The Natural High

Jorge Quinones

Foreword In a world plagued by addictions of all types, various persons looking for internal peace have found it. Whether that addiction might be, there is an answer equal to the effect but opposite of that addiction. The natural high is not written by a physician or health expert. It is a recollection and recompilation in the quest for freedom of many individuals who have achieved it. Once bitten by addiction Science has no remedy up to date to cure it. Can addiction be controlled? Can addicted persons live up to the margin of their addiction? More people are dying because of their addictions instead of the other way around. An addict does not necessarily have to die to the horror of that disease. And this is the case of the ones who have achieved The natural high

Chapter 1 The most horrific plague I remember entering a courthouse. In a wall there was bulletin. It was about a handsome male model turned heroin addicted. The bulletin showed pictures of him throughout his life. The first pictures were of him from his successful model career. As his life continued his was bitten by the addiction. His life became tough. He lost his career. His health deteriorated so much he was not much of a figure he used to be. The last picture was taken when he was found dead on an overdose with a syringe piercing his vein. I remember the messenger guy that did the food runs for all the workers in a very famous prostitution area. He was addicted to crack cocaine. He was homeless and no one wanted anything to do with him. He cashed in the favors going for food on foot for one or two dollars a trip to finance his habit. The crack addict would sleep in the grey skull castle which was the name of a very famous large abandoned building in the area. Thats the place where also he was found dead. Blood excreted by ruptured organs. It was a sad case. I remember an old lady who after retiring from a long teacher career went to a casino for the first time in her life. She was bitten. All her retirement checks were spent in the casino plus all the money she would manage to get through a side line of work as a private teacher at home in the afternoon helping children that had difficulties in certain areas. One night in the casino she fell to the ground. Medical attention was needed. Her blood sugar levels had gone down too much for being in the casino for long periods of times. The addiction was stronger than the experience and kept going to the casino. This time she made sure she would eat the available food given free at the casino and all of the time her parking ticket would be cleared since she had lost even her parking money in the casino. She was in denial. Her deceased husband had a property he wanted for his two sons to inherit. The house was sold and the money lost in the casino. This was the last money the retired teacher spent in her life in the casino. Science had not understood addiction to a hundred percent. Otherwise they would have a cure and you would not see people begging for money in the streetlights or stealing from their loved ones and even from them since having money for your clothing and spending it on something else is stealing from yourself. It doesnt begin in the 20th century. Addictions come from ancient times and history notes many cases were rare addictions or aberrations as it was now in ancient times had brought calamities to the persons it had gotten to. The human tendency towards addiction is nothing new. Indeed, it is likely that addictions have been around for as long as we have. The first literary mention of the term addiction is found in Shakespeare's Henry V. Prior to the common usage of the word, the behavior of addicts was referred to in variety of ways. Addictions have been recognized variously as habits, weaknesses, illness even possession by evil spirits.

