It’s 10:34am and I’ve now got my hands on a paper bag full of the single drug I can’t use reasonably.

I’m writing this, as I don’t have a better tool of expression to grab the moment.

I made a call at about 9:23am to refresh my pain meds. As you know (though have misspoke without me correcting you), I have Norco prescribed every week. You’ve called them Lortabs, and I just nodded. Subtle difference, but that’s at best, my desire to be right (read: accurate), or at worst, some undiagnosed OCD. Addiction isn’t a question. It’s fairly obvious.

So, as I think about it, I’ve gotten exactly nothing done. All I’m attempting to do is distract myself from the want. I’m trying to not think about 11am, and the time I get that little piece of paper that I get to trade for my personal vice. I’m thinking about the ritual: the arrival at the office, the walk to the desk, that blue, monogrammed, security-protected little sheet that I get handed. Playing cool to the desk receptionist. “Oh, your husband’s name is Dick Johnson? Hilarious.”

She speaks softly, wears scrubs, wears that lingering smile. I notice she’s not wearing her wedding ring. Neither am I, but I have safety reasons. Perhaps her, too. That’s a story for another time.

I take my golden ticket, crease it in half, and slip it into my eternally-occupied denims. It’s a “thank you,” a nonchalant dismissing of this red-headed gatekeeper I’ve kept charmed, and I’m hobbling back to my car, maybe embellished, maybe not. I feign strength more than I feign pain, but I always knew as a kid, pain got sympathy. It took these last few years under the iron and the bar to learn strength gets a certain respect I’ve come to appreciate as well. Maybe I let the leg drag a little more; I wonder if keeping the show going is necessary. Maybe I don’t hurt like this right now, but I will at some point. I’m sure to make them, and if need be the security cameras, aware.

I’m in my car now in this story.

It’s 10:05. Maybe a quick dash to get some coffee. Caffeine only makes the mind race harder, but it’s a motion, an action, to dispel my thoughts for a few minutes.

10:08.

That didn’t go as fast as I hoped. I took a few moments to think about this as I walked away.

I’m driving towards my pharmacy. I’ve got my comfort blanket creased in two in my back left pocket, opposite my wallet. It sits under my ass, metaphorically propping me up as I pull into the lot. I park, double-check the wallet and script, then lock the doors. They thunk hard as the motors engage, pulling them down. A little light flash and honk confirms all the operations went through without a hitch.

10:12.

Once inside, I turn the corner, past the workout supplements, protein shakers, and Tylenol. One of the over-fat, under-height women there will take my comfort blanket, unfurl it, and ask what my birthday is, as if they didn’t know. As if we haven’t done this dance weekly, 30, 40 times already. I’ll answer, smiling, and she’ll proffer the question of whether I’m waiting, or coming back later. Woman, I’m addicted to these things: of course I’m waiting.

If she’s new, or one of the not over-fat, under-height techs, but an actual pharmacist, I’m told “at least 30 minutes.” If they know me (and most all of them know me now), it’s 15-20. It’s almost always 15.

I have a pattern of checking the clock about every four minutes during this narrative, but it takes another three to drink my coffee, refresh Facebook, and get around to actually writing this.

If I’m lucky, Sheila will give me my prescription. If Sheila wasn’t 250 to 270lbs, she has a pretty face I’d probably have talked to in the days before my wife. She’s kind, pleasant, and remembers me for my graciousness. I’m always nice to my drug dealers. That’s not to say I wouldn’t be otherwise, but Sheila makes that extra effort to get my prescription out to me a little faster, and if that, in some alternate universe, required a pity fuck, or some sort of friendly getting-to-know her, then hey, what’s the harm in that?

The NDP government has faced recent calls to declare a state of emergency over the fentanyl crisis in Alberta but, for one Calgary woman, it comes too late to save her partner.

“Our treatment, both from a policy and treatment perspective, has failed. It failed me, it failed Nathan and it failed Nathan’s family,” said Rosalind Davis, who watched the man join the ranks of the hundreds of Albertans who have lost their lives to the deadly drug.

