Normalise talking about our darkness.
If humanity is ever to heal from the grand, systemic illusions of the modern world, we must learn to strip away the defensive compromises and speak openly, nakedly, and without a single shred of conditioned shame about our deepest, darkest secrets. For darkness is not evil.
More than a decade ago on One Lucky Soul, I began diving deep into this chemical landscape with Opiated Then Hatin’ It (2015) and the tragic history details in Addiction Talk: My Correspondence With a 31-Year-Old Reader Before He Passed Away.
Back in 2016, during the release of many confessional list-articles, my guiding motto was stamped clearly for all to see: “I am you and what I see is me.” Whether I was recounting the pristine logic of a micro-taper, the ridiculously comic relief of experimenting with rectal buprenorphine on a bathroom floor, Ego Death on a heroic dose of mushrooms, or the three-day Sakarana (Deadly Nightshade) madness, the attitude remained unchanged.
Now, a full ten years have passed since that era. And fresh off the heels of publishing my latest continental dissection, A Superpower on the Couch: Reflections from the Ten-Year North American Trip, the clinical scale expands once again. More time has settled, the dust of the old has cleared, and it is high time for more truth to be revealed herein. Here lies the detailed bahareez — the ultimate essence — of my private runs across the Canadian-United States border and the independent research that followed. Tracing the timeline through Venice Beach, Sokhna, and Dahab — the totality of that trajectory, along with my even earlier past, needs to be fully documented under the lens of the person I am today.
This is not a guide for your recovery. It is not a sterile institutional handbook, nor is it a comforting story with a neat happy ending tied up with a bow. This is a lantern held up to the dark corridors of my inner being, hopefully to kindle a light in the darkness of humanity. This is my naked truth — non-romanticised, unjudged, and free of condemnation.
Make no mistake: What you are about to read is simply the formula of what worked for me under my own specific, volatile circumstances. We know that every human being is structurally, biologically, and psychologically different. Naturally, what served as a lifeline for my brain could shatter another person’s reality, or their body, mind, and soul. I am not offering a template to copy. Even so, the intricate details of this journey remain entirely worth sharing — not just for the sake of educational storytelling, but as an uncompromised testament to speaking my truth: An oath I took 15 years ago when first taking writing as a vocation.
Documenting these unadorned razor-sharp timelines goes far beyond an exercise in emotional catharsis. It is a calculated deployment of Harm Reduction — the vital, strategic lifeline that quite literally allowed me to crawl back into the land of the living. In the teeth of a predatory chemical complex, becoming my own relentless researcher was the only shield that minimised the systemic wreckage to my body and mind. It truly can mean the difference between life and death.
If the following writing can help a single soul with a valuable piece of information, certain “substance,” or in dealing with a loved one who’s in the trenches, a happy man I would be. Perhaps it would be of essence to a student from the year 2300s who is curious about how life was back then — from my own eyes.
This is the chronicle of how I reverse-engineered the pharma machine, extracted the deepest essence of my survival, and reclaimed sovereignty over my own flesh.
Consider yourself warned: What follows is a massive, high-density twenty-two-thousand-word memoir spread across ten Acts and accompanied by twenty-five archival field records — carved directly out of the marrow of the trenches and flat-out doubling the length of my previous longest 10.5K The Healing Powers of Storytelling Opus from earlier this year. Pour the glass of wine or light that sumthin’ sumthin’ up, adjust the lenses, and handle the weight accordingly.
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Act I: The Buffalo Parking Lot
There was exactly zero milligrams of buprenorphine left at home in Toronto, out of the thirty 8mg pills in the initial bottle acquired from Williamsburg, New York, and the digital clock on the dashboard of my rented car was ticking backward toward zero. It was December 2010 — the first of three gruelling border runs I would make over the span of a single year — and the windshield was framed by the bleak, frozen concrete of a Buffalo, New York pharmacy parking lot. I was all alone. I chopped the white pill into a fine line directly on the glossy surface of a plastic CD case, leaned down, and took it in.
As the familiar, chemical yet somewhat sweet burn hit my nasal membrane, a wave of self-mockery washed over me. I had just driven across an international border from Canada to collect a script from a seedy, state-licensed Manhattan doctor named Dr. Smith. When I called him from Canada, he casually demanded an extra $50 over the phone. His reason? Sending a Subutex script all the way up to a border town like Buffalo looked “suspicious”. He obviously knew that after driving for two hours, I will freakin’ pay.
Lab-coat dealers. That’s all they were.
 |
| State-licensed pharmacology cutting through the freezing Buffalo sleet — because the institutional matrix always demands its cut first. |
Looking at that glowing corporate pharmacy sign cutting through the freezing sleet, the reality of the system hit me. The only difference between a street junkie scoring from Om Hazem or Rana and Mohamed in Cairo and a compliant patient in North America is that the government wants to make sure its own dealers take their cut first. It was the exact same repackaged ritual, just institutionalised, formal, and state-approved: The right way to be dependant on drugs, you see.
For the uninitiated reading this, it is crucial to understand the unique, deceptive neuropsychopharmacology of buprenorphine. Biochemically, it sits at a staggering 40 times the strength of morphine per unit of mass. If a person with zero opioid tolerance takes even a tiny fragment of this drug, it will smash them — knocking them out cold or sending them into a violent illness. Yet, because it is a partial agonist, it possesses a rigid pharmacological ceiling. For someone like me coming off a heavy baseline, it didn't get me high; it provided no euphoria, no rush, and no escape. It simply parked itself on the receptors with an iron grip, locking out withdrawal while quietly building a massive, state-approved chemical anchor in my system.
Scientific literature and psychological research explicitly show that cognitive traits like an overactive mind and an intense, foundational openness to experience play a monumental role in how a person interacts with psychoactive substances. For a brain that is constantly spinning, generating a profound structural sense of alienation from the surrounding world, the internal noise can be relentless. The initial draw to downers isn’t just about getting high — it is an instinctual hunt for solace. A desperate search for some quiet. A psychological Shhhh.
Is the above an internal story some keep replaying in their mind as an excuse to keep getting high, or is it backed up by data? It could very well be both. Coincidentia Oppositorum — The Unity of Opposites.
Coupled with a relentless native curiosity, this neuro-architecture is precisely why I delved headfirst into the chemical world for over thirty years as an addict-researcher-psychonaut. To understand the trajectory, you have to be completely honest about the utility: I took these mind-altering substances because of the genuine good I received from them initially. They provided a brief, artificial peace that silenced the static. But a highly active mind also behaves differently under the influence; it tracks the curves, studies the receptor kinetics, and builds a high functional tolerance that allows it to navigate deep waters where others immediately drown. In other words, it can still function under these altered states — just on different frequencies.
For the uninitiated reading this, it is crucial to understand the unique, deceptive neuropsychopharmacology of buprenorphine. Biochemically, it sits at a staggering 40 times the strength of morphine per unit of mass. If a person with zero opioid tolerance takes even a tiny fragment of this drug, it will smash them — knocking them out cold or sending them into a violent illness. Yet, because it is a partial agonist, it possesses a rigid pharmacological ceiling. For someone like me coming off a heavy baseline, it didn't get me high; it provided no euphoria, no rush, and no escape. It simply parked itself on the receptors with an iron grip, locking out withdrawal while quietly building a massive, state-approved chemical anchor in my system.
Scientific literature and psychological research explicitly show that cognitive traits like an overactive mind and an intense, foundational openness to experience play a monumental role in how a person interacts with psychoactive substances. For a brain that is constantly spinning, generating a profound structural sense of alienation from the surrounding world, the internal noise can be relentless. The initial draw to downers isn’t just about getting high — it is an instinctual hunt for solace. A desperate search for some quiet. A psychological Shhhh.
Is the above an internal story some keep replaying in their mind as an excuse to keep getting high, or is it backed up by data? It could very well be both. Coincidentia Oppositorum — The Unity of Opposites.
Coupled with a relentless native curiosity, this neuro-architecture is precisely why I delved headfirst into the chemical world for over thirty years as an addict-researcher-psychonaut. To understand the trajectory, you have to be completely honest about the utility: I took these mind-altering substances because of the genuine good I received from them initially. They provided a brief, artificial peace that silenced the static. But a highly active mind also behaves differently under the influence; it tracks the curves, studies the receptor kinetics, and builds a high functional tolerance that allows it to navigate deep waters where others immediately drown. In other words, it can still function under these altered states — just on different frequencies.
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Act II: The Seven Years and The Egyptian Tabteen
To understand how my brain arrived in that freezing Buffalo parking lot, you have to look at the historical layout of my past — a chaotic, seven-year timeline of everyday heroin use in Egypt. I was a “Junctional Funkie,” using the substance as a chemical medicine to navigate the profound disconnect of a passionless, high-pressure corporate life. It first started as a once-a-week ritual for two, then three, then four of us; you know, like we did with the other substances and all was fine and dandy. But heroin was, is, different. Especially when your ego convinces you that you are a “smart user” who knows what he is doing, and who will never shoot.
Months later, the Thursday night was followed by a Monday night or whenever else our work allowed. Shortly after it was thrice a week. Then the day you were not on you became extremely exhausted. The cure? To take that day to diminish the pain to be able to function, because I was always working — sometimes hiding from your very own circle because [only!] now you absolutely know it is a full-on addiction and you’re ashamed of yourself, your weakness. The final eventual nail in the habit was everyday use.
No one plans to become hooked, you see, you just find yourself there one day.
One critical, nightmare-fuelled experience to cut through the mind-numbing monotony of a decade of rigid employment was a trip to Sinai when we were intoxicated for three full days after ingesting one of the five most toxic plants in the world. Surviving the madness of Sakarana — Hyoscyamus muticus (aka Deadly Nightshade) tells the harrowing story along with the research that followed later.
When the heroin took hold in the mid-20s, my mind, forged through a strict Jesuit-bred education, always maintained a peculiarly detached observational quality. Even at my lowest, I was studying the environment and myself along with it. That built-in discipline, paired with an budding, passionate interest in the intricate dynamics of neuropsychopharmacology, birthed a stubborn shred of self-preservation that kept me away from the needle — a hard line that the preserved the “Observer” alive even in the belly of the beast.
I watched many switch to the needle for pure financial efficiency — it required smaller doses than sniffing or smoking. Luckily, however, syringes and blood turned me off. The idea of sticking an injection full of a rather unknown street substance right into my blood felt too foolish and even senseless. It is as if one is asking for an even shorter life than it already is. I have seen enough death around me to know what I did not want. There was also a deeper, more insidious psychological trap to recognise among shooters: Some who eventually managed to quit heroin began shooting cocaine or ketamine instead. They weren’t just hooked on the chemical; they were addicted to the fatalistic physical ritual of the needle itself. And I can easily relate.
The other major deterrent beside not wanting to die was shooting-related diseases. Watching people close to me end up with Hepatitis C cemented the notion — Hepatitis B is also transmittable through sharing needles. Friends who shared a similar path losing all their teeth in their thirties and all their hair even earlier, was yet another discouraging visual that you do not forget. And not all of them were even shooters, which exposed the brutal reality of the street gear. It felt freaky, looking at their physical deterioration up close, a haunting sight that filled my every nerve ending with a profound, protective sense of gratitude for my own preservation. It seemed I was subconsciously harm-reducing before even knowing there was a name for the concept.
To my mind, neither death nor disease was to be the price to pay for my unadulterated curiosity towards altered states of consciousness, neuropsychopharmacology, and the otherness. Hence, staying away from the needle was my one unbreakable rule that I have stuck to until today.
Madness was always another possibility to cautiously entertain, which this psychonaut nefelibata wanted to equally avoid. We’ve all seen spirits descend into it to never come back. Drug-induced psychosis, in particular, is an entity I have been around up close and personal multiple times. Not pretty, let us just leave it at that.
Regardless of the route of administration, one might fairly say, addiction is addiction. Sure; yet there are different degrees that affect the speed at which the body deteriorates. I cannot begin to imagine lasting seven years of daily shooting — not even four. Statistically, I should have been either dead or in jail, with no visible veins left in me.
Somehow that high tolerance, and the ability to function, can be looked upon as a curse. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, being a Junctional Funky — who kept working normally throughout an entire decade — is what made me last seven years. I never [seriously] got caught by the police, or parents, or coworkers, and neither did I stay home for more than a few weeks in between jobs; well, except once, which is coming in the following Act III. I was playing the silly game by working in big multinational organisations while pleasing parents and the society at large. The price of assuming the role? My own well-being and mental health.
Before knowing who you authentically are at the core, you often get to know who you aren’t — and knowing what we don’t want is a significant step towards what we do want.
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William S. Burroughs piercingly unveiled in the prologue of his 1953 masterpiece Junky: “You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default.”
In late-90s Egypt, pre-addiction, our underground pharmacology was already reckless and wild. Following weed and hash from the first year, we were introduced to “Kemya”, a word meaning chemistry in Arabic; a street term referring to harder chemical drugs — as opposed to plant drugs like weed or hash.
Before even experimenting with street heroin, we would routinely consume a bottle or more of the Alexandria-made magical and nostalgic cough syrup Codaphen (which contained both codeine and ephedrine). Sometimes it would be coupled it with twenty pills of the cough medication Broncholase (Codeine Phosphate) to induce hallucinations and ten pills of the heavy muscle relaxant Somadril Comp. (Carisoprodol) to increase the sedation; a mix we called “Combo Chassé / Chassis” — referring to totalling a vehicle chassis.
As not to swallow thirty damn pills in one go, the process was to open the capsules, drop all the powder on a light, small piece of tissue before placing it at the back of the mouth to be swallowed with water. Yikes. It was a dirty, volatile, and highly dangerous form of street alchemy — devoid of much awareness; it was an unsanitised method of altering reality before the introduction to heroin.
El Kimi-Kimi-Ki Wel Kimi-Kimi-Ka.
 |
| From plant to powder: the complete material spectrum of altered states within the early-2000s Cairo underground. — From the Private Archival Collection of One Lucky Soul |
For some, this dangerous combo still required a preliminary street
procedure known in Egypt as “Tabteen” (تبيطين) — meaning to create an
internal coating or lining within the central nervous system. Why? To maximise the chaos.
To execute this tactical art of Tabteen, users would first drop a heavy downer before anything else — sometimes taken on the way to score to help mellow things while also passing time. The number one choice was specifically Roche’s Rohypnol (Flunitrazepam) — which was ingested purely for its heavy recreational sedation in the region and NOT as a date-rape drug; number two was Rivotril (Clonazepam), known on the street as “Abou Zomba” due to the total havoc it often caused. The nicknaming of “Abou Zomba” drew a direct parallel from its stronger and slightly more expensive sibling, “Abou Saliba”, “the one with cross,” which referred to the four-quartered Rohypnol pill.