Alcohol, while being one of the most common drugs today, is also one of the oldest. People have been fermenting and brewing alcoholic drinks since at least 8,000BC. Lets not be fooled by legal products sold everywhere. Alcohol is a drug. A bunch of drugs prescribed by doctors reduce the symptoms and other problems but they are not a cure for addiction no matter the addiction the person has been bitten with. Sex addiction is another problem science is trying to work with. A roman ruler was known for its sexual addictions or depravations that lead him to his death. All addictions have been treated separately for its individual traits and still the result seems to be that more persons are lost to addictions than the ones rescued from them. Why is this happening this way instead of the other way around? This question is more intriguing than it is hard to answer. This question hits the minds of all the family suffering from the suffering of their loved ones when they find they have no means to help them. The other question is, are they alone? Understanding addiction is like understanding all the laws of the universe and all the things science does not have an answer for and therefore there is no magic pill for this disease. When the syphilis venereal disease spread world wide, science was able to find a cure for it. It was the penicillin which also cured gonorrhea and other infections. Such an injection for addiction does not exist. It would be so wonderful to visit your doctor and have a conversation like this. Patient: I have to admit my problem is gambling. Doctor: Why do you assume you have that problem? Patient: I cant control myself. I have to go to the gambling rooms and cant stop once I start. Doctor: There is this new medicine we are using for that specific problem now and the results are wonderful and guaranteed. It is an intramuscular injection called teraxyflan. You will feel no longer the need to go gambling after the medication takes effect. Patient: I'm so thank full doctor. This would be a scenario all addicts and their families would like to have. If you think about it this would be great. No more violence related to drug trafficking and barely any economics underworld except by those illegal moneys obtained in a way not related to any addiction. This means society would be a lot more peaceful than what it is today. The Second World War would not have occurred if a man in power did not have an addiction for world control and an addiction of hatred by human race. The addiction of power has also brought calamities to this world as much or even in greater numbers than the ones mentioned before. So the man in power sees a very bloody and terrible war and instead of wanting better crops by fertilizing the soil with the blood of war, he goes to the doctor to get treatment. Dictator: Doctor, I have a very bad complication in my life. Doctor: Your pulse and blood pressure are excellent today, what other thing could be going bad for your majesty today? Dictator: I have this addiction to power. I have built war machinery with the sweat and blood of our fellow people of this nation and have plans for annihilation of a certain group and other groups by race and other bodily deficiencies.

Doctor: Science has come now with a drug for the treatment of such symptoms. Doxyplerk will take all those symptoms away in the next two hours after injected. It is an intravenous drug. The dictator takes the shot and miracle, no second world war ever happens. No holocaust. Actually this is how it is not being worked. Science can not provide to this date a specific drug to a specific addiction that will cure it as penicillin cures syphilis. All the resources appointed to work on this problem have been divided into specific organizations meaning that there is not an official group or organization given the task by any government to deal with this problem. The problem is so big that is has to be dealt with by area since no single organization would have the size and real state to accommodate the number of people dealing with addictions today. Giving the examples; the veterans administration hospital has an area to treat addicted veterans with therapist and doctors. Local hospitals have an area to treat the addicted and each city may have a specific location where programs are being developed to treat this horrific disease that has killed more than any other disease or pandemic and has gotten killed more innocent people not aware of the situation than any other cause only matched by natural disasters. Certain locations to feed the homeless because of this disease have also been established and yet addiction has become the longest pandemic in existence in the whole world. Polio, or more properly poliomyelitis, was one of the most feared and studied diseases of the first half of the 20th Century. It appeared unpredictably, striking its victims, mostly children, with a frightening randomness that resulted in near panic during the epidemics of the 1940s and 50s. Then, in 1955, a breakthrough occurred when, after massive field trials involving nearly two-million children, the Salk vaccine was shown to be effective in preventing the disease. Today, polio is all-but-forgotten as it has completely disappeared from developed countries, and worldwide eradication was predicted to end by 2005. Science was able to deal with this horrific problem and solve it thoroughly and yet we have been dealing with addictions for periods much longer than the mid-20th century and still science have not achieved a drug or vaccine to prevent and even less eradicate this problem from developed countries and much less to predict a date of worldwide eradication. We can begin to understand that this is a bigger problem than we really though it was. The government deals with many social, economical, military and education problems in daily basis reaching favorable solutions. More roads and road expansions as well as large bridges and large tunnels are built as the population develops and increases but addictions keep growing faster than roads, schools and wars. This is the reason so many foundations along with all the government programs had to be established in order to give a helping hand dealing with this problem. People who advocate legalizing drugs state that Illegal drugs are often sold in unknown strength and purities, and in a preparation that maximizes the dealer's profits rather than protect the health of the user. This will make some drugs much more harmful then they might otherwise be if they were sold in regulated environment. This is not a natural high as we would like to achieve like the lucky persons that have been able to achieve the natural high having been bitten by any addiction or not. Let us see what the statistics in the United States tells us about several causes of death including the drug related deaths.