Davis and her partner, Nathan Huggins-Rosenthal, purchased a house together in the autumn of 2014, and with Nathan helping out with renovations, their lives were growing together exactly as they had planned.

However, after injuring his back during the process, Huggins-Rosenthal took a prescription painkiller that led to addiction. Just 18 months later he was dead, and Davis was left with a lifetime of questions without answers.

“It was so incredibly senseless, but I didn’t think the addiction was that bad,” she told Postmedia.

“You wake up every morning and you feel like your skin is crawling . . . you check your phone every morning and you check your text messages because you don’t think it’s real.”

Huggins-Rosenthal wasn’t what the public generally envisions when thinking of a “stereotypical” addict.

“He had his MBA, he worked as a successful stockbroker . . . he wasn’t what would be considered a stereotypical user,” Davis said.

“Our typical weekend morning was just drinking coffee and reading the paper. We weren’t people who went out every weekend. We’d go to the dog park, we’d go to yoga. All of those normal things, and then one day he just lost interest in life,” she added.

After five or six months of being in the dark, Davis confronted her partner about the problem and they agreed to seek treatment in February 2015.

However, the system failed him, in Davis’ eyes.

The couple faced a four-month wait after being referred to an outpatient program at Foothills Medical Centre, and Davis believes it was a contributing factor in his death.

Now, six months after Huggins-Rosenthal’s overdose death, Davis wants to shed light on addiction, and try to stop that same system from failing someone else.

“It’s so easy to ignore when it’s not a problem that directly hits you. But it’s an epidemic, it’s touching more and more people,” she said.

“When you bring it out into the open you have more control over the situation. The more they push people into the shadows, or punish people who are addicted, you’re creating a bigger problem” Davis added.

Not far from the home Davis still resides in, a different family followed a different path, but endured the same tragic result.

John Cliffe — whose 35-year-old son Jason died recently from the drug — is begging anyone who may even think about taking fentanyl to think twice.

“I feel like I’ve got to do something for my son,” he said.

Jason was heavy into hockey in his youth, said his ex-wife, Jennifer.

“Boxing, too,” she said. “He was a bronze and silver glove winner in his first year, I think he was 12. He was a five-time gold gloves champion, and a Canadian champion until he gave it up at 19.”

Jason went to Father Lacombe High School in 1997, before leaving in 1999 with a clear path for himself in mind.

He worked as a roofer for a number of years before finally opening his own business based in Calgary, Cliffe Exteriors, as a legacy for his two kids, who are five and nine.

Jason’s father and ex-wife want the public to know that the addict and the person are not one and the same.

“He was a wonderful boy and he was married, he had two little kids,” said his dad.

“He went to rehab last year, he was so good, and then he relapsed. He had money one night and he thought he would have some fun . . . and it killed him.

“You shouldn’t go before your children,” he said of his son’s death that now leaves two children without a father. “I just turned fifty-nine two weeks ago and I’m just broken.”

Jennifer said even though Jason battled addiction, he remained a good father.

“Even in our marriage, I had to separate the addiction from the person,” she said.

“Even through a lot of it, though, he was there for the kids.”

The death toll from the potent synthetic opiate has reached 153 in Alberta by the halfway point of 2016, adding to the 274 people who lost their lives last year.

John Cliffe said it’s time for action, to keep parents, friends and family from going through the same pain they’re going through now.

“It’s terrible. The government has to do something, and something soon,” he said.

“It’s like a disease for these young people. One time and they’re dead.

“He was old enough to know better, but it was an addiction. Age doesn’t matter, it doesn’t discriminate. You grieve for everybody when they die . . . but a son? It’s so hard.”

The grieving dad said his message is simple — and he hopes those who can make a difference are listening.

“If my message can save one kid, that’s all I care about.”

If not for the therapy and anti-depressants I took for the first year of my sobriety, I would not be alive today.

The early morning sunlight slipped in through the closed blinds, illuminating the dust in the air and landing on the armchair right across from me. My therapist, a short, amiable woman, sat casually in the armchair, clipboard resting on her lap. She waited patiently for me to say something, her eyes looking at me with concern.