Whether taken sublingually or sniffed, the potentiating process lined the stomach as well as padded the brain before hitting the killer Chassis mix, or any other opiate. Utter recklessness.
People who could not get their hands on these two potent drugs would take ten Xanax (Zolam in Egypt) to attempt to reach the same comatose state. Heck, I later learned from the other side of the world that some users potentiate their opiate intake with OTC meds like diphenhydramine — contained in Tylenol PM.
The idea behind the tabteen is that these benzodiazepine linings dropped baseline anxiety, obliterated physical tension, and insulated the central nervous system. When you hit the codeine or heroin on top of that type of lining, it caused explosive synergy. The benzo aggressively potentiated the opioid, multiplying the euphoria and creating that deep, heavy nod. Conversely, if the benzo follows the opiate, the effect of the former is almost nonexistent as it is effectively cancelled out by the latter.
Some say, potentiating ruins the effect of the opiate, because time passes without you noticing, and you forget stuff. Guess it always goes back to personal choice.
The above mixes were all part of The Day, which were usually spent at home or indoors, smoking joints and drinking tea — used as tasyee7 ( تسييح ), melting of all that had been ingested, which comes last in the list.
As for the minority of us those who frequented bars, pubs, nightclubs, and parties, the going-out pack, was the Rohypnol crossat mixed with alcohol. It took a while to know your own doses, because more than you can handle means the nights would turn dark and you wake up with much larger missing pieces, or after having a car accident. Learning later on that they use it to date-rape was quite a shock, but it also made sense. The forgetfulness was notorious.
One of the many related Chez Nanigans — during a multiple-day binge of Clonazepam and booze — was waking up one morning to a girl jumping into my bed at home in the Sheraton, trying to wake me up all sensually, so we can go down to the pool. The only issue is, I had no idea who she was. No name, no face, though she was pretty looking. Upon questioning my friend who had spent the night, her and I apparently met on the pool the day prior, went to the cabana for some Mumbo-Jumbo, and then we ate and swam for hours. Oh, and she was not alone, she had two other female friends who had also hooked up with my other friends; which friends?, no clue. You then get flashes like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Four days were spent in that coma, during which I got in the car in my swim short and drove to one of the toughest neighbourhood in old Cairo, El-Madba7 (The Slaughterhouse area) in Sayeda Zeinab, to meet the dealer again to get more “Abou Zomba” and back. Barely remember a full week. Ouff.
One fact that ought to be mentioned is that by the early 2000s, they stopped producing Codaphen. The other favourite high in Egypt, Rohypnol, followed suit. Egyptian Clonazepam remained for a while before becoming only doctor-prescribed. Or so it goes. As such, those of us who had these recreational drugs to play with, usually only on weekends and special occasions, found nothing left but heroin. Like we had successfully done with the substances before it, it began as a weekend thing. But that did not last.
Another thing worth mentioning is that any talk of premium, imported goods — like classic psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, ecstasy) — was an extreme rarity at the time. To secure those “smarter drugs,” you had to find a trusted friend travelling abroad, pay them in advance, and pray the quality wasn’t watered down. Cocaine, too, was isolated to hyper-exclusive elite circles back in the 1990s and likely the 80s too, a far cry from the ubiquitously active economy it commands today throughout the region. Thus for users wanting anything other than weed and hash during that era, there really were no other options available.
It felt less like a random collective shift in lifestyle preferences and more like a deliberate socioeconomic strategy executed by the powers that be — who, just a few years prior at the hands of Ministry of Interior Habib el Adly, had systematically choked out the local Bango (marijuana) economy only for it to be rapidly replaced by high-margin imported hashish. These sweeping market transformations are always calculating corporate decisions taken at the highest altitudes of control; they are never haphazard happenings on the street. Ever since several years ago, decent weed made a comeback in Egypt, and it’s sold by the gram like “abroad”, or by the kilo. Again, it smells like political decisions taken by the higher-ups.
Speaking of, I wrote an article in Arabic about the widespread phenomenon of hashish mixed with all sorts of harmful shîte in Egypt — with a brief English translation at the end.
احذروا التقليد عند الشراء — ظاهرة الحشيش المخلوط في مصر
Back to the trenches.
After heroin became our drug of choice and tolerance inevitably grew over the following years, these potentiating agents became almost essential to the chemical equation; that is, if you still wanted to feel a certain high rather than merely avoid withdrawals. While it was, and is, effective street science, anyone who survived those trenches knows: the opiate + benzo mix is also the easiest “textbook” way to stop breathing. Some of us engaged in such life-threatening acts so you don’t have to. Health is Wealth, my Friends.
Fortunately, throughout the four and a half years of university, heroin was still that scary drug that caused overdoses. It was how I managed to graduate with degrees in Journalism and Mass Communications, Psychology, and Philosophy. As a senior, I even aced a psychology course by getting an A+ — my one and only. The topic, you wonder? Check Geeking Out Over Ψ 400: Drugs and Human Behaviour for a fun story ride.
Post-graduation, when my mother was reading all my grades, she curiously stopped at that A+. Looking at the name of the course, she then flashed a knowing smile that expressed an “Of course!”
To execute this tactical art of Tabteen, users would first drop a heavy downer before anything else — sometimes taken on the way to score to help mellow things while also passing time. The number one choice was specifically Roche’s Rohypnol (Flunitrazepam) — which was ingested purely for its heavy recreational sedation in the region and NOT as a date-rape drug; number two was Rivotril (Clonazepam), known on the street as “Abou Zomba” due to the total havoc it often caused. The nicknaming of “Abou Zomba” drew a direct parallel from its stronger and slightly more expensive sibling, “Abou Saliba”, “the one with cross,” which referred to the four-quartered Rohypnol pill.
Whether taken sublingually or sniffed, the potentiating process lined the stomach as well as padded the brain before hitting the killer Chassis mix, or any other opiate. Utter recklessness.
People who could not get their hands on these two potent drugs would take ten Xanax (Zolam in Egypt) to attempt to reach the same comatose state. Heck, I later learned from the other side of the world that some users potentiate their opiate intake with OTC meds like diphenhydramine — contained in Tylenol PM.
The idea behind the tabteen is that these benzodiazepine linings dropped baseline anxiety, obliterated physical tension, and insulated the central nervous system. When you hit the codeine or heroin on top of that type of lining, it caused explosive synergy. The benzo aggressively potentiated the opioid, multiplying the euphoria and creating that deep, heavy nod. Conversely, if the benzo follows the opiate, the effect of the former is almost nonexistent as it is effectively cancelled out by the latter.
Some say, potentiating ruins the effect of the opiate, because time passes without you noticing, and you forget stuff. Guess it always goes back to personal choice.
The above mixes were all part of The Day, which were usually spent at home or indoors, smoking joints and drinking tea — used as tasyee7 ( تسييح ), melting of all that had been ingested, which comes last in the list.
As for the minority of us those who frequented bars, pubs, nightclubs, and parties, the going-out pack, was the Rohypnol crossat mixed with alcohol. It took a while to know your own doses, because more than you can handle means the nights would turn dark and you wake up with much larger missing pieces, or after having a car accident. Learning later on that they use it to date-rape was quite a shock, but it also made sense. The forgetfulness was notorious.
One of the many related Chez Nanigans — during a multiple-day binge of Clonazepam and booze — was waking up one morning to a girl jumping into my bed at home in the Sheraton, trying to wake me up all sensually, so we can go down to the pool. The only issue is, I had no idea who she was. No name, no face, though she was pretty looking. Upon questioning my friend who had spent the night, her and I apparently met on the pool the day prior, went to the cabana for some Mumbo-Jumbo, and then we ate and swam for hours. Oh, and she was not alone, she had two other female friends who had also hooked up with my other friends; which friends?, no clue. You then get flashes like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Four days were spent in that coma, during which I got in the car in my swim short and drove to one of the toughest neighbourhood in old Cairo, El-Madba7 (The Slaughterhouse area) in Sayeda Zeinab, to meet the dealer again to get more “Abou Zomba” and back. Barely remember a full week. Ouff.
One fact that ought to be mentioned is that by the early 2000s, they stopped producing Codaphen. The other favourite high in Egypt, Rohypnol, followed suit. Egyptian Clonazepam remained for a while before becoming only doctor-prescribed. Or so it goes. As such, those of us who had these recreational drugs to play with, usually only on weekends and special occasions, found nothing left but heroin. Like we had successfully done with the substances before it, it began as a weekend thing. But that did not last.
Another thing worth mentioning is that any talk of premium, imported goods — like classic psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, ecstasy) — was an extreme rarity at the time. To secure those “smarter drugs,” you had to find a trusted friend travelling abroad, pay them in advance, and pray the quality wasn’t watered down. Cocaine, too, was isolated to hyper-exclusive elite circles back in the 1990s and likely the 80s too, a far cry from the ubiquitously active economy it commands today throughout the region. Thus for users wanting anything other than weed and hash during that era, there really were no other options available.
It felt less like a random collective shift in lifestyle preferences and more like a deliberate socioeconomic strategy executed by the powers that be — who, just a few years prior at the hands of Ministry of Interior Habib el Adly, had systematically choked out the local Bango (marijuana) economy only for it to be rapidly replaced by high-margin imported hashish. These sweeping market transformations are always calculating corporate decisions taken at the highest altitudes of control; they are never haphazard happenings on the street. Ever since several years ago, decent weed made a comeback in Egypt, and it’s sold by the gram like “abroad”, or by the kilo. Again, it smells like political decisions taken by the higher-ups.
Speaking of, I wrote an article in Arabic about the widespread phenomenon of hashish mixed with all sorts of harmful shîte in Egypt — with a brief English translation at the end.
احذروا التقليد عند الشراء — ظاهرة الحشيش المخلوط في مصر
Back to the trenches.
After heroin became our drug of choice and tolerance inevitably grew over the following years, these potentiating agents became almost essential to the chemical equation; that is, if you still wanted to feel a certain high rather than merely avoid withdrawals. While it was, and is, effective street science, anyone who survived those trenches knows: the opiate + benzo mix is also the easiest “textbook” way to stop breathing. Some of us engaged in such life-threatening acts so you don’t have to. Health is Wealth, my Friends.
Fortunately, throughout the four and a half years of university, heroin was still that scary drug that caused overdoses. It was how I managed to graduate with degrees in Journalism and Mass Communications, Psychology, and Philosophy. As a senior, I even aced a psychology course by getting an A+ — my one and only. The topic, you wonder? Check Geeking Out Over Ψ 400: Drugs and Human Behaviour for a fun story ride.
Post-graduation, when my mother was reading all my grades, she curiously stopped at that A+. Looking at the name of the course, she then flashed a knowing smile that expressed an “Of course!”
─── ✵ ────── ✵ ────── ✵ ───
Act III: The Big Pharma Illusion & The Radical Alternative
The catalyst for change arrived five days into my last job in the corporate matrix, when I gave a presentation in both French and English to clients visiting from Canada. The topic? A true story about climbing to the summit of The Great Pyramid one midnight back in 1996. That presentation shook the neural snowglobe, shattering the comfort zone and forcing a total departure from the familiarity of everything “known”. I left Egypt to relocate to Toronto — supposedly far and away from my inner demons. The journey to recovery had officially begun; so did the neural transformation.
It started with talking to strangers online — a purely cathartic release. On Bluelight, a pioneering peer-to-peer harm-reduction forum, I opened up to members as they did to me. We built an anonymous digital camaraderie and unfiltered knowledge-sharing network composed of an eclectic variety of users, ex-users, psychologists, physicians, chemists, and pharmacists. It was an elite, rogue laboratory where I could access information one rarely gets to hear from a common doctor, a street dealer, or those in between; also anonymously encourage others and be encouraged as well through my own posts and recovery. One moderator of a Progress Thread, Captain Heroin, became virtually close during those intense days. Even now, I can log in to read my old ravings, rantings, and ramblings — where I, Been&Done, share my doses, progress, and how I was feeling day by day, in clinical detail. “A bit edgy with girlfriend,” is one confession.
It was essential then to write all that, to bring it to my awareness and conscious attention; to know you are not alone in the trenches was another catalyst that tremendously helped the recovery; so was finding out about those who have it much, much worse: Whether it was shooting for 20 years or being hooked on heroin plus a bunch of other different drugs, it made me look at my situation and think, maybe for the first time, that it is not the end of the world. But also the success stories — from the horses’ mouths — were inspiring, indeed showing that there is a life past addiction.
Bluelight is an education on its own: A sobering, eye-opening gaze into an earlier version of myself during this period of metamorphosis, of coming back to life.
It was a few years before the move, while still stuck in Cairo, that a half-Nordic ex-girlfriend — with whom I had originally started using heroin years prior — returned from Europe with what she called a “miracle drug” to stop withdrawals: Subutex. Before that, the only primitive detox method we had in Egypt was Tramadol. I still remember the first advice I ever received from an older street friend who has since passed away: “Take 200 mg of Tramadol SR in the morning, plus 200 mg at night, and drink lots and lots of water.” May Goofy Rest In Love. Of course, I was back after three or four clean days
Once I realised what Subutex could do, I began treating it like currency. I contacted cousins in France and England to get me more, but the European medical systems were too tightly locked. America, however, was wide open. My former brother-in-law walked into a doctor’s office in Manhattan, New York and easily walked out with a bottle of Suboxone rather than Subutex, which was sent to me in Egypt.
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| The backing paper of the chemical lease — a temporal flash-forward tracking a multi-continental warfare that would span fifteen years. — From the Private Archival Collection of One Lucky Soul |
Toward the end of my time in Egypt, I made quite a bit of money from a couple of real estate deals. Being a first in my young adult life, it naively felt like it was an unlimited amount. So I left work and stayed at home to party. With 6K EGP per day, around 1K in U.S Dollars per the then-rates, the money was spent on heroin, cocaine, women, and sushi — in that particular order.
In case you do not know, the notorious heroin + cocaine mix dubbed speedball, sometimes dynamite, is another “textbook” way to OD. The marriage between the opioid depressant and the central nervous system stimulant can lead to sudden respiratory failure, as well as fatal cardiovascular events (raises the risk of heart attack, stroke, irregular heartbeat, and brain aneurysm). The “Push-Pull” strain between cocaine forcing the heart to beat faster and heroin drastically slowing down the respiratory rate places extreme physical stress on the heart and lungs. Both substances heavily amplify each other’s addictive potential and toxicity, making a speedball vastly more dangerous than using either drug by itself.
During this killer high time, I was seeing a recently separated foxy woman while an ex-lover was still somewhat in the scene. The hedonistic companionships were exciting as they were pure pleasure.
Several months of excessive debauchery and I recall the very day I was in front of an ATM across the street from my building when I suddenly realised there were 27K left. Dang, 1/10 of the total. Not just that, but I’m hooked on both powders — more so on junk since it had been several years.
