33-34 yo Drugs, Rape,Insaniety, Gay, GraduationDivorce, abortion,

I’ve woken again with the now familiar nightmare.  The psychedelic drowning with my mind moving about in it’s shell.  I’m quite afraid but not in panic. Just tired. The 3 am wakening. The memories.

The chronology of this time is confusing.

I remember her mother and her father fighting. He’s become violent. She’s again demanding her daughter’s total involvement.I ‘m a psychiatrist by now and call the ‘bluff’.  The constant alcoholic family drama and crisis have worn me down. My wife is in her final year of her residency but this constant loud distraction of her mother’s is a priority. I’ll be unfaithful after she graduates. After I throw the big party for her. After she gets angry about the gazebo insisting we can’t ‘afford’ one , after she’s taken the lowest paid academic job.  After she’s said she doesn’t want children and maybe we could adopt.

I drove over with her and took her mother to an apartment leaving her drunken father and drunken brother.  Problem solved. Yet, no.  The mother is now more depressed. Aparently safety and being out of the situation is not the solution.  She’s now even more of an issue for my wife. The mother’s chronic depression, hypochondriasis, drunken marriage, all of that is competing for centre stage as my wife is coming up to the finishing line of a good thing, her pediatric specialty. It’s all about the mother.  Alcoholism is like that. Untreated Al Anon’s are like that. But the whole family drinks and I drink. And as the stress of work increased the drinking increased a bit for us whereas for the mother she and her husband drank more along with the older brother who would soon die of liver disease from alcoholism

But my new friend is a woman doctor, quite the genius, from an amazing family. Yet she’s married the bad boy whose father is a schizophrenic criminal and whose family is even more bizarre than my in laws and definitely lower class to their middle class.  My friend’s family is if anything upper class. Class and education become a thing now because the boyfriend is a biker drug dealer and his attraction to the beautiful doctor with high intelligence is rather classic bad boy good girl dynamic. I’m of course studying all this at the time and treating families with wayward adolescents and paralleling my own life is this whole psychotic work life where the descriptions of the patients resonate with the friends and families outside of the psychiatry ward and psychiatry outpatients.  The walls between the two are grow thin.  

I have real difficulty with this time.  The final year of my residency. There’s the conference and infidelity. She’s teaching and I’m continuing to do my residency, work seeing patients in my basement, moon lighting  in the detox ,studying for exams, preparing for orals,and actually attending my first AA meeting because I am invited as a professor and am working with alcoholic families. It’s unusual.  I don’t think in a thousand years I’ll ever come to such a meeting as fellow sufferer. decades later I will.

I remember that there are these huge house parties that academics throw.I’m attending them occasionally by myself. I guess this may be after my ex and I separated.  I remember the big party I threw for her graduation and that there was no such celebration of my graduation. It was Maria Gomorri who convinced me to attend my final exam. I was going to leave.  I have a tendency to leave things that bother me.  

I had been fucked by my professor. I’d divulged to him my difficulties with my wife.  We were apparently working on staying together but she was furious and hurt and life was a mess. I was either at work with crazy people who were angry and wanting to kill me or at home with a wife who was angry and wanting to kill me.  

I was smoking dope. i remember hot knifing hashish because the biker friend had brought some in from Montreal. There’s a few of us. Now. I’m a good customer. He’s used his wife to access uptown markets. I introduce him to other faculty members.  

At this party in Tuxedo, millionaires and academia, there’s a girl passed out on the coats in the room for that. I come in to get my coat and this guy is about to rape her. He’s with his friend. Their pants are down. She’s drunk and trying to push him away feebly because she’s so out of it. I fight with this lawyer and his buddy and push them out of thee room then carry this woman out to my car. Her girlfriend comes with me bringing her fur coat. I drive them to her apartment in the Osborne area. It’s very uptown. I carry her into the bedroom and leave her with her girlfriend.  

The lawyer and businessmen from my high school are identified as serial rapists who have victimized dozens of young women using the new ‘date rape drug’.  I don’t even register that this is what has happened to this woman I’ve rescued but that her assaillants were another couple of predators. I’m just glad I stopped it.  

I’ve stopped dozens of women being raped having arrived to interrupt the attack. Weird. I remember an Indian woman being raped outside a bar and I walked across the street because she was screaming help and this guy was ripping off her dress.  They were both drunk. My car was parked nearby. Broad daylight. Winnipeg.  

“Would you like some assistance, “ I ask as she’s being punched in the side of the head and he’s ripping off her panties. It may seem strange that I’m so formal in these sitatuions but I am. I’m kind of like a Roger Moore OO7 character come to rescue.  There’s a funny movie of home made super hero’s and I identify. I discuss these situations with my psychiatrist. He eventually says, the insight, the bit I’m to reflect on , ‘you must be ‘scanning’ your environment for opportunities to rescue people. I think most people just don’t see what’s going on around them. They have their head down or are focused on where they’re going but you must be scanning your environment for an opportunity to help.”

I remember the woman drowning at the beach. There were hundreds watching. Only six of us went to assist. The lifeguard pulled her out of the water. I ran the length of the beach to help him pull her body out of the boat as he’d pulled her in and now was getting her out of the boat and I was helping with CPR. But there were hundreds of people and only 6 of us came to asssist him.  I’d run by them taking pictures, pointing out to the friend that there was drowning person, commenting on the lifeguard rescuing her.

“I’d rather be raped by an Indian than rescued by a white man,” she shouting at me spitting. At that time a half dozen other Indians stumbled out of the bar and I made my escape. They’d run a chain on her. I never know if she said that because she meant it or knew that this guy was one of a gang and that they would kill me if I interceded.  I just didn’t know but I left.

Now I’m avoiding talking about sex.  

I told my psychiatry supervisor, the professor, the clinical supervisor. “It’s all counter transference. You must tell me as it can affect your therapy patients.” He will abuse my trust. Use my information for his purpose. He is a narcissist at best, perhaps a sociopath but not a psychopath, thank God. 

So I open up and tell him about being raped as a teen by a man ,about the drugs , the betrayal by the band, the police and ‘good time Charlie’s back in town’ , about the first marriage. He told me it was terrible that the man had hurt me and that I shouldn’t have been hurt when I was penetrated.

 Someone who cared  would go slowly and caringly and heal all the pain of that time.”  It seemed like something odd at the time but only was something I thought of in retrospect when the mind wonders ‘why didn’t I see that coming....how could I have taken a different path...should I have taken a different path.”  

I’d go on to tell him  about my wife and the girl in Phoenix. I’d tell him how there’s no more  sex in the marriage any more, how lonely I was , how I’d given up everything ,being a country gp and flyin doctor to be a psychiatrist and now I didn’t know I wanted to be because my marriage didn’t make any sense and I didn’t like where we were going.  I felt trapped and desperate. I was so vunerable.   She was  constantly angry and I told him how depressed I was, how guilty I felt, how remorsefulremorse, and how I’d been seeing this psychiatrist for training but now all I knew was remorse.

Virginia Satir has come to town and we were attending a workshop.  She was doing all her human sculpturing and teaching us through ritual the positions of power. I was paired with my supervisor on stage and must sit before and below him.  

“I really liked when you were on your knees before me,” he said. 

“I liked the workshop,” I said. 

He was Jewish and had invited me to attend this weekly study of the tarot. It was Aleister Crawley and the demonic and we always drank and did drugs.  We’d go,  smoke dope and watch the slides and have a discussion of Alester Crowley and sexuality. It was very stimulating. .  There were followers of Crawley there.  He was into the demonic and drug use. Ironically my new friends the biker drug dealer would eventually tell me he too was a follower of Aleister Crowley. 

There was this whole ‘gnostic’ excitement. I felt invited into an inner circle of esoteric teaching by psychiatrists and psychiatric staff. I was studying psychiatry and attending this weekly seminar with a half dozen people from the psychiatry department. We were always smoking dope and drinking wine and it was intellectually very stimulating and fun. 

My work was thoroughly demanding and my home was depressing and these wonderful people invited me into their inner circle. One was an old lady who was a card reader and clairvoyant.  We’d talk about spirituality andspiritism  and the discussion of sexuality was free ranging as well. I was the youngest. 

I was deeply interested in spirituality and had been for ever. I was not meditating or doing prayer because I’d been told not to. I was ‘thinking’ and ‘overthinking’ and everything was related to everything. There was this huge fun insightful revelation of meanings in meanings and all this analysis. Analysis and analysis and analysis and jokes about analysis and comments about double entedre’s and lots of exhilarating insight into the unconscious.

I was no longer involved with Community Medicine because I was told I had to ‘choose’. I was always being manipulated. In retrospect I see this massive manipulation and how it was never about my “needs’ as a student but always about their “needs’ . They were always saying what they felt would be good for me but not ever how it would serve them. So of course I was taking extra call and doing others work and it was all their self sacrificing by letting me do their work.  I’d train in all this and realize how it was used in the workplace and it’s just all part of daily life but now I saw it.  Always there was a quality of you should ‘volunteer, but if you don’t you’d be failed in the residency.”

I had friends in the residency.  A beautiful colleague. She was getting all the same manipulation and disclosed that she’d had sex with her supervisor.  I didn’t register this.

A senior colleague told me that my professor was homosexual and that I should beware . He had a history of using the young staff men and students.  He had a overtly gay medical student as his companion frequently.  But I was in theatre. I wasn’t homophobic .  I had friends who were gay. I was married. HE was married. His Irish wife was divorcing him. I don’t know the reason but when I told him about my own marital problems he divulged his wife was cold and angry. “Irish, angry, unforgiving.”  

My mother was Irish and she sure was one to hold a grudge.

He was such a good man. So hard working. So spiritual. So loving to his daughters. His wife like my wife was so unsupportive. The women at the Aleister Crowley study nights were older but so sexually liberated.  So open in discussion , so avante  garde.

He invited me to attend a Jewish dinner. I think it was Passover. It was a central feature of his religion and he told me that I was being invited, ‘initiated’ into the very core of Judaic religion. He thought I would appreciate this. It was so spiritual. 