Year 2006 Tobacco 435,000 Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity 365,000 Alcohol 85,000 Microbial Agents 75,000 Toxic Agents 55,000 Motor Vehicle Crashes 26,347 Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs 32,000 Suicide 30,622 Incidents Involving Firearms 29,000 Homicide 20,308 Sexual Behaviors 20,000 All Illicit Drug Use, Direct and Indirect 17,000 Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs Such As Aspirin 7,600 What do we have here? Legal substances kill more people than the rest. They even beat the car accidents the same legal substances cause in our roads. If we think the way legalizing drug advocates think, we would rapidly become advocates of the same cause stating that illicit drugs cause less deaths than legal ones. It doesnt come to their minds that legalizing the rest of the drugs would increase the death rate. I will put the death rate aside since the only thing guaranteed in this world when you are born is death. Wealth, good living and other things are not guaranteed. Some people get them some dont and when persons die they dont take any of it to the grave. Death is guaranteed to anyone born. So we will put these issue aside since our main issue here is the natural high so we can live with it until the day we die. We will put the sexual addiction aside for the rest of this written material since sex is a natural activity of the body and will concentrate in drug addictions.

Chapter 2 When the sun reaches the zenith The sun shined bright in a hot summer Monday. Many addicted persons got to their daily task of finding money to finance the next drug. Many tricks had to be done in order to cure the sickness of the moment. A lot of manipulation of human beings was conducted in order to receive money from them. All those who awaked sick this day by the time the sun had reached the zenith have found a way to satisfy the moments need The night was close by when the next need arrived to every addicted person that covered that specific addiction by the time the sun had reached the zenith thus becoming a vicious cycle. This is what comes in costly. A single drug is not too expensive. The habit is what becomes expensive. Take for example a car tire. It can cost over a hundred dollars but you dont have to change them several times a day. A single drug dose may cost form three to ten dollars which is not expensive by anyones standards. Having those amounts repeated several times a day becomes a very expensive to support habit. Now that we have got clear that drug is not the expensive part of the addiction and that it is the habit that becomes costly, we are becoming ready to start on the quest for the natural high. The sun reaching the zenith has another side of the story also; the bright side of the story. Let us begin the story again: The sun shined bright in a hot summer day. Many persons who appreciate and can live with a natural high, did not have to wake up sick due to the disease and did not have to rise to cash in some money. This people had money saved for this hot summer Monday and simply woke up to follow their plans for the day. By the time the sun reached the zenith all those people were enjoying a nice day in the outdoors being the beach a lake or a river. Maybe a hike was the choice for someone to enjoy the natural high. This had a cost but this is what life is about, working and making a living without having to struggle daily and ending up with nothing. The natural high is the bright side of the story. As I write these words, the night is approaching in a hot summer day. A day I truly enjoyed writing and having my natural high. It is a wonderful feeling of fulfillment and life in its full. The natural high is something everyone has a right to enjoy but sadly many decline to develop after puberty. Eventually after high school comes college and wild parties involving a lot of alcohol and crazy contests begin to distort the natural high. This is the time were most people start changing the natural high for the garbage high. Education is not doing much to avoid this. At this age some young men and women start leaving the churches they grew up and become involved in the garbage high. Some even start a lot earlier due to home disorders and dysfunction. This is a critic time in the life of every person male of female. At the beginning the garbage high is fun and nice until it goes through several stages and becomes a cross to carry without help from anybody. Now we cant live without the drugs but neither can we live with them. There is no control. Changing our natural system of happiness for the garbage one takes some time and a process. It changes with each individual how long or where along the trek you became dependent and impotent to an addiction and now they are sick for life. Sick for life might seem as doomful but the sickness can be control and the garbage high can be changed for the natural high. The thing is that many people do not