As such, I did what I felt I had to do: Use the remaining money to get far and away from my dealers in order to get clean; it was a conscious effort to break away from the mindless, toxic pattern I found myself sinking into even more. Where to? Amsterdam and London. Yep.
In case you do not know, the notorious heroin + cocaine mix dubbed speedball, sometimes dynamite, is another “textbook” way to OD. The marriage between the opioid depressant and the central nervous system stimulant can lead to sudden respiratory failure, as well as fatal cardiovascular events (raises the risk of heart attack, stroke, irregular heartbeat, and brain aneurysm). The “Push-Pull” strain between cocaine forcing the heart to beat faster and heroin drastically slowing down the respiratory rate places extreme physical stress on the heart and lungs. Both substances heavily amplify each other’s addictive potential and toxicity, making a speedball vastly more dangerous than using either drug by itself.
During this killer high time, I was seeing a recently separated foxy woman while an ex-lover was still somewhat in the scene. The hedonistic companionships were exciting as they were pure pleasure.
Several months of excessive debauchery and I recall the very day I was in front of an ATM across the street from my building when I suddenly realised there were 27K left. Dang, 1/10 of the total. Not just that, but I’m hooked on both powders — more so on junk since it had been several years.
As such, I did what I felt I had to do: Use the remaining money to get far and away from my dealers in order to get clean; it was a conscious effort to break away from the mindless, toxic pattern I found myself sinking into even more. Where to? Amsterdam and London. Yep.
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The Subutex helped tremendously on this first week, before tapering for another week. Having amazing cannabis also helped me come back to life. Then there was a journey on magic mushrooms, acquired legally from the Amsterdam cafes, which aided the resetting further.
What finalised the recharging process is going out dancing once in London to the beats of the legendary Carl Cox. It reminded me of my earlier, younger, cleaner, dancing self — whom I was endearingly missing. My last time clubbing was six years earlier around New Year’s Eve 2002 in Amsterdam, since I had outgrew the scene in Egypt following the first introductory years in the mid-1990s. Also, in the adult world, to take a vacation and travel abroad was significantly harder to manifest ever since starting formal employment in 2000. So it certainly was cool and healthy to relive the dancing days and the entrancing electronic music. Dancing is absolutely therapeutic as it is cathartic.
That break was in 2008 when even a single dose of MDMA allowed me to get a glimpse of a less toxic future. Following the nigh tout, I vividly remember sitting there on the white-sheeted bed of the hotel when a sublime, hopeful, and almost otherworldly yet also freaky epiphany came unto my mind’s eye: It was a vision of my own possible liberated non-addicted light, followed by a little fear or apprehension from my own magnitude, which I knew was still within me even deep in the trenches. The real, full-of-life bon-vivant version before diving into this limited, limiting dark world. If I survived all that and kept moving up the ladder all the while bound to a substance, imagine what you could do without the dependence, without needing to recharge the biological battery every so many hours? And the commitment, imagine if channelled towards something positive and constructive? Mind: Blown. I felt that alternate reality so deeply within my every never ending, almost as an actual truth that will indeed materialise someday, that my eyes got all watery. I was staring straight into the shining sun.
I did word out what I had just experienced to my cousin and the foxy lover who encouraged the idea — while hiding the tears from them. Yet at that Cairo employee level, I still had no idea what to do with the insightful added perspective.
Only recently did I dissect why most humans fear their own light more than their own darkness. Because freedom comes with its own price: To mature and be fully responsible for your own life, and with absolute accountability, you have to actively own that freedom; own your truth with zero excuses. Dealing with the uncertainties of life outside the confines of that familiar prison is a solitary mode of existence, liberating and deeply empowering. Understandably, for the conditioned mind, the unknown — or the end of the “known” — can be terrifying. It was why approaching the sun felt scary. Truth is, it is always far easier and more convenient to follow the herd, obey established paradigms, and remain comfortably shackled.
By the end of the European trip, I was 23 days clean from heroin for the first time in years; three days had been the max before. The fog had finally lifted, and I began envisioning a more illuminating future where I was no longer shackled to a damn chemical. Part of me then knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel because I saw it — a clean, unfragmented horizon entirely free from the heavy physical bondage of daily dependency.
Splendid news, right? Well, once the plane landed on the Egyptian runway, I called my dealer. From inside the plane. Yeah, the story you tell yourself in such a situation is that you will now finally get close to the first few times years ago when the high is sensational and the nodding is crazy. This is how possessed the addict is — ON/OFF, that is all there is. My mind had equated Cairo with heroin, like some kind of an escapist method of [un]being.
One must remember, before writing, drumming, creativity and art in general, l was still lacking an alternate arena to channel that dangerously passionate internal velocity. That is, on the actual ground, not in my mind’s eye. No motivation, no inspiration, or even aspiration — just cold perspiration. In such apathetic, impassive existential vacuum “the junk won by default”.
Despite two more years of the robotic life I had programmed myself to lead, the seeds of change were planted in that Ams hotel room.
The neurobiology behind that sudden vision is that the raw MDMA payload triggered a massive structural flood of serotonin and dopamine, momentarily over-riding years of severe receptor depletion. With heavy everyday use, an abuser’s brain suffers a literal imagination bankruptcy; it physically lacks the dopamine capacity to visualise a way out of the tunnel or construct an image of a healed future self. It is certainly not just a matter of simple willpower, nor a definitive black-or-white choice; there is an undeniable, hardcore physical element to the neuroplastic equation.
Activating the legal psilocybin mushrooms earlier in that journey operated on this exact receptor plane, forcefully binding to my serotonin 5-HT2A nodes to initiate a profound neural reboot — structurally clearing out the remaining defensive chemical debris and helping re-wire the baseline communication paths of my unguided neural grid entirely alone. Some of us instinctively knew the therapeutic qualities of psychedelics before it became an industry.
Oh, and the coworker who had made the same amount of moula sold his car and got himself the latest model BMW. Uhu. This dude? It mostly went up his nose, but it had also afforded me this much needed intermission, which turned out to be a significant catalyst to what is there to come — unbeknownst to myself or anyone... of course.
An amusing and now historical Snapple Fact from the era: 27K EGP at the time could buy me plane tickets to London where we stayed at a friend’s house and to Amsterdam where four days were spent in a decent hotel — lasting over three weeks. The USD rate was around 5 EGP. Yep, you can laugh and cry at the same time over these not-so-distant times.
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The only doctor I went to in Egypt was around the time I told my parents everything, Dr. John. After listening to me talk about my colourful past before and after H — Rohypnol and psychedelics and all — the man simply opened his bag and gave me a few strips of Tramadol; he also prescribed Remeron (mirtazapine) to help with the sleeping. He then surprised me by uttering: “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you can do anything you want except opiates.” Hm, are you sure, Dr. J?
One remarkable effect of Mirtazapine, as a friend and I recall it, is the extreme hunger mid-night, since it is taken before bed. A friend confirmed that he woke up one day to find himself munching on the bed cover. Uhu.
The confession was followed by going to El Ein El Sokhna to detox with my mother and father for few days; another time with only mother. Imagine? Did those break solve the underlining drug issues? Nope. There were never long enough for any visualisations and I was instantly back once in Cairo. Addiction is much more than just quitting a substance, which, in fact, is not the hardest thing to do. It is what comes after: Learning how to live life and to regulate your emotions without needing some kind of battery. And that may take some trial-and-error to figure out what works with you. Eternally thankful that my parents were understanding and did not freak out; because that never helps.
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| The Peace Bridge dividing two separate legal realities — December 2010. Even amid the freezing geopolitical boundaries of the border run, the sun continues to pierce through the darkness. |
By the time I made my real escape to Canada and a significantly more clear-headed me began the research, I was introduced to the great Big Pharma patent illusion. Suboxone was Subutex mixed with Naloxone, marketed as an “abuse-proof” miracle because the Naloxone was supposed to trigger instant withdrawal if a user tried to shoot it. Yet the street always outsmarts the lab. Because buprenorphine has a far higher receptor binding affinity than naloxone, users who already had a baseline level of Bupe in their system could shoot Suboxone without hitting withdrawal at all.
The mechanism didn’t stop people from shooting it; instead, it just gave a percentage of other users like me chronic daily “Naloxone headaches” as it absorbed through the oral mucosa. Man, that was so painfully annoying, my every nerve ending recalls.
I was stuck, facing the very real threat of sliding back to street heroin just to escape the headaches. If I were in Egypt, I could have very well slipped. That was what eventually drove me to see the New York doctor myself, demanding pure Subutex, and beginning my real research on the forums of Bluelight.
American doctors around 2010 were routinely handing out monster doses — 24 mg of buprenorphine a day (three 8 mg tablets) to kids — completely blind to the hyperbolic receptor occupancy curve of the drug. As a partial agonist with a structural ceiling, handing out 24 mg didn’t make patients cleaner; it just built a huge, impenetrable chemical reservoir in their systems, locking them into a state-approved addiction that lasted for years. Many were given a cocktail of other types of drugs.
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| A 1901 pharmaceutical advertisement by Bayer marketing Heroin Hydrochloride as a cough specific for children — before the market was criminalised to secure a state-sanitised monopoly. |
My fundamental distrust of authority and of the wider system didn’t just spawn from my own street experiences with lab-coat dealers; it equally came from studying history. As I previously explored in Amphetamine, Methamphetamine, and Crystal Methamphetamine — A Psychonaut’s Review (2018), drugs like heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine were once legal, heavily commercialised, and sold freely to housewives, children, and millions of soldiers on both sides of World War II.
Remember cigarette commercials from the 1930s to the 1950s showing doctors list the benefits of smoking? Heck, the big Cairo doctor who gave birth to me in 1977 was apparently chain-smoking while examining my mother. Uhu.
After demonising it for decades, now cannabis is legal and a multi-billion dollar global market. How about that for a paradigm change.
And of course, alcohol. How it is everywhere, still celebrated and glamourised in movies despite it killing millions of people every year. And it’s a shitty drug, seriously, said the man who drank a daily bottle of rosé for ten years starting Canada before realising another type of shackles: The legal ones.
The somewhat convincing story this time: Wine is arty and fancy, now that you are an artist and intellectual writer, philosopher, poet that is the new field in which you will become a connoisseur. Quoting Plato’s “There is truth in wine and children”... often to myself. Uhu. While I did enjoy drinking wine while cooking, dining, writing and still occasionally do, and while I never got drunk or overdid it much as this bottle was spread throughout the whole day, whenever I find myself acting mindlessly or mechanically, the sensors start to beep beep. I would quit for two or three weeks completely normally, I never lied or sold anything to acquire it. Indeed, wine may not be heroin or Subutex, but alcohol, even wine, is still a substance, only that it is much more accepted in the West at least. It was not much of a dependence, but it sure was a habit.
So after some deliberations with myself following the passing of my father — who really loved his vodka — I dropped yet another habit. The younger generations have already got it; they broke the cycle. The fact that big booze companies and nightclubs have been losing money is the concrete result of this paradigm shift.
Make it a habit to break a habit ever once in a while; you’ll feel rejuvenated.
Oh, and to end the list of legal-illegal absurdities, what about criminalising psychedelics ever since 1969. Imagine the setback that could have otherwise helped entire generations. The good news about these days is that the genie is finally out of the vial, as the science and the therapy are openly reaching the mainstream.
All that is to show that the legality part of it — the War on Drugs — is just a big farce, part of an elaborate hustle to make money. It only depends on who is making money off it. We will get into this again later by rewinding into the not-so-distant past.
One of my core One Lucky Soul reflections captures this systemic failure: Legal and illegal does not necessarily mean good and bad or right and wrong. It simply means that a specific group of men in power got together at a specific point in time and decided that certain things are “right” while others are “wrong”. It is largely a fragile matter of societal perspective — and as history repeatedly proves, perspectives tend to drift, collapse, and change over time.
There was another horror from history that considerably contributed to my distrust of the establishment and of the wider system, especially the North American apparatus, and that is the MK-Ultra mind control program. What I learned while conjuring The two-part MK-Ultra: Then and Now – A Thorough Analysis of Mind Control, written all the way back in 2013 Toronto, was as stupefying as it was outrageous.
Spanning from the 1950s to the mid 1970s, the sole purpose of MK-Ultra was the behavioural modification — or behavioural engineering — of human beings in order to be able to control and enslave them. Through these mind control techniques, subjects are first “de-patterned” by manipulating their individual mental states and altering their brain functions. This was done through E.C.T. (Electro Convulsion Therapy), the administration of drugs like powerful psychedelics, chemical sleep, hypnosis, sensory and sleep deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, among other various forms of torture. This is not a script from a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story; it is documented reality from not so long ago.
A total of 44 American and Canadian colleges and universities, 15 research foundations or chemical or pharmaceutical companies and the like including Sandoz (now Novartis) and Eli Lilly and Company, 12 hospitals or clinics (in addition to those associated with universities), and three prisons have participated in MK-Ultra. Most programs within the military industrial complex have zero oversight by Congress, and the project that began in the 1950s was kept secret and classified for all this time until the late 1970s. Doesn’t that just show us how powerful those who ran the show and are still running it are. ’Murika, fuck yeah!
They did this to their own unwary population — all illegal, immoral, and inhuman. Perhaps knowing that makes all they did and still do to other countries and different people a wee less messed up; “brown people” more specifically to remember the great George Carlin, who told it like it is from the inside.
On a more positive note, there was also other tests from the same era. Those, however, do not involve horrific torture or chemical sleep. The subjects in such experiments were given LSD — Lysergic Acid Diethylamide — among other psychedelics and were interviewed and monitored, first for the sake of research then for therapy. My continuously-updated 2015 exposé, The LSD Experiments of the 1950s and 60s [Videos & Documentaries], details the earlier days of the molecule. Gleefully, it was quoted and cited in the 2017 academic book Drugs and Society — 13th Edition by Annette E. Fleckenstein, Glen R. Hanson, and Peter J. Venturelli. Yeah, Baby.
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| A mid-century medical advertisement promoting a pure amphetamine inhaler for children — an unadorned testament to the systemic ignorance and absurd hypocrisy of the institutional apparatus. Notice the “SAFETY” stamped over the smiley blonde girl. |
Beside mind control, when you look back at the calculated geometry of the Opium Wars — shared in more detail in ACT VIII — or stare at an archival advertisement where an ignorant medical system stamps the word “SAFETY” directly over the image of a little girl inhaling pure amphetamine, you see through the alarming absurdity of the institutional apparatus. They handed out speed to children for head colds and over-the-counter heroin for coughs, ignorantly blind to the long-term dependency loops they were manifesting.
