Am I Sober?

Am I Sober?

"Physical dependence is not the same as drug addiction."
- Suboxone Medication Guide

The manual further instructs, "Your healthcare provider can tell you more about the difference between physical dependence and drug addiction." Which had been my plan until I was pulled out of the medication line and escorted to a backroom because of "suspicious mouth activity" (that's not poetic licensing, those were the COs exact words to the nurse when she spied me sucking my thumb). The staff suspected many of us were squirreling our medication, catching us fed their Nancy Drew/Batman fantasies. But if your lead is a turd, you end with a turd.

"Open wide and lift your tongue," nurse Pitbull said for the third time. I did my best Jaws impersonation and attempted to touch the tip of my nose with my tongue, an old party trick. "I can't see anything when you do that! What's in your mouth?!" she repeated feigning frustration. Truth was she enjoyed this power flex, most who work Corrections do—the proverbial child with a magnifying glass playing god against helpless ants.

"What do you think you're gonna find in there," I said turning away from her colonoscope flashlight. I knew what she hoped to find: a contraption that allowed me to save my 8mg Suboxone sublingual strip (they're like orange Listerine strips but for opioid addicts instead of fresh breath seekers). It annoyed me that she only cared about the how and not the why, making her more insipid sleuth than nurse. I wanted to scream, "I STICK IT TO MY TOP TEETH, SO UNLESS YOU'RE GONNA PULL THEM OUT THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!" Instead, I said, "For months I've asked you to lower my dose, and every time I'm met with a hundred 'Why? Are you really sure? Think about it a bit longer because once you go down it'll be really hard to go back up,' making me second guess myself, and the monkey on my back latches on to this and convinces me to keep my dosage where it is—maybe go higher, why not? From the day I was asked if I wanted to go from 6mg to 8mg it was the addict saying yes, because when it comes to free drugs the addict always wins. Please, lower my dosage without all the questions and roadblocks so the addict won't have a chance to sabotage."

Unmoved, Pitbull scoffed—scoffed!—and said to the other nurse, "Give me his dose, he'll take it here." This was the inevitable moment I had dreaded: forced to take the full 8mg instead of the half dose I'd prescribed myself. As a Millennial, my history with the medical establishment's habit to overprescribe is long and intimate (let's put a pin in that and circle back later), and I refused to allow them to drug me into oblivion. Except I had allowed just that. No one had put a gun to my head when they opened the Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT) program eight months ago and I signed up. No nurse had manipulated me into raising my dosage from 2mg to 8mg (though they did increase it up to 6mg without asking me). And this is prison. I could refuse my dose, but then Pitbull could take me off the program, causing me to withdrawal; or if she felt cruel she could write me a ticket for insubordination, causing me to lose my spot in the college program. I opened my mouth as wide as a boa constrictor and placed the Suboxone under my tongue. Pitbull watched me the entire time, a glint in her beady eyes. Ant meet Magnifying Glass.

When I got back to my cell, I pulled out my typewriter and began drafting a letter to the doctor in charge of MAT requesting to lower my dosage. I had to make sure not to lead with frustration/anger; sleuthing aside, my experience in the program had been positive. Suboxone is a combination of the opioid (synthetic opiate) buprenorphine and the overdose-reversal drug naloxone, and it's used to treat opiate withdrawals and cravings. My participation wasn't only about the medication, the treatment provided counseling (at least it's supposed to, I am yet to see a counselor though I'm told I will... someday), and routine drug tests. Guardrails to keep me on the right path. Because of this program, for the first time in my adult life, I've been able to just say no when offered opiates. For an addict, saying no to your choice of poison doesn't just end at the word no. I've turned down opiates before Suboxone, but there was always that insane internal colloquy all addicts know:

Enabler: Do you want some [INSERT DRUG OF CHOICE]?

Addict: Nah, I'm good. Thanks. (walking—running—away) I can't believe I said no,

and without a thought! I'm doing so good. I've been doing good for a while. How long

has it been? Okay, a "normal" person wouldn't call that long, but it's long to me. Too

long... I do have to [INSERT ANYTHING] and it sure would be easier if... What the fuck

am I thinking?! Stop. You said no. Leave it at that. But...