I went to dinner with his wife and children.  It was a wonderful evening.  The children participated in the ceremony. His wife was withdrawn and angry but they preceeded through this candlelight ritual. I think we had Matso ball soup. Maybe gefilte fish.

It was family. Warm and Rockwellian..

He invited me down stairs. We’d already drunk quite a bit and we smoked drugs.  “My cousin gets the best stuff. You’ll love this.”

I was catatonic after I’d shared a joint. He undressed me then.  I remember the most amazing sexual experience. I was frozen in moving, and he was all over me, pleasuring me in every way, massaging my body, licking me, fellating me, then he was in from behind, gently entering me.  It was surprising. Not painful.  Perhaps he had lube.  I know he was prepared. I was floating alsmost like a float room experience.

He kept saying, “I know you wanted this. You forced me to do this. You made me do this. You were so sexy. You wanted this. You made me do this”. Then he was pounding me from behind, his voice angry.

He was very angry at his wife. She was using the children as a weapon interefereing with his seeing them. They were separated.  He liked me to wear her lingerie so he could fuck me in their marriage bed.  I did as I was I told. I felt that my residency, more than three years of twining depended on my not angering him.

I enjoyed it all. Physically it was pleasurable. After it was over and he was sated I felt guilty and ashamed.I told him  that I just wanted to be friends, after that first time, 

“I just want to be friends. I don’t want a physical relationship”  I’d tell him every time and he’d just persist. A little wiry man who could destroy my career and reputation. The department was dominated by Jews. I now believed they all or most had been initiated this way. I didn’t want to look the fool, I just wanted it over. 

He’d describe homosexuality as the highest spiritual act and insist that my desire to be spiritual without being physical was the problem. That I must embrace my sexuality in my spiritulity. They were not separate.

I’d figure that this was what Jews did. This was the spirituality of Judaism. I’d also figure that my fellow residents were going through a similiar initiation into psychiatry. There was the woman being fucked by one of the other professors. I didn’t think hers was spiritual as much as romantic.

I felt I’d been so ignorant of this other adult mature level of reality and consciousness.  Was like doing drugs, feeling elite but dirty. 

Maureen had moved out with her mother. I was left in the house alone. This whole separation and her moving out had preceded the sex but it was all so overlapping, his divorce and her leaving and then I met my friend and musical mentor from years before. We’d talked over the years, having coffee in Osborne village. This night he told me he’d sold his guitar and was drunk and picked up a bottle and threw it at the mirror on the wall across the from counter.  I settled things down. I did that. I’d countless times especially with doctors out drinking paid for the damages and got them home in a taxi.

I brought my friend home and told him as he had no place to stay he could stay in my basement.  Maureen moved out. He smoked dope every day and I kept the refrigerator full and he said “every artist needed a patron’. 

But he taught me to play guitar while he was there. And the psychiatrist came over and I had my harmonium and tabala and we’d smoke ganja and play drums and make music and chant. It was all so very holy but after the artist went downstairs, the man would get angry and demand sex. He was always agitated while the artist was so mellow. Stoned I’d see them as a cross and a star. We’d be smoking Thai weed and I’d see them morph into the catholic and the Jew. I didn’t know what I was. I was some kind of Christian Hindu. I’d say years later I sold the house to get rid of the house guest. I’d not say it was because I no long felt my bed was safe. He’d drop in at all hours for his “booty call”. I’d wonder whether I’d have liked this if he didn’t hold power over me. I wished we’d elsewhere and elsewhen but I grew increasingly to realize I was more an object to him.

I loved these nights but I didn’t like the sex. I loved making music. I loved the discussions. Which isn’t true in a way because I loved being used or more, I loved not being in control. I loved that after years of pleasuring of my frigid withholding wife here was this person who was solely interested in pleasuring me.  And yet it wasn’t right and I felt wrong.  But I liked that I was receiving rather than feeling she was always taking and then I felt he was taking and no one cared that I said no. I’d talk to him about it and say that I didn’t like it. I told him over and over again I didn’t want to do it again but he’d just climb into my bed at night. Show up for his ‘booty call’ and I thought I was such a woman, complaining and yet participating. Saying no and doing yes.

It was all what I assumed the other residents were experiencing or at least those who were the best.  My friend was studying multiple personality disorder and I was fascinated with borderlines.  I had this sense that I was now ‘split’ , two persons. Animus and anima. I felt I’d become the animus and anima and that this man who was Simon to my Garfunckel was enlightening me. I was doing kundalini yoga exercises and felt my chakra opening and expanding. I felt his energy penetrating me, burning up my spine. I felt at times he was breeding demons in me, I would later wash for years. 

Later I’d read that great line about Bob Dylan, “Bob, how come you promise us girl’s you’ll make us princess’ and  we all end up feeling like whores.’

I’d stopped seeing my psychiatric psychotherapist. I don’t know why. I didn’t want to talk about my homosexuality. I felt forced gay and wondered why I didn’t just leave my residency, leave the university, leave the city, the country and go to Africa. But I stayed. 

The women fm the Alistair Crowley group asked me to come by and stopped me naked and had sex with me.It was a bit mechanical.  There was lust but I was depressed. I’d known love I thought with Maureen but that had just become nothing. Here was this other world of sex and drugs.  I was in the inner circle. I kept wondering which of the Jewish psychiatrists was a top and which was a bottom.  There was all this secrecy and I was told I wasn’t to know ‘yet’.  I’d ask always about judaism and Freud.  There were heady discussions but he wanted to ‘show’ our sexual relationship. I was ashamed of it. I wanted to be discrete but he’d touch my bum in the cafeteria. He’d try to fuck me on an elevator. We’d almost get caught and that thrilled him though it horrified me. 

Once we were supposed to just be going out to park and talk and next thing I was stoned and having my cock sucked and a policeman was at the window. This invigorated him and terrified me.  He was off on vacation coming back and telling me about his gay pursuits but it was increasingly just sex.

I was also feeling like my other friend was using me. I was giving him a place to stay and lending him thousands. The week of needing a place to stay became months. He wasn’t leaving.  Why would he. Don’t feed the raccoons.

I learned I had a problem saying ‘no’ to everyone . I was simply not assertive when it came to my personal space and relationships. Years later it would be a central issue of advanced therapy. I was repeatedly pushed into situations I didn’t want because I was afraid of the emotional extortion. I was afraid if I said ‘no’ to the emotional bullying by Maureen she’d leave me. I felt if I said ‘no’ to my professor he’d have me kicked out of my program.

I felt that I’d given up my general medicine, my northern medicine and my community medicine and my marriage, all to complete this psychiatry residency. I was in the last year and if I could just take it up the ass a few more times I’d pass. 

Mostly I felt that I’d worked so hard and had the highest grades and was the most admired resident, offered positions in all the university, yet now  it was reduced to my just being a ‘fuck’ .  I felt I’d never be thought of as having passed psychiatry on my own merit but that I’d passed because I’d sucked the supervisors’s cock.  

I’d become a bimbo.

I’d tell a friend years later about this feeling. My friends were psychologists and they’d say, “He bred you. He made you his bitch. That’s all it was a bout. Domination. You were the golden boy and he showed you. You were probably a fantasy aryan in his twisted perverted mind.” Women and men would all tell me their rape and date rape stories. All my friends had been used in someway. I identified with the women. I’d been reduced to a hole in the mattress, a number on an arm. I had no self esteem. I just wanted out. I only felt good stoned. I was down so low it felt like up to me.

I thought that. He hated his wife for what she was doing. I was Irish. I’d find myself in these weird ancient struggles. A catholic Irish doctor would fuck me over, not literally but figuratively, and I’d eventually learn he hated the ‘protestant Irish’.  “You’re family was never Irish. You’re British. .”  It never was an issue to me. The idea of being Irish only gained meaning years later when I went to Ireland.  I’d spend the next decades wondering about my sexuality.  I’d wonder as much about my identity.

I’d begin to drink more heavily , regularly a bottle of wine and now I was smoking dope a whole lot. He always had some from his cousin and my drug dealer biker friend was supplying me with it and my friend had his source. I was working two jobs and paying .

So here I was being fuckcd and not wanting to be fucked, this guy showing up and taking me somewhere to fuck me when I ‘just wanted to talk’ and me feeling like I was in this weird Bizarro movie.  My wife was not speaking to me having gone back to her mother.  I couldn’t say anything to my parents and I didn’t want to be ‘gay’.  I wasn’t gay.  But I didn’t think I wanted to be a pscyhiatrist any more because the other psychiatrists were gay.

I was offered a job by Dr. Nady El Guebaly and I took it. I became an assistant professor.  I had a clinical position as the head of family therapy at the teaching hospital. I became terrified.  

“Now we’ll be working together I can have you whenever I want you. I ‘m so looking forward to fucking you over lunch. You can suck my cock  between patients and we can really get it on all the time. “ he whisper to me in the hallways grabbing my crotch. I’d cringe. 

I was horrified.

I’d had a girlfriend for a few months but she said she was pregnant and I said we could have the baby but she said she wanted an abortion and I begged her to not but she went ahead anyway. I was devastated. She was Jewish. 

When I left the city he took that girlfriend as his own and told me she hated me now. He took the position of head of family therapy that had been created for me and now was vacated. 

We’d remain ‘friends’.  

I was supposedly ‘bisexual’.

My friends sister was beautiful.  I was visitting him in California smoking dope and drinking wine and he told me ‘don’t get involved with my sister.’ Her ex is a great guy but she just had a kid with him and then made his life miserable. She ‘s my sister and I love her but she’s a bitch. I dont want to see you hurt.”

I didn’t know what sex I was but I was a ‘slut’ and easy. She just had to take off her bra and I was to quote Paul Simon, “just like a dog who was befriended.’

