Fentanyl Epidemic

“I’m a doctor just like you,” he said.  I knew him in passing.  A good fellow.  Well intentioned. Most of his life a drug addict.  Now he and a friend like two teen agers going fishing patrolled the Downtown Eastside with Narcan kits they got free from the pharmacy.  Instead of trout he caught life slipping away in the gutters. Occasionally, he brought it back with drama and flourish.
“I’ve saved a dozen lives,” he said.
It was good entertainment. He used himself. The suboxone helped him and only a few times a week did he ‘party’.
 “We like the fentanyl because it’s strong enough we can push through the suboxone.” he said.  The patients liked the oral methadone and suboxone because it stopped the withdrawal sickness.  They could have a life separate from the daily grind of finding the money and getting high.
Their faces linger in my memory.  Only weeks ago I saw them.  A couple of young Caucasian women, in their 20’s with boyfriends.  They came as couples to get their opiate replacement medication.
I talk up a storm about AA/NA/SMART, the non pharmacological treatment groups, Detox and Treatment Centres and Recovery Homes..  We really only get paid for the prescriptions. The doctors break into two groups. The rich ones who write a lot of prescriptions and the poorer ones like me who do counselling and try each time to push the patients closer to recovery.
Recovery isn’t Harm Reduction.  Recovery is a proactive program of wellness leading to abstinence from mood altering substances.  Harm reduction is supposed to be a step on the way. But now our Prime Minister is so vocal about smoking pot and all the tobacco company wealth is back in the business of smoke everyone in the DTES is either smoking marijuana or cigarettes or both.  The trouble with drug addiction is that it really dulls the senses and their addiction to smoke is seen as nothing compared to the heroin and crystal meth and crack cocaine.  Then there’s the sex addiction, gambling and pornography and crime.  It’s a smorgasbord of free choice in the DTES.
But mostly they tell me they don’t want God or any of that spiritual or religious stuff.  They want drugs.  Addicts are materialist hedonists.  They are sometimes even like the monkeys we studied back in school with the electrodes in their amygdala pleasure centre who would live to pull the lever of pleasure.
More and more they tell me they don't want any of the recovery options. "I just want that free heroin. Can you direct me to where I can get my injections for free.  I don't want to stop using. I just want to get the stuff free."
Each of the women was demure with whimsical smiles and street smart eyes. College drop out. They’d been into opiates only for a year or two at most. They’d started with pills they got at parties and then became hooked. With their boyfriends they now needed fentanyl pills every day, at least one or two, sometimes more. They ground up the pills and snorted them.  They smoked marijuana too.  A lot of the marijuana had been sprinkled with fentanyl so the herb was hurting folk bad.  Even the organic shops marijuana had been tested and come back positive for fentanyl. I imagined with the fentanyl so cheap dealers were going about sprinkling powder here and there to increase their clientele.
Drug dealers are lizards who want to be your friend.
The Fentanyl was coming from China.  It was sold on line and brought in over the border en mass.  My hypochondriac patients complain that it and crystal meth are in the air in the DTES.  The paranoids are afraid of the food outside in the markets. They’re crazy but no more so than the neighbourhood.
It’s just that their faces linger. The two women from last month. I've mostly forgotten the patients that died before them.
Sometimes I remember Gordon Lightfoots song, “Only a go go girl in love with someone who doesn’t care.”  I think of their mothers.
They’re dead now.
Their boyfriends each on different weeks came in and told me the same story.
“We got high together and overdosed.  I woke up but she didn’t”.
They were sad but it hadn’t changed their own drug habit.  If anything they did more.  Running from the demons. Burying the pain.
“Sometimes you see the shadows out of the corner of your eye,’ the older guys tell me.
I talk about higher power and participation.  I repeat till the cows come home that it’s a disease of relationship and that they have to find a way to associate with people that don’t use.  I hand out pamphlets and point them to all the different groups and services that we have.  The government pays for drug and alcohol counsellors but it’s like getting adolescent boys out of gangs, one on one care doesn’t work. They need a new group, a new club, a new association.  Their religion is addiction. They see their drug as god and their dealer as their priest.  It’s high ritual.  The language doesn't tell you that but it's there as bold as the body bags.
I ask him if he’s stopped using.
“Not yet. “ he says telling me about the great feeling saving a life gives him with his free narcan kits.  I think of it as band aids.  It’s like a lone medic in Afghanistan. Every life counts.  Don Quixote charges another wind mill.  There has to be a Dulcinea.
I expect the feminists would call me chauvinist because I remember those two women more than the half dozen more young men I’ve known who are just as dead in these last few months.  It’s wrong to even speak of gender. Freedom of speech is dying as quickly as youth.  It's only okay to speak of what we're told to speak.  Designated truth or fake news.  More illusion of choice. There are so many divisions today.  I worry I’ll offend someone even by asking them to live. The Prime Minister is proud of his new physician assisted suicide programs.  They’re opening more and more needle injection sites with dilaudid and some are even giving free heroin.