Depending on your commitment and length of sobriety the internal struggle gets shorter and shorter. Since starting MAT I've been offered opiates five times, and have finally reached the point where no is just no. Addiction is patient though, and literally anything can bring the insanity rushing back. But I also knew at this point my 8mg Suboxone intake was gratuitous—a clear red flag. Suboxone should be the alternative to doing drugs, not the alternative to doing life. I had raised my dosage with the intention of administering the dose myself as needed/desire (red flag), but the incident with Pitbull had shown me my folly. If I chose to do nothing, my addiction would be at the wheel. So with all this in mind I began my articulate, heartfelt letter to the doctor. However, as feared, the dream-like tendrils of my too-high dose began snaring my mind. One by one the lights in my brain flickered off. It was Saturday, and mail wouldn't go out until Monday, so I put my typewriter away and gave in to my heart's desire: sweet, sweet sleep. I slept for 13 hours. Fuck you, pitbull.

I awoke the next day in a fog thicker than cough syrup. I'm an asshole in the morning, and when I direct that towards someone I'll try to smooth it over by saying, "I'm sorry, I'm not a morning person." But that's not accurate. I have nothing against mornings, they're great, easily in the top 3 of best times during the day. It's waking up I hate. I don't mean that in a Sylvia Plath woe my existence kind of way, I hate the physical act of waking up. The dry mouth, heavy eyelids, slow mind torture. If there was a pill I could take to fast forward through the first hour of waking up... oh wait, there is! So much of my addiction has revolved around palliating this universal life function. Of course, that's insane, like injecting yourself with a substance you bought from a hobo, but addiction isn't about logic. I wanted to stay in bed, but it was Sunday, cell clean-up day, and as the main porter it's my responsibility to set up the cleaning supplies. Before leaving my cell I went into my stash and took an eighth of my Suboxone strip (red flag).

The math goes like this: I fold my 8mg strip into eight squares and take 3 squares daily, morning, afternoon, evening. I don't know what medical dosage this equates to, but 3/8 throughout the day must be less than 8/8 at once, right? I didn't want to take that morning eighth, I didn't physically need it, but mentally my brain was like a balloon filled with bees. The demon of addiction is the same across the spectrum of humanity, but the form it takes to haunt us is unique to the individual (think Pennywise from It). My monster's favorite tool of torture and enslavement is mind games like convincing me my withdrawals are worse than they are (if I were given a 4mg strip that looks like an 8mg strip, I wouldn't feel the difference—which I strongly believe should be a form of treatment ethical or not, what's ethics to a demon?). My aversion to waking coupled with my physical dependence, which according to Mylan Pharmaceutical is not the same as drug addiction, meant I should take my medication first thing in the morning instead of later in the afternoon as the MAT program here required. But the amount of rationalization all this took made me uneasy; and I had heard pharmaceutical manufacturers make outrages claims before, only to find out they had been FDA Approved lies (put another pin here).

Is Suboxone a facsimile of me sober or high? I thought, making a mental note to address it in my letter to medical and went about my job. I finished by a quarter to ten when the TV in the rec room caught my eye. There was a familiar face on the screen, one I've seen every day since I was seven years old. It wasn't surprising to see him on the news, he had written a memoir and had been doing the TV rounds all month, but there was something off. The TV was on mute, but then the prompter appeared at the bottom of the screen and a bomb exploded in my heart. Oh. My. God. Not my Chandler Bing...

"BELOVED FRIENDS ACTOR MATTHEW PERRY FOUND DEAD IN HOT TUB AT THE AGE OF 54"

I ran back to my cell, and scanned every news channel in hopes of answers. Any answers. My mind was a traffic jam of questions and memories. His book still sat on my desk; I had devoured it in two days, and was into my second reading. Now it was my Ouija board, a way to communicate with him, and at that moment his message from the beyond was, "It is very odd to live in a world where if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one." I wanted to disagree with him, but couldn't. It's the disclaimer addicts wear on their foreheads—a loaded gun held to our temple with our finger on the trigger.

The news offered nothing but speculation, with a heavy emphasis on Perry being in his hot tub while waiting for his assistant to return with his brand-new iPhone. All relevant information to establish a timeline, though that last detail felt accusatory, as if to guilt the assistant for not returning sooner. Amongst the news segments reporting that 300 people die in hot tub-related incidents every year the manufacturer of Suboxone put out their own warning reminding users of their epidermal patch not to get into hot tubs since the heat may cause the entire dose to be released at once and lead to an overdose.