St. Paul said, I do that which I don’t want to do and don’t do that which I want to do”  my own life was a reflection of my fundamental clinical concern.  I flew to India when I graduated, asked what I always wanted. I’d spend a couple of life changing months around Bombay, now sex with women, wanting to be sure I was okay but feeling somehow ‘impregnated”

I returned to Winnipeg just wanting to get away from the insaniety. I couldn’t go on with his desire. He was oblivious of my feelings and I felt like I was saying all the things women said. It wasn’t spiritual. It was just lust and lies and sordid.  After I went to California and came back to move ther  felt I was again with a loving woman and with friends. I would move to the US and leave this mess.  

My friends were multimillionaires. I was going to parties with world famous doctors. I just needed to do my exams.

I felt badly telling Dr. Nady I was leaving. I so admired him despite my colleague fucker disparaging him. My colleague lover fucker friend was brilliant in a different eccentric way and admirable in his own way and intellectual. I liked being fucked but I didn’t like being fucked. Especially when I compared that to the experience I had with the women which was transcndent by comparison. So deeply emotional and reassuring. Homosexual sex was a kind of advanced mutual masturbation whereas love and lust with women was something more. 

It’s was all just overwhelming and I was a bit paranoid with all these ‘witchy people’. He was so looking forward to my joining them and he’d touch my crotch or bum.  Some of the women on staff were telling me they were part of a coven and excited I was joining them. . The Alester Crawley reference was always coming up. I was reading a book given to me about Madame Blavatsky.  It all seemed secret and sordid. I felt like I was in a Rosemary’s Baby episode only somewhere.mn the line I’d deliver a demon. I’d d meet still occasionally with Carl Ridd or John White and they seemed lighter freer. I felt so dark and heavy. I needed the pot to get by and to get sodomized. I needed more and more to be drunk fo when he entered me.

I was however having wild crazy time. My biker friends had me on the back of their motorcycles when we’d careen about the streets of the city at high speed. I was dealing with lawyers with Maureen. My mother was incredible. I kept wanting to just walk away. She’d help with all the horrendous ‘paper’ and protect me. I felt safe with my parents but a disappointment, I avoided my brother and sister in law not wanting to bring my sordidness in to the joy of their growing family and love. 

“I still think Maureen is wonderful woman but I’ll never forgive you for letting that mother anywhere near us. She’s the nastiest person I’ve ever known. She’s so shallow and arrogant. I understand now everything you were going through but I don’t approve of any of it. You’re old enough to know better..”

Well, I went off and had a glass of wine and smoked a joint and left the mothers to fight over the dead carcas of a life.

One night I spent the whole night drinking a bottle of whisky and considering ways to kill myself while looking at the pink house and all our possession and that life which was now dead .All of this was  dead ‘stuff’. I threw the television at the wall. I thought everything was better when we’d kept it in the closet. I blamed the tv and all the propaganda and us watching movies all the time and the news. I blamed this and that. But in the end I blamed me. I didn’t kill myself.  The sun came up. I watched it. Winnipeg is a beautiful city at dawn. 

I had the Mustang. I ‘d driven down to San Francsisco to see my friend and his wife. I’d begun a love affair with his sister. She wanted me back. She said we would move in together. It seemed such a good solution. 

I traded my mustang in for money. The now ex had frozen my accounts and was taking all the money. I told my Mom I just wanted out. I said not to fight. She took the house and the possessions and the back account and I left in this beat up bug that had been used by the Vancouver Folk Festival as an amb ulance.  I was travelling south with a Mennonite artist. I’d named the bug, Pendergast. I’d been given tickets for speeding in the mustang and convinced the authorities that this bug couldn’t speed. It hardly made 80 and was without a hand brake so on hills I opened the door and put a brick under the front tire.  It had problems with hills. 

Still I had money for getting to SF.

“You can’t leave, I’m not finished with you.” Maureen had said. I’d  replaced. “I gave you 10 years of respectability and nothing was ever enough.”

We would never talk again. I’d done my best. It turned out to be the worst. 

The gazebo had been the last straw for me. I’d been working three jobs and all the money was going to her but I wanted to sit outside in the summer. I hated the mosquitoes. I had my garden and I barbecued outside. These were good times for me. Gazebos’ went on sale for $100 and I could have put one in the backyard but she’d said ‘we’re not having a gazebo’ .she put her foot down. More shouting. More anger. And in retrospect I expect she didn’t want the neighbours to hear her screaming. She’d begun to scream at me just like her mother screamed at her father. It’s an eerie thing.  

I never got a gazebo even though I had the house to myself for six months.  

With my new “love” rented a house in Marin.  I had a steady supply of pot. We all smoked pot back then and we drank wine. She went to work . I studied for my American exams and got A’s. Stanford offered me a job on the basis of Jack Hildes reference. 

“Dr. Hildes is greatly admired. That’s a great reference to have.” They told me. 

I was going to enter the community psychiatry program on staff .  I had made a friend of a Berkeley prof and he offered me a position teaching in their philosophy, communication and culture department, a new position, which would have involved psychiatric research in community psychiatry.  

Her  boy had been impossible. The first week I arrived I was at the principal’s office because he’d been destroying things.  He was violent and destructive and I’d not been told he’d been expelled from every school, seven in total. He was in Gr. 1.

I’d come to know that women no longer were interested in me as a friend but would almost invariably have a crazy person in their family and see having a boyfriend who was a psychiatrist as a cheap solution. I’d learn women with old cars liked mechanics. It was a different and difficult insight.

Now that I had been womanizer and bred I was softer and had more insights  identifying with women and understanding them differently.

I assumed this was why psychiatrists as part of their finial initiation had sex with the residents. I didn’t think mine was an unusual thing. I knew there were psychiatrists who just prescribed drugs and were kind of ‘junior neurologists’ but I figured the psychiatrists who like me were the psychiatric psychotherapists, the analytically trained, the inner circle who could do magic, these ones had sex. I found myself wondering who was having sex with who and who I’d have to have sex with. I didn’t want any more homosexuality.  I didn’t want it at work. I wondered if non Jewish psychiatrists went through the homosexual initiation or just the Jewish ones. I couldn’t imagine the Jews I so admired all being homosexual or even have sex with students. 

I was going to marry and raise this kid and hang out in Marin and have a good life. It was a full time job straightening out this kid. His mother used him as an emotional weapon. Her ‘inability to control him’ resulted in him making her the centre of attention. No one wanted her around. He was sexualized. What I’d call the single mother syndrome. Without a man to protect him from the mother she’d smothered him. She treated him like a boyfriend. I’d call it emotional incest. 

I became the boys friend, another uncle. I ‘d phone up his father , meet with him and tell him that I was ‘pinch hitting’ that I was not going to interfere with his fathering. I was going to continue to love his ex but that his relationship with his son was completely sacrosanct.  He was my friends friend and soon the three of us would be taking the  “little man’ everywhere with us. His mother didn’t like this.  “You’re ruining my son.”  Yet he stopped being kicked out of school and soon we were invited everywhere as a family. He was a great kid and no longer had temper tantrums when his mother was angry . He had stopped being her surrogate amplifier. 

That’s when the shit hit the fan. One day at this elegant affair I heard the mother and aunts and other important women telling her how pleased they were with her son’s behaviour “since Bill had come along.’  They actually said she was doing a lousy job of parenting because he’d been becoming a little terror.  They told her matter of factory the family had been going to insist he be sent to military school. However, now that “ Bill had smartened her up and let her son be little gentleman it was all thanks to Bill.  Feminists don’t like any praise going to men and single mothers demanding their be no other god but them aren’t likely to take well to being told by their very successful wealthy and powerful mothers the way things were. 

She was furious.  She was angry. Her son this little man of 7 years old suddenly through his old fashioned temper tantrum beginning to break dishes at the table. I picked him up and gently put him in his room.  That had been the ‘technique’ which had lead to his stopping all his acting out.  I’d simply remove the audience and remove him from the audience. I was highly effective while his mother had played the game ‘i’m overwhelmed. I don’t know what to do’ but refused to give up control.  She and he could ruin any event. He was a very bright boy and learned a lot of bad behaviour from her. 

I’d been called and offered a locum at the Brandon Mental Hospital. The provincial psychiatrist had called me because they were desperate with an asylum and no psychiatrist. Could I come for a month or two. I was to start at Stanford. I didn’t need this drama. I’d been through the insaneity with Maureen.

Now she took the boy out of the room and brought him back into the kitchen .  Splitting and using the poor kid to get back at me and her mother and all of society for wanting quiet and order. 

I phoned Manitoba.

“What are you doing.” 

“I’m taking the job I told you about.”

“You’re supposdd to be starting at Stanford.”

‘That can wait. I don’t want the kid screaming and your screaming and us going back to the way it was when I arrived. I told you I was never again going to sit in front of a principal again.. I’d done my own time as a child and I wasn’t going to do that for you again. Your son was doing great. That’s what your parents and grand parents and everyone said. He’s getting A’s at school.You’re angry so he’s angry but we agreed he’s not allowed to break things or he goes to his room. You’ve arbitrarily changed the rules and frankly I’m not going to do this again. The evidence is overwhelming. I think I’ve done my job here. You can think about it while I’m away.”

“No one leaves me.”

“I’m leaving you now.”

I got on a plane the next day.  We exchanged letters and calls for awhile 

Eventually I’d send her a bill for psychiatric services.  She didn’t like that. She never paid. My friend said that all the men who knew her thought that was genius. True coup d’tat. “ But my mother and she will never forgive you. The boys doing well and his father thanks you.”