They once assisted the Tong, Euro Gangs and Hell’s Angels who brought in the Heroin profiting by the government taking care of providing drug clubs, keeping their business alive with safe injection sites  and carrying all the costs of bad drugs.  Now they’re actually going toe to toe with pharmaceutical grade product versus the ‘shit they call down’, the gangs provide.
“It’s not heroin anymore.  It’s not been for a long time. Synthetic shit. That’s why the fentanyl is attractive. Cheaper and it does the trick better.” he said.
The uppers go with the downers.  Jib, or crystal meth is everywhere as well. Not as much crack smoking as doing jib these days.  There’s a lot of doing jib then heroin to get to sleep and then getting onto straight heroin and maybe cigarettes or pot. After the drugs get happening big time the alcohol which may or may not have been there in the beginning becomes less important.  Some say drugs account for 80 or 90% of the material theft.  The insurance companies are not suffering.
Legalization which is what our Prime Minister was pushing means that a drug could be sold in a school candy machine. If it’s legal, it’s legal. Like mother’s milk.
Decriminalization is accepting the disease model and treating the whole matter not as a moral issue but rather as an epidemic.  Harm Reduction, really palliative care, a term with a marketing twist came out of the cancer treatment and then the Aids Epidemic.
Harm reduction may not be that good for the individual. Individuals do best if they get into AA or NA , treatment, recovery houses or join a church.  When they look at people 20 years abstinent individually they mostly work,  belong to spiritual organizations and have replaced their previous habit with community participation and love.  Love of God, love of family, love of fellow man and woman.  Drug addiction is at best mental masturbation.
The Harm Reduction is good public health and ultimately may be preventative as the profit in drug sales moves into the public purse. It’s hard to say if there’s any less gambling today but the government gets the money rather than the Mafia.  Now one then wonders what’s the difference between public sector crime and private sector crime.
But I’m a medic in D Day and the enemy in this case, the drug dealers, they don’t provide medics for their ‘side’.  I still think I'm on the good side. I just don't know some days if I'm doing righteous work or enabling.  There’s a whole lot of other types of medicine I could do.  But I’m down here in the DTES with more and more young people. When I began in the 80's working in a detox the clientele was mostly in their 50's.  Not a lot of really old people in this work.  Living past 60 not so common here as in the suburbs.
My patient is going off with his buddy to look for more bodies in back alleys in hope he can revive them.
I’m just doing what doctors do, pushing life, where the profit always seems to be more in pushing death.

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.

Breaking "Bad Relationship" Addiction

The hardest thing about getting healthy is giving up all the unhealthy things that one is attracted to.  In relationhships one has to accept that their "picker" is broken and they will choose abusive relationships because that is their tendency. It's no different from children picking with diabetes and hypertension being left to pick the food they find most tasty. Naturally they will pick sugar and salt both of which are unhealthy.
People who have had bad relationships are 'attracted' to bad relationships and find 'good' relatioships 'boring', 'bland', 'dull', 'unexiting', 'not sexy', ie 'unnattractive.'
Healthy relationships don't involve all the 'drama' of the soap opera set. People who are good in relationships don't sleep with your sister or boss because they're angry with you. They don't punch you in the mouth. They don't send pictures of you in sexually offensive positions to the internet. They don't phone your place of work and say that you are a pedophille when you aren't. They don't tell the customs agent you're a terrorist.  They don't bring over friends that make bombs in the basement. They don't ask you to store their stolen drugs or stolen cars. 
Healthy people are really rather dull and boring by comparison to all the other 'exciting' people who have a shallow superficial attaction.
People who make their money through hard work don't throw it away.  "Big Spenders" and "High Rollers" are commonly 'criminals' because their 'money' often coming from 'ill gotten' means was 'easy come, easy go'. 
Normal people like 'gifts' but question 'largesse'.
If the girl or guy has sex with you the first night they probably will have sex with Adolf Hitler or Ava Brawn the first night. It's not because you're so attractive, it's because they're cheap or loose or make bad choices like you do.
Good relationships are 'simmered' like a good stew. Don't burn the roast.  They don't have to be eatten right off the stove.  Let them cool a bit and the flavour will keep.
Yet if you've gone out with a woman who stole from you then you will often be attracted to a woman who steals.  Attractions are linked.  Pavlov showed that ringing bells and giving dogs steaks resulted in them salivating when they heard bells.  If I have sex with a person who steals I will be attracted sexually to thiefs. If I have sex with a woman who in rage attacks beats the crap out of me I will be attracted to women who are dominatrix material.  If a girl has sex with a man who intermittently beats her she will be attracted to men who have that 'look' that normal women shy away from. Abusive men and women have a certain 'immaturity'. They're not socialized or toilet trained and adults don't 'choose' them because adults want healthy relationships so avoid men and women who do drugs and alcohol and crime and all that exciting sexy stuff.