Did Suboxone kill Matthew Perry? I wondered, and hated myself for falling into the speculation trap. It's bad form, tacky, and disrespectful as fuck. But this wasn't just another celebrity death, this was one of Us. Someone who had battled the demon every day and had the scars to prove it. Helping others with their sobriety was his Holy Writ. If he was slain by the demon, he'd want Us to know and learn whatever we could from it.

Encouraged, I examined the Medication Guide for clues. "The manifestation of acute overdose include pinpoint pupils, sedation, hypotension, respiratory depression, and death." The news reported Perry hadn't been in the water for too long when he died. Could he have nodded off and drowned? I've had the dope nod on Suboxone, but never passed out unless I wanted to. Although Suboxone mimics the euphoric effects of opiates, it has a ceiling, meaning that unlike an opiate where the more you do the higher you get, the effects of Suboxone taper off once you reach a certain level (the manual has it at 24mg). I believed this to be the main distinction between medication and drug, taking it to mean that unlike heroin I can't overdose on Suboxone; thus not as dangerous. Wrong. So wrong. If I could overdose from too many vitamins, why would I think I couldn't overdose from an addictive opioid medication? Physical dependence is not the same as drug addiction.

Nurse Pitbull wasn't there to administer our medication that afternoon, a small kindness from the universe. If someone would've asked to see my teeth, I may had spit at them. I had gone down the rabbit hole all morning, grieving the loss of a friend and questioning the motives behind my choice to be in MAT (I was even questioning the nature of my reality). Every time the COs announce the MAT run they may as well be ringing the dinner bell, many of my fellow participants spring to life. "Droga time!" a Latino friend exclaims every single time we line up for meds, salivating. Most, if not all, of us were taking Suboxone before the program launched, but at $30-50 a strip none of us were taking a full 8mg strip daily. Now it was free, we had a license to do it, and for the first time I was asking myself what it all meant. Matthew Perry had wrestled with his choice as well, half of his doctors had told him he should stay on Suboxone for at least a year but probably the rest of his life, and other doctors told him he's not "technically" sober while on it. By all accounts from the people who saw him last, he was in great spirits, looking forward to the future, and sober. But if Suboxone did contribute to his death, coupled with his misgivings about the drug itself, was he truly sober? What even is true sobriety?

I called my best friend Troy at 6 p.m. with that question in mind. "Best friend" doesn't do our relationship justice, but neither does calling him family. He's all that and much, much more. From the day I met him in 2012 at Clinton Correctional after a stalker staked my then-boyfriend in the neck in front of me on Valentine's Day (did I mention my life has been very dramatic?) Troy has been my refuge and protector. My #1 fan and queensguard. I trust him with my life and he trusts me with his—a statement we've put to the test more than we'd like. We're addicts, disclaimer on our foreheads—COULD DIE AT ANY TIME—metaphorical loaded gun to our temples with our finger on the trigger addicts. And through our bond and love we've learned to trust the other's finger on our trigger. When I've relapsed he has seen me through it, and when he relapses I'm the one who sees him through. Troy was released in 2019 after serving more than 30 years, and there hasn't been a day we haven't talked. Well, almost every day, he had had a relapse 8 months ago, but thankfully I was able to get my finger back on his trigger and walk with him through recovery. He was 3 months sober when Matthew Perry died.

"Oh. My. God. Chandler Bing," I said in my Janice voice as soon as the call connected. It has always been my go-to line when I didn't know what to say or wanted to break an awkward silence. Troy knew it well.

"I know," Troy said. "Weren't we just talking about his book the other day?" Two days ago to be exact, when he told me he saw someone reading it during their Narcotics Anonymous meeting. "I'm sorry, I know how much he and Friends meant to you."

"Chandler could always make me laugh, and he was Matthew Perry." I went into a college-length oration about Friends and its cultural impact that even someone as attentive as Troy would've had a hard time following. "Did you know he filmed the entire final season of Friends while on Suboxone?"