Gratitude derailed

Thank you for the light in the morning when I walk the dog. This morning the sky was blue and the crocuses have returned. I’ve seen daffodils and now the neighbours tulip stalks are up.  I’m so looking forward to the tulip days to come.  It’s like somehow this year I lost faith in the fall and winter coming to an end.  My brother’s diagnosis has brought me face to face with aging.  I’m seeing illness all about me in a way that I’ve not for so many years.  There’s always been the itching sensations after treating the scabies patients.  The germophobias that assail me somedays.  I know that I can’t go out from fear now some weekends.  The attacks come back. There’s this lack of faith that I’ve had.
My decision to stop marijuana smoking as occasional as it was still remains an issue too because even though I drank and that was little compared to the mainstream today I felt I was wrong to be ‘breaking the law’ by smoking marijuana. As a professional it didn’t matter that I did this on holidays or weekends. It didn’t matter that I bought my marijuana from doctors or that I smoked marijuana with doctors , psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and lawyers. It didn’t even matter that I had seen a psychiatrist who recommended that I smoke marijuana given my wife’s illness.  All that didn’t sit well with me.  Spiritually I’d felt that I wasn’t right. I’d made a promise to God to change my life. And I felt that smoking marijuana was breaking the law and I didn’t consciously break the law.
I was and am and always was a law abiding citizen for the most part even though in Canada today the legal system and bureaucrats and parliamentarians think people who are law abiding so called good citizens are fools, that’s what I was.  I’d speed in my car occasionally but these were lapses of judgement.  The marijauana smoking was conscious. I truly believed that the State was wrong, not just in it’s views of individual behaviour with respect to drugs but with its views towards sex and a variety of ’social laws’.   As I got older I saw that Canada wasn’t a ‘free society’ in a lot of ways and when I smoked marijuana I was ‘rebelling’.
Yet here I was riding on roads made by the collective.  I was enjoying the clean water and food that came from the collective.  I was thankful for the courts and parliament for the jails and laws that fought murderers and thieves  I enjoyed so much of what our ancestors had given us in our buildings schools and churches.  I was being paid as a physician through the organization of health care. I was taught as a physician.  These were all ‘lawful’.  So what was I do ‘breaking the law’.  Why was I smoking dope.  I drank wine and that wasn’t an issue.  I was a wine connoisseur. Yet when I drank wine I smoked cigarettes and marijuana. I’d concluded as a physician that smoking cigarettes was stupid, evil, extraordinarily unhealthy and that the tobacco boards were organized crime. I further thought that our government was corrupt to arrest marijuana smokers but allow tobacco producers to be rich and major influences on the supreme court and parliament.
When I drank legal alcohol I’d smoke again though I’d quit and when I was smoking cigarettes I’d prefer a joint so I’d break the law and get some marijuana as well. I’d even tried cocaine but was glad it didn’t agree with me.  My pleasure seemed to be red wine and smoking a mix of low strength marijuana and tobaco.  I thought I was ‘cool’ when I was a little buzzed.  Like I was James Bond and Sherlock Holmes and that I could write and play guitar better. I was wrong . I also thought I was a better lover. I was slower but I don’t think I was a better lover. I know too I didn’t think about work and I didn’t worry and I was just happy to sit and let the world go round and round as compared to my normal state where I’m trying to help and work and concerned about what I could do next.  I certainly never worried I wasn’t fulfilling my destiny or doing all I could be or achieving my potential or what others thought when I smoked a joint. I was utterly narcissistic and definitely purely pleasure oriented. A hedonist. Canada is a country of hedonism today or some might call it "shedonism'.
But I was breaking the law.
So when I stopped I sought help from the Physician Assistance program.  I couldn't get my wife to address her illness so I felt the best way was for me to admit my problem, and that this would lead to her getting help.  I was a politically outspoken person who had represented a lot of cases against the totalitarian corrupt authorities.  I’d been an outspoken critic against communists and fascists and Canada breeds both in abundance in high places.  I had integrity and told the truth and defended patients from abuses from above as much as I fought the diseases which plagued them from within.  It made me a lot of enemies.  Reporting a pedophie means that he’s caught but the ring survives.  Reporting a doctor doing unauthorized experiments on patients for profits catching him but not the nest. Always the very authorities whose job it was to protect patients were collecting their pay and not doing their job.  I was a vigilante good samaritan, doing the right thing.  But of course, when the criminal was caught, it was naturally asked why the beurocrats who are paid millions to protect patients didn't get these 'big fish'.  They naturally looked bad and they hated people like me.  I think too that they're there to 'protect' those 'special  doctors who aren't like the rest.
I had to do it .  It was a thing I had with this ingrained integrity and ethics and morality that said that doctors shouldn't be killing and that eurocrats shouldnt be colluding.  Of course everyone wondered who was getting kickbacks.  Why  were these doctors getting away with murder.  The elite protects its own.  It’s disgusting but true.  To get ahead they have to have protection within the courts and high places and especially within the bureaucracy. I exposed this.  If you do good in Canada you will be burnt. I was a whistleblower and whistleblowers are all collectively condemned in Canada.  The State thrives on 'informants' and encourages 'confidential informants' and administrators carry little black books like all good communists do but 'whistleblowers' are another thing.  They disrupt the common business of corruption and undermine the whole 'institution baksheesh' industry.  The Reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo.  The whole job of the elite, the bureaucracy and the courts is to resist change.  Change  threatens  the powerful.   The lie is they are always 'promoting change' deceitfully.  Lie, lie, lie!  Deny. Deny Deny!  It's the halcyon cry of the courts and bureaucracy.  Fuddle Duck!!!
I cause change.  My generation was a ‘change catalyst.’
My question at the time is what do I do with my drug addicted wife and how can we get help with our marriage.  I’d been divorced and concluded that I  was facing another divorce and the common ingredient in my divorces was that my wives and I drank and smoked marijuana.  Of course given feminism in it’s day and the radical feminists in beaurocracy they had long concluded that all divorce was the cause of men, another common ingredient in marriage,  so drugs were irrelevant.  This was before lesbian marriage with its similar rate of divorce so the idea that men were the cause of divorce went out the window but too late for my marriage.  I divorced.  I was punished as men are in divorce .  It's a sexist society, i.e. men are sexist.  I was also punished as marijuana smokers were in the day.  Marijuana smoking wasn't actually punished but rather being truthful about marijuana smoking.  The same as homosexuality. For the longest time homosexuality wasn't punished as long as you were not truthful about it.  Society is that kind of lie.  I was punished because while the bureaucracy paid lip service to the idea of ‘disease’ the individuals involved in the programs were holier than thou and claimed that they were the guardians of the public good.
Yet they didn’t care that the prime minister was smoking dope as a teacher and that the prime minister was smoking dope as an MP.  They didn't about the irreparable damage he did as a teacher and the irreparable damage his example has had on children.  Baseball players and hockey players are condemned for smoking marijuana because they are an 'example' to children but Justin Trudeau was smoking marijuana when he was an Member of Parliament so what kind of example does that set for children.
They justified all that they did to me and others by the idea that we were a threat to society. I was never a threat to society and never made a bad decision. I loved the movie with Denzil Washington as the pilot because that’s what I saw in my case and for those around me.  This horrible ‘war on drugs’ world was coupled with beaurocratic pomposity and deceit.
So my marriage ended.
The friends of the men whose friends I’d caught stealing, killing and raping, suddenly gloatingly became my superiors holding my freedom in their hands.  I was terrorized by a little hitler and his little eva brawn.  And today I’m afraid of drugs because I believe seriously that too many people in Canada are on drugs and that the only way we have been able to get another lying Trudeau in leadership is because Canada is a nation of stoned drunks.  I would have voted Trudeau when I was smoking dope.
So I’ve not handled the election well. I’ve not handled watching 18 billion candian dollars go to the PARTY.  I’ve not handled the lies well and the idea that others don’t ‘get’ it.  I’ve also wanted desperately to smoke dope again so I can join the stupidity and not be aware of what’s happening.  I’d like to smoke dope and believe that there isn’t illness and everything is an illusion and that if I just have my dope mind I’ll get by.  When I smoked dope it was like I was one of the batteries in the  movie Matrix. I thought the Matrix was the best movies about the drugged and the awake.
I’m awake today.It's hard to be awake.  I think of the millions who were not caught up in the Hitlermania of their day or the Lenninmania of their day.  There's this 'mania', an orgy that I could get myself caught up in when I was smoking dope and drinking. I liked the group grope and hedonistic throb of the club scene when I was a little high and in denial of reality.  I loved the escape to adolescence, the disregard and animal like awareness that drugs brought.  I smoked a joint and drank some wine and I was blatto.  My IQ dropped and I had trouble following conversations or walking to the bathroom. I was demented.  Usually I was actually more aware than the thousand or so others in the club since I was only a light user in public and at home I used to just go to bed early.  I was a happy drunk, if drunk is the right word.  Rarely was I angry but like all couples drinking we had our shouting matches.  She was always a public ranter screaming at me when I wanted to get her home public scenes worked well for women.  I remember trying to get drunk women into taxis to get them home with even drunker men trying to keep them at parties and me caught between these two drunken nightmares.  Sometimes I went home alone and worried all night if she'd get home somehow.  When I went to Al Anon I was the 'wife' and my stories were the norm for that group. I fit right in.  They'd all been their with their drunks and addicts.  And yes, some of them had joined in but the fact was we'd always been the 'adults'.  We'd been the ones who had to 'get the other home' or take care of the 'adult' business the next day. I was always 'papa'.  I am seriously tired of being the 'man' .  I always knew I could take care of myself and I could take care of others but that if there was trouble I really couldn't rely on the wife to take care of me. She was hardly able to take care of herself.  It wasn't just out in the wilderness but in the city. I've watched the new rage of girls in high heels beating up guys in tv movies and it's more of the lie.  I've known too many situations where there's three or four men and I'm defending myself and a woman and the woman is usually drunk and stoned and often caused this scenario but probably won't remember what happened the next day.  Or she'll rewrite the script to be something like a Supergirl scenario and ultimately she'd find a way to blame me for her drunkeness or being stoned legless.
I’m thankful fortmy sobriety. I’m thankful I’m not stoned. I’m grateful for the relationship i have with family and true friends and the journey I’ve been on if only because it helps me related to the horrendous abuse that so many Canadians have had who when they smoked dope at their jobs were subjected to forced treatment for the benefit of society. I am thankful that Justin Trudeau driving his car stoned didn’t kill anyone and I didn’t kill anyone even though I now know that people who smoke dope are ‘impaired’ for 36 hours though they feel the effects of marijuana for only a few of those hours. I’m thankful I didn’t hurt anyone except my beautiful ex wife with my unkind words because her drug addiction was so much worse than anything I experienced and I never was understanding of her it mpairment because I was totally caught up in the narcissism that drugs does to self and relationships.  I know today that relationships are the first thing harmed by drugs and that we can’t really know each other when we’re in a parallel play only because our only intimacy is with the ‘drug’.
I suspect there’s a ‘dose ‘ factor. I think there’s a ‘steady state’.  Certainly pharmaceutical medications don’t ‘impair’ like ‘self administered pleasure’ drugs. I don’t suspect there is a ‘low dose’ that can be helpful but that this isn’t like the aspirin where we know the dosage by years of study.  With marijuana it was always ‘good’ weed’ , bad’ weed’ and effects over time. I truly don’t think ‘maui wow’ was ever strong enough to do more than what a beer did but BC Bud is “killer weed’ far more potent than possibly cocaine or tequila.  A regular hallucinogen.  I hope one day that agents like SATIVEX will make dope safe.
But I’m struggling with this right now.  When I hear Truedau speak I could swear he’s had a joint especially when he smirks to himself.
I loath that the Trudeau household was a Maggie filled dope house of second hand smoke when my friends were being put in jail for one joint. I hate the double standard and I’m really struggling with getting old and thinking I may be dependent on institutions like my parents were and have to trust again. Because I stopped trusting 17 years ago when I divorced and I witnessed the worst medical care I’d ever believed possible and saw first hand abuses of power that I never in my life would have thought could occur in Canada and yet were done to me.  I’m lucky to be alive.  God had other plans. I put my living down to the intervention of an unknown female Irish psychiatrist and some Christian doctors who believed in truth and love more than profit and power.
But I’m struggling. A whole PTSD time coming back to me and questions between me and God about prayer and faith and gratitude.  And rumours of war and end days and Freud saying ‘maybe the paranoids are right’ and me thinking really ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’.  And everyone seeming to be smiling their joint like smiles, while  I’m standing on the street during “Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ scene.  The smell of marijuana reeks. I can’t get away from it in Vancouver.  It’s worse than the smell of second hand smoke or stale beer.
I'm hoping for tulips and that this too will pass. I'm hoping that with spring I'll snap out of this and find gratitude. I know I'm needing to deal with resentments and fears and that I have to get my head into the same room as my head. I've got to be thankful. I've got to find a way of seeing this present situation in a way that spiritually makes me a better person. I always remember Dr. Ney, the great anti abortion physician saying, the world is full of bitter people. You have choice.  He'd cry when he heard of more babies being killed.  I see the light going out in the eyes of people when they're on drugs and alcohol. He saw the light going out in the world when a baby was killed because there was no hope and no one cared for life.  Death stalks the earth.  But there is gratitude.  And with an attitude of gratitude there is no room for the darkness, fear and resentment.  That's what Hal Morley told me and Hal was a light in the darkness.
So again I must find gratitude.  Thank you God that I'm alive. The daffodils are out.  Soon the tulips will return.