I couldn’t meet her eye. “I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to be saying right now.”

She nodded, jotted a few things down on the clipboard, and brushed a stray hair from her face. The lamp sitting on her desk seemed to grow brighter in the silence. I rubbed my eyes and fought the urge to yawn. I hadn’t slept in nearly three days. By then, it was normal for me.

Depression is an odd thing. I had been living with it for so long that I failed to notice the symptoms anymore. The constant fatigue was a part of my make-up, the dark circles around my eyes a regular occurrence. I spent my nights awake, staving off the uncomfortable despair by binge watching documentaries and drinking my thoughts into silence. After spending nearly half of my teens in a fog of untreated suicidal ideations, the discovery of alcohol as a solution to my dangerous melancholy seemed to me to be serendipitously welcome.

When I moved from my Midwestern hometown to Denver, Colorado for college in the fall of 2010, the night-caps were already a part of my routine. It was easy to sneak bottles of cheap whiskey past my RAs and walk to class in the morning with a carefully spiked coffee. The small campus was full of people like me—hyper-intelligent insomniacs who finished their homework before 7 p.m. and left the campus in droves to attend one of the many parties held in the neighborhood each night.

I didn’t stay there very long, though I wished I had. When I left that college after only a year and transferred to a larger campus down the road, I suddenly found myself with far more freedom to do what I wanted. The lack of structure and accountability from my friends created a vacuum that I quickly filled with drugs and alcohol. I often skipped classes and failed out of that second college after a year of avoiding responsibilities and shutting myself up in my room.

After that, the darkness that surrounded me grew. I dropped out for a year and in that time nearly destroyed myself. I chose the right kind of company that wouldn’t look twice at the amount of drugs I was taking. They were a ragtag group of 20-somethings who spent every day under the influence. We talked about nothing and scraped pennies together to get dollar menu burgers from the food joint down the street. None of us had jobs.

I was 19 years old and I hated myself. I spent hours in the shower after each night of hard partying, scrubbing my skin until it was angry and red—trying desperately to scrub away the grime that had attached itself to my being. Many times I sank to the floor of the bathtub, my tears mingling with the water as it rushed down the drain.

My sample post 12

When I first got sober, my favorite trick was to stumble around bars pretending to be drunk in the hopes that the hot guy across the room would take advantage of me. Now that I’ve outgrown that unsurprisingly ineffective technique, meeting prospective dates in sobriety is often a matter of sheer serendipity—of keeping an eye out for eligibles with mutual interests and having my radar on for prospective partners in the periphery. To some extent everyone does this, but being in recovery is both a blessing and a curse in terms of honing that romance-detector: our mental faculties are clear enough that we’re more aware of potential mates in our environment but, without the crutch of alcohol to slacken our inhibitions and the dim lighting of a bar to make everything seductive, it’s often more difficult to feel comfortable approaching a complete stranger.

That anxiety makes the early stages of dating challenging, says relationship expert Dr. Belisa Vranich. Newly sober alcoholics, she says, are likely to feel “really intense fear” when they first re-enter the dating pool. “A lot of people who are newly sober have never dated before without being under the influence of something,” Vranich says. “It’s terrifying not to be at least a little bit high—to have nothing to lean on to relax.” But the longer you’re clean, the easier dating gets. So what can you do to find people to practice—and potentially succeed—with?

Transparency about your sober status can sometimes pay unexpected dividends.

Get involved with social or political activities

In my hard-partying days, the only political issue I was passionate about was lowering the drinking age but sobriety opened up a whole new world of opportunities for social and political activism. And getting plugged into the community is a great way to meet like-minded people. Vranich also recommends signing up for volunteer work since conversations in these environments happen organically as a result of shared interests that extend beyond the same brand of gin. (Volunteering will also put you in touch with some honest-to-goodness quality people; jerks tend not to donate their time to those less fortunate.) The Internet can, of course, give you access to groups of people who share your interests—MeetUp is a site that offers a way for people who are passionate about everything from snowshoeing to hypnosis to exotic cheeses to meet each other (meetings are held across the United States as well as internationally).