That piqued his interest. Troy had had his own running with Suboxone recently. His last relapse was as bad as they come, they usually are the older we get, and he was only intact by the grace of his Higher Power. There was a key difference between his addiction and mine: He likes to go up, I like to go down. I like my heart beating a little slower than everybody else's. This meant there was always going to be a component to his struggle that I could never truly understand and vice versa. Troy's loaded gun was crack, keeping him awake for days at a time as his brain disintegrates ("spun" is the term). When he finished burning all his bridges, Troy would go to a detox/rehab and tell the intake person that he was smoking crack and needed help stopping. The attendee would sympathize with him, tell him there's a long waiting list, and direct him to another detox/rehab. Apparently, in New York at least, being a crackhead isn't as pressing as being a dopehead in the age of fentanyl. Desperate, he picked up heroin with his crack so the mandatory urine test would come up positive for opiates. He told the intake officer, who had seen him two days prior, that he was a raging dope fiend who was one sneeze away from trying needles. He had a bed that night.

They started him on two 8mg Suboxone strips a day, which was double my dose and I've been using opiates since 2004! It was too much for a one-day dopehead, and I made sure to tell him. Troy had snuck his cellphone into rehab (we lived in constant fear he'd get caught and his phone confiscated, and he'd leave because he couldn't talk to me; thankfully he was never caught), and during our phonecalls I'd gauge the affect Suboxone was having on him. My mom had told me my speech had become slurred since I started taking Suboxone, and I had noticed myself having difficulty remembering things. This was around the time I went from 6mg to 8mg, so I was curious (when my mom has a bias her observations can't be taken at face value because she's inclined to exaggerate or gaslight to get her well-intention point across). But after two weeks I didn't notice much of a difference in Troy. He sounded better than he had in months. However, Troy not being a downer person, I knew he wouldn't stay on Suboxone once he left rehab. I warned him the withdrawals from a 16mg dose would be terrible, so to start taking one strip and stashing the second. He, too, had a nurse Pitbull, and he couldn't refuse his second dose even though he wasn't in a prison. Troy had to leave rehab sooner than planned due to a family emergency. His doctor gave him a month's supply of Suboxone (60 strips), but he stopped taking it almost as soon as he stepped out the door. Now he only takes a small piece every now and then when he can't sleep. Asshole...

(That's addiction for you, illogical as fuck. Being an upper, Troy can take an opioid and stop whenever he wants whereas I touch an opiate and they'll need the Jaws of Life to pry it from my hands. But it works both ways, I can do coke and stop without a care while Troy wouldn't stop until he was dead. Insanity is addiction's greatest tool.)

"So is Suboxone true sobriety or not?" I said as the operator warned there was a minute left on the call. "Or is it another version of California sober?" (The term was coined by author Michelle Lhooq who quit everything but occasional marijuana and psychedelics. Artist Demi Lovato swore by it, until she "relapsed" and nearly died.)

"It's an open-ended question that needs an answer," Troy demanded before we said goodnight. When I was born Troy had already been through a divorce and rehab. What I had in introspection, he had it in spades in experience. Yet in that moment I heard the urgency, dare I say fear, in his voice. Sobriety meant life to him, and Suboxone was too new to tell if it were friend or foe. For Us—addicts like me, Troy, Matthew Perry—anything that threatens a relapse is always foe. It wasn't Suboxone's fault that the Anything category encompassed any and every thing, but neither did it absolve it.

That night I watched Friends on Nick @ Nite. It was the one where Chandler couldn't quit smoking... and behind the fourth wall Matthew Perry couldn't quit OxyContin. Friends ended in 2004, the year Perry was on Suboxone and I snorted OxyContin for the first time; Ground Zero of the Opioid Epidemic—my generation's Alpha and Omega. It was a time when I assumed the justice system played out like an episode of Law & Order, and when a doctor said a medication was "virtually nonaddictive" I believed it. Matthew Perry wrote in his memoir that "taking OxyContin is like replacing your blood with warm honey. But with heroin, I would imagine, you are the honey." He said there was something about the word "heroin" that always scared him, and because of this fear he never tried it. I, too, feared heroin, once upon a time, oh so very long ago. (Okay, let's go back to those pins).

* * *

If someone would've told me on my 18th birthday that in four months I'd be doing heroin, I would've told that person to get the fuck out of my face because obviously that person was a liar who knew nothing about me. I didn't know one person who did heroin, they were homeless junkies or rock stars who flirted with death. I lived in the suburbs; I had a strong support system consisting of a loving family and close childhood friends. My life was meant to resemble the movie Mean Girls, and my future was going to be like an episode of Friends—neither of which involved heroin. (It's okay if you want to slap me in the face right about now, a lot of people, myself included, wanted to slap me too.)