Waking Up Sober

There’s no hang over. The room isn’t twirling.I’m not asking myself what I did last night.  Not so much what I did, but what did I say that I might regret.  I’m not wanting to die. I’m not hating work and the human race and wanting to curl up in my bed and never come out.
Instead, the soft light of dawn comes through the window panes.  I step out of bed softly.  The way the light falls on the bed is beautiful. I’m happy.  I look forward to the day.
Crossing the living room I enter the bathroom where I have an old beat up tattered and torn copy of Around the Year with Emmett Fox. It’s pleasant to sit on the toilet and read today’s passage.  Metaphysics is science and art. We learn by doing. And there’s a quote from James, “be ye doers of the word."
I’m thankful to be sitting on the toilet and not on my knees beside it with my head down the hole, retching. Retching beyond retching, dry heaving, like soiled seizures, without the comfort of coma.
I sit down to meditate. I pray to my Higher Power.  At the advice of my spiritual friend, Willie, I’ve been praying to the Holy Spirit.  My sponsor, Bernie, called his Higher Power, Holy Spirit too.  I talk to Jesus sometimes still. Then there’s a pantheon of names of God that blindfolded men have used to describe the elephant.  God is infinite, finite, omnipotent, omniscient.   Holy of holies.  I go on in my head detailing all I think I know.
Recently I’ve been riding my Harley Electraglide motorcycle to work listening to Steven Bell. Two refrains from his music  play over  again in my echoing brain:”We’re not alone” and “It’s always been about love”.  We're not alone. It's always been about love.
As I’m sitting quietly considering my breathing, repeating Psalm 23,  I hear the little guy get up.
Gilbert, the cockapoo is my room mate.  I saw him laying stretched out on my bed when I woke up. Now he makes his way over to the couch where I’m sitting cross legged. He jumps up to sit beside me. I feel his paw on my knee.   “It’s always been about love”
I open my eyes. The little guys big brown eyes are looking at me expectantly. One paw on my knee. He's made his morning greeting. It's my move.  I hug him, roll him over and rub his tummy and chest.    He squirms with joy.
I go back to meditation.  A little while later he’s sitting beside me, again,  with his paw on my knee, big brown eyes boring through my closed eye lids.   I know I shouldn’t reward this ‘behaviour’.  I should focus on my meditation. I should listen carefully for God. I should be focusing on my ‘quiet time’.   "It's always been about love".
 I look the happy fellow in the eye turn him over on his back and rub his chest for a longer while.  Then I go back to meditating, thinking too that he came over when my mind was wandering, wondering about the external manifestation and synchronicity and flow.  I’d begun thinking ahead too, to my day, worrying about the myriad of details that could overwhelm me, the recent crisis of betrayals, mutiny, disruptions, equipment failures,  physical threats, world war, zombies, alien invasion.
He next appears with a ball.  I get up then. We're not alone.
Years ago I remember kicking my dog, Shinto, hung over, him greeting me with wagging tail and me pushing him away and then kicking him as I staggered to the washroom to be sick on a country morning.  I wish I could take back that shuffling kick.  After he came back and licked my foot worried he'd hurt me. Shinto was a saint sent to be with me through the end days and early days.
After him, still early days though I didn't think so, came Stuart, the white Scotty.  The drug dealers who threatened me ,wanting me to pass their marijuana dirty urines so they could get high paid government jobs. When I wouldn’t, they poisoned Stuart.  They sent me a “message”.   Cowards.  I didn't pass their urines dirty urines but years later you could hear my voice at the biker rally when Steppenwolf sang out, Goddam the Pusherman.  And we all sang along remembering friends and family the slime had killed.    
I put the coffee on.   I like that I’ve fine coffee, my own stove and coffee maker.  It’s mine. It’s not rented. I own this. I pay taxes.  I’m a contributing citizen.  I put on the kettle for the instant porridge. Once hunting with my friend Luke, he brought these little packets of delicious.  I don’t know if I had encountered them before, but they tasted so good on that trip in the woods with all that camaraderie and humour, I just love having them now for breakfast.
I started feeling irritation about this crisis at work that has been thrown at me.    Enough time in the day for that later.
I moved my mind instead to remembering the wonderful woman who stepped forward to assist. She makes me wonder about genetics and pedigree.  Her family overseas is royal blood.  She has that fundamental understanding of ethics and morality along with a joie de vivre, immense talent,  skill and training.  She's been a blessing.
Rather than thinking about the negatives I focus carefully on the positives.  It takes effort. It doesnt come naturally any more.
In passing, sipping my hot delicious coffee, of the the group I was with yesterday. I find myself dwelling more on  the one person who I think wrongly or rightly doesn’t like me.  Then thought I see the ridiculousness of my thinking.     I let this person go and conjure up the smiling wise faces of those compassionate understanding old souled people that I hung out with.
In my head  realize I'd began writing a poem for the negative one, about their emotional land mines, their judgementalness and insecurity but stopped myself. I thought about the soft spoken worker, that Brother Lawrence in our midst.  I could so easily be distracted by the drama queen desperate approval and miss Brother Lawrence.
I see myself about to campaign, to run  Napoleonic war, with the emotional maturity of  5 year old or at most a 13 year old girl. This person likes me, this person, that person doesn't. She loves me , she loves me not.   Here I'm Napoleon again and I’ve taken Germany and Italy, but I still have to assault Russia with my charm,  good grace and diplomacy.  I caught myself almost taking her bait. She's erected walls and moats and hurled down flickering eye lids of burning oil glances and I'd stood 'bewitched'.  Meanwhile Mother Mary, Magdalene and St. Theresa of Avilla are all glad to talk to me.  I just wasn't giving them my attention. Meanwhile Russia isn't all about me, either.  
I conjure up my personal Mother Mary. She’s always true and curious. I love her curiosity and good will.  I envy her too.  Still,I want to think her life was ‘easier’ than mine, ‘more privileged’, ‘richer’. I want to dismiss her radiance and goodness.  I want to make unfair comparisons. I want to chop off the heads of others to make myself taller. But I can’t. I think of her and it’s just ‘all about love’. “I like Steve Bell,” she told me once.  Agape is what C.S. Lewis called it.
After being sick I used to have coffee and run through my mind all my enemies.   I never even thought about ‘winning them over’. I just imagined hunting them down and doing abhorrent things with their exposed intestines.  Mostly I scowled.  I’d take a couple of cups of coffee and fifteen minutes or so to ‘compose myself’. Then I’d " force myself" to do what I had to do blaming everyone else for my ‘having’ to go to ‘work’ , "having to put up with idiots’, "having to be diplomatic’.  I wanted my personal army, my personal rocket launcher and I wanted to nuke all the silly little girls with their ‘wrecking balls’ and their insufferable prissy little begging boys.  I felt sore that I was born out of time, fully equipped for a western but deprived of a Mexican cantina, some easy wrench and an obvious bad guy.  I always wore the white hat in my own drama. I even wanted my own spaceship with lasers. I couldn't be satisfied with a sunny day in the summer when I wanted a spaceship with quantum generators and planet killers.
Today I tell myself I have to be nice to those not nice to me, if only to reduce the blow back. I think Karma isn’t some intellectual thing but rather a spiritual law. The golden rule, is just that. Be unto others as you would have them be unto you.  I’m still trying to be more forgiving.  We talked about my ex wives yesterday.  I can list my own faults ad infinitum today and even think about theirs. Mostly I remember their infinitely smooth skin, the sweet smell of their hot sweat and the warmth of their exquisite miraculous bodies. We were all so young, yesterday.
I hope I do better today.  Today is my new canvas.  It’s time to shower.  Dress.  It’s a new day.  The wreckage of the past is lying out there somewhere. I don't expect to encounter it today. Mostly it's all new.  Only I'm projecting the past onto the present. .  And I know, “We’re not alone’.
“It’s me against the world,” I used to think.  I was an angry Bruce Lee.  After a days war I could settle down for a drink.
Today I’m really happy with the peace.  Especially the peace of mind.  Nothing tastes better than a tall glass of sparkling spring water too.