choose to change that high. It is a small percentage that would like to change it. The percentage that got sick and tired of being sick and tired. The ones who were brave enough to say this is enough. That is when they admitted they were impotent to their addiction. What does this exactly means? It simply means that we are not capable of controlling the situation we have gotten ourselves into. It means the addiction can not be controlled. It means the person would wake up sick looking for the cure of his addiction. It has become a routine a vicious cycle or a way of living that took most of the hours of the day to work out. The addicted could not hold jobs simply because pay day was to far away for them to way and they needed to go to the street to catch in on whatever service they can in order to finance the addiction. This gives them suffering as well as their family and loved ones becoming most of the time the forgiven black sheep of the family. As sad as this may seem and sound, there is ways a mind corrupted after years of garbage high to transform it into the natural high our bodies were born with. Then there is the supposedly point of no return. The natural high is something now matter how advanced you are into an addiction is still achievable if the proper steps are done to regain it. We are not trying to find a natural high; we are trying to regain it. This is an important factor I want to stress. We are born with it to utilize it during our lives. In a specific part of our lives we became entangled in activities that convinced us that garbage highs are better than natural highs. In some extend of our lives we could not live without that garbage high. When it came to drugs, that was the life then we could not live without them and much less live with them. Much of the addicted persons were walking like a man wounded at war worthy of a purple heart. As a matter of fact a Purple Heart should be awarded to all those damaged in the war they have against drugs and their daily struggles to finance thy habit. It is during that struggling that the world turns black to all the addicted. To turn that way around and switch back to the natural high would be another struggle, but a struggle that will not last the rest of your life or take you to your grave. How long does it take? So far I have found no one who has been able to switch their garbage high back to the natural high to tell me the exact time it took him not to feel the desire to consume drugs. They all guaranteed me that it could be achieved. It will take more time for others or it can take less time for the rest. The important thing is that it can be restored to an optimum level so we can enjoy it for the rest of our life in the hard situations, the good situations, and the normal situations of daily life. In some part of our life we had ruptured with our natural high. There have been wars. People have suffered accidents were pain drugs were administered for prolonged periods of time. Not all people who have interrupted their natural high or have decided to live on garbage high have done so voluntarily even if this is a small part of all the addicted who the choice was theirs to pick up that first drug ever offered to them. We are living in a world where the drug is the word of the day. It is simply the most accepted choice in society and the peer pressure the society is delivering is a mighty blow. The statistics of the people that dies because of the problem of addiction is not even a small percentage of the people that are switching their natural high for the garbage high or that are in the process of it.

Most addicted people reach a point when they ask themselves or their God, why me? Why do I have to live with this condition I can not change? It is a point in the life of every addicted that they are convinced they can not bring their natural high back. Some of them do not know at that point that this could be done. Most just dont want to return to their natural high. We will leave those alone with their life. Our main concern here is the ones who want to regain their natural high. Children runaround and laugh when they hide and the adults cant find them. Did they drink alcohol or take any drug for the laughter? No that was just simply the natural high not yet disturbed. Addicted persons no longer see things that make them laugh until they had their addiction covered for the time being. College students can not see or take note on time when their natural high begins to be interrupted and corrupted. The lines of studies require much concentration on their subjects that when the time to party comes they hit it with all their might. They did not learn in high school how to keep their natural high and in college most of the addicted in the streets today had their natural high corrupted and changed for the garbage high. It is a sad fact but one we have to face. Our sons and daughters will one day go to college and I'm not blaming college since a great number starts much earlier than that. Some times the parents are blamed for not seeing the symptoms on time. Most of the times symptoms do not show clearly until advanced stages of the sickness and in the earliest stages mistaken for some other condition. Gradually this is when the natural high begins being switched to the garbage high. When this sickness attack, it does not discriminate by social status, sex or sex orientation, nationality, religion or political believes. It goes to every corner of the cultures and elusively enters to harm the social relation of all by altering the natural high and switching it to the garbage high. Once this is achieved, the social life becomes decrepit for everyone around the problem direct or indirect involved in it. Social peace and tolerance towards the other is crippled by the addictions. The addiction brings and houses other diseases which become a chain of transmission and even sudden death at the exposure of an overdose. This disease brings tears to the eyes of the strongest when it hits him or someone in their family. It leaves children without a childhood simply forming a more decrepit social system as the years pass by. The only way to repair society of these effects is learning how to recover the natural high.