a pain killer,
CBD has some promising studies but there are some
psychosomatic stuff going with it.   

Do people get  high from doing Kratom?
Personally, i have not gotten high off it.  I’ve read stories
of people taking heroic doses off it so that they get high.  
There is some responsibility that the user has to take.
There is a potential for abuse but i believe it is way safer
than alcohol and safer than acetaminophen as far as what
it does for the liver. Any time we bring something into our
bodies, it should be to correct something and it should have
an end date.  We should always be striving to improve
our health. I measure [intake of anything] by the amount
of harm, and i do not believe that Kratom depresses the
respiratory system in the same way opiates do. Fibromyalgia
and other chronic pain conditions seem to respond well to it,
for people who rely on benzos for anxiety this could be a good
alternative for them.

Tanya J: Sexing, Scoring and Away from Home

My typical day...is a 30 -48 hour day and then a big 15 hour sleep.  Sometimes it starts at 7-8pm sometimes it starts at 3am...it really depends on so many things- where I am, who I'm with, how im working at that time (ie from the street or online), if I wanna go score, or if I have any specific plans. So even if i do very different activities or stick to wildly different times from day to day- I'm usually trying to take care of myself and people around me while working towards my own goals (making money, learning new things and trying to change some of the fucked up things in the world)  I use heroin basically every day..or at least I have done for the last 4 or So years... And I travel a fair bit - for work and to visit friends and family ...even when I don't plan on it I still end up moving around a lot.  A lot of the time its almost like there's this feeling that I'm being moved on or I'm about to be moved on. On the street in Narrm [Melbourne] police will issue sex workers and our clients "move on notices " if they think we are loitering with intent to solicit...and even if I dodge them, I see a regular client get told to move on & if he's seen in the area again its a 24 hour ban. And even if I rent an apartment there is this feeling of "how long will we last here" - places where sex workers and drug users have hung out for years keep getting gentrified so fast- and now im in Europe I similar things happening everywhere I go- in Amsterdam, in Oslo, in London...

Most days I spend a few hours texting/talking to potential clients and filtering through time wasters, and other people I get a bad vibe from.. And maybe on average I do one job a day.. Sometimes I might do three quickies (10-15 minute car jobs) in an afternoon,  other times I might do 3 bookings all week (and hopefully they are 1 hour or longer or otherwise I end up with no drugs and real sick hanging out)

But when work is really quiet it goes from good to double bad coz I'm not only broke but also going thru withdrawals for heroin and often also coming down off uppers ...but I'd rather have good times and some shit than just the same boring  same thing again and again. I enjoy being outside my comfort zone or challenging myself in different ways.

How do you travel over borders so much with a habit?

I have info and things on my devices but I just be vague and send heapsa texts but in trying to avoid extra risks .  I don't carry shit on me, they drug test everything I have twice for residue, question me for 3 hours as it is. It's like its better to be sick for 24 hrs than risk like everything when people are making fairly active watch. But anyway, finding shit, i dunno I think its easy in street based work ..either I find people somehow or I know enough people or place to go to then ask then to ask people  for things .. Like these days I just travel back and forth from Stockholm to Australia. I can get OST sometimes like methadone but I try avoid that now its easier being sick 24 hours than getting off and on methadone

I like to read a lot about history, take notes and share stuff with friends or my partner. If I don't make music or write poetry or spend time reading/listening to oral histories ...then I kinda sink down into a depressive hole... I need to do things like this to keep some hope in future or to distract myself from tendencies to be overly pessimistic & cynical

A big part of me taking drugs ( injecting heroin and smoking ice) is to find time and create the kind of mental state I want to be in to focus or relax or enjoy doing those kinds of things to the max... And also to treat myself and enjoy the money I earn from sex work- as a kind of investment in myself and how I feel.

Clear a$ FIJI: Make. That. Money$$

I'm laptopping in Fiji, buzzed on my second glass of white wine awaiting my taxi driver.  It's not as cheap as the Phillipines here so I have to be careful, but the weather is certainly perfect and much much cooler than summer in Japan.  It's actually winter here, its still warm and lovely.  Just not humid like Toikyo.  I made a spur of the moment purchase for a RT ticket to Sydney that cost $600.  The flight even had a 12 hour long stopover in Fiji!  I had never been here so I definitely was thinking really hard of some good reasons why I SHOULDN'T GO.  The purpose of the trip was work.  I am saving for a used laptop.  Last year, in LA my shit was all stolen out of the car.  I left it in an unlocked car while I dropped my friend off at the theatre he worked on and I popped in and out of the car parked in front of the theater all night.  It was still lifted.  But nice and quietly, no broken glass.  Just a clean lift.  You're welcome.  He left a sweaty t shirt in the backseat in lieu and it didn't actually dawn on me until hours later that the backpack that held my laptop was gone.  Definitely a stupid move on my part, so I stayed quiet for many months.  I was just going to have to do without my new machine.  Somehow.  Ten months later, I'm still trying to make the best out of the situation and trying to figureo out how I can get a digital production machine into my life again.  I'd just been approved of some new credit lines but if I wasn't making the $50-100 extra per month to pay off the cc card bills then charging something that I couldn't afford did not make logical sense.  Been there, done that.  Charge the future with no plan on how to pay your bills for it.  A lesson I think everyone who has a credit card quickly learns.