So make a list of 10 minimum requirements in a mate.
It's not rocket science.
1) She or he doesn't have a drug or alcohol problem.  You go out on enough dates to see if they do drugs or alcohol peculiarly before you have sex.  You ask questions and you listen to stories. 
2) You avoid people who are 'victims'.  It's a pretty big clue if the guy or girl was beat up psychologically or physically by all their previous partners. Figure you'll be the next 'abuser' because immature people see themselves always as victims, and children and never accept 'their part in it'. 
3) Ask about previous break ups and beware of cliches. "we didn't get along",  "we weren't right for each other'.  "he wasn't ready for committment'. These are the new politically correct ways of saying he or she was a jerk. The "paranoid position' , otherwise called 'immaturity' is 'I'm right, they're not".  Watch for people who tell stories in the "I'm right , they're not" or the variation "I 'm okay, we're weren't'". Find out what the longest relationship was. This indicates clearly the 'distance a person can do'. It's like their 'marathon' capacity.  I have the fondest memory of a woman I knew for 6 months.  She had a history of 6 month relationships, I'm more like 10 years myself, but she was superb for 6 months, a terrific sprinter. But like a sportscar she broke down on the NASCAR before the first pit stop. 
4) Dont' read women's or men's magazines about relationships. They are written usually for losers.  This is written for losers.  The best way to know about good relationships is to spend time with people who have good relationships and ask them about their long term deep committed relationships.  People who say they want long term deep committed relationships are commonly liars. They really want sprinters and sportscars but they say they're looking for a long haul truck. Right!  Women and men lie equally.  No gender or race or religion has a monopoly. Stop being sexist and racist.  Accept your own failures and successes and admit to your own limitations. People who are successful in relationships choose someone with common goals and then do what successful people do.  My friend who is one of the most long term committed successes I know told me the most absurd thing I've ever heard about relationships. "I dont' argue with my wife" he said.  I always argued with my now divorced wives. What a bizarre man.  Yet if that's the 'counter intuitive thing' that works maybe I should try it. 
5) Don't listen to people with less years of relationship experience.  People who do are downright silly.  If you want to fly you don't listen to a tree climber about how to drive a plane.  Relationships are skill sets. Everyone can be good at a one night stand. Look at all the losers in Hollywood. They make it look good even. They even make a virtue of necessity. Lots of losers there but in fairness the business of Hollywood is intrinsically anti marriage and anti family.  So it's not surprising few Hollywood marriages are compared with Billy Graham or Queen Elizabeth or Hillary Clinton.  Quality and quantity go hand in hand.  "Strange" makes for good short term relationships.  It's actually biological and driven by a cocaine like substance in the saliva that wears off after months or at most a year or two. After that marriage and relationships are 'committments'. They often don't 'feel' good and most people in long term committed deep relationships have had many times when they didn't "think' it was a good idea.  Women talk about 'committment' alot but their track record is as bad if not worse than men. Much of 'feminism' was 'social communism' and attracted women by saying they were the 'proletariat' and men were the 'bourgeoisie'. Feminist died when half the women were rich and abusive to men and overnight the whole 'communist paranoid ideology' fell with the Berlin wall.   Beware of idealogues of any kind.  These are people who argue with a lawyer on their shoulder.  If you disagree they will quote scripture, Marx, or their mother to prove you're wrong. Normal people disagree and agree to disagree without chopping the heads off others to make themselves right. In relationships both people are commonly wrong and together usually get it right.
6) Divorce is failure. The first baby of a relationships is the relationship.  It takes two to divorce. If you are divorced you killed the baby.  You're a baby killer.  If you say the other guy killed the baby then admit you picked the wrong baby sitter and ultimately are responsible for the death.
7) Acknowledge 'fault' but don't wallow in guilt.  The trouble with the legal system and "Deny, deny, deny, lie, lie, lie" religion there in is that if someone doesn't admit wrong in building the bridge bridges keep getting built that fall down. So commonly in relationships people keep picking the same ninja over and over again and complaining about being attacked in the night by Bruce Lee. 
8) Once you have a list of minimum requirements, priorize the list.  Yes I want a 6 foot tall partner but not if they have a history of serial murder.  On the other hand if the fellow I like is Danny De Vito and I want a 6 foot talk guy Danny's sense of humor (hilarious) may swing the equation. But this should be considered' raltionally' because I can't trust my 'emotions' because they are 'damaged' by bad relationships. I always have to consider that I'm prone to make mistakes if I have had relationships previously that weren't what I wanted. They may well have been what I needed but in getting needs and wants connected I have to seriously look with humility at my choices.