Marijuana Smoker

I see addicts all the time.  Mostly they come to me complaining of ‘depression’.  More commonly than not they have seen a colleague of mine who has given them an antidepressant.  The colleague has usually avoided asking any details about lifestyle and especially glossed over addiction.
Most medications were tested in non alcoholics and non addicts.  If my colleague called the pharmaceutical company that made the drugs he prescribed they’d say they were not  tested in combination with 2 bottles of wine  a day or 1 to 6 joints a day of BC Bud.  If there were justice, my colleague would be faulted for 'lack of due diligence'. All manner of patients have difficulties with combined pharmaceutical drugs and street drugs.  It's a common cause of "side effects' and 'death'.
Most of my colleagues don’t know that Amsterdam after 40 years of experience with marijuania has lifted the standard famed ‘BC Bud’ marijuana to the most dangerous drug category, alongside Heroin and Cocaine. The Dutch 'experiment' with drugs has been a failure and is being reversed.  Pot Cafe's are now highly regulated.  Portugal decriminalized drugs but made treatment of addiction central.  Everyone except Canadian Teen Agers and Children, are getting off drugs.
Most of my colleagues and Canadians in general seem ignorant that the marijuana that the Beattles smoked in the 60’s had a THC content of possibly  1 whereas todays BC Bud is as high as 15 to 30.
When a person comes into the office and says that they are irritable and having trouble sleeping and feeling negative and have self pity and negative ideations and maybe even are suicidal, the first thing I wonder is, are they drinking or doing drugs.  My colleague would say, I think they’re depressed.  Yet I was in charge of a suicide ward and was a supervisor in a psychiatric emergency and reviewed all the completed suicides I’d known and lo and behold they were almost all associated with drugs and alcohol.
Suicide is under almost all conditions a severe brain disease.  If you see a mouse running repeatedly head first into a wall trying to kill it self you don’t at first consider Nietze and philosophical things. Even a veterinarian thinks, Brain Disease, meningitis, brain timor, etc.
So similar real doctors are taught when they see a person with symptoms, especially of depression, to think first a foremost of ‘organic’ causes, especially if the disease is so severe as to be ‘life threatening’ as suicide is.
Just as a person could have lung cancer without smoking almost all lung cancers especially the horrid oat cell carcinoma were found in tobacco smokers. My famous Califorinia respirologist friend says, 'there would simply be no department of respirology were it not for cigarette smokers'.  We now learn that hypertension and heart disease are diet and alcohol diseases, diabetes most a diet disease.  Once called mental illness, most departments now are called "Mental Illness and Addiction".  There's less and less mental illness and more and more addiction but we can't 'blame the victim' and the rich doctors never tell the emperor he has no clothes.
Yet, just because depression is common and increasingly with the increasing drug (specifically marijuana) abuse and alcohol abuse, suicidality is ‘common’ .
But today patients who are diagnosed with addiction or alcoholism may face consequences.
1) They lose the ‘sympathy’ of the ‘depressed’ patient.  “Just Say NO” campaign, while being true, and helping countless people, also minimized the difficulty that addicts and alcoholics have stopping drugs and alcohol.
Most people who have come to me with ‘depression’ and ‘alcohol or drug abuse’ have indeed tried to stop.  The CAGE Screening Test, the simplest 4 question test of all, asks ‘have you ever considered cutting down’.  Not surprising people who don't use or even don't abuse drugs and alcohol have never considered 'cutting down' but some 80% of those who have turn out to have the disease of addiction. It's a marvellous red flag.
Most patients referred to a specialist like me for depression who also have alcoholism or addiction have indeed ‘tried’ and are ‘defeated’. They have ‘hopelessness’ because their lives are ‘unmanageable’ with their addiction.  Yet they don't like the name 'alcoholism' or 'addiction' and were 'alcoholics anonymous' called 'stress stop' they'd go their in a minute. It's just that 'honesty' is lost early in the addiction cycle, for the addict and alcoholic, and for the enablers and for society.  Everyone avoids talking about the 'elephant in the room'. Especially if they've seen an angry elephant.   Historically addicts and alcoholics excelled young in the navy and army early in their disease. The air force began to have a problem with addiction when they got into jets and today alcoholism and addiction are identified early in the military but very late in politicians and others farther from the 'front'.  Artists rarely get diagnosed as alcoholics and whole generations of artists have been influenced by pedophiles, just as an example, likening sex with infants to an 'addiction' and showing how it can be promoted as 'okay' and 'normal' especially by 'addicted' artists.  But when I asked marijuana smokers if they wanted their neurosurgeon on marijuania they said no. Today I prefer artists who aren't intoxicated.  Tiny bubbles is very passé.
Chemical addictions, like alcohol and marijuana ‘short circuit’ and ‘disrupt’ neuropathways.  It’s like splashing a circuit board with water.  The computer screen will show all manner of entertainment and flashes and gibberish just like the ‘delirium’ state caused by intoxication.
Here I note, a person can have 1 to 3 glasses of wine without ‘intoxication’.  Note the word ‘toxic’.  Drug experience is ‘on or off’.  One can drink without getting ‘drunk’ but one smokes marijuana and gets ‘stoned’ .  Drug addiction is ‘digital’. It’s on or off.
The ‘state’ has been described as ‘dissociated’ , two personalities, and over time the ‘dissociated self’ can ‘consume’ the well person, in the Doctor Jeckyl/Mr Hyde way all of us see who work in addiction.  Recovery is to a very large extent the recovery of the authentic self and the expansion of the potentiality.  The addict person is a very abbreviated reduced person with limited access to higher brain function and major loss of control.
The ‘sympathy’ component of addiction was associated with traditional ‘disease’ categories.  A person had a ‘heart attack’ and it was thought to be ‘involuntary’ whereas a person showed up drunk in the Emergency and that was ‘voluntary’.
The ‘rage’ in ‘pharmaceutical medicine’ is the treatment of ‘involuntary’ disease.  Fundamentally there is ‘fate” and “free will”.  In our society we ‘take credit’ for our good deeds and ‘blame’ others or the universe for the ‘negative’.
Insurance companies excluded alcoholism and addiction (because they could get away with it and knew they’d save fortunes in the insurance lottery) but kept ‘heart disease’ and ‘lung disease’ as ‘involuntary’.  Today we know that those who had heart attacks and lung cancer more often than not got them as a consequence of drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco.
Today we call them ‘diseases of lifestyle’.  Life ‘style’ is such a politically correct ‘fashion favourite’.  In the Bible they said the ‘sins of the fathers and mothers will be passed on to their children’.  In the East they called it ‘Karma’.  But in Consumer Corporate society it’s just called “marketing’.  More often than not my alcoholics had parents who were alcoholic and the smokers had parents who smoked.
But nobody wants to be ‘honest’ and no one including the doctors, government and corporations want to do anything but ‘collude with the dying customer’.  Indeed when the smoker gets lung cancer the covert aggression of the manufacturer and friends was to offer him a cigarette.  Alcoholics on their death bed are given more to drink.  It’s comforting.
So my ‘johnny come lately’ junior colleague has a wholly ‘addiction’ practice so that only ‘addicted’ patients are sent to him. This ‘selection bias’ ensures that he not only doesn’t have to make the diagnosis he’s politically correct and leaves the heavy lifting to the first doctor who says, “I think your diagnosis is alcoholism or marijuania addiction."
The beauty of heroin addicts and crack addicts is that the ‘prohibition’ society makes everyone’s life easy because these people know what they are doing is ‘wrong’ and no one has to ‘convince’ them they have a heroin or crack addiction.  They just may or may not be ready to address the problem.  Drug addiction and alcoholism are ‘fun, fun and trouble and trouble.’  The sooner you get off the train bound for institutions, early death, disease, jails, the easier the fall, but as that train speeds up and descends deeper and deeper it’s more frightening to jump off and much harder to crawl back to where you are no longer down.
Chemicals such as alcohol and marijuana and eventually all drugs of addiction, which mostly over stimulate and damage the dopamine (happy, think ‘dopey’) circuits are ultimately depressing.
The initial euphoria is a product of the ‘disinhibition’ of the loss of the frontal lobes which are the latest and most human structure of the brain associated with judgement and editorializing, delayed gratification, planning.
The buzz diagnosis in the pharmaceutic industry for the 'mood swings' of addiction is 'Bipolar II" disorder. Addiction and alcoholism are the 'great chameleons of mental illness because ever 'symptom' of mental illness can be seen in the addict, from the usual 'anxiety' to the final states' early 'dementia' or 'schizophrenia' like' psychosis.  All intoxications are 'delirium like 'or 'cognitive impairments' and 'mood disorders'.
Spiritual teachers recommended a once a lifetime or once a year ‘drug experience’ to have this experience of being aware of the more primitive ‘childlike’ thinking but especially the notion of ‘time’ as a critical factor of ‘assumed’ thinking.  Meditation is a ‘timeless’ experience but so is ‘drug abuse’ and ‘drunkeness’.  Immediately in the altered state one loses ‘time’ awareness.  In the proper ‘context’, historically and culturally established by tribes and medicine men one could have an induced religious experience. This ‘dangerous’ rite of passage, as described in Huxley’s Perennial Philophy and known to Indians in the “Peyote” experience is wholly different from the ‘abuse’ of substances seen today.  For one these 'religious drug experiences' are a cultural and community and 'controlled and regulated by elders 'experience. But mostly they are just 'once' or at most 'once' a year.  There's nothing 'religious' or 'spiritual' about daily or weekly 'intoxication'.
It’s all in ‘dosage’.  To the addict or alcoholic ‘more’ is better whereas in fact the value of alcohol to ‘enhance’ a meal as often encouraged by gourmands is at most a glass. Two glasses of wine ‘dulls’ the palate’ just as with the heart, which is made better with 1 glass of wine is made toxic with three.  Huxley suggested it would be beneficial for people to have an hallucinogenic experience once in their life. Not to live their life as Mr Hyde.
Whereas alcohol biological effects wear off in a matter of days, marijuana or cannibis last weeks to months.  A person’s perception and interaction with others, relationships being most sensitive to drug and alcohol abuse, as with higher tasks of work and play, are not just affected in the ‘intoxicated’ phase but also in the ‘withdrawal’ phase.  Weekend binge drinkers are in ‘withdrawal’ in the middle and end of the week.
One wonders about jokes about being careful with work done by governments and union workers at the end of the week.  The ‘withdrawal/craving’ cycle is all part of addiction.  With the classic white collar martini drunk Judge his ‘decisions’ made late in the day were commonly less favourable as opposed to those mid day.  Astute lawyers timed their clients cases against the judges daily evening drunkeness.
The WHO has long held that one is only clear of drugs and alcohol if one has been abstinent for one year.  The DSMV says a person is in 'remission' if one is one year abstinent. All 'harm reduction' strategies are only 'valid' scientifically and culturally if they are leading and directed ultimately to 'abstinence.' Otherwise they may well be enabling, and a doctor takes an 'oath to do no harm'. Enabling is harmful. If one is only providing 'palliative care' one should indeed tell the patient that they are being treated as if there is 'no cure'.  Abstinence is a 'cure' for addiction.  So it's ironic that people are so often offered 'harm reduction' sometimes even first offered 'harm reduction' rather than given the true facts especially those that say that the people working in predominantly harm reduction  are usually the most negative about their clients potential.
There is no ‘healthy’ or ‘medical’ smoke.  All smoking is ‘unhealthy’ and ‘not medical’.  When a person tells me they use ‘medical marijuana’ I routinely ask them if they ‘smoke’ it, knowing that the estimate that 95% of British Columbia ‘medical marijuana’ establishments were for pleasure purposes.  Smoking marijuania is 'recreational use'.  The cost/benefit medicinal value of any marijuana is negated by smoking it.  Only marijuana consumed without smoking is potentially of 'medical benefit' given the burden of disease associated with marijuana.