I am on a FB forum for sex workers that travel internationally.  I get notices when someone posts on my FB feed.  This woman had toured in Sydney and she wrote "I killed it.  I worked from 10am-10pm and I had to turn away all the drug users (mostly coke), and still did heaps great. Its your choice if you want to do it, but I choose not to." AND THAT SOLD ME.   DRUGS AND MONEY.  BOOM.  WHERE'S MY CREDIT CARD.  BITCH I'M SIGNING.  SYDNEY HERE I COME AGAIN.

It was Hulk like primal expression of being fed up with making minimum living wage working my ass off as a teacher in Tokyo, with no ability to even fathom buying a new computer, even with a credit card.  I've just been fed up with not having enough money.  Sex Work is about making changes and upward mobility happen.  Therefore this campaign is called OPERATION UPWARD MOBILITY DOWN UNDER.  I need a new used laptop.  I'm aiming for a mere $500 budget for a machine that do Final Cut and Photoshop.  I've been without these things for almost one year and almost convincing myself that I don't actually need a computer.  But, I do, I really really do.

I'm sick of the straight life I lead.  I'm sicking of not being able to be in control of my situation.  I'm sick of being in a place where men do not think I am attractive.  This is also a motivator.  Plus, I want to make money and do drugs.  And fuck.  I'm not even exaggerating.  I'm ready to let loose.  I've just passed something like a breaking point.  It was this need to really not let other agencies or stripclubs determine if I was going to be able to make this money, it was this strong desire to just fuck all those middle men and try to make this happen myself.  I have lost a lot of confidence in Japan since the Japanese male and I are not really on the same energetic wave length it seems.  I need to go to a place where I attract bees to honey again.  Be myself, the queen, the godddess again.  Get my grove back.  GET a laptop again finally. Take my art and music production out of hiatus.  I can do this.

Stormy is the New Black

Stormy Daniels got arrested at an Ohio strip club last night.  I don’t think she even had to wear orange because she was out on bail the same night and the charges were dropped the next day.  Her mug shot looked great. Straight from the stage to jail. Do not pass go. Do not crawl along the stage to collect your tips first.  Of course it was a set up. But Stormy’s got one of the hottest lawyers in media right now, Michael Avenatti who is quickly able to overturn the bullshit scheme.  The bad guys have to go back to the drawing board. She is lucky this time. It’s going to be hard to be more careful next time because even in liberal California clubs, touching of the buttocks in a sexual manner is considered prostitution, it is a grey area inside the clubs. In 70% of any city's clubs a dancers can be caught with a dick in the hand to really get the correct charge, which is the annual sting that happens in most of modern day “strip clubs” in America.  Just like it happens on the streets, on backpage and craigslist of the days. Stings. Sweep the bitches up. But this sting was different. Timely. When I was a stripper in 2000, I made a living not doing extras but that was me. It sounds like Stormy was caught on a technicality of touch without a penis involved, otherwise it would have been mentioned. And it sounds like it didn’t even happen in a private booth or VIP area which is where prostitution usually takes place. Also, in the media, none of them mentioned the charge name, which i wonder if it was prostitution? Lewd behavior? Unwanted touch?  I read the police report and it is written as if the touch is non consensual.

Defendant is charged with three counts of sexually oriented activity in a sexually oriented business.

She jumped down from the stage and put a customers face in her cleavage and smacked her boobs

against their faced and that is being framed as the crime.   Any police officer I have EVER chatted

with, including the ones that arrested me EVER thought that arresting prostitutes was a solution or a good use of their time.  I would LOVE to interview these cops and see if they can actually say their grounds for arrest to a camera with a straight face. NO. #NOT.YOU.TOO Nice touch getting one of

the lady cops to do the sting.  She’s probably like, oh dang I don’t get to dress like a hooker and

cruise the streets in my secret super whore costume and loving it tonite? I get to use department

money and get smacked in the face with some titties?  Stormy Daniels’ titties? Some police have it

rough. I do remember the firemen who came in the club periodically to do their fire inspection

NEVER flirted or acted inappropriately though. They’d roll through the club look at the exits in the

back and not smile or talk to anyone.  So it’s possible that the cops involved in the sting had some

inner narrative about making America safer by doing their jobs, playing inside their brain while Cardi

