I’ve decided to stay sober. Such decisions seem to be magnets that attract all sorts of intoxicants, so my sobriety could die before the sun rises. My personal best was 9 years, while in ad-seg [Administrative Segregation, a level of solitary]. Staying on the wagon is easier without so much temptation.
You have your “specialist” addicts; alcohol, heroin, pot, etc, who are only attracted to one type of high.
That’s not me. If it makes me smile and blurs reality a little, I’ll do it. Anything to forget.
Wish I could blame it all on my little cage and prison stress, but it would be a lie. I liked to drink beer and whiskey with parental consent – at the age of 5. It’s not at all surprising that I still like to get high. What does surprise me, when I look back at my life, is that I didn’t go to prison as a teenager.
My latest binge was a prostate medication, Oxy Butayl. Cheap at 20-cents a pill, even if you take a handful. I ate 40 in 12 hours. Caught myself holding intense conversations with imaginary people. Nice! Couldn’t sleep. Dry mouth. Might not have been so bad if I hadn’t mixed in the Zoloft. Pill books warn against mixing them. Since I like both alone, why not?
Over the years I’ve indulged in numerous drugs here in Texas Prison. Antihistamines: Sudafeds, Dimetabs, Actifeds, Benedryls. Psych Meds: Ortane, Cogenton, Elaville, Melarill, Zoloft. Other assorted medications: Oxy Butayl, Dicyclomine, Colonadine, and Colonapine that might be fun if misused and taken in extremely high dosages.
All the medications that are prescribed by medical staff and passed out by Med-Techs under the direct supervision of security personnel can be found on the black market for less than a quarter each. The inside joke is that the many psychos that need their meds to stay stable seldom take them. They sell them to people like me, a drug addict, for coffee.
Alcoholics just brew their own. Making it is easy. Just mix juice and candy and fermented fruit. Give it a gentle shake and wait a few days. (If you add some of the juice from a can of Whole Kernel Corn or from a raw potato, then the alcohol content is outrageous.) Real sugar is hard to get out of the kitchen, but it improves the taste a lot. The hardest part is hiding the horrible smell [from the fermenting sugars] so that you don’t get caught.
Then there are the goodies provided by staff. Most are in it for the cash, but some guards are drug addicts and support their habits by providing for ours. K-2 flows through the holes in security along with the tobacco and the cell phones. The synthetic pot that can’t be detected in drug tests, K-2, sells for $100.00 or so per latex glove finger, or a ball the size of a shelled peanut for $10 of commissary, or by the joint for $4.00. A cheap prepaid cell phone goes for $400 cash.
A smart guard can double his salary in tax-free cash and never get caught. (It’s not unusual for guards to be affiliated with the same gangs as prisoners. They might have come from the same neighborhoods or even gone to school together.)
As long as TDCB guards are underpaid and control the perimeter security, we will have access to whatever we can afford.
Today I am sober. In the past 72 hours, I fell off the damn wagon to take a couple of Zolofts for my nerves. (They were frayed from my Oxy Butayl binge and I had come damn close to hurting an idiot I really like. He has no idea how close it was.)
One day at a time. Everything boils down to that – a prison sentence, sobriety, life – it’s about doing one day at a time. Never easy.
No excuses. No explanations. No apologies. I am what I am. Life is never easy. How can it be when death is the only way out?
Daniel Harris is serving 35 years in Texas for Attempted Capital Murder.
We send your comments to our writers but if you’d prefer to write Daniel directly, please write to:
Daniel H. Harris #00622851
MICHAEL Unit
2664 FM 2054
Tennessee Colony, TX 75886
Just absolutely amazing, I’m in the comfort of my home reading this. I’m currently 1 year and 8 months (?) clean from IV heroin. Been an addict since I was 14, had to have surgery on my leg. They say marijuana is a gateway drug but thats bullshit, my doctor was lol my first drug high was from vicodin and I was hooked right after. Get this, a month before, my dad had just died from alcohol withdraws in a jail cell, he was even on suicide watch. I was so afraid to take the meds but the pain got too bad. I had MRSA in my bone morrow or w.e and they did a biopsy, didn’t work, so 6 months later they took my bone out and scraped it and sent me home with a script for 180 10mg norcos and everytime I ran out, I called, and they refilled. This wasn’t in the 90s either, I’m only 22. I moved out to TN and I was home getting my stuff when I got barred out and IDK what happened but I guess I did stupid stuff for my family to know I was on something. I fell asleep with my moms laptop and I had my facebook messanger opened and first thing she saw on it was a discussion i was having with my roommate in TN about our suicide pact. I was about to get messed up with MS13 for some opanas and roxys and we were going to take a hand full of xans and then bang at least 100mg of opana, putting us both out. we had a suicide pact, thats exactly what it was. mom found it, had an intervention, and then i was off to the psych ward that was also part detox. i spent july in there, got out and then started up at the methadone clinic. I’m nearly 2 years in, June 27th 2017 was the last time I used and July 22ed I believe I got out of the hospital. lol can’t remember when I got out but I can tell you the date, even the hour, of the last time I got hit with the sweet release of xxx-morphine going through my blood, warming me up as it did, and then the amazing onset of the pins and needles. fuck, here I am romanticizing it again.