The quote from Dr. Smith himself is the ultimate proof of the lab-coat dealer’s mask. When he dropped that line — “I don’t want to give you ideas, but some people just use their Drug Of Choice (DOC) on the weekend, and carry on using Subu for the rest of the time.” — he wasn’t warning me. He wasn’t acting as a guardian of public health. He was laying out a commercial strategy. He was priming his client. I had spent a decade an a half navigating street pushers from Cairo to London; I knew the cadence of a dealer keeping a hook in a customer’s mouth like the back of my hand. Hearing that hustle come out of a licensed Manhattan practitioner in a sterile coat came to shatter any remaining illusion of the system’s moral authority. It was a beautiful piece of predatory seya3a, corporate-style.
Realising this geopolitical hypocrisy forced me to learn how to rely entirely on myself. It is a deeply solitary state of existence, yes, yet it is also a profoundly empowering place to be. When you realise the laws are arbitrary and unreasonable, you stop waiting for an institutional saviour, take total custody of your own neurochemistry, and remember and recognise that you are the only sovereign authority over your own flesh. Only you can tame your own monkeys; that is the naked truth.
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Act IV: The Self-Directed Taper & The Niagara Falls Glimmer
Refusing to replace street heroin with a doctor-approved lifetime shackle, I used the collective knowledge of the underground internet to design my own micro-taper. While sitting in Toronto diving deep into Bluelight, trying to crack the code of this then-novel partial agonist, I stumbled across the ultimate bahrouz — a singular, essential, life-saving nugget of pure psychonautic seya3a, or wiliness, that exposed the entire pharmaceutical industry.
I unearthed the existence of Temgesic — the original buprenorphine hydrochloride formulation used in India and Europe for severe pain management. Developed in 1966 by the UK company Reckitt & Colman (now Reckitt Benckiser), it was first launched in 1978 as an injection and in 1982 as a sublingual tablet to treat moderate-to-severe pain. Over time, Temgesic paved the way for higher-dose buprenorphine formulations used to treat opioid addiction.
I’m willing to bet the vast majority of modern clinicians have no idea what Temgesic even is. Well, I did ask some of them, and nope. The dosage per pill that turned everything upside down? A microscopic 0.2 mg.
That single fact blew the doors wide open for me. It was the missing link. Think about the astronomical, criminal gap in the maths: while European maintenance programs offered 2 mg blocks along with the 8 mg, American corporate doctors were aggressively prescribing 8 mg giants — multiplied by three — to kids. That’s a mind-numbing 24 mg a day, pushing patients way past the pharmacological “ceiling effect” of the drug where the receptors are already 100% saturated, doing nothing other than maximising the chemical reservoir and guaranteeing a multi-week or even multi-month withdrawal nightmare. Absolutely no one needs that dose.
Uncovering the 0.2 mg Temgesic reference point was insanely empowering. It provided the logical foundation for my entire one-year taper plan: If 0.2 mg is already an active, clinically effective therapeutic dose for a human being, then I can easily, safely step down below the standard clinical cliffs. Of course, such vital self-learned knowledge was how the whole tapering plan materialised.
For someone given a daily 8 mg pill by their doctor — sometimes three of them — they can never even visualise the same pill being divided into 40 doses. Sounds far-fetched, right? Well, it is not. Being my own researcher, and guinea pig, saved my life. I did a whole lot of reading on Bluelight, which offered tried and tested knowledge from those with you in the trenches, plus of course links to external studies and medical research that the normal person wouldn’t be interested in.
Seriously, these forums were so educational, I remain forever grateful for all the knowledge gained. As a seeker who was healing himself, reading and chatting anonymously was the closest I ever got to conventional therapy. I had writing, and then drumming, and then sunrises — nature in general.
Practically and magically, I took control of the chemistry. Towards the final months of that recovery year, I would take a single quarter of an 8 mg pill — yielding exactly 2 mg — crush it down with surgical precision, and divide the powder into 10 equal microscopic lines of 0.2 mg each. This meant a simple quarter of a pill could stretch out for 10 days of meticulous step-down management. Abracadabra!
The couple of people who happened to see those tiny white doses spread across the black plate could not believe their eyes, nor the thorough precision. They’re barely lines at that point, to be perfectly honest. I remember making fun of myself on occasions: You are allowing this speck of dust to control your life? From a couple of grams of heroin just to be normal to this. Good job, man, but time to let go.
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| Solitary footprints pressed into the deep Canadian snow — visualising the stark freezing isolation of a self-directed micro-taper countdown. |
I remember walking into the pharmacy on my Toronto street, Davisville Avenue, for something unrelated when, for some strange and purely cathartic reason I ended up confessing my line-cutting methodology to the Egyptian pharmacist working behind the counter. Maybe I was looking for some encouragement or validation from someone in the field, maybe a certain reaction to a methodology that I knew well was unique and drastic — be it positive or negative. Maybe it was the Arabic… or all of them combined. And there it was:
I will never forget the look on his face — his eyes went wide and googly. It was blazingly obvious that in all his years of university and sterile clinical practice, he had never heard of a patient self-micro-managing a molecule with that level of calculated precision — certainly not with an opiate as ruthlessly potent as this one. But that is the difference between an institutional textbook and the ground-level application of neuropsychopharmacology within the reality of the trenches.
When you choose to bypass the sterile walls of programs, hospitalisations, or shrinks, your mind desperately needs an alternative arena for therapy. For me, expressing that unmasked inner self was not a mere hobby; it was the active cure — an emotional cleansing release that taught me how to work with my hands, my head, and my heart like a true artist. As Carl Jung famously noted: "Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain."
I will never forget the look on his face — his eyes went wide and googly. It was blazingly obvious that in all his years of university and sterile clinical practice, he had never heard of a patient self-micro-managing a molecule with that level of calculated precision — certainly not with an opiate as ruthlessly potent as this one. But that is the difference between an institutional textbook and the ground-level application of neuropsychopharmacology within the reality of the trenches.
When you choose to bypass the sterile walls of programs, hospitalisations, or shrinks, your mind desperately needs an alternative arena for therapy. For me, expressing that unmasked inner self was not a mere hobby; it was the active cure — an emotional cleansing release that taught me how to work with my hands, my head, and my heart like a true artist. As Carl Jung famously noted: "Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain."
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As I would later recount in a 2016 confessional archive conjured within the future freedom of Venice Beach, California — where my mind finally had the space to dissect the sheer, mind-numbing monotony of that year-long taper — to document the journey with undisguised truth, you have to include the moments of sheer ridiculous comic relief right alongside the grit. When you spend an entire year staring at a tiny fraction of a pill every single morning, the crushing boredom of the routine drives you to experiment with new variables just to spice things up.
To trace the curiosity towards a route of administration I had never toyed with, we must go back to my late teenage years in 1996 after being introduced to MDMA (ecstasy). Now, this dude we knew who lived in London told us that some people put the pills up their asses because it gets you higher. Of course we never thought about trying it, leading to becoming an inside joke among my friends and I.
[عايز تعلي؟ طب لف و فالأس طيزك], “Do you want to get higher?” “Yes.” “OK, turn around and spread your ass.” Pfff.
Then mid-taper in Toronto, while searching through Bluelight vaults, I found much more about taking some drugs rectally through a process called plugging — and rectal buprenorphine was a documented reality over several threads. Hmm.
My motivation wasn’t about seeking a cheap high, it was about maximising the maths through experimentation. You see, the bioavailability of buprenorphine is a measly 30% if taken sublingually under the tongue, which is the official prescribed route. It jumps to 50% if taken nasally up the nose. The intra-rectal route, however, bypasses first-pass metabolism, reaching a higher 54% bioavailability. Apart from intravenous shooting or intramuscular jabbing — which again were never my thing — this was the ceiling of absorption efficiency.
Likewise, after a decade of chasing altered states, a completely new route of administration would at least crack the paralysing repetition of my daily dose. Guess there was also a rebellious “I [still] break the rules” part that instigated the novelty — now that I wasn’t dealing with street dealers on a daily basis but rather, it was the state, the institution, the establishment.
So, I walked down to the store, bought a baby syringe, and headed back home genuinely excited for the sheer novelty of it. I prepared the liquid solution, laid flat on my side on the bathroom floor with one leg kicked up in the air... and Bam, I pushed it in. You have to keep lying perfectly still for a few minutes so the liquid doesn’t just fall right back out of you. Uhu.
It worked, but obviously jumping a few minor percentage points higher in absorption didn’t make that much of a practical difference to my oversaturated system. I was still glad to have tested the variable; tried it one more time a few days later, and that was the end of my brief stint with drugs up the bumbum. Even so, that is the reality of the psychonaut-researcher: You don’t guess, you don’t judge, and you don’t accept institutional assumptions. You study the existing literature — threads and comments — and test the variables yourself. This was the closest I’ve been to “shooting up”. Again, too much work.
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| A deserted Buffalo landscape cutting through the December 2010 blizzard — the bleak perimeter where the American government became my new legal dealer. |
That first winter run to Buffalo, New York in January 2011, right after clearing the Rite Aid mission, marked a sharp psychological transition. The frantic inner chaos and border panic evaporated, giving way to a cold, focused clarity. Even in the trenches, running a script through a blizzard under the eye of an arbitrary border system, the psychonaut brain actively searched for symmetry, architecture, and beauty amid the bleakness. This is why my Conon Rebel camera went almost everywhere with me, documenting those astounding times when I was scoring legally from the American government — my new dealer.
I knew that one day everything would be exposed to the light, and having visual ledgers would preserve the truth and the beauty of the storytelling. It was a lesson learned the hard way after climbing to the summit of the Great Pyramid one night back in 1996.
While cruising around the freezing grid in the rental car, my lens stumbled upon an immense, gothic stronghold cutting through the pitch blackness: the Connecticut Street Armoury castle. Also known as the 74th Regimental Armoury, the historic 1899 stone military fortress stood tall in the freezing air at Columbus Park — the physical symbol of the rigid institutional authority I was conditioned to trust before I learned to distrust.
I knew that one day everything would be exposed to the light, and having visual ledgers would preserve the truth and the beauty of the storytelling. It was a lesson learned the hard way after climbing to the summit of the Great Pyramid one night back in 1996.
While cruising around the freezing grid in the rental car, my lens stumbled upon an immense, gothic stronghold cutting through the pitch blackness: the Connecticut Street Armoury castle. Also known as the 74th Regimental Armoury, the historic 1899 stone military fortress stood tall in the freezing air at Columbus Park — the physical symbol of the rigid institutional authority I was conditioned to trust before I learned to distrust.
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I parked the car right at the perimeter before going down to snap a few memorial tourist-like photographs of that quiet, frozen American border city I had not yet seen. Clickity Click.
With the fresh script safely in hand and the dose-du-jour already ingested right there in the pharmacy lot, the familiar, grounding chemical burn — and the throat drip — signalled to the nervous system that the immediate crisis was over. The physical panic was pacified, and I rolled back toward the Ontario border feeling safe and secure in my tactical isolation, in custody of my own focus.
The ground-level logistics of that final recovery year were pure madness. In March 2011, a routine Canadian DUI landed me in the infamous Toronto Don Jail for six days — a rough medieval facility that was thankfully shut down several years later. It was inside those cold iron bars that the foundational seed was first planted: The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword.
Ka-Boom. Ka-Chink. Ka-Paaawww.
Almost instantaneously, the decision to become a writer and own the entire narrative layout was taken. I say "taken", but it truly felt like I was not the sole decider; it felt as though I was chosen — à la Bukowski.
With the fresh script safely in hand and the dose-du-jour already ingested right there in the pharmacy lot, the familiar, grounding chemical burn — and the throat drip — signalled to the nervous system that the immediate crisis was over. The physical panic was pacified, and I rolled back toward the Ontario border feeling safe and secure in my tactical isolation, in custody of my own focus.
The ground-level logistics of that final recovery year were pure madness. In March 2011, a routine Canadian DUI landed me in the infamous Toronto Don Jail for six days — a rough medieval facility that was thankfully shut down several years later. It was inside those cold iron bars that the foundational seed was first planted: The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword.
Ka-Boom. Ka-Chink. Ka-Paaawww.
Almost instantaneously, the decision to become a writer and own the entire narrative layout was taken. I say "taken", but it truly felt like I was not the sole decider; it felt as though I was chosen — à la Bukowski.
My passport at the time was confiscated due to the legal aftermath of those Canadian Chez Nanigans. Consequently, by the time the initial 30-pill medication supply was depleted across three months, I faced a hard wall. On the following trip to refill my script across the border in Buffalo, I couldn’t cross legally. Hm.
For that second border run, with no passport in hand, a close Canadian friend who also possessed a tactical green card drove me down. I brought along Caramella, my Cocker Spaniel companion, who had travelled to me all the way from Egypt. She had lived through the heavy darkness of the Cairo heroin years right beside me, and now she was experiencing the vibrant greenery, the new breeds of dogs, the rejuvenating revival, and the charming Canadian snow. Her pure, wide-eyed amazement at the falling flakes and the scampering squirrels — the whole novelty of the experience and of the New World — enticed and inspired my own mind to awaken to the beauty of life: To the Ultimate Ground of Being. The Canon Rebel was also there for the documentation.
For that second border run, with no passport in hand, a close Canadian friend who also possessed a tactical green card drove me down. I brought along Caramella, my Cocker Spaniel companion, who had travelled to me all the way from Egypt. She had lived through the heavy darkness of the Cairo heroin years right beside me, and now she was experiencing the vibrant greenery, the new breeds of dogs, the rejuvenating revival, and the charming Canadian snow. Her pure, wide-eyed amazement at the falling flakes and the scampering squirrels — the whole novelty of the experience and of the New World — enticed and inspired my own mind to awaken to the beauty of life: To the Ultimate Ground of Being. The Canon Rebel was also there for the documentation.
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| Caramella La Bella awaiting at a Lake Erie park, 2011 |
My friend dropped me and Caramella off at a deserted park by Lake Erie to wait in the freezing cold before driving across the border alone to hit the same Rite Aid pharmacy from Act I. We sat there in the winter wind on the edge of the lake, a man and his loyal dog, outsiders to a mammoth conglomerate of a system, yet somehow still in total custody of our own fate, refusing to be crushed into a million pieces like a pill of Subutex. Click.
In between all the chemical madness of that first year, a parallel reality was blossoming; I was
actively
living my best and healthiest life in years. I was jogging through the
crisp air, deeply communing with nature, taking occasional inner
journeys while camping out on frozen Canadian lakes, and getting
passionately into the art of cooking.
Simultaneously, I joined the University of Toronto for a creative writing certificate, taking intensive copywriting and logic courses, and flat-out acing them — like les Jésuites student that still was under my skin, the same A+ geek from Drugs and Human Behaviour at AUC. It was the very first time I had stepped back into a classroom setting since my AUC graduation in 2000, stepping back into the halls of Higher Learning to rebuild my mind from scratch. Beyond that, I ended up befriending the copywriting teacher, Leslie, who was fated to become my first actual editor.