And yet, there had been drugs—some may say a lot of drugs. I was no angel. My version of Mean Girls cast the real Lindsay Lohan, not the character she played. I'm also curious by nature and studious, making me a zealot in my pursuits. It was marijuana my sophomore year and coke my junior year, delving into both worlds like a valedictorian chasing a 4.0 GPA. The former made me fat (because weed makes all food delicious), and the latter helped me lose that weight. We were introduced to coke by the graduating class before us—blowing lines at a senior's party or in their car was a rite of passage for a junior. But after a while coke's effects—heart racing, busy mind, vacuous void within your soul—got old. Once I lost my desired 30-40 lbs (in 3 months!) I dropped the habit like last year's wardrobe. What replaced it would open Pandora's Box and destroy more lives than Oppenheimer's atomic bomb ever did.

It's comforting to blame malevolent forces for our misfortunes and shortcomings. Truth is OxyContin didn't make me an addict, the potential was always in me (thank you Powers That Be!). But there was something insidious in the way OxyContin was marketed. When tragedy befalls us it's in our nature to want to unravel the cosmic formula: If this didn't happen, then that wouldn't have occurred. I've done this countless times during my incarceration, pulling one thread and following it to its culmination. It's therapy and torture, going back to the minute of my crime, then the hour before, then a day, a week, a month, a year. The further back, the more ripples the Butterfly Effect creates. So what if I went back to 1996 and the FDA, who must approve every word on a medication's label, wouldn't have approved Purdue Pharma's labeling of OxyContin as "virtually nonaddictive"? What if their employees wouldn't have been told to explicitly cite a misleading letter claiming that "less than one percent" of users become addicted when properly administering opioids? What if Purdue Pharma would've admitted to have ZERO empirical evidence—no data, no studies, nothing—to support their claim that OxyContin's time-release feature made it nonaddictive? Perhaps then so many doctors wouldn't have felt emboldened to prescribe OxyContin for chronic back pain, and then perhaps my friend's mother may not have had a stockpile of 40mg OxyContin, and then perhaps he wouldn't have shown us what he found in his mom's bathroom, and then when I asked if they were safe he wouldn't have read the bullshit—FDA Approved—claim that it was virtually nonaddictive, and then I wouldn't have had repeated this lie ad nauseum to every friend I introduced this virtually nonaddictive pill that replaced your blood with warm honey. Perhaps this same scenario wouldn't have been repeated by millions of teens, in millions of homes across America. Perhaps many of my friends who died of an opioid overdose would still be alive. And perhaps I could've been exploring my meaning of sobriety from a therapist's couch instead of a prison cell. But we're talking about an alternative universe, one so far from ours 9/11 may not had even happened, and life isn't a Marvel movie. In our reality Oxy was my Alpha, and I did get over my fear of heroin.

I held out as long as I could. After graduation, when I learned Oxy was heroin in a pill and tried to stop, I was already its slave. The withdrawals were like nothing I had experienced before—like having mono, the flu, late-stage AIDS, and terminal cancer all at once. And like the pain of the first heartbreak, I thought the withdrawals would never end. At the same time the FDA realized its error in judgment (if it can be called that) and tried to pull back OxyContin as much as they could. Overnight the street price of Oxy doubled. No easy expense for an 18-year-old whose habit could run him $100 a day. Heroin sprung seemingly out of the ether; one moment it was something I only saw on TV, the next every dealer sold it for a fraction the price of Oxy and claimed it was twice as powerful. My best friend called me one day near the end of summer telling me she was thinking about trying heroin. I vividly remember imploring with her, "Don't do it! Don't you want to be one of the few people who can say they've never done heroin?" She laughed and agreed. Later at night she called me back and told me she did it, and it was the best thing she ever had. An hour later I was next to her snorting heroin. It tasted like hamburgers and copper. It felt like truth. I'd arrived. I was an adult. I was already gone.