9) People are most commonly disappointed by unrealistic expectations.  Not surprisingly I've found women in general lacking when I compare them with Angelina Jolie as a  'brand'.  For all I know Angelina beats Brad in the bed room but her 'brand' is not helpful if I compare 'real women' against that. 
10) Real people are a gestault. They are a package.  When people argue they commonly isolate one trait rather than seeing it in context. If we did this is sports even the best football player or hockey star would be found lacking somewhere in the play. A great baseball hitter may be a poor catcher and still end up in the hall of fame. When I see ugly people together I just assume they probably are amazing in bed or maybe one is a great parent or a good cook. It's something that's the glue and I don't criticize other relationships and try especially not to criticize my partners these days.  People who criticize their partners should accept that they bought the lemon and don't really know what's a good person so if they get rid of the lemon are most likely to get another.
11) Co dependents Anonymous is a good organization to start addressing relationship issues without spending an arm and a leg.
12) Better to do marriage therapy when a good relationship falters than to talk ad infintum with a counsellor about relationships when single. It's good for the counsellors but it's like doing a lot of time in ground school when a person's real problems are flying the plane.  Get on a horse and then get advice about riding but don't pick the mean horse.  For that a counsellor can help you.  Get advice on how to fix the picker.  One fixes the picker by going out with 'unnattractive people' .  It's like learning to eat non greasy food. At first it tastes bland and unnattractive then after a while you wonder how you could ever eat that greasy shit.  You act your way in to right feeling and right thinking but it all begins with the acceptance that you've a broken 'picker' and the problem lies within not without.  Change and the world changes with you. 
10)

Retrospective Falsification

This is an amazingly common psychological process.  My favourite example is arguing couples who say "I never loved you", or "I never loved him or her".  They can be anywhere from 1 to 30 years married when they say this and they can have children homes and cars and complete lives built around the marriage.  They will have taken vows and made formal committments yet here will one or the other or both be making this statement without any consideration that they sound and probably are as psychotic as the person who says "The CIA are speaking to me from a micro chip they put in my tooth."
Retrospective falsification is often as in this case coupled with 'emotional reasoning'.  The fallacy here is that "I don't love him now so I must never have loved him".  The notion here is that the person has a capacity for love today and that since this person isn't 'loveable' now then they must not have loved them.  Further the idea is that love is some kind of romance novel magic that gets permanently bestowed on a knight or princess and if that person doesn't remain loveable then it wasn't 'love' originally however the grandiosity and arrogance of the person who makes such statements is that they 'today' have the capacity to know 'true love'.  The fact is that love is what love does and that relationships that last, beget children, result in people staying together through crisis, building houses together, etc is as much love as love is.  A person may grow and realize that what they liked a decade or more ago is different from what they liked now. A woman who was a sociopath might well have loved as sociopath at the time, the love of two sociopaths (minimalist at best) being the best she was capable of given her limitted capacity herself.  Years later when she has grown as a human being she may realize that she no longer needs to be a sociopath, having developped spirituality and gained the capacity for care and generosity for others.  She then may experience a greater slice of the big world of love and say that what she had before wasn't what she has now.  She has matured in her capacity for love and her taste has become refined as say one's taste for music or food.  I 'loved' fast food as a teen ager but today while I still 'like' fast food" I love a well made salad or venison liver pate. I hated liver as a child though.
Retrospective falsification is the 'rewriting' of one's personal history especially in a 'politically correct' way. The communists were masters of rewriting history. When Trotsky was 'in' his picture was everywhere but when he was 'out' the Communists actually air brushed him out of group photos.  This is 'retrospective falsification'.  It's a sneaky form of lying to maintain the appearance of infallibility.  In this case the 'state doesn't make mistakes' whereas on a personal level its usually "I don't make mistates". To maintain one lie another lie is used.  In the case of retrospective falsification an person might have once been a friend of Clifford Olsen.  However when it turned out Clifford Olsen was secretly killing women the memory of the relationship might change to "I was his acquaintance but never liked him."  Certainly Peter's denial of knowing Jesus in the Bible is a classic example of retrospective falsification.  He only realized his 'lie' when the 'cock crowed' and he realized Jesus had 'prophesized' his memory lapse and denial.
Retrospective falsification is changing the past based on new information in the present.  It's been recognised that people are 'lying' routinely on a daily basis and many times a day in many ways not necessarily black hearted lies, but what are considered 'white lies' or just good manners.  One classic example is 'How are you?"  "Fine", the person replies, not because they are, but because they don't want to discuss being fired with the office gossip.  Retrospective falsification is often just a means whereby a person defends the ego and maintains the illusion of their being good decision makers rather than recognising that people commonly err and that we can learn by our mistakes.