Simultaneously, I joined the University of Toronto for a creative writing certificate, taking intensive copywriting and logic courses, and flat-out acing them — like les Jésuites student that still was under my skin, the same A+ geek from Drugs and Human Behaviour at AUC. It was the very first time I had stepped back into a classroom setting since my AUC graduation in 2000, stepping back into the halls of Higher Learning to rebuild my mind from scratch. Beyond that, I ended up befriending the copywriting teacher, Leslie, who was fated to become my first actual editor.
 |
The University of Toronto campus grounds: The intellectual crucible of Higher Learning where the surviving observer alchemised street trauma into creative Copywriting and Logic disciplines. |
Day
after day, expressing myself in writing became an integral part of my
healing journey. Sharing what matters most to me became an exorcism of a
sort, so I am no longer alone with it. From repression and suppression
to full-on alchemical expression, it was equally a means for self-exploration. I
allowed my work to speak for itself, by showing who I really am at the
core.
I was fortunate to have writing, so I didn’t need shrinks to Know Thyself — and psychedelics too.
I was fortunate to have writing, so I didn’t need shrinks to Know Thyself — and psychedelics too.
 |
When both eyes are closed the third will guide you towards mystical heights. “Seeing” the rainbow in Niagara Falls from the Canadian side — April 2010 |
The next major intuitive visions came unto me during an exploratory vacation to Canada six months before relocation; passing by New York as well before returning to Egypt. As opposed to the precognitive dreams that followed later, in rare cases the epiphanies may psychonautically occur in waking life, often catalysed by altered states of consciousness — this time it was LSD.
While staring at this rainbow by the Falls and contemplating the bridge that crosses to the U.S, fittingly called The Rainbow Bridge, I was overcome by an intense indescribable, incommunicable, nameless sensation “telling” me that, one day, I will somehow “thrive” or “blossom” in America. For lack of better wording, the peculiar message was internally translated as “Good things will happen to you there”. Hm.
This was significantly odd because there was neither any intention nor wish to go anytime soon — other than possibly in short future visits; certainly not to stay for a long time, let alone reside. There was actually nothing for me to do in the States, for I was in Toronto to supposedly settle in one way or another. Likewise, I truthfully had no idea what “thrive/blossom” meant in such context or in which department. Down deep inside my heart of hearts, however, I knew it wasn’t going to be related to any formal employment or “work”, but more of a personal endeavour. It was even more confusing because that was right before taking writing sincerely as a vocation, so there was no frame of reference. What I saw or felt in my mind’s eye didn’t really make much sense at the time. Still, from previous instances of “inner knowing”, I somehow also instinctively knew there was a certain truth in it.
This time, from the periphery of the trenches, there was no accompanying fear to the revelation — a little apprehension maybe, yet also some excitement towards that strange alternate reality. I was not staring at the sun from afar like some kind of mirage, I was getting close to the point of feeling its warmth. And Lordy Lord, it was mystical, beautiful, delightful. The rainbow that just happened to be there certainly added some symbolic Magick to the apparition. Weird, man. Where was this novel perspective or realisation coming from? Must be the Acid molecule.
And the science again here is that stopping heroin for several weeks, my baseline neurotransmitters had, to a certain degree, successfully repaired themselves; I possessed even more natural dopamine velocity than during the initial Amsterdam glimpse. I was approaching the actual end of the tunnel, and therefore my brain had recovered the neuroplastic capability to see the horizon much more clearly. From what we know know, by binding directly to my 5-HT2A receptors the LSD dissolved the rigid [Burroughs] Default Mode Network that had kept my cognitive patterns locked into defensive, repetitive ruts, while initiating a profound hyper-connectivity that turned a waking reverie into a permanent blueprint for liberation.
It so happens that this Niagara hallucination-turned-reality was captured on camera by my then-girlfriend. You can see above an unusually full, blissed-out smile on my face. Though other than these couple of photos as a reminder of a fun trip, I brushed the moment off and carried on with being. The sweatshirt, acquired from London, is still an unintended whimsical touch to the capture
This time, from the periphery of the trenches, there was no accompanying fear to the revelation — a little apprehension maybe, yet also some excitement towards that strange alternate reality. I was not staring at the sun from afar like some kind of mirage, I was getting close to the point of feeling its warmth. And Lordy Lord, it was mystical, beautiful, delightful. The rainbow that just happened to be there certainly added some symbolic Magick to the apparition. Weird, man. Where was this novel perspective or realisation coming from? Must be the Acid molecule.
And the science again here is that stopping heroin for several weeks, my baseline neurotransmitters had, to a certain degree, successfully repaired themselves; I possessed even more natural dopamine velocity than during the initial Amsterdam glimpse. I was approaching the actual end of the tunnel, and therefore my brain had recovered the neuroplastic capability to see the horizon much more clearly. From what we know know, by binding directly to my 5-HT2A receptors the LSD dissolved the rigid [Burroughs] Default Mode Network that had kept my cognitive patterns locked into defensive, repetitive ruts, while initiating a profound hyper-connectivity that turned a waking reverie into a permanent blueprint for liberation.
It so happens that this Niagara hallucination-turned-reality was captured on camera by my then-girlfriend. You can see above an unusually full, blissed-out smile on my face. Though other than these couple of photos as a reminder of a fun trip, I brushed the moment off and carried on with being. The sweatshirt, acquired from London, is still an unintended whimsical touch to the capture
─── ✵ ───
By June of 2011, One Lucky Soul here was officially incepted, emerging directly from the birth canal of my imagination. It served as my own experimental avant-garde palette — a rogue creative laboratory where I acted as both the creator and the primary guinea pig. This deliberate reconstruction of my daily existence proved that true recovery is never a mere mechanical subtraction of drugs or structural doses; it is a profound process of integration, of reinvention, of forging an expanded, expansive, rich reality that is worth living without the incessant need to escape it through synthetic medication. Whatever the mode, transcendence on occasions is indeed beneficial, because it enriches our waking life. That is if the goal is not to live on a secluded mountain to meditate or to mindlessly repeat century-old dogmas.
Months later, following the third and final run to America, my body adapted to the 0.2 mg lines — the forgotten therapeutic baseline of the original Temgesic molecule. From that plateau, the quantity was dropped even further to a microscopic 0.1 mg. Then, as learned from the various underground networks and harm-reduction sources consulted during the lengthy research phase, I deployed an alternate-day schedule — one day yes, one day no. Because the buprenorphine molecule possesses a wickedly prolonged half-life spanning anywhere from 25 to 60 hours, the alternate-day rhythm allowed the drug to slowly and smoothly drift out of my blood level without a sharp, violent drop, especially after a full year. It turned out to be a flawless self-engineered curve. Not like I did not feel any discomfort, far from it, but I think it was the most efficient way to minimise the withdrawals. Knowledge Is Power, my Friends.
With such a microscopic dosage, the final stash of 30 pills was stretched out for roughly five months of meticulously accurate step-down management. Eventually, the painstaking tapering method came to the prospected end — and along with it, the last ingested 0.1 mg fragment of Subutex.
The independent research worked. Following that last week of the taper, I took Dr. John's few-year old Remeron (mirtazapine) to help with the sleeping. Then one night, I only had a Tylenol PM (diphenhydramine). The next night, half a pill. And then the third, nothing. UNSHACKLED AT LAST.
For the first time in eight years of continuous opioid saturation, I slept completely unaided. I woke up on that mid-October morning of 2011, went on Facebook, and posted a single cryptic status: “I’M FREEEEEEE”.
Man, going back to your natural state and to loving yourself felt splendacious.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
— Albert Einstein
— Albert Einstein
─── ✵ ────── ✵ ────── ✵ ───
Act V: The Venice Beach Reminder & The Addicted Mind
In those first initial, unprotected months after the final micro-dose left my system, the world had rushed in with a vengeance — like a tube train up my spine. Stripped of my synthetic armour, the world hit with bloodcurdling, unfiltered velocity.
I would find myself tearing up on the Toronto subway, watching a blind man calmly navigate the subterranean concrete labyrinth with his guide dog — moving forward with dignity — while I would be taken back to the near decade when I wilfully sabotaged my own functional biology.
A similar emotional rupture hit me while standing at my window of my studio, watching a young boy in a wheelchair smashing a tennis ball on the courts ahead. A moment captured through my lens that eventually became part of my sentimental photo-article, Photos I Shot That Brought Tears to My Eyes. In that recently-awakened state, the mind constantly wrestled with a lingering, defensive loop of self-pity, mourning the years — the health and the money — evaporated by dependency.
Three years in cold, distant, sanitised Canada were enough; especially regarding the gruelling legal parameter of the visa renewal process, since I never married or formally immigrated as it was prospected. Following the death of Caramella near the end of this period — a loss that made me crack open and sob like a child for the first time in my adult life, prompting me to write Adieu Caramella just to heal — and the dissolution of a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere, I coddiwompled aimlessly across the U.S. of A à la Kerouac for seven adventurous months. Endings are new beginnings in disguise was my mantra. Having already dealt with the reawakened sensitivity of the emotional sobriety stage of recovery — along with the inherent shadows of shame and guilt — being On The Road was the new adventure my soul was seeking.
In March 2014, I found myself in sunny Venice Beach, Los Angeles, where I was intuitively compelled to stay. It was there at my new enhanced Rat Park that the decision to dedicate myself to One Lucky Soul was taken much more sincerely, channelling all my creative work — Meraki — into this singular space while stopping publication anywhere else. It was a deeply inspiring time to solidify fully owning my vocation as a writer. A time to answer the call for creative work and creative existence as a whole. I was ready to use a unique, gritty set of life circumstances to forge something magnificently phenomenal that only my specific neuro-circuitry could produce. I surrendered to What Is, becoming a humble volunteer of the Youniverse and its daemons. I followed the sun until I got too close.
Also there, drumming followed writing as an additional artistic self-expression. Weekly Venice Beach Drum Circle replaced online forums as actual social gatherings where, at first, no one knew me and I knew no one — another profound layer of liberation.
My own spirited monthly baby, Full Lunacy Drum Circle [by One Lucky Soul], followed at Dockweiler Beach.
Then, the body reminded me that it never truly forgets its past chemistry. I was run over by a car while riding my bicycle through the streets of Venice. After a drudging four-hour wait and a wacky four-hundred-dollar bill at the Emergency Room, I was discharged with a standard cocktail of prescribed pharmaceuticals: Hydrocodone (5/325), Flexeril (a muscle relaxant), and Naproxen.
My article Dreaming of the Accident Before it Happened details the precognitive madness from April 2015. Conjured days after, Opiated The Hatin’ It details my thoughts about revising that old, familiar world.
 |
| The physical aftermath of the precognitive dream taken right before heading to the Emergency Room — Venice Beach, March 2015 |
The day after the accident, the intense deep-tissue pain set in. I looked inside my toiletry bag and, by a strange stroke of coincidence, found a long-lost 1-mg Xanax pill. My old street-smart brain instantly clicked into gear. I decided to perform a clinical version of the Egyptian Tabteen. I swallowed the Xanax and three Flexerils first, waited 45 minutes for the nervous system to be padded and lined, and then swallowed the Hydrocodone.
The pain vanished. Opiates, Ah! Bloody Magick. I spent the day around the house writing, listening to Pink Floyd’s Animals, and visiting that distant, smoky earlier life. One ought to note, the analgesic properties do not actually heal the bruises; they merely make the sensation of physical trauma more tolerable to the brain. For the curious reader and the dedicated psychonaut, the exposé The Intertwining of Pain and Pleasure (2022) delves right into the captivating nature of this peculiarly mysterious, multi-dimensional relationship ― neurobiologically, psychologically, and philosophically.
By the third night, waking up at 3:00 AM with sticky eyes and a heavy, lethargic body, I decided it was enough. It was time to drop the pills and deal with the remaining physical pain naturally. Those ten minutes in bed were a microscopic withdrawal symptom from just three days of use. Here lies the profound difference between an amateur and an experienced mind: if someone who had never experienced addiction woke up sleepless after three days of pain medication, they would simply think, “I’m having a restless night,” and fall back asleep. Their symptoms would pass because they wouldn’t obsess over them.
But a mind well acquainted with addiction? It instantly recognises the ghost of withdrawal. It panics, connects the mild restlessness to memories of past agony, and actually weaponises its own thoughts to amplify the physical suffering. The simple action of fearing or overthinking the withdrawal triggers a cascade of real stress chemicals in the brain, turning a minor sleepless night into a mental battleground spent breakdancing in bed ― literally and metaphorically. This hyper-sensitised state makes the symptoms worse by linking them to prior suffering, becoming reactionary to the slightest micro-shift in biology.
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
― Seneca
― Seneca
By then, I knew that all too well; so I kept observing with calm impartial eyes, made a mental note of the situation — which became the crux of Opiated Then Hatin’ it — then went back to bed, having decided that this brief visit was more than enough to remind me why that world or this mode of existence no longer fits. While I absolutely needed the painkillers for my smashed body, a part of me still enjoyed the chemical break. In all honesty, it was the foggy after-affects that turned me off; it repulsed me to willingly choose to feel so old and broken afterwards. Perhaps I needed that reminder — a confrontation which I did not go seek, but one that came to me exactly when required.
Those who have walked through the fire of their own hell and survived it tend to leave sparks of light wherever they go and in whatever they do.
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Act VI: Global Paradigms and The "Sabbooba" Mills
Living in America after that accident opened my eyes to the staggering scale of the corporate drug landscape. The U.S. consists of roughly five percent of the world’s population, yet it consumes eighty percent of the global prescription drug supply. In 2010 alone, enough opiates were prescribed to medicate every single American adult around the clock for a month. No wonder there are so many zombies around. The dealers wear lab coats, and because the addiction is funded by insurance and institutionalised by the state, millions remain tied to a shelf, untethered from the actual reality of their own bodies. In fact, many people I know theren are o doctor-prescribed mood-altering chemical shackle., especially those below the age of 50.
One cannot help but make a connection with the early work of Edward Bernays, the father of public relations — or modern advertising. The Vienna-born man was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who, since the 1930s, has worked with major corporations of manufacturing and advertising, politicians, and the CIA.
Bernays combined the ideas of Crowd Psychology or Mob Psychology with his uncle’s school of thought. He had a crucial and successful role in manipulating the masses by using their inner desires and fears to engineer public consent. The American citizen was then redefined as a ‘consumer’ and corporate greed was incepted, while Bernays became rich and famous in the process. He was later named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life magazine.
How things are today in America is a byproduct of such work. Out of simple citizens, consumers they have become to be capitalised upon by predatory conglomerates.