To say heroin burned down my life would be like saying OxyContin started the Opioid Epidemic; heroin was the accelerant. In high school I was popular and everyone's friend, in the real world no one gave a shit how many candles I had gotten at Sweet 16s. I was depressed, aimless, with some heavy family responsibilities. So basically I was every young adult in the world, except I was addicted to opiates. I was weak, and found it easier to escape. The two years I was on heroin were a blur; only reason I can definitively say I began shooting up in April 2006 is because it's written in my Presentencing Report. Heroin took full control of my mind and soul, and I relegated myself to the sunken place. There was one moment towards the end that I can recall with clarity:

A friend and I went back to the school to visit because that's what people suffering from failure to launch do. Being back made us feel clean again, to a time when she was a cheerleader and we could wear tank tops without worrying if our trackmarks were visible. A girl we knew to be a bigger dope fiend than us was leaving school and walking to her car. People had begun calling her "clay hands" because she'd shoot up in her hands and often miss the vein, causing her hands to swell and you could poke indents as if they were unbaked pottery. She had been popular before she became Clay Hands. Was she still popular? I wondered. I couldn't imagine what my peers would've thought of me if I had brought heroin to school back then. People would have been shocked, and I publicly shamed (think Cersi in Game of Thrones Shame!). Except that was two years ago, which may as well have been an alternate universe because somewhere along the way life had gotten so off course. And it had begun with us, The Class of 2005. Just as the class before ours had passed down coke to us, we had passed opiates. The Class of 2006 and 2007, heroin addicts. Because we opened Pandora's Box and didn't know how—or cared—to close it. I wanted to puke, cry, run through the halls screaming, "I'm sorry! I didn't know!" If the Sackler family, who owns Purdue Pharma, was going to hell, they better save me a seat because I helped them. I went back to the sunken place after that, and wouldn't reemerge until I was in prison, sober for the first time in four years, and facing 35 years to life for murder.

What followed was not like an episode of Law & Order. The prosecution didn't care what had led to the crime, not my heroin withdrawal or the PCP and Xanax I had taken to alleviate it. They didn't care that I hadn't meant to hurt anyone and had just wanted the heroin. A person was dead, another injured, and it had all been over drugs. The senselessness, the tidal waves of pain washing in all directions, made me wish I had died. But I wasn't dead, and not for a lack of trying, so I had to do the only thing left to do—live. I had to find atonement, to believe I was better than the worst a person can do to another, to find purpose because life without meaning truly is a prison.

In 2009 Newsday asked me to do an interview. I was reluctant to speak publicly because I believed the mere mention of my name would reopen wounds for all who were hurt, but my father had recently passed from a massive heart attack (a "widow maker" the doctor called it) and I was grieving, desperate to express some of my pain. I wanted to help somehow, alert parents of the oncoming storm. I was also curious. I knew kids as young as middle school had been buying heroin, and there hadn't been a day I didn't think about them. Did anyone learn anything? The reporter promised to keep the interview about drugs and their impact, and against my family's wishes I agreed to do it. (Finding out my beloved town was still under the grip of heroin was not worth the pain I caused my mother when Newsday decided not to use our interview and instead rehashed the story of my crime.) At the end of the interview the reporter told me I had done a "great service" for shining a light on the heroin problem in Long Island (people were still hesitant to call it an epidemic) and asked me if there was anything the government could do.

"Suboxone," I said. "I took it after rehab, but it's expensive and insurance doesn't cover it and doctors don't like prescribing it. I don't know why because it didn't make me high or anything, just helped me with the withdrawal. It was like taking an orange vitamin. They should make it available to everyone."

Although I was mistaken about it being innocuous, I still stand by everything I said over a decade ago. I suppose the government agreed and doctors came around because they've all but shoved it down our throats. Physical dependence is not the same as drug addiction, Big Pharma says, but I've been lied to before. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on...

* * *

I finished my letter to the doctor who outranks nurse Pitbull and mailed it out on Halloween. In one page I outlined my hopes and concerns, requesting to gradually lower my dose and once I'm down to 2mg we'll discuss where to go from there. True repentance meant sobriety. So the question remained: Is Suboxone sobriety?

What I yearned for was a definitive answer—a yes or no—so I began by distilling the question of sobriety into its basic parts and looked to the Oxford Dictionary for definitions. (It didn't have an entry for Suboxone, but it did have one for OxyContin. Do as you like with that information.)

Sobriety (n.): The state of being sober.

Um... okay.

Sober (Adj.): Not affected by alcohol; not drunk; free from alcoholism; not habitually drinking alcohol/ (v.) Make or become sober after drinking alcohol.