2) The patient who has been diagnosed as having addiction or alcoholism is suddenly fased with not being told to take ‘a pill’ as alcoholics and addicts have been pharmaceutical industries greatest friends.  The last alcoholic drug addict that died whose pill cabinet I went through, had every prescription and over the counter mood altering substance known to man.  Indeed if one was cynical one would consider that the ‘drug doctors’ avoid asking about addiction with any care, concern or ‘due diligence’ because they know they run the risk of losing a very valuable customer. These ‘prescription pad’ doctors would rather throw another drug into the mental soup of the insane patient than ‘make the diagnosis’ of alcoholism and drug addiction because this could ‘anger’ the alcoholic and drug addict.  Freud considered alcoholics and addicts to be 'orally addicted' He thought these people were fixated on the 'breast'.  He thought the damage psychologically was done in the developmental phase when one is being 'weaned'.  He was probably right.  However sex addiction and gambling addiction are not oral fixations so addiction to alcohol and smoke might well follow Freuds observations but overall addiction appears more a behavioural disorder of impulse dyscontrol and regulation failure.  Cognitive therapists see marijuana and alcohol as potentially like 'computer viruses'.  We know now drug addiction and alcoholism are 'contagious' but better still we know that 'recovery' and 'abstinence from drugs and alcohol' are equally if not more 'contagious'.  Groups get better  whereas those who isolate are the least likely to recover.

Why doesn’t anyone want to ‘anger’ the alcoholic and drug addict? Ask a wife or husband what their response was when they told their partner they thought they were drinking too much or smoking too much marijuana. It's not usual a Rockwell moment. There's nothing cuddly about an addict or alcoholic  who is questioned or even criticized. The whole development of the 'motivation' interview was to avoid questioning or even' addressing' the addict or alcoholic in the 'denial' phase of addiction.  Alcoholics Anonymous told people to come when they reach their 'bottom'. A bottom could be anything from loss of marriage or loss of job or just feeling stupid on marijuana and having had 'enough' . It's said you can get off at any floor , you don't need to take the elevator all the way down.

Note, I have had a dozen complaints to the College of Physicians and Surgeons solely by making the correct diagnosis.  I have had my car windows broken by alcoholics. Marijuana smokers have murdered my dog. My life has been threatened repeatedly and my windows have been shot out.
Judges, probably drunk, agreed that it was okay if a man killed another ‘under the influence’ , the courts being the prime enablers in the country for drug addiction and alcoholism and the best friend of the tobacco companies.  Ask Mothers Against Drunk Drivers who their greatest enemy is.  For years it was the judge and the courts.  Doctors working against the widespread promotion and sale of tobacco especially to children literally fight the government and courts to stop the killing.

When I last diagnosed a marvellous old chap with alcoholism and refused to give him ‘valium’ for his ‘nerves’ and indeed told him the ‘combination’ was dangerous and that I couldn’t in good conscience prescribe him more drugs for his ‘anxiety disorder’ and ‘depression’, he wrote scathing ‘rate your doctor’ comments for 2 weeks after the visit.  The difficulty with rate your doctor is that when I fired a secretary who had relapsed on crack she too wrote a number of ‘comments’ about my character, practice.
Alcoholics never say they don't want to go to alcoholics anonymous because they want to continue to drink. That would be a very politically incorrect thing to say to a boss, for instance. They always say they don't want to go 'because of the God thing'.  That's because the 'god thing' works today. 30 years ago they said they didn't want to go because of fears of anonymity.  My favourite complaint is that they don't like the colour of the wall. Everyone knows that Alcoholics Anonymous membership would sky rocket and be as popular as the pubs if they served alcohol.  No one complains about picture of the Queen in the pubs and no one complains about drinking in Christian establishments and the very best drinking goes on at religious funerals.
I had one pothead complain that I was a man. They never said that I'd told them to quit pot. No one ever tells family what the doctor said truly when he tells them to stop watching porn, stop drinking or stop smoking pot.  They tell the referring doctor if they're a woman, "I think I need to see a female psychiatrist'.  If they're a man, 'they say I didn't like that psychiatrist, could you refer me to another'.  The most popular psychiatrists prescribe the most clonazepam and ritalin to the addicts and alcoholics.  They collude. Addicts and alcoholics love those who collude.Theres a great book called the Alcoholic Republic that gets down and dirty with the problem of collusion.
Alcoholics and addicts are nasty people in their disease.   Dr. Jeckyl and Mr Hyde. They’re at first jolly but addiction is like making love to a gorilla, at first it might be cuddly but it’s not over till the gorilla says its over.  So after the honeymoon the meanness of the addict or alcoholic comes on.  And that’s any time but the increasingly briefer period of ‘okay’ feeling that the person gets with the abuse.  The Chinese coined a term to describe searching for this elusive moment as ‘chasing the tail of the dragon’.
So the Government and the College and academics all spout ‘platitudes’ about not prescribing dangerous combinations of drugs with active alcohol or drug abuse( and there are countless measurement tools and assessment tools for assessing drug and alcohol abuse) but mostly people 'avoid' asking and 'cherry pick' and 'collude'.  Everyone can then say they were 'well intentioned' even though the 'outcome measures' show this as often as not supports and even promotes'.  It's a start though so better than nothing. Platitudes are sweet sounding at least.  Like 'lifestyle disease'.  Very PC.  It’s not even easy to speak to a family member or friend about a person’s alcohol or drug abuse (given that the second question of the CAGE is ‘has anyone ever suggested you might have a problem with alcohol or drugs, has anyone  "annoyed" you by suggesting you cut down).  The Government and the Colleges of health care are by nature 'PEOPLE PLEASERS" so they are grossly in effective in addressing addiction because people with addiction (especially marijuana smokers) are so easily 'annoyed'.
Meanwhile the richest and most lauded and most successful psychiatrists are those who the drug companies reward for prescribing the most pills too.  Addiction psychiatrists by their very nature, tell people to stop prescription drugs and abusing illicit drugs.  We're poor by comparison and we're the ones who get the complaints not the 'drug pushers'.  The police are beat up by the drunk, never the drug pushers.  Drugs and alcohol impair the memory and protect the source.  People rarely roll over on the drug pusher. Goddam the drug pusher!!!!
And today they tell people to stop smoking marijuana.
All doctors tell their patients that smoking mairjuania is unhealthy.
All doctors tell people to stop smoking.
Not very adamantly.
Not strongly.
But they're telling them.
I remember when we offered patients cigarettes in the office or bummed a cigarete from the patient or nurse in the hospital.
Addiction can be cured.  Look at how addiction therapy has 'cured' smoking.

With all the gains we've made at high cost addressing tobacco smoke I'm sorry but I don't want to have the smoke epidemic start all over again with 'safe' 'herbal' 'medicinal' 'marijuana. Is every one stupid. Just look at the marketing of tobacco. It was sold as a means to have smaller easier deliveries because smokers babies were smaller. Women were encouraged by tobacco companies and their paid doctors to smoke during pregnancy.
Everything the marijuana crowd and their bully boys are saying is what the tobacco industry said 50 years ago.