From the other side of the Atlantic, I later met a cool 60-year-old European woman who had been on continuous Suboxone maintenance for over thirty straight years, following a teenage heroin and crack addiction. In countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland, the government utilises a highly progressive harm-reduction model, handing out free Suboxone or even medical-grade heroin (diamorphine) in clean, supervised clinics to stabilise long-term users. From a societal standpoint, it is a healthy and peaceful leap forward — crime drops while fatal overdoses disappear. At the same time, it introduces a quiet, invisible trap: The Forever Patient. Because the drug is free and safe, this woman had never once thought about dropping her dose beyond a certain level. Forty plus years of continuous opioid receptor saturation takes a bulky and somewhat silent toll on an ageing body. Still better than the street.
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| The forensic analgesic chart from Opiated Then Hatin’ It (2015) — an early field record documenting the astronomical potency scaling of the synthetic landscape long before the over-the-counter epidemic flooded the streets. |
When I eventually moved back to Egypt, I watched the same institutional trap operate under a different mask. I discovered certain Cairo doctors selling Subutex and Suboxone under the fraudulent guise of a specialised “medical course” for 500 EGP per pill, which later skyrocketed to 800 EGP; today, that street price has undoubtedly multiplied. One of them had his own practice in a hospital and this was a side hustle — a ridiculously lucrative one. Once again, licensed physicians act as nothing more than glorified, high-priced corner dealers, actively exploiting desperate individuals trying to stay clean from street heroin.
Every few months, these dealer-docs travel to Europe to bring back those 8 mg pills to distribute to a growing market of trapped Egyptians. In fact, the first time the Egyptian government even discovered the existence of buprenorphine was only several years prior, when someone was caught at the airport smuggling an insane quantity of pills. Suspicious, they looked into the compound only to realise it is a narcotic, partial agonist or not. Ironically — or perhaps predictably — the person once had a role within the local AA and NA crowd, who ended up serving a prison sentence following that high-stakes airport bust. Ever since that specific incident, buprenorphine was officially added to the strict state anti-narcotics schedule (El Gadwal) and criminalised. Even so, certain doctors will always find their ways to exploit the supply lines.
Whether a patient buys their Bupe through a corrupt Cairo middleman or receives it entirely for free through a progressive Western insurance framework, they are bound to the establishment like peas in a pod. This is the precise reason I fiercely refused to become a registered addict inside the Canadian or American databases during my exile in Act IV; I instinctively rejected that tracking label inside the Big Brother system. This rejection was likely a vital catalyst that kept me in check — a certain fundamental boundary ensuring I never returned to any chemical habit.
Another powerful catalyst that preserved my autonomy was choosing to fully embody the “On The Road” frequency during that decade in North America. Never settle or get too comfortable — a mode of existence that turned out to be essential for creativity. Truly, comfort zones are dead zones, enemies of achievement. Unlike my reality in Egypt, I barely possessed enough money to live while travelling across the United States, an economic restriction manifested somewhat on purpose. Rent aside, I had 22 US$ per day to eat, drink, smoke, and live. Yep. And I am someone who grew up living in five-star hotels for 20 years. The one thing that made sense to me at the time — regarding such a simple, strange, nomadic, minimalist way of living — came directly from my article Why Hippies Are Sometimes Called Bohemians. The introduction came from the research.
“Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or anti-establishment political and social viewpoints, which were often expressed through free love, frugality, drug usage, and, in some cases, voluntary poverty.
Bohemians rejected the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle and the strict moral values it embodied. They equally rejected materialism and the pursuit of money by leaving their middle class lives behind, having no permanent residence, and by living solely for the sake of art and literature. Living carefree, indulging in drugs — mainly hashish and opium — and alcohol, and adopting sexual freedom was their way to rebel against the status quo. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀
In some cases, they were associated with a more economically privileged, wealthy, or even aristocratic circle, which was sometimes referred to as Haute Bohème or conveniently, High Bohemians.”
It was comforting to find people from different walks of life who willingly choose to live on the Razor’s Edge — including the voluntary poverty — even if from centuries ago.
Residing in metropolitan Toronto or in gentrified Venice Beach, there was simply no financial freedom available to fall back into chemical dependency. Looking back, this tactical baseline was my intuitive way to protect myself — my regained freedom — on the go and in the moment. I was operating at a time when there was no existing manual or master blueprint for the psychological terrain I was navigating. It was no longer a time to consume, it was mainly a time to experience and to follow it by creating that which has never existed before.
Looking back, another major concern which kept me in check in the wilderness of North America is fentanyl. Yeah, that motherfucker I first heard of from the above chart back in 2015 — before it turned into a street epidemic.
Also Carfentanil, the extremely potent synthetic opioid used to sedate large animals, which is roughly 100 times stronger than fentanyl and 10,000 times stronger than morphine. Say what! I would have called Carelefentanil. Uhu. Can you even imagine the microscopic amount needed to kill a human being? Truth is, while the drug is authorised strictly for veterinary use, it has indeed appeared dangerously mixed into illicit street drugs. The stories you now read are scary, man.
All that said, I remain forever grateful to have exited that world before the arrival of this synthetic shîte. Because again and again, I did not want to die from getting high. I really, really didn’t. Life, my Friends, is too beautiful to end it in such a way.
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| Enjoint: Healthy and whimsical at the Madhouse — Venice Beach Drum Circle, 2018 |
The trick with “maintenance,” you see, is as follows: Who relies entirely on state-approved chemical bondage will ever rebel, shake the status quo, or spark a revolution? You cannot say “fuck the government” or travel across borders without profound anxiety when your physiological stability is dictated by an institutional database. Living on a psychotropic medication, you become an infantilised passive asset of the state, like a sleeping mole on a chemical leash. “They got you by the balls,” as George Carlin once again used to say.
Still better than the street despite all that? Abso-fuckin’-lutely — it is the lesser of two evils.
The darkest underbelly of the Egyptian scene, however, was not the lab-coat pushers; it was the recovery industry itself, which I have been observing from the periphery through the eyes of those close to me for thirty long years. In fact, every single one in my five-people group spent some time in rehab; a couple went in and out more than 15 times. Seriously. In Egypt, many rehab and detox centres are largely the Sabooba (سبوبة) type — a predatory, money-making racket run by capitalistic doctors and ex-users looking to cash in on the sheer misery and desperation of families. Sounds familiar? The global pattern remains identical. It’s still less scary than the North American model.
Again, the observing psychonaut does not judge, nor does he preach. He takes notes, studies the patterns, and sees lessons in the mistakes of others — since this fleeting life is too short to learn all the intended lessons through our own mistakes. It is often through the mistakes of others that we learn best. Then again, they are only real mistakes if nothing has been learned. Actually, without mistakes we’ll never learn; and without learning we’ll never evolve.
The darkest underbelly of the Egyptian scene, however, was not the lab-coat pushers; it was the recovery industry itself, which I have been observing from the periphery through the eyes of those close to me for thirty long years. In fact, every single one in my five-people group spent some time in rehab; a couple went in and out more than 15 times. Seriously. In Egypt, many rehab and detox centres are largely the Sabooba (سبوبة) type — a predatory, money-making racket run by capitalistic doctors and ex-users looking to cash in on the sheer misery and desperation of families. Sounds familiar? The global pattern remains identical. It’s still less scary than the North American model.
Again, the observing psychonaut does not judge, nor does he preach. He takes notes, studies the patterns, and sees lessons in the mistakes of others — since this fleeting life is too short to learn all the intended lessons through our own mistakes. It is often through the mistakes of others that we learn best. Then again, they are only real mistakes if nothing has been learned. Actually, without mistakes we’ll never learn; and without learning we’ll never evolve.
One way to learn from our mistakes and failures and get past them is to talk about them. For all forms are self-expression are healing. That’s why art therapy is a successful thing. True art also has the ability to lift a human being out of time, in the legendary words of William S. Burroughs — a state that becomes profoundly meditative in and of itself, as during Flow State. My most recent being was while finalising this lengthy piece when I spent 17 consecutive hours in The Zone, working and polishing, beautifying and obsessing.
Likewise, mistakes and failures mean we’re trying new things. Doing something. Without them, one could lead a ‘safe’ life yet never learn or grow or rebuild themselves. Let alone how uneventfully dull and drab the complacency of life would be. In truth, many great discoveries started out as mistakes. There is no good reason then to be afraid of making some. Perhaps above all, it is an opportunity to start over — for rebirth.
Likewise, mistakes and failures mean we’re trying new things. Doing something. Without them, one could lead a ‘safe’ life yet never learn or grow or rebuild themselves. Let alone how uneventfully dull and drab the complacency of life would be. In truth, many great discoveries started out as mistakes. There is no good reason then to be afraid of making some. Perhaps above all, it is an opportunity to start over — for rebirth.
Perhaps if you genuinely care about someone, you may add a statistical ledger here and there or share how you survived your own chaos. But, most active users already know the maths. And the actual truth is, we are all different, and to each their own. What I silently do whenever meeting my European friend is imagine myself in her coordinates. I could easily have chosen to live out my days stabilised on Subutex, but I chose not to. I want to feel it all: the Ups and Downs and All-Arounds. The full spectrum of being human — still experienced from the observer vantage point and with a certain equanimity. This is just a ride after all. We are here to dance.
I’ve envisioned the light at the end of the tunnel then created a reality around it; one I need not to run away from. Living on sunny beaches for the past 12 years, away from the hustle and bustle of big cities, was the healthy environment that inspired the metamorphosis. To numb my feelings about the life I’m leading is no longer an existential need. I fought hard to be wholly me, and I’m proud of my survival story.
Freedom, sovereignty, and autonomy are worth every ounce of the fire. For the average person who simply takes their liberty for granted, these natural, essential concepts remain intangible. Only when losing that foundational baseline independence and self-determination, even for a brief season, do we begin to realise how vital it truly is to existence — how elemental it is if one is to be fully, unapologetically oneself. We feel the true meaning of freedom only after it is taken away through control or oppression. That’s one hard-learned truth for you.
I’ve envisioned the light at the end of the tunnel then created a reality around it; one I need not to run away from. Living on sunny beaches for the past 12 years, away from the hustle and bustle of big cities, was the healthy environment that inspired the metamorphosis. To numb my feelings about the life I’m leading is no longer an existential need. I fought hard to be wholly me, and I’m proud of my survival story.
Freedom, sovereignty, and autonomy are worth every ounce of the fire. For the average person who simply takes their liberty for granted, these natural, essential concepts remain intangible. Only when losing that foundational baseline independence and self-determination, even for a brief season, do we begin to realise how vital it truly is to existence — how elemental it is if one is to be fully, unapologetically oneself. We feel the true meaning of freedom only after it is taken away through control or oppression. That’s one hard-learned truth for you.
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Act VII: The Shadow of Sherif: A Decade Later
It was shortly after publishing Opiated Then Hatin’ It in 2015 Venice Beach that a 31-year-old reader from Egypt named Sherif reached out to me through a private message. He had read my words from across the world and felt a desperate lifeline.
“I’m 31 years old. Yet, I feel like 70,” he wrote.
Sherif’s downward spiral was a textbook case of systemic medical failure. At age 20, he was misdiagnosed with a bone tumour in his tibia by ignorant Egyptian doctors, who subjected him to 30 useless radiation sessions and four major surgeries. He spent his entire twenties in a cast on crutches, lonely and in agony, finding his only solace in Tramadol and benzos. When he finally fled to London, British doctors delivered the grim truth: the radiation had caused gangrene. He was forced to make the choice between death or an above-knee amputation. He chopped off his leg, swam in a sea of NHS pharmaceuticals, survived a suicide attempt, and eventually made the fatal mistake of returning home to Cairo to be near his family.
Isolated in his bedroom, refusing to use his prosthetic leg, he was trapped in a 24/7 drug loop, spending over 70,000 EGP on predatory Sabooba, money, halfway houses that did nothing but empty his mother’s pockets. When he reached out to me, he was clean for 10 days yet losing his mind, trapped on a zombie cocktail of heavy anti-psychotics (Risperdal, Chlorpromazine) prescribed by a psychiatrist who told him his brain was permanently deranged.
For two weeks, we exchanged the bahareez of our lives. I spoke to him not as some mechanical lecturer, but as a peer who had survived similar trenches. I told him to look at the taper maths, to look up his meds on Bluelight, and to recognise that his leg was being used as a psychological hanger for his self-pity. I told him that if he conquered his mind, he could become a fearless individual, and that his mother would look at him with a pride he hadn’t yet imagined. I tried to inject hope into his black world, advising him to look toward meditation, reading, and the ultimate paradigm shifts of psychedelics.
Our chat abruptly ended on July 9, 2015. He told me to listen to Portishead’s Roads. I told him I was busy with some stuff.
Seven months later, back in Los Angeles, I checked his profile. Sherif was gone. Ten days before his death, he had posted the Islamic testament of departure — the Shahada — followed by a final, haunting poem on his wall: “We were born to die... loneliness and solitude all the way... suddenly and out of the blue, you take your last breath... nothing left, just a memory fading away into oblivion.” He knew.
The epilogue to his death was a definitive indictment of institutional murder. His sister later found my profile and revealed the truth: after a relapse, his desperate mother sent him to an unlicensed detox clinic called Beit el Horeya in Hada2ek El Ahram, run under the shadow of a famous doctor named Ehab El Kharrat. Once inside, Sherif — a disabled man on crutches — got into an altercation with the supervisors. They tied him to a bed, threw an unknown injection into his veins, and left him to die while noise shattered inside the room. When the police raided the place, the corporate doctors immediately weaponised bureaucratic lies, claiming he was an uncooperative diabetic, or denying their affiliation with the facility entirely to protect their medical licenses. She denied the diabetic part.
They took his money, they took his life, and they traumatised his family. A decade later, the link to his story stands as an uncompromised monument to the sheer, murderous ignorance of the recovery system.
Addiction Talk: My Correspondence With a 31-Year-Old Reader Before He Passed Away is my piece detailing the whole human ordeal — written in memory of Sherif.
 |
| The behavioural anatomy of human dependency — unmasking how the root network of internal wounding fuels the universal need for a chemical or psychological shield. |
Split cleanly across: Substance, Activity, Thought, Feeling, or People loops — depending entirely on whatever variable we utilise to numb our internal existential friction. Legal or illegal has nothing to do with the fundamental notion, as verbalised earlier in the OLS Reflection. Whether a human being is dependent on street junk, a monthly corporate salary, or a repetitive loop of anxious overthinking, the neuro-chemical mechanics remain identically defensive. It is a universal human pressure — La Condition Humaine. What tends to differ are the stigma and the judgements, largely based on the legality farce at a certain point in time.
Act VIII: The Sokhna Remission and the Sinai Mountains Whisper
“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.”
— Lao Tzu
— Lao Tzu
Two more years in Venice Beach allowed the weight of Sherif’s death to settle into my bones. At 40 years old, I found myself back in Egypt, not knowing what this newer version could — and would — do regarding the same demons I thought I had left behind. My old friends were either married with kids about to finish high school or still battling their demons and were toothless by then.