Oxford adhered to the Alcoholics Anonymous definition of sobriety. Not a bad one to follow, Matthew Perry had lived by the tenets of A.A., but to them sobriety starts and ends at the bottle and everything in between is nuance. Troy had switched to N.A. after his last relapse, and he felt better accepted there—more at home. Having "Narcotics" in its title, I figured N.A. had had to deal with members in the MAT program so I asked Troy to email me whatever information he could find on N.A. and its practices. What he sent me would raise more questions than it answered.

"Wait, Troy," I said on the phone, "are you sure we're reading the same N.A. pamphlet? Because I got the complete opposite message than what you got."

Troy had been ecstatic when he told me that I "must" read the article he found; as far as N.A. was concerned, Suboxone is sobriety, you just don't discuss it in N.A. because it's nobody's business but your own. That was NOT what N.A. thought on the matter, and that Troy had deduced that from the reading worried me.

"The fact that N.A. is a program of complete abstinence should not be misunderstood," I continued, quoting the N.A. pamphlet. "They even give you an anecdote about a member who was taking methadone and was encouraged to continue attending N.A. meetings and one day he felt strong enough to get sober."

"Yeah, but that was methadone," Troy argued. "I think Suboxone is different."

"It may be, but you're splitting hairs because they also mentioned MAT," I said. "To them an opioid medication is not sobriety."

"What am I supposed to do then," he said, deflated, "give back my 90 Days Clean keychain?"

I didn't have an answer for him, and told him that was a conversation he needed to have with his sponsor. My intention had been to make sure Troy was aware of his decisions because denial is dangerous to addicts like Us, but making him question the nature of his sobriety made me feel as if I were discounting the three months of hard work he had put into fighting the demon. Problem was if Troy wasn't sober, then neither was I. To me he was sober; I know Troy high, the Troy I've seen since he got out of rehab was not that. The answer to what sobriety is lay deeper than what A.A., N.A., or even Oxford had to say about it. Unsure of where to look next, I took a cue from my past.

Before Facebook, AOL/AIM and MySpace ruled supreme, and customizing your profile was an extension of yourself. I excelled at this, learning a good amount of coding and web design. And I also learned how to make online surveys. I'd make polls for everything from if I should grow out my hair (no) to if people would like me better if I were Jewish (yes), and though people may had wanted to slap me in the face they also loved participating in my polls. Prison is many things, one being a large controlled data warehouse. I wrote four questions and surveyed 60 people consisting of inmates, friends, family, and COs (I wanted to include nurses/doctors, but to my surprise they were the only ones who objected; some tried to stop me). The results were as follow: (rounded to the nearest percent) - 70% of people surveyed considered themselves sober. - 47% considered sobriety abstaining from everything addicting. - 27% considered sobriety abstaining from your drug of choice. - 27% considered sobriety abstaining from anything illegal. - 65% did not consider doctor prescribed Suboxone sobriety - Only one person considered Suboxone without a prescription sobriety. And out of the 13 people I surveyed from the MAT program, 5 considered themselves sober, 8 considered sobriety abstaining from everything addicting, 5 considered sobriety abstaining from your drug of choice, 7 did not consider doctor prescribed Suboxone sobriety, and 1 person considered Suboxone without a prescription sobriety.

Learning 65% of my peers did not consider me sober was unsettling. Now I really had questions. Thankfully, a month after Matthew Perry's passing and my letter to medical I was called in to see the doctor.

Four people from MAT saw the doctor before me. All got into a shouting match with him when he refused to increase their 8mg dose, claiming he didn't want them to overdose. The doctor had a reputation for being a class A assbag with a mountain of litigation against him. But I'm different, I assured myself, He can't deny me less drugs, can he? When I walked into his office he was visibly flustered, though he tried to shake it off.

"I see your bloodtests came back clear of fentanyl and K2," he began. "Good. It's everywhere and it can kill you. Now, would you be willing to substitute the sublingual strips for a monthly shot of Suboxone?"

Breathe, I told myself. "First, no. I was a heroin addict and I'm never injecting myself with a drug again. Did you not get my letter? I need to go down on my dose. The program has been great, I think you guys are really making a difference, but it has served its purpose and I don't want to be dependent on an addictive opioid—"

"I'm not weaning you off!" he interjected. "This is a maintenance program."

"Yeah, and maintaining me at 8mg is too much. My heart rate slows, I fall asleep, I can't remember things. I'm not letting you drug me into oblivion—"

"We're not drugging you into oblivion, we're maintaining you—"

"In oblivion." I could be rude too. "You can maintain me at 2mg and then we can discuss what that means and where we go."