But a day doesn’t go by in my office where someone smoking marijuana daily or weekly doesn’t tell me that I’ve got a problem suggesting they have a problem with marijuana.

Indeed any doctor who is being a healer in the western world of ‘lifestyle’ disease i.e. principal diseases are addiction diseases - gluttony i.e. over eating, smoking, over drinking, lack of exercise poor diet, workaholism etc, is going to get complaints.

Indeed when I ask doctors, have you had a complaint to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and they say, “no’, I know that they are good businessmen, jolly good fellows, wearing rose coloured glasses, lying, playing it safe, but they’re not ‘healer’s and they’re not physicians in the true sense and they’re not ‘psychiatrist’ especially by any definition of the word. Or they have a very circumscribed practice where they can do medicine, like pathologists do, knowing all the ills of addiction but never having to face a living patient and tell them how to delay ending up in the morgue.

I'm PRO LIFE and condemned for it as a doctor today. The Euthanasia doctors and single government health care insurance with it's conflict of interest loves euthanasia.  Euthanasia is good for you because it saves the government money.

First ‘do no harm’.  The greatest harm that can be done other than actually killing a person is to watch, thereby, encourage, them, killing themselves. We call that ‘enabling’.  Stop filming the terrorists. The media black outs of terrorist demands dramatically stopped terrorism campaigns of the 70's.  Stopping advertising of tobacco stops it's sale.  Stopping advertising marijuana and especially promoting 'safe heroin injection' ensures that there will be an eventual reduction in addiction.  We are winning with stopping smoking tobacco. We have addressed the greatest public health concerns of the day. We are finding cures for HIV.  To promote smoking today would be like say have promiscuous safe sex.

Yet so man individuals and most institutions in our society enable and encourage addiction.
It’s the elephant in the living room.

My friend who is one of the most successful and entertaining men in the field of gambling addiction gets millions of dollars of research money from the casinos and probably from the MOB. He laughs when he says his ‘mandate’ is  not to ‘cure’ gambling but to find a way to ‘stop’ a gambler after he has lost his house, job and marriage,  from coming to the casino and making a nuisance".  His job is to address the ones who are bad for business. Indeed this genius recognizes that promotion of gambling is tied to the taxation system and may well be preferable to those who don't gamble as a means to fund bridge building. This doesn't say good things about the 'stigma' attached to addictions but it speaks to the reason why people want to be called 'stressed' or 'depressed' and diagnosed with 'PTSD" rather than "Addiction'.
No military doctor has ever advanced his career by suggesting that stupid military commanders shouldn’t waste their assets.

Indeed the most recent example of this was a brilliant loving caring wonderful human being of a military doctor who tried desperately to stop the wholly unnecessary ‘waste’ of ‘friendly fire’ only to be fined and pilloried by every official organization in the country.  In my mind the man is one of the greatest heroes of the day and were our society not so sick , he’d be awarded the medal of honour for his courage and genius which surpasses mine and most of my colleagues.

Locally we have a ‘SAFER INJECTION Site” called “INSITE “ which I say should not be funded by ‘TAX PAYERS” but rather by the gangs like ‘allegedly’ the TONG and Hells Angels, who ‘allegedly’ are behind the distribution of heroin. Just like my gambling doctor friend the Insite crowd clean up the ‘mess’ caused by the addiction to Heroin.  Insite makes Heroin look good, puts a pretty face on addiction and helps the gangs market their goods, protecting the industry of drug addiction just as my gambling friend is given money to stop the loser from returning to the casino when he’s lost his assets.
When I was a bar tend in England at 20 the pub owner threw the drunk without money out on the street.  Now they call an ambulance. The cost of the health care system is exorbitant because of addiction.

10% of all people who abuse develop some level of addiction.  Addiction is diagnosed by it's negative consequences at first to the individual and later to their society.
10% of marijuana smoker will develop addiction of some kind. The more available a substance is the exponentially higher rates of abuse occur. It’s not madness that had tobacco companies wanting to put cigarette dispensers in schools and it’s no surprise that the western world has an epidemic of obesity with all the carbohydrate ‘chips and nachos and chocolate dispensers’
Sabet in REEFER SANIETY shows very clearly that the taxes never pay the cost of addiction.

Indeed taxes are like the apocryphal proverbial Mexico City Police.  When I was there I was told by locals if I was robbed I have to think twice about calling the police because they often apparently figured that since a ‘robbery’ had occurred and a gringo was putting in an insurance claim ‘anyway’ then they should help themselves to anything the thieves had forgotten to take. So the ‘taxation’ argument goes , since the ‘drug pushers’ have taken most of your money and life the government now can take whatever is left by ‘getting a cut of the action’.

Indeed in Canada in a famous referendum, all gambling and liquor and drug ‘revenue’ ‘sin tax’ was only to be allowed by government if the assets went directly only to health care and education because the corruption of government would occur when ‘sin tax’ went to the income of the politician and courts and bureaucrats. This is the case today which makes it hard for my patients to understand ‘what’s the difference between the RCMP arresting you and collecting tax for marijuana smoking” and the gangs charging you and beating you up a bit if you didn’t pay your debts.

A colleague psychiatrist,  a favoured doctor-businessman, a great ‘corporate scion’ of medicine, says that the problem isn’t with heroin being sold on the street or cocaine being sold on the street or marijuana but rather that ‘we’re not selling it’.  He sees no problem with ‘prescription drug addiction’ and indeed promotes speed, oxycontins and ativans and clonazepams better than any ‘street drug pusher’ I know.  He doesn’t like the ‘competition’ which he sees as ‘unfair competition ‘ because the marijuania drug pushers ‘don’t pay taxes’ and ‘aren’t regulated by the College and Government’.  Imagine the complaints department for The College of Marijuania Producers - every childs mother would be complaining daily to that place.   But the College of Physicians and Surgeons is the enforcer of complaints by addicts about their doctors who have diagnosed their addiction with the negative consequences that has for their insurance or work or marriage.  Stopping their addiction and getting in recovery would help everything especially their health but in the interim it's easier to complain and be nasty.

So Justin Troudeau says he smokes marijuana and smoked marijuana while working.  Whats new about that. His father said he didn’t swear but said ‘fuddle duck’.  The acorns don’t fall far from the tree.
But Clinton said he put a marijuan joint to his mouth and didn’t inhale and Obama said he smoked marijuana contritely.
The fact is, Clinton could well have done just what he said. When a joint is going around , to be part of the crowd, and to be a politician like Clinton became, you learn to ‘fit in’.  You are kind of a Nazi among the Nazi’s and Kind of Communist among the Communists and Kind of a Jew among the Jews and Kind of a Christian among the Christians. This is the essence of political correctness.  You are without ‘substance’ and as a new ‘opinion poll’ peace time politician you’re like the addled brained weak kings of the feudal world who had syphilis of the brain and were loved by all the powerful men until faced with an American Revolution.  So Clinton caught in the act, with the photographic evidence, and testimony, not dissimilar to when he was caught with pants down, may or may not have ‘inhaled’ but he wasn’t ‘proud’ of his behaviour and tried like the marvellous Flashman of the Flashman novel  series to weasel out of it. He knew right from wrong.  Just like he knew it was wrong what he was doing on the job with Monica, his being married and collecting government funds for working but indeed was ‘distracted’ by Monica.  We don’t hear much from her but Clinton today is the highest paid ‘speaker’.
Obama did drugs. He admits it and ‘apologizes’ for it.  He ’s ‘contrite’. it's all in the attitude.
Justin Troudeau isn’t contrite.  It's his attitude of entitlement that offends.  That’s the problem.  He ’s like Mayor Ford.  They are two very entitled elitist white men who don’t seem to understand that this country is a ‘democracy’.  We believe in laws for everyone. I'm waiting for an apology from Troudeau for breaking the law and essentially 'bragging' about it.

My friend got caught for smoking a joint.  He went to jail. He didn’t like authority and was claustrophobic. 10 years later, raped and beatten and life changed irreparably he came out and joined a criminal gang.  I met him years later. To the best of my knowledge he’d killed people by then.  He’d been no different from me. We’d come from the same background. I smoked banana peels one day thinking it would get me high. He smoked ‘grass’. The police caught him. I got sick. He went to jail. I went to university. We met up in our 40’s.  He deals marijuana.
I’m sure he thinks Justin Troudeau is a chump.  He hates pompous poofs like the Troudeaus.  Can’t stand them.  To him they’re just feudal lords, ‘dandies’ is what he calls them. He reads a lot, was brilliant as a young man.  Today he's rich. He could be the lead in Sons  of Anarchy. He’s that sort of guy.  He was only supposed to go to jail for ‘possession’ of marijuana.  He was only supposed to do ‘6 months’.
Justin Troudeau wasn’t arrested for ‘possession’ and he would never have done time. As Animal Farm told us ‘some animals are more equal than others’.  The communism of old man Troudeau, the great atheist religion, has turned out to have killed more millions in a mere hundred years than all the religious wars in the thousands of years before.
Communist countries have devolved into gangster run states and the democracy of Canada continues to muddle along despite the ubiquitous corruption of Quebec.  The satire of the recent Quebec investigation, had one of the leading politicians of the province saying ‘I only took 5 million dollars, I could have taken millions more, everyone else was taking millions more’. That’s the moral relativism of this ‘class’ of characters.  What might have been called in Casblanca, ‘todays’ cast of ‘usual suspects’.
My other patient was caught with a few joints and put in jail. He was young and blond and it was before the drug courts. So he was supposed to just do a few months and leave. He was gang raped and died of HIV Aids.

Everyone wants decriminalization.  Decriminalzation makes the problem a health care problem and addiction and alcoholism ‘disease’.  Legalization is what the gangs want. Already people like Emory are counting their millions. These pothead promoters are the new CEO’s of Tobacco Companies.  They are addicted to power and money.  No one cares about the addict. No one cares about the 10%  - the losers.

The marijuiana smoker is toast.