Chemical Illusion

Melinda Ferguson*

The thing about drugs is that they make you feel so good. In the beginning. At least that’s how it was for me.

I remember it so clearly. That first joint. I was 16. One Friday after school some doobie came my way and I swear the wallpaper of my mind was never quite the same. It literally blew my way of thinking. With that first intake of sweet smoke, the doors of perception were opened sky wide. For the first time in my young life I got a whiff of the concept of freedom – me, a middle-class schoolgirl, crushed in an all-white apartheid, lying school system – nothing could have beaten that emancipation I felt that day.

I had experienced a feeling almost as good five years earlier when at the age of 11 I took my first drink – amber burning brandy stolen from my mother’s stash in the liquor cabinet in our family dining room. I still recall the way it burnt my insides and calmed and lulled my childlike, panicked mind. For the first time I felt like I had found home.

So later, when they came, those anti-drug campaigners, to our school and stood before 800 pupils and told us how bad the drugs were and how dreadful they would make us feel, I looked at them, silly squares, and knew they were lying, like so many adults around me.

That’s the thing: probably more harm is caused by these “don’t do drugs” campaigns than any good whatsoever. It is hard to argue with the first-hand experiences of those initial amazing forays into the seductive world of chemicals … You see, there was a time when I absolutely loved the feelings that drugs gave me.

Drugs became my best friend. Soon I was on my way to university with an every day doobie habit. And then it was Acid – otherwise known as LSD. How could I forget the first time I tripped out in a sea green field with the love of my life, JZ, just 20 years old, staring for hours at the silver halos around trees, getting lost in the inside of a flower, the petals velvet thick. Then kissing and melting into each other lips, becoming one, losing shape and sense and all track of time …

They say addiction is progressive and they don’t mean it in the political sense. They say that dagga is a gateway drug and most addicts progress from it to harder stuff. I’m afraid to say in my case they were right – 100 percent.

It’s 1998 and the cobra-fanged demon has pounced, and like a mad, rabid dog it’s got me by the throat and will not let me go. I’m not quite sure how all those good times have turned so bad. Perhaps it happened after I took that first hit of heroin; perhaps it has always been waiting, since that first stolen sip of brandy, that innocent joint – crouching dragon, waiting for the kill.

Now all that seemed like blissful Icarus gliding, turned into cold curdly porridge, infested by maggots, fattening on my spleen juice that burst forth, bile-bitter every time I smoked that brown shit. Arms embracing the toilet in some danky Yeoville commune – the retching and puking, wiping my mouth, like I’m trying to wipe my mind, making space for denial to set in as I reach for another hit.

Then the crack, loading rocks on glass pipes, the lies, the need for cash … The hole grows bigger with each rock that sizzles and each line of heroin that runs down my lungs. On hands and knees praying to the god of crack, scouring and scraping paranoid pipes as dealers line their pockets with my dirty money. Like some sick jelly trifle, denial set in and my addiction grew like a fat, pregnant maggot.

Being a slave in the 14, 15, 16, 17, 1800s couldn’t have been much fun. Stacked sardines in human, sweaty faeces. Being a slave in the 1990s was like lumpy vomit for dessert. First thing in the morning needing a hit so bad, sweaty skins, aching bones, body screaming from the sick torture rack of withdrawal and craving – you’ll do just about anything to get it.

The thing with drugs, they stopped making me feel good.

At the end it was hell.

It always is.

*Melinda Ferguson is the author of Smacked – A harrowing true story of addiction and survival.



LitNet: 13 June 2006

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