I knew I had to re-escape Cairo. I entered a brutal, self-imposed hermit phase in Sokhna, detoxing from the Subutex I had accumulated from the Egyptian lab-coat dealer. Because, you guessed it, it is still Abso-fuckin’-lutely better than going back to the street. But why having to choose between two evils?
Buprenorphine withdrawals are a special kind of Bleugh; because of that massive half-life, the physical agony doesn’t just peak and vanish — it lingers deeply embedded in the marrow, testing every shred of your sanity. They bloody last. Yet because I had survived the trenches before — with street heroin and the cold 0.1 mg Subutex taper in Canada — I didn’t panic from this rather brief stint. I knew I had it within me. My cells already held the blueprint for survival. My body’s inner intelligence remembered how to flush the poison out and rewrite its own chemistry.
When COVID-19 hit Egypt shortly after moving back and the world was frozen with fear and mass anxiety, I decided not to inject an unknown substance in my body. If I were into needles, I would have injected an actual drug aeons ago. Ha. What I did, however, was totally isolate myself, remaining there all alone on a beach in Sokhna for how long? Wait for it... two and a half years! Uhu. I was enjoying the aloneness and the beach-front location so much that time just slipped by. Staying away from suffocating Cairo along with all human drama was how I yet again protected myself.
Almost everyone I know got jabbed in fear of COVID; more than three quarters of them still got it. I never claimed to know the full truth about that pandemonium, but I knew I was healthy as I was and needed no jabs or boosters or roosters. Looking back, absolutely no one knew shit anywhere in the world.
I equally recognised that the whole novel crisis was capitalised upon, which was revolting; that is in addition to seeing first-hand how fear paralyses people, which was dreadful.
Right from the start of my relocation, I decided that for my own well-being, I needed to create my own outlet, my own circle, and my own rhythm, fun, entertainment — entirely from scratch.
Once a week, usually on Mondays to ensure I was completely alone on the entire beach, I would have a “Day Out”. I drummed under the sun and took dips in the Red Sea when it wasn’t too cold. I also began filming myself to study my technique, uploading the videos to YouTube. Eventually, I started drumming along to Chopin, Baroque, and experimental music. I worked on un-hacking my drumming by doing the exact opposite of what my hands naturally wanted to do, forcing myself to react in the moment rather than play from muscle memory. Unshackled by the Red Sea — Free-Form Djembe Jam: The Lysergic Recordings [video] is one article about it.
Outside of Mondays, my system still needed something to chase — just not drugs anymore. So, I began chasing the sunrise... almost every single day. Since the house sits right on the beach, I would take my camera out to shoot photos and videos, usually pairing a morning post with a deeper reflection. There are probably hundreds of them, which will one day make a great exhibition.
Another thing to realise is that, just like writing has become part of me wherever I am in the world, drumming has now become the same. While I was drumming alone there, part of me felt that a drum circle in Egypt is not such a far-fetched idea. But where?
Deep psycho-philosophical pieces came to being, like A Dialectic With Myself: A Practical Yin-Yang Approach to Coincidentia Oppositorum and The Intertwining of Pain and Pleasure. It was time for trying to make sense of all that transpired during the ten-year trip and conceptualise it, hopefully integrate the novel perspectives into the ‘I’.
 |
| Getting it out into the ether, or on the sand, and then once it is fully, consciously realised it has no control over you. — Sokhna, 2021 Forgive. Because you deserve to set yourself free. It is not always about forgiving or being forgiven by others, you see. Sometimes we need to forgive ourselves. Follow me? With forgiveness comes love. And love breeds compassion, understanding, and empathy. Makes you feel one with the bumblebee, the tree, the sea — the universe in its entirety. This openness also brings upon some needed vulnerability. ’Tis destiny, my friend, quel poetry. A B C 123 Do Re Me Let it be, love. Now set it free. |
Since no man is an island, I started to miss people, even small talk and eye contacts. By the time I finally broke the isolation and reached the shores of Dahab, the physical shackles were breaking. I finally had the needed space to resume my passions. I started jogging again along the edge of the Red Sea, letting the salt air clear the remaining fog — eventually going back to callisthenics — in addition to sunrise stretching on the beach along with the local doggo pack. I also picked up the djembe and began drumming on the beach amid the elements; that is my own meditation. A month later, I launched Full Lunacy Drum Circle — Dahab as a sister gathering to Full Lunacy — Dockweiler I have incepted in 2016 L.A. Ah, there it is that Bohemian enclave, which I had last visited in 1999.
I once again clawed my way out of the depths by returning back to my true self. Dahab has become my new querencia where I function at my own zen rhythm — my most recent Rat Park.
Two full years had passed when, as it often happens, the universe threw a wild wildcard into my balancing act
I was out for my morning jog at 7:00 AM, moving briskly along the Dahab boardwalk. There is something magical and poetic about having a beach all to yourself — as I came to experience again and again. As I passed a lone, stationary Bedouin standing by the mamsha, he quietly threw a single heavy word into the morning air while I ran past:
“Afyoun”. (Opium).
I was literally running, in running gear, at seven in the morning! The sheer absurdity of it hit my brain like a lightning bolt. For a second, the defensive rational side of my mind kicked in: “Haha, you’re completely imagining things. Of course he didn’t say that. It’s just your chronic tinnitus playing tricks on you in the wind.”
I forced myself to ignore the thought. I pushed it down into the subconscious and left it there for four or six months, focused on my usual rhythm — the early morning jogging, writing, the djembe, and the monthly Full Lunacy.
But a psychonaut’s memory is a dangerous thing. After nearly half a year of that one-word call, the other part of my brain slowly dredged the moment back up to the surface.
“Hmm... I wonder if that Bedouin really did say that. We actually used to score raw opium right up here in these mountains during our wild road trips to Nuweiba back in the early 2000s. The poppy plant — the absolute OG mother and father of every single opioid molecule on Earth — is actively cultivated right here in the valleys of Sinai.”
Another few days of mental wrestling passed, and the curiosity finally won. The cunning brain then began to infuse some elaborate and rather convincing half-truths to rationalise the decision:
“An occasional opium tea is almost harmless; that is compared to whatever more potent opiates. Also, it has been over 20 years; as a psychonaut, maybe it is time to delve into such an archaic and exotic substance in order to write about it. You did cover most other major drugs in your research, but where is the Matriarch and Patriarch? With your specific past with junk and bupes, it seems like you ought to. Oh, and poppy has been cultivated right here in these majestic lands for centuries, so it’s farm-to-table. No adulteration, no cutting, no cheating. The final thought was: You never even went to seek it, it came to you, and at the most unlikely time and space. Again. It seems the plant wants its story told.”
I picked up the phone and made a casual call to a close Bedouin friend, asking if raw opium was actually flowing through the area. Five minutes later, his message came back, confirming: “It’s right there if you want it.”
Haaa. The demons. Just when you think you’ve run far enough into the desert to leave them behind, they sit quietly by the boardwalk at sunrise, waiting to whisper your name.
This, by the way, was not a first: At some point in L.A, it so happened that a next-door neighbour was selling blow.
But the ultimate synchronicity Ka-Pawww was when I was mid conjuring Amphetamine, Methamphetamine, and Crystal Methamphetamine — A Psychonaut’s Review when an old acquaintance from Egypt happened to pass by me in Venice just out of the blew, opening up that he had been prescribed Adderall after going through a sort of drug-induced psychosis, and shared some with me. The following week, the homeless guy living around the local gas station gave me a little ziplock as a thank you for the old clothes I had recently donated to him. A few days later one afternoon I tried those two lines of meth for the first time and stayed awake till 5 am. Those two events just happened to take place while I was mid the piece. And uppers are the least attractive highs to me personally, so this street knowledge seems to be the one attracted to me. And once was enough. I came back to Egypt to find somewhat of an epidemic of “Ice”. I’ve even learned that it is produced locally, somewhere in Sinai. “What meth did to me in two years, heroin haven’t even come close in twenty years,” someone I know recently confessed.
When the same happens again and again over years and across countries, you realise they are no coincidences. Synchronicity, yes. Either I have been chosen to write about these things — chosen yet again, à la Bukowski — or it is my psychonaut self that attracts these happenings... or both. This effortless pull is something mysterious I haven’t yet fully understood, cementing the realisation that a distinct cosmic role is why I am still alive — surviving, and even thriving in whatever I put my mind and soul into.
 |
| The raw patriarch of the synthetic landscape: A living Sinai mountain organism growing natively in the backyard, long before its lineage was hijacked by international corporate monopolies. — From the Private Archival Collection of One Lucky Soul |
Then came the latest opium research.
Knowing that the matriarch and patriarch of carfentanil were growing right there in the mountains of my own backyard compelled me to start digging into the raw history. This wasn’t some synthetic molecule dreamed up in a Western lab; it was a local plant deeply woven into the ancient timeline of the region and its culture.
The Ancient Egyptians revered the poppy — specifically cultivating the famous Papaver somniferum varieties in Thebes — and recorded its medical, sedative benefits in the Ebers Papyrus around 1500 BC. The ancient Greeks similarly catalogued its power, dedicating it to Nyx, the goddess of night, and Hypnos, the god of sleep.
For centuries, before it was refined into white powder or pressed into doctor-approved tablets, the raw gum of this plant was consumed whole as a tool of survival, creativity, and escape. Reading Thomas De Quincey’s foundational 1821 text Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, you see the timeless psychology of the substance: “Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!”. Truth is, De Quincey also laid bare the terror of the debt the plant demands.
I devoured whatever I could find about that ancient plant: The history, early and recent studies, documentaries, personal experiences shared on threads in online forums. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes: “There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.”
Also, Club des Hashischins, which I had covered before.
“... After spreading throughout Arabia and India for hundreds of years, hashish as a mind-altering substance came to be embraced in some European literary circles in the 1800s. Most notably, le Club des Hashischins, which was a Parisian club dedicated to the consumption of hashish and other drugs; its members included literary luminaries such as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Dr. Moreau ’de Tours. As well as Charles Baudelaire who later wrote his 1860 book Les Paradis Artificiels, which is about the state of being under the influence of opium and hashish. ...”
In all the research, the most mind-boggling by far are the two Opium Wars from the mid-19th-century. The archival reality of that era is profoundly horrifying. Before Americans went fully mental on their own flesh and blood with MK-Ultra and Big Parma, it was the British led by drug-loving Queen Victoria who were messing with the world, India and China more specifically. As a widely-known historical fact, the woman regularly ingested wine-infused cocaine as well as Laudanum, the infamous opium tincture mixed with alcohol; she also took ganja for her menstrual pains. True story.
Imagine what nations can do for the sake of profit, out there in the open — how illegal, immoral, unethical, and downright absurd. The British East India Company was incepted to make this global narcotic cartel formal, yeah sure. This is our world, Ladies and Gentlemen. And it is led by the original drug smugglers — with the conscience of a virus — who absolutely do not care about you or me. Dr. Smith and the Cairo plug among the others lab-coats are just products following through the legacy; mere downstream middle-managers executing the same colonial lineage.
Has the geopolitical machinery truly evolved, or has imperial drug-smuggling merely taken a hyper-sanitised, corporate form under the regulatory databases of the New World? The corporate boardroom has simply replaced the cargo hull, transforming colonial exploitation into an insurance-backed monopoly designed to harvest recurring assets from a dependent population. O’ the depravity, the absurd hypocrisy of it all!
I set out to document this re-introduction with the utmost truth — with no judgement, and no applause. I am not here to moralise or romanticise. These are just teary, sweaty, bloody documented facts from the trenches, cross-examined with historical reality. When you look at the raw opium plant in the desert, you realise that humanity has been fighting, writing, and dancing with this same organism since the dawn of civilisation.
Knowing that the matriarch and patriarch of carfentanil were growing right there in the mountains of my own backyard compelled me to start digging into the raw history. This wasn’t some synthetic molecule dreamed up in a Western lab; it was a local plant deeply woven into the ancient timeline of the region and its culture.
The Ancient Egyptians revered the poppy — specifically cultivating the famous Papaver somniferum varieties in Thebes — and recorded its medical, sedative benefits in the Ebers Papyrus around 1500 BC. The ancient Greeks similarly catalogued its power, dedicating it to Nyx, the goddess of night, and Hypnos, the god of sleep.
For centuries, before it was refined into white powder or pressed into doctor-approved tablets, the raw gum of this plant was consumed whole as a tool of survival, creativity, and escape. Reading Thomas De Quincey’s foundational 1821 text Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, you see the timeless psychology of the substance: “Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!”. Truth is, De Quincey also laid bare the terror of the debt the plant demands.
I devoured whatever I could find about that ancient plant: The history, early and recent studies, documentaries, personal experiences shared on threads in online forums. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes: “There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.”
Also, Club des Hashischins, which I had covered before.
“... After spreading throughout Arabia and India for hundreds of years, hashish as a mind-altering substance came to be embraced in some European literary circles in the 1800s. Most notably, le Club des Hashischins, which was a Parisian club dedicated to the consumption of hashish and other drugs; its members included literary luminaries such as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Dr. Moreau ’de Tours. As well as Charles Baudelaire who later wrote his 1860 book Les Paradis Artificiels, which is about the state of being under the influence of opium and hashish. ...”
In all the research, the most mind-boggling by far are the two Opium Wars from the mid-19th-century. The archival reality of that era is profoundly horrifying. Before Americans went fully mental on their own flesh and blood with MK-Ultra and Big Parma, it was the British led by drug-loving Queen Victoria who were messing with the world, India and China more specifically. As a widely-known historical fact, the woman regularly ingested wine-infused cocaine as well as Laudanum, the infamous opium tincture mixed with alcohol; she also took ganja for her menstrual pains. True story.
Imagine what nations can do for the sake of profit, out there in the open — how illegal, immoral, unethical, and downright absurd. The British East India Company was incepted to make this global narcotic cartel formal, yeah sure. This is our world, Ladies and Gentlemen. And it is led by the original drug smugglers — with the conscience of a virus — who absolutely do not care about you or me. Dr. Smith and the Cairo plug among the others lab-coats are just products following through the legacy; mere downstream middle-managers executing the same colonial lineage.
Has the geopolitical machinery truly evolved, or has imperial drug-smuggling merely taken a hyper-sanitised, corporate form under the regulatory databases of the New World? The corporate boardroom has simply replaced the cargo hull, transforming colonial exploitation into an insurance-backed monopoly designed to harvest recurring assets from a dependent population. O’ the depravity, the absurd hypocrisy of it all!
I set out to document this re-introduction with the utmost truth — with no judgement, and no applause. I am not here to moralise or romanticise. These are just teary, sweaty, bloody documented facts from the trenches, cross-examined with historical reality. When you look at the raw opium plant in the desert, you realise that humanity has been fighting, writing, and dancing with this same organism since the dawn of civilisation.