My friend Celeste, a 25-year-old student from Portland, Oregon, was heavily involved with her local Occupy movement, even though, she says, “It was kind of stoner city down there.” Still, at the Occupy camp, she began chatting with a guy who was more pass than puff-puff and it turned out that he was also in recovery. “After the cops shut down the camp, the relationship kinda fizzled out and we stopped hooking up,” she laughs. “But it was good to have a sober ally there.”

Go online

This is a major, if obvious, option and one that Vranich espouses emphatically. “With Internet dating,” she says, “you can actually say you don’t drink before the date, which really helps weed people out”—not to mention getting you weeded out by hard partiers. (I love it when I’m mistaken for a naturally responsible teetotaler, rather than somebody who used to black out and wake up in different states.) Specifying that you don’t imbibe on conventional dating sites like Match or OKCupid is easy since the sites actually ask you the question, while still others—like the sober social networking website In The Rooms—are specifically geared toward sober people. “Some couples reconnect after knowing each other in the program 20 years ago, losing touch, and then finding each other on our site,” says In The Rooms co-founder Ken Pomerance. Meeting on a sobriety-specific social network, he says, cuts through the getting-to-kn0w-you clutter. “There’s a gut-level trust and honesty that you’ll find from people in recovery,” he says. “You don’t have to walk around the elephant in the room.”

Flirt over fitness

After leaving the haze of active alcoholism or addiction, many of us develop a newfound interest in taking care of our bodies—and there’s no reason to be bashful about picking up equally health-conscious dates at a gym, yoga class or triathlon. Darren, a 46-year-old doctor from San Francisco, found his future spouse in his cycling club a few years after separating from his ex-wife and getting sober. “One morning after a ride in Golden Gate Park, this pretty, quick-witted blonde and I got to talking, and we just clicked,” he says. “It was nice because my sobriety didn’t even come up, but if we’d been in a bar it probably would have been an issue. She has a moderate relationship with alcohol, but since we’ve both been training for a triathlon, she’s hardly been drinking, either.”

Discover your passions—and the people who share them

Vranich encourages sober people to ask themselves what they’re interested in that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol. “What do you do with the time that you would have been drinking or drugging or hung over?” she asks. “What are the things that make you happy? And what would you like to do that you’ve never tried before?” Abandoning the darkness of active addiction leaves a significant space for new interests to develop or old ones to be rediscovered, so why not go back to childhood, adolescence or those infrequent days of unintended sobriety and try to remember what moved or inspired you? Thendo it.

My friend Kurt, a 27-year-old graphic designer from New York, discovered his passion for graphic design after he got sober and he met his current beau at the graphic design section of a bookstore. “I was being clumsy and dumb and accidentally knocked over a book,” he says. “Alex smiled at me and started asking me about Photoshop. Even though I was still being totally awkward, he seemed to think it was cute. We ended up really hitting it off.” Likewise, Jeremy, a 24-year-old student from Philadelphia, made it a priority to go to more music shows in sobriety—music had always electrified him but he’d usually been too drunk to appreciate it—and he met the woman who became his girlfriend while standing in line at an Arcade Fire concert. “We started talking about how great the set was and went from there,” he says.

Overdisclose (but not too much)

Many of us tend to be understandably reticent about identifying as people in recovery, but transparency about your sober status can sometimes pay unexpected dividends. When you’re honest about being sober, you make yourself vulnerable—and allow others the same opportunity. Catie, a 27-year-old fashion merchandiser from Austin, says, “I have this bad habit of always telling people that I’m sober, even when it’s not necessary so when I was meeting friends at a wine bar and the waiter asked me what kind of wine he could bring me, I said, ‘No, I don’t drink,’” she recalls. “He blurted out, ‘Neither do I!’ Even though it was just a lucky accident, if I hadn’t had such poor boundaries, I never would have met him.” The two ended up going out twice after that.

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