“The reason I do drugs is so I don’t feel the fucking feelings I feel when I don’t do drugs,” Nick, a forty-year-old heroin and crystal meth addict once told me, weeping as he spoke. “When I don’t feel the drugs in me, I get depressed.” His father drilled into his twin sons the notion that they were nothing but “pieces of shit.” Nick’s brother committed suicide as a teenager; Nick became a lifelong addict. The hell realm of painful emotions frightens most of us; drug addicts fear they would be trapped there forever but for their substances. This urge to escape exacts a fearful price.