B was violently twerking so hard in their faces they couldn’t breathe. Smart strippers know the laws,

especially if they are full service sex workers.  The ones doing the hand and blow jobs and more in

the clubs are the ones we are trying ot get! Or some other narrative to divide good girls and bad girls

again. Touching someone’s buttocks with the intention of stimulation and vice versa, rubbing your

butt on the genitals til they come IS touching genitals with intention of orgasm or something like that and that is prostitution in most of the laws, but in most laws it is rarely enforced.  Once a year or so,

and often, like this totally politically motivated. Stormy could be risking her life, I unfortunately

imagine her dead, face down in a pool somewhere, faked suicide or overdose. I doubt she does

drugs, because i am sure it would have been exposed to the media vultures. Stormy and all of these bogus charges are my 12 Thai boys in the cave story. I want sexuality to come into the light out of

the cave. Even in America, we still have so long to go before men and women are equal in a lot of

key ways.  

Pills for ART, ART for Pills

Nan Goldin came up in the 1970s doing Heroin Chic photographs

before Calvin Klein branding created that term

in the 90s.  She is most known for her gritty

New York apartment documentary color

photographs of sex, queers, whores,

drugs and their lives of that time.  

its protagonists—including the

artist herself—are captured in intimate

moments of love and loss.

They experience ecstasy and pain

through sex and drug use; they revel at dance clubs and bond with

their children at home; and they suffer from domestic violence

and the ravages of AIDS. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is

the diary I let people read,” Goldin wrote.

The collection that evokes her main body of work known as “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” has been included in every major art museum in the world from the Museum of Modern Art to the Guggenheim in the U.S, a household name for photographers, especially those artists who came up when AIDS was bringing every down to their knees.  The Act Up Die In was coined at this time as direct action awareness to bring attention to this urgent issue. Goldin is bringing awareness through a Die In once again, to bring attention to America’s current opioid crisis. Goldin was addicted to heroin in the 70s and 80s and then almost 30 years later after she required prescription pain killers to relieve herself from the recovery of a pinched nerve surgery, she became addicted again.  This time the drug was oxycotin. She believes one of the wealthiest art beneficiary families The Sacklers are to blame. The Sackler family made most of their wealth by drugs and have “given back” via art philanthropy which they are more well known for world wide than the creation of Valium in the 60s and Oxycotin in the 90s.

“She says that Arthur Sackler, who ran an advertising agency that successfully marketed the drug Valium in the ’60s, essentially created the model that was later used by his brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, founders of Purdue Pharma in 1991, to sell OxyContin for profit, ultimately at the expense of lives. As a result, she believes that all Sacklers have an obligation to help end the opioid crisis.”  She wants art museums to stop taking donations from this family and she wants the Sackler foundation to create harm reduction projects and start to put money towards the current opioid crisis which she says, they helped to create. Nan Goldin found herself in the 3rd year of her addiction, eventually overdosing on Fentanyl which she thought was heroin because she had already two timed her prescription and ended up being cut off by her doctors, so she had to turn to the streets to get her fix.  The result was almost deadly, but unlike some lives like Prince that Fentanyl has claimed Goldin survived to tell and shout and use her global art star leverage to demand that the very museums that indeed did and do support her career as an artist even if they were partially responsible for her addiction clean the blood off their hands and not continue to act like they are unaware of the crisis that is killing more people everyday than ever before. She wants the public to become aware to and the work that she is doing is unlike any activism that any other artist is doing to challenge philanthropy and the opioid crisis at the same time.  Follow the money. Act Up.

Special K Saved Me

Ketamine  has been the subject of some media featuring the work that the drug has done to miraculously and rapidly reverse depression and suicidal ideations for its patients.  The one time injection treatments that one clinic is charging $450 per. The treatment must, like other psychological treatments be done under the supervision, intake assessment and close monitor of a nurse and psych team.  It is not FDA approved as an antidepressant but it is approved as an anesthetic. There are several clinical trials running at the moment, that will hopefully lead to its full legal and appropriate use. Dr. Mandel of Ketamine Clinics of Los Angeles says “Ketamine is the best treatment for depression.”  One of the ways Ketamine works is by blocking the NMDA (N-methyl D-Aspartate Receptor) one of the 3 major glutamate receptors in the brain. This receptor is involved in synaptic plasticity and memory functions, among other functions. A Ketamine induced blockade of the NMDA receptor results in an increase in glutamate.  This initiates a cascade of neurobiological events that researchers believe is one of the key reasons behind ketamine’s rapid antidepressant effects. “Ketamine has a half life of 2 hours and 45 minutes but the effects are lasting for months” Lisa Monteggia, pHd “We got involved with really looking at how K triggers an antidepressant effect because of the real need,” she states, “recent clinical data shows that about ⅓ of depressed patients don’t respond to anti-depressants, so what do you do for those patients?” Traditional antidepressants can take up to 8 weeks to work and the effects of ketamine can be seen in 60-90 minutes.  It is addictive and does have a long term toxic effect. Therefore, taking it outside of a doctor’s supervision can have detrimental results. I’m sure many party people are going to here about this and try to dose themselves, but I think psychological counseling in conjunction with treatment is the treatment that you definitely can’t get at any circuit parties or afterhours clubs. I think the most effective facilitations happen when your facilitator isn’t also on drugs and isn’t also dealing with the same issues as you, i.e not in mutual codependence, even though this model has been the one that has helped many many drug users cope for short periods of time, but sometimes the outcomes/come downs/withdrawals as we probably personally have witnessed have led some down to some darker paths.

