I had the opportunity to talk at length with ALL the long-term drug addicts in the area where I live, people who stayed addicted to hard drugs for decades, often having survived heroin/opiate addiction before developing dependence on cocaine/crack, very rare people, able to compare not only the short-term effects or the ways each drug creates addiction, but also the subtle long-term psychological differences, those “weak signals” in the middle of a storm, which only prolonged use over time can make you fully perceive.
All these people, although there are huge differences among them in psychology and life experience, told me the same thing, confirming a sentence uttered by one of them that sums up the concept well; I report it below, with minimal changes: “when I was doing heroin my life was destroyed by it and I was risking my skin because of the risk of overdose BUT …I WAS STILL ME, with crack maybe I don’t risk dying, BUT I’M ANOTHER PERSON, I THINK WITH ANOTHER HEAD”.
I absolutely agree with this statement and I have verified its truth in many people including myself; drawing on a comic and film series I will make an analogy that in my opinion explains well the underlying message, the essence of the sentence and of the testimonies I collected: In the Marvel X-Men saga it is hypothesized that the genes responsible for our evolution can be stimulated, accidentally or intentionally, generating in each individual an early mutation toward another evolutionary stage.
Since evolution is a mechanism that proceeds by trial and error, each human being evolves differently, toward a different “species”, so for example someone becomes super-strong, someone grows wings and flies, others take on very powerful psychic powers, others regenerate extremely fast and can heal from mortal wounds in a few seconds; in short, in each human being a different mutation occurs, not predictable before “triggering” the mutation.
THAT’S IT: if one takes derivatives of the coca leaf, and particularly in the case of crack, something similar happens with respect to the person’s psychology: everyone “changes” psychology in a different way, and there is no way to understand in advance the nature of the change.
Yes of course, some effects are very common: snorted cocaine tends in most cases to give a kind of “sense of omnipotence” that often translates into increased aggressiveness, while the state of pleasure reached tends to make one “inert”, meaning basically indifferent, even when very serious/unpleasant things happen around us...BUT THE KEY POINT is that YOU literally BECOME SOMEONE ELSE, it’s as if an “alternative” version of ourselves, sprung from nowhere, showed up and took control, often without us even realizing it!
Under the effect of cocaine/crack one evaluates facts/circumstances/memories in a very different way, one notices aspects and/or nuances that were previously invisible/unknown and in general our judgment is noticeably altered, and the way this happens is individual and absolutely unpredictable a priori.
I have reached the conviction that the use of cocaine and/or crack induces a kind of split personality (more properly D.I.D., Dissociative Identity Disorder); the first time I observed and described this behavior was with a person very special to me, whom I called Miriam in the book dedicated to her; I report below the link to the relevant chapter:
At first I thought it was simply one of the immediate effects of taking the drug, destined to disappear along with its elimination, but today my fear is that, with intense/prolonged use, this effect tends to become stable and remain even when the drug is no longer taken.
The fascinating thing, and the most painful for me in the personal relationship with Miriam, is that the two (or more) personalities tend to COEXIST STABLY, as if inside the same body, regardless of the behaviors of the moment, the two personalities were ALWAYS present, each with its own evaluation and judgment, with the consequence of making both the person and the relationships they maintain with the rest of the community intrinsically “unreliable”.