─── ✵ ────── ✵ ────── ✵ ───
Act IX: The Naked Truth and The Cosmic Integration
One essential key to a full and fulfilling life is to never lose the
wondrous curiosity or childlike enthusiasm. To be a creative adult
requires just the same.
As I reach the boundary of my 40s and prepare to step into my 50s [One Lucky Soul: The Healing Powers of Storytelling Link], I look back across this sprawling, chaotic landscape with clarity. I don’t doubt it anymore: there undeniably is an underlying cosmic order to why I survived the things I did. I didn’t make it out through a random stroke of luck, nor did I survive by the clinical standards of Western addiction medicine. Standing here in the shadow of the Sinai mountains, looking at a visual timeline that transitions from the raw green plant to the cold white matrix of Big Pharma pills, the naked reality of my survival lays itself entirely bare.
Articulating these gritty clinical details is no simple release of old psychological static. It stands as a calculated, living act of harm reduction — a counter-strike to show that survival requires total custody over your own neurochemistry. That is why I write about these topics so openly, so nakedly, and without a single shred of defensive compromise. The public needs to see the real chemistry, the real psychology, and the real maths of the human brain under pressure, if only to minimise the institutional stigma and the hush-hush shame surrounding the reality of dependency. In the immortal words of Gabor Maté, addiction is the most human thing there is.
The medical complex wants you to believe that healing is a matter of compliance — moving from the illegal street dealer to the state-approved pharmacy counter, keeping your head down, and staying safely, quietly numb on a FREE lifetime prescription of Subutex, Xanax Prozac, Adderall, Vicodin, or whatever else. But in truth, that is just a slower, institutionalised death. We tend to forget that it’s an industry explicitly designed to create customers rather than cures. “By. The. Balls.” Have you ever wondered about the “free” thing?
As I reach the boundary of my 40s and prepare to step into my 50s [One Lucky Soul: The Healing Powers of Storytelling Link], I look back across this sprawling, chaotic landscape with clarity. I don’t doubt it anymore: there undeniably is an underlying cosmic order to why I survived the things I did. I didn’t make it out through a random stroke of luck, nor did I survive by the clinical standards of Western addiction medicine. Standing here in the shadow of the Sinai mountains, looking at a visual timeline that transitions from the raw green plant to the cold white matrix of Big Pharma pills, the naked reality of my survival lays itself entirely bare.
Articulating these gritty clinical details is no simple release of old psychological static. It stands as a calculated, living act of harm reduction — a counter-strike to show that survival requires total custody over your own neurochemistry. That is why I write about these topics so openly, so nakedly, and without a single shred of defensive compromise. The public needs to see the real chemistry, the real psychology, and the real maths of the human brain under pressure, if only to minimise the institutional stigma and the hush-hush shame surrounding the reality of dependency. In the immortal words of Gabor Maté, addiction is the most human thing there is.
The medical complex wants you to believe that healing is a matter of compliance — moving from the illegal street dealer to the state-approved pharmacy counter, keeping your head down, and staying safely, quietly numb on a FREE lifetime prescription of Subutex, Xanax Prozac, Adderall, Vicodin, or whatever else. But in truth, that is just a slower, institutionalised death. We tend to forget that it’s an industry explicitly designed to create customers rather than cures. “By. The. Balls.” Have you ever wondered about the “free” thing?
 |
| Red Star microdot LSD and Dali blotter art prints: The visual catalysts of a parallel path that dissolved the rigid Default Mode Network to reclaim the active fire of the psyche. — From the Private Archival Collection of One Lucky Soul |
Xanax, Xalkori, Xgeva, Xtandi, Xyrem, Xylazine, Lexapro, Dexedrine, Paxil, Celexa, Nexium, Effexor, Desoxyn, Suboxone, Subutex, Benzedrex, Celebrex, Clarinex, Brintellix, Trintellix, Luvox, Vioxx; Zaltrap, Zantac, Zelboraf, Zestril, Zithromax. Zocor, Zoloft, Zosyn, Zyban, Zyprexa, Zykadia, Zyrtec, Zytiga, Prozac, Victoza, Benzedrine, Etizest, Otezla, Etizola.
Pharmaceutical companies deliberately add the letters ‘X’ and ‘Z’ to the brand names of their drugs so we find them compleX and believe they know what they’re talking about. DzzzZ.
Observation-turned-truth Ha-Ha aside, the actual fact is that pharmaceutical cartel often pay outside agencies hundreds of thousands of dollars, even up to half a million, to develop a name for a product. The more technical and sciency sounding, the better. Everything seems to point at La Moula — the name of the game.
Observation-turned-truth Ha-Ha aside, the actual fact is that pharmaceutical cartel often pay outside agencies hundreds of thousands of dollars, even up to half a million, to develop a name for a product. The more technical and sciency sounding, the better. Everything seems to point at La Moula — the name of the game.
─── ✵ ───
My survival didn’t come from their clinics. It came from a completely different realm: a gruelling, parallel path forged through a three-digit deep psychedelic trips, starting in 1997. That was the real medicine — the radical revolution in the psyche that felt like an Anastasis. Those were the unyielding, ruthless mirrors that forced me to look directly into the eyes of my own darkness and tear down the illusions I built to protect myself. The psychedelics didn’t numb the pain nor did they solve anything by themselves; they blew the door off the hinges and exposed why the pain was there in the first place, rewiring my neural pathways, expanding my neuroplasticity, and opening up the Doors of Perception.
Radical and lasting change, however, manifests through the post-journey integration; it is what you do with what you have experienced during it — the novel perspectives — which begins with a transformation in consciousness; letting go of our own conditioning while destroying our presuppositions and discarding all untruths. That’s the basis of spiritual illumination: Seeing reality for what it is, not as we want it to be or as we think it should be. Being enlightened is not about being a better or happier person, it is about being true to yourself.
Otherwise, without The Work, psychedelic trips may be just another chemical escape. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Yet, the way of the psychonaut goes far beyond recreational or “for-fun” festival use, just as it approaches the contemporary mainstream horizon with a weary, street-tested caution.
We are living in an era where the concept of “plant medicine” is being used left and right, and as things advance in this hyper-capitalistic world, Big Pharma is already aggressively moving to capitalise on the changing legal quagmire. Whether people seek to heal from deep trauma through overpriced Ayahuasca ceremonies under a shaman in the Amazon, or via micro-dosing templates in urban centres, psychedelics are becoming widely accepted. About time. How will that massive societal shift turn out? We have to wait and see — it remains an exciting time to be alive.
I only hope this commercialised wave will not systematically ruin the sacred territory for those who choose to journey alone without an institutional manual. Knowing first-hand how the corporate drug machine operates from the inside, as you should too before we delve into the coming final act, one cannot help but look at this new frontier with an observant and protective eye. As the clinical complex moves to extract, bottle, and standardise the experience for the mass market, a critical question remains for the modern voyager: Will this corporate acceptance deliver true psychological liberation, or is it merely design-engineering a more sophisticated, state-approved cage for your consciousness? Be careful out there in the deep water, my Friends.
Even though each journey is different from the other, after some time psychedelics may no longer be necessary or useful. As Alan Watts puts it: “If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.” Psychedelics are no magic pill, they are mere tools — magnificent colourful tools to enhance our consciousness and to show us that there is more than this physical reality; make us see life and ourselves under a different light. Following the journeys comes the time to work on the findings, in a conscious effort to apply the knowledge to one’s existence. That is how integration works in knowing oneself, shifting perspectives, and consequently in bettering the quality of our lives.
Here, however, is the most critical, naked truth of this entire manifesto: That cure was only mine. It cannot be bottled, it cannot be standardised, and it cannot be safely prescribed in a clinical pamphlet. What saved my life could completely shatter another person’s mind. The psychedelic realm demands a fierce, terrifying level of psychological sovereignty and an innate, street-tested understanding of your own internal chemistry. If you run into that fire without a deep and relentless respect for the molecules, it will burn you to a cinder.
With that, towards the close of this contextual piece, I am compelled to once again assert that I am not offering a safe, comforting story with a neat bow tied at the end. The demons don’t vanish just because you start jogging on the beach or drumming under a full moon; nor do they cease to exist within your very being once you relocate to the other side of the world. They change shape. They also know your permanent address. They wait for you when you least expect them, like at 7:00 AM on a quiet boardwalk, whispering ancient words like Afyoun to see if you are still paying attention.
And honestly? I wouldn’t want it any other way. There are zero regrets because it all made me who I am today.
─── ✵ ───
I have always had a deep, unyielding fascination with walking the Path of the Razor’s Edge. It has a certain mystique that breaks the monotony of the bland goody-goody, the ordinary, the conventional, and the orthodox. In Kingdom of Fear, Hunter S. Thompson seems to have captured this state of mind: “Never turn your back on Fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.” That is how I choose to navigate my existence. I deliberately remind myself occasionally of my demons, not because I want to relapse, but because I look them dead in the eyes. Out of the mud, came the lotus. You keep them right out in front of you where you can track them. In a weird way, this calculated proximity keeps me humble — relating to a significant portion of the human race, including those navigating their own mental health terrain.
The most dangerous thing a recovering addict can do is fool themselves into saying: “I slayed the dragon.” Mayhap they did, yet this black-and-white certainty could very well emanate from the ego as an arrogant lie. The dragon, the monkeys, the demons are still there. They are all mine — they are permanent, foundational, integral parts of who I am. I cannot wage war against my own biology or my own psychology without destroying myself in the process — which could very well mean destroying the best parts of myself. You cannot flee from your demons and they cannot be executed; they first have to be accepted, then integrated; that is, if wholeness is the goal.
As such, the light and the shadow are two sides of the same coin. These two poles are not antithetical or incongruent; they are complementary and are part of one unfragmented whole. Transcending duality is the ultimate living manifestation of Coincidentia Oppositorum — where claiming absolute truth means one has stopped growing. On the other hand, to learn how to dance with the demons is to take the darkness out towards the light. That’s the Alchemical Gold. This tension of opposites is the energy needed to turn the subconscious conscious, thereby keeping the Fire of the Soul alight. When you become a light unto yourself the darkness has no hold on you — it loses its grip and eventually its power. It is how the full potential is reached, by boldly and wholly embodying the most authentic youest you.
The second most dangerous thing post-recovery is to remain stuck in the same loop — years, decades, an entire life — when all your energy, attention, entire existence is going towards NOT being an addict. Sure, it is a great thing to be clean and to remain clean; as the institutional models do a phenomenal job of saving lives on a basic, survival infrastructure level. But while they stop the physical haemorrhaging, they demand a tragic tax for that safety: They tend to systematically extinguish the Fire of the Soul.
The Perpetual Patient Trap: The traditional model forces a human being to spend the rest of their lives identifying exclusively with their sickness. Every single meeting begins with a declaration of brokenness: “Hello, I am an addict”. They lock themselves into a permanent, lifelong defensive war against a hidden enemy. Same circles, same vocabulary, same neural circuitry.
The Static Cage: Because their entire cognitive focus is poured into not doing something, their dualistic worldview becomes defensive, rigid, and safe. They become risk-averse, black-and-white automatons. The chemical dependency is traded for an institutional dependency. Like being part of a cult.
In my view, there is more to life than not being something. What we resist, persist while conflict will always exist. The secret lies not in fighting the old paradigm, but in creating a new one that will exhaust the old one and render it obsolete. Echoing with more words of wisdom by Carl Jung: “I’d rather be whole, than good.”
Sobriety without creativity is just an empty, sterile room. It is the definition of clinical madness. That is, not use whatever happened to me to propel me forward, like a catapulted arrow shot with a bow. I didn’t break my chains just to sit peacefully in a sanitised corner counting days on a calendar. I took the chaotic, enigmatic, dangerous velocity that almost killed me during those years of street addiction, of doctor-prescribed meds, self-explorative inner journeys, and utilised and alchemised it to fuel my art and creativity — poetry, writing, drumming and founding a community across continents. I chose the Path of the Razor’s Edge because I know in my heart of hearts that an examined life fully lived requires the Fire of the Soul. For that is how you suck the marrow out of life.
But again, that is just me with my own unique biology, psychology, experiences, and set of circumstances: Precisely why this writing is not really a guide for beating or even dealing with addiction. Harm reduction? Much more likely.
More details are covered in the Early Memories Never Worded series — recently migrated to One Lucky Soul here under the first Subconscious Chronicles and its Sequel.
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| The Solar Crown: Communing with the Sinai sun from the home patio — Dahab, 2023 |
“The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalised into harmlessness. This problem is exceedingly difficult, because it not only challenges the whole man, but reminds him at the same time of his helplessness and ineffectuality.”
― Carl Jung
― Carl Jung
Accepting myself fully — the light, the heavy addiction years, the street-smart calculations, and the wild psychonaut impulses — has been my not-so-secret. I don’t run from my past, and I don’t pretend it’s gone. I even fully expose it every once in a while just as we are doing herein. For our darkness is not evil; it is to be accepted and integrated.
Looking back across this sprawling landscape, it is blazingly apparent that my entire experience with heroin and Subutex was the most traumatic, educating, cauchemardesque, and illuminating thing that has ever happened in my life. It really got my guts out. Yet, it was the precise blessing through which I learned to coexist with the totality of who I am.
As Terence McKenna famously chiselled into Food of the Gods: “The shaman is more than merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself, who is cured, and who must shamanise in order to remain cured.”
My heavy daily addiction began the exact same year my family left twenty long years of living in five-star hotels to move back into a normal flat; it was a desperate, unconscious reaction to losing my childhood playground — the then-Rat Park — right as I entered the adult corporate rat race, self-medicating with street junk to break away from the shackles of industrialised conformity that was creeping up on me through those unfulfilling multinational corporate jobs. And as we said, it was also the time when all the local highs we knew ceased to exist in the country while the “smarter, non-addictive molecules” from abroad were rarely ever available, certainly not to the average population.
But through a sequence of fortunate events, relentless perseverance, and a healthy dose of self-love I was able to reverse-engineering that trap, more than once. I claimed the alchemical return. If I made it out of a decade of heavy opiate addiction nakedly and alone, then anyone can navigate their own chemical habits, be it alcohol, pills, sugar, or gambling. For he who fights his biology, or psychology, can never win — nature is not to be conquered; it must be embraced.
True mastery is learning how to be at peace with your own internal chemistry, keeping the conscious ego silent while letting the demons ride securely in the backseat with their seatbelts on; sometimes even in the trunk, but in the car nevertheless. Life begins all over again knowing that you can pretty much survive any internal terrain since you have learned how to dance natively with your own hell. At the very end, we must understand that we all remain different, and whatever floats your boat is valid. For