i’m by no means clean. cannabis has helped a lot but like today, i’m on meth. i occasionally get a stim when I have a lot of work I need to get done. i was on 30mg adderall 3x a day, instant release. stims don’t give me euphoria, they just calm me down and allow me to focus. cocaine is shit and the only time I’ve ever gotten high off meth and had actual euphoria was also the first and only time I’ve ever OD on meth and it sucked. I’ve OD on opiates 8 times, 3 of which I had to get hit with narcan (1 being suboxone actually, girl started freaking out when I went out and she put a strip on a spoon, watered it, drew it up, found a vain and hit me with it. Not fond of those days.
still so fucking depressed though. i’m not as suicidal as i was but lately i’ve been getting back up there where i’m wishing death. hop on interstate to head 25miles to get the ‘done and 25 miles back home and on the way i’ll get behind a log truck and ride their ass just hoping a huge log would fall off and kill me. sounds fuck, doesn’t it? i wish i didn’t have these thoughts and i can only imagine what kind of thoughts these would manifest into if i was locked into a cage like a dirty animal with POS CO’s that treat you like shit.
prison reform needs to happen. private prisons need to disappear. it’s not right, that you are worth a shitton of money for being locked up by the corporations — CORPORATIONS — that own the prison. It’s crazy. But that’s why there isn’t a true rehabilitation program in prison. They want you to come back. They want you to commit more crimes while you’re on the inside so you have to stay more. some prisons make as much as 15K, probably way more in some parts of the US (also i’ve seen some being 7k per-prisoner which is just fucked up thats just the bare bare bare items), per-prisoner they have locked up. they make billions of the war on drugs. they know it was a total failure but for them it was a huge W frfr. Thats why they lobby congress for get tough on crime attitudes. I think if you just look back, either by book or memory, of the 1980s it just proves that their policies and ideas are failures for communities and only help the owners and the people on the board (stock holders) and the politicians whose pants were filled up with cake by these corporate bastards.
to whom it may concern, locked up: you are a slave. you are. black, white, hispanic, asian, doesn’t matter. you are a slave right now as you are locked up. the slaves were freed, yes but the 13th amendment states this:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” & “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Congress has the power to enforce [this article] and they do, constantly, like with the war on drugs. They were practicing legal slave ownership. Slavery isn’t just found in some 3rd world shithole, its found right here in the US and its legal. They wanted to create poor neighborhoods and crime would flourish in. They wanted all this to happen. Them being like law enforcement who can legally steal your money. If you get pulled over and have 1000 bucks on you, the police will probably take it by “seizing it” even if they have no proof that you were about to buy drugs with it. Even if you weren’t. I watched a raid where they took the poor guys fucking TV’s. People don’t sell drugs because they want to. Everyone I know fucking hates committing felonies everyday just so you can eat. Only people I know that enjoy committing felonies are psychopaths and suburban white kids that think its cool to get high. Literally highway robbery.
They spy on us, read our emails and texts (regardless if youre in or out of the pin – NSA), monitor our calls, watch us through our webcams (even Samsung TV’s that you can use your hand instead of a remote, when you get the chance google hacking into samsung smart TV scary shit), imprison us forever for just trying to feed our children because all the other job opportunities moved away & everything you learned you probably learned in public schools. They kidnap you and hold you against your will. You get caught with a brick (2.2 keys) of cocaine, boom 20 years. That’s really fucked seeing how many millions of tons of cocaine is brought in a week. A kilo isn’t shit but they’ll give you 20 years like your pablo fucking escobar and this didn’t do anything but make people more violent, gangs more powerful and richer, and prisons overpopulated. And overpopulation is a fucking godsend to the owners of the prisons.
Man, I really feel bad for the men and women that are victims of the war on drugs and are serving retardedly long sentences. Most are being punished and abused over a DISEASE. ADDICTION IS A DISEASE. Even if you don’t admit that it is, means nothing because it really is. The same way if people don’t admit that evolution is a real thing, doesn’t matter, everything around them still evolves.
We must reform. We must spark the change. Maybe one day,
GODSPEED MY DUDES
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