Chasing Dragons

In 1958 the Hong Kong government released a report which they raised concerns over the rising practice of citizens who were inhaling, or “smoking”, heroin as a new way of ingesting this harmful opiate...

They cited a shortage of syringes as one of the reasons for the uptick in this new phenomenon. The other factor seemed to be due to the relative affordability of the drug itself, being that this new “smokeable” version of heroin was often much lower in quality than the more commonly injected version. Prices varied, but this cruder version of heroin could commonly be purchased anywhere between HK $0.50 and $2.

However, the user couldn't simply swallow the drug. This new form of heroin could only be effectively ingested through inhalation. To inhale the heroin, the best method was to place it on a piece of tin foil and light a flame underneath. This caused a chemical reaction between the heated foil and the heroin, charring the outer edges of the drug while preserving the inner portion until the intense heat eventually caused it to smoke. The user would then use a straw or tube to inhale the smoke, introducing the drug into their lungs, thus achieving the desired high.

The practice became known as "Chasing the Dragon" due to the smoke "tail" produced by heating the heroin. The most effective way to inhale this smoke was to follow the tail.

The phrase "Chasing the Dragon" now has a broader context. It is used by addicts seeking the elusive initial high from their drug of choice (DOC), which can never be replicated, regardless of the quantity consumed. Or, as the Narcotics Anonymous organization puts it: one is too many and a thousand is never enough.

I know this all too well. I'll save my personal addiction stories for another time. Today, I want to discuss the homogeneity between DOCs and living in the past.

In 1994, Terrence Mitchell of the University of Washington and Leigh Thompson of Northwestern University published A Theory of Temporal Adjustments of the Evaluation of Events, where they coined the term “Rosy Retrospection”. The theory effectively goes that humans look back on the past with fonder remembrance than was reality at the time when they lived the events.

I’m not really “guilty” of this practice, because guilt would be the wrong judicial term. I’ve been “sentenced” to living in the past. It’s a punishment to always find oneself doing nothing but dwelling on past mistakes, or equally inhumane to always feel the elusive “high” of positive memories. Neither the good nor bad times, which our minds are addicted to fixating on, have ever actually occurred in the past, but rather in the present of that moment.

About two months into my tenancy at the University of New Mexico Hospital, I was scheduled for routine (routine by my standards at this point) surgery to graft additional tissue from my hip to the area of my body most in need of the new tissue, my left leg.

Up to this point my entire outlook had been generally positive. Sure I was in constant pain, and yes a nurse had to feed me and wipe my ass, but I was in a pretty good place considering those things. Of course, the primary reason for my sunny disposition, and the one I completely discounted, was due to being pumped full of Dilaudid, which was quickly becoming my DOC. But all of this euphoria was about to be unraveled.

After I awoke from my anesthetic slumber, I felt an immediate tightness in my chest and a shortness of my breath. I began to have the uncontrollable need to rip off my Miami J cervical collar, feeling as though it was suffocating me. “Was I experiencing a heart attack?”, I wondered.

The truth ended up being far more simple. I was undergoing a massive panic attack, the likes of which required several nurses, and, you guessed it, more drugs to restrain me from executing my planned “escape” from the hospital.

In Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps Score, we learn that there’s an almond shaped part of our brain called the amygdala that triggers our “fight or flight” system when a threat (real or imagined) is detected.

Somebody get this man some dilaudid, STAT!

Well apparently my amygdala had taken just about all it could of my surgeries and hospital bed, because I was going to get the hell out of that room, ineffectual legs and arms be damned.

However, the threat I was detecting wasn’t really about anything being done wrong by hospital staff or doctors, but rather the threat to my mind identity of the person I was on September 11, 2021, the day before my accident.

Ezenwa E Olumba uses the term “cognitive immobility”, or the inability to adjust to new surroundings, to best describe what I was now experiencing. My mind was almost literally rejecting the idea of my new reality. It was as though the prior two months of the same situation didn’t exist, clearly being masked by my heavy regimen of narcotics, and I just seemed to “wake up”. I suddenly become aware that my body had been effectively buried alive, and I was now experiencing crippling mental claustrophobia.

In March, I took my 18 year-old daughter to Scotland. It was to be the first time I would leave Chewey in the care of anyone other than me, and this was going to be for nine days!!!

As I handed him to my sister-in-law and walked out their door, all I could see was Chewey’s eyes and his look of disbelief as I slowly drove away.

In the last two and a half years of my life, I had experienced so much loss. Loss of relationships, the death of loved ones, the imminent loss my kids to moving on as adults in their lives, and even the loss of my former self, both physically and mentally. By the time I left for Scotland, I didn’t even recognize the man I was from early September of 2021.

Chewey didn’t ask for this responsibility, but to me he had become the symbolization of stability in my life. He was the one constant joy, and as I left him that day in March I began to instantly recall my former self, even to the point of rosy retrospection, embellishing memories that were otherwise prosaic, or even negative. I wanted to be “me” again, or at least the me I remembered being before my accident, and this idea of my former self would cloud my mind for far too much of an otherwise beautiful trip with my daughter as we traipsed around northern U.K.

All of the power I gave to the past during my trip, was, of course, all wasted, and I was reminded of that when I went to retrieve Chewey from his aunt and uncle’s nine days later.

Upon recognizing I had returned, Chewey ran to me with same level of exuberance he greets me with each night. He wasn’t more happy, but he also wasn’t less happy. He was just…well, he was just happy.

Chewey’s lesson: we are powerless to relive the past, but that’s ok because nothing ever actually happened back then anyway. Tomorrow’s positive memories can only be created, now. Said differently, the present will always be exceedingly more powerful than the past.

So I implore you…hell, I implore me…stop looking to chase that dragon of the past, and start observing the beauty of the present moment.