"I'm not changing anyone's dose! Take it, don't take it. Do whatever you need to do. I'm not bringing you down."

He offered no explanation, talking in circles about responsibility and control. I didn't know what childhood trauma he was reliving, and I didn't care. I had described overdose symptoms and he ignored it, so I walked out of his office in the middle of his rant. He was not going to decide my sobriety nor rent space in my mind. Besides, I had my answer.

Addiction does the most damage when its victim doesn't want to know the truth. Like my mom always says, "There's no one blinder than the person who doesn't want to see." I joined the MAT program because my denial almost killed me. A friend of mine was going to a visit and asked me if I could hold his stash until he came back. He gave me a small joint and half a strip of Suboxone for my trouble, and put the rest of his weed and Suboxone back into a balloon filled with five grams of heroin. I had been taking Suboxone on and off for months, and didn't think twice about holding heroin. It was fine; I was California sober. The K9 Unit rushed into our block while I was cleaning the showers. Knowing the dogs would detect the drugs, I swallowed the balloon. The CO noted my suspicious movement and they searched my person and cell, finding nothing since it was inside me. Once they finished, over an hour after I had swallowed it, I was able to guzzle a gallon of water and stick my finger down my throat. The balloon had opened in my stomach and my puke tasted like industrial chemical soup. All five grams of heroin/fentanyl had dissolved in me, so why wasn't I dead? I still don't know, maybe there wasn't enough time for my body to absorb it, maybe the eight Suboxone strips counteracted the opiate's overdose, maybe there is a Grand Design and I have my part to play. The only thing I was certain of is that I hadn't been sober and I needed help.

Before the prescription, I chased Suboxone like any other drug because that's what it was—a drug. Duh. And now it's my medication, but can a simple piece of paper signed by some prison doctor with issues be the difference between addiction and sobriety? Of course not. It's what we do with that piece of paper and where we go with it that matters. That's where sobriety lies.

If you break your arm, you have to wear a cast. But if you continue wearing the cast long after your arm has healed, you really need to ask yourself what it is that you're doing. MAT is a procedure, one I entered because I needed to rehabilitate my brain, and only I can say when I feel well enough to take the cast off. After months of healing I'm ready to take the guardrails off and face life without crutches. It's something only I could've discerned, not Troy, not my mom, not nurse Pitbull or a doctor in need of soul-searching. I wish there was one simple answer, one simple solution that would put everything into perspective. All I'm sure of is allowing my demon to take the wheel again means entering the mind of that person who was capable of causing senseless amounts of pain. That person does not deserve atonement, does not deserve love or understanding. Who in their right mind would want to be that person?

Am I sober? Yes. I'm in treatment because after decades of abusing my body and mind, I can't fix it on my own like someone with a ruptured spleen wouldn't be expected to operate on him/herself. And like any medical procedure, my treatment has a rehab period, the length of which I'll try to shorten as much as possible. It's not my fault I got stuck with a doctor that has an untold number of lawsuits against him, it is prison after all, but neither do I blame these doctors for overprescribing— now or in the past. I think, or want to believe, that their hearts were in the right place, but as a nation America has a habit of overcorrecting.

Matthew Perry's cause of death was determined to have been an acute ketamin response combined with his Suboxone medication, causing him to lose consciousness and drown. Ketamin is used in a controlled environment supervised by a doctor to treat addiction and anxiety. His last treatment was a week and a half before his death, the finding of undigested ketamin in his stomach means that he had been taking it unprescribed. In the end it doesn't matter if addiction won or not. He fought the fight the way he knew how and tried to help as many of Us as possible. That his Chandler Bing lives on in the pantheon of culture so generations will call him a friend is an exclamation mark on an astonishing and very human life. He taught me when it comes to sobriety look everywhere you need, and when you need answers there's no better place to look than within. You know when something feels off to you, like how you know lying by omission is "technically" not lying except it is when you omit on purpose. If you're taking an addictive and regulated drug without a doctor's prescription, you know that's not sobriety. If you lie about taking said drug, that's not sobriety. If you have to do mental gymnastics to justify to yourself taking such a drug, that's not sobriety. Everything else in between may or may not be sobriety, ask yourself the question and go down the rabbit hole. And if you're still stuck in second gear, look to Matthew Perry for help. He was there for me, and he'll be there for you too.