Jeff Ellis is bipolar has been hospitalized at psychiatric facilities but somehow  was able to consistently stay employed most recently at the Sky Network as a NFL football analyst.  His wife lost her job and his daughter went away to college and he had what he calls a complete mental collapse.   “No matter how amazing my loving wife was, I was still alone. Mental illness means you are alone.” Jeff now says, after Ketamine treatments that he no longer has to feel alone.  

We can find a dozen youtube testimonials and at least 2 VICE documentaries on how Ketamine has saved severely depressed people’s lives.  Some have definitely expressed fear that the treatment could be outlawed soon and send them reeling back to where they started, perhaps even further into the darkness.  It seems likely that this could happen given that Jeff Sessions was recently on a campaign to “crack down” on recently legalized marijuana state operations. Luckily, the Trump administration’s priorities have been reappropriated, but because of the Fentanyl opioid crisis which has not seen a large support of harm reduction tactics being funded, I have my doubts that Ketamine treatments can be assured safety for long under this presidency.  

I used to identify as having depression about ten years ago.  At this time, I had been smoking weed daily since my twenties but I do remember for an entire year of the most severe times, there would be days in which I was triggered into a spiraling depression and I would drive as fast as I could straight to a medical marijuana dispensary.  Tears would be streaming down my face, it was difficult to think straight yet I was tunnel visioned to the straight road that I knew was what I needed when these breaks happened. I would get there regardless of any cost to get my instant cure from this agony that I was currently feeling.  There were a few places in Los Angeles that I could smoke on site after purchase, so I would sit down and smoke my first bong hit and count backwards 5-4-3-2-1...Relief. This was when I truly identified as depressed medical marijuana as a medicine for my depression, because it was. Suicidal ideations were there, and risky behavior was there because I couldn’t muster the effort to kill myself.  I was actually just hoping a client would do it for me. These days, I don’t identify as depressed and I don’t smoke weed in the same way. The last time I had one of these depressive attacks was right before I moved to Japan. Japan doesn’t have easy access to any kind of cannabis, in fact it is very very illegal. The fear that I would not be able to find this kind of relief if needed triggered the same kind of fear that I hadn’t felt for many years.  At this time, I was in Seattle and marijuana was legal for all uses and did not require a prescription. I remember tearfully asking a worker there, if he would just come with me somewhere to smoke for a few minutes so that I didn’t have to be alone. I was terrified of something unknown, something that my head had created and only cannabis was going to be able to calm these voices down and I knew it based on my experience. At this time, I was willing to beg a stranger who I gambled  might at least understand the relief that marijuana could provide to depression and paranoia. For some people, they feel more paranoia, fear and depression on cannabis, but for me, it never ever had this effect. The man who worked there obliged, even though workers were not supposed to smoke with customers, he could see that I was desperate. If you get to look into the eyes of a creature who honestly believes that she is about to die, you will know it and do what you can to save or help her.  It has worked for me during this period to have a tow truck driver take my car down off the hooks from being towed away miraculously. I wasn’t faking it or being dramatic. I honestly felt like I was going to die and maybe they knew that? I understand very very well the feeling of relief that the Ketamine treatment patients are gleaming about and I feel happy for them. I have heard other severely depressed/bipolar people speak about wanting to kill themselves everyday, one of them was another sex worker who would always post these kinds of thoughts on her Facebook wall.  I wish and hope that they could find relief for their pain. I knew that there was nothing I could offer emotionally that would be strong enough and that felt terrible but I didn’t want to add to their frustration by being just another person telling them to control their thoughts, meditate, run, or smoke weed. It takes a lot of inner work which some people are just for whatever reason unable or incapacitated by this illness to consider. To break through, it takes a strong desire to want to, and the very definition of depression is that you do not want to do anything. Even actually planning how to kill yourself takes effort that one might not have so you are just trapped inside your ideations for years.   Ketamine apparently is the new trend in ways to help you step outside of your own mind and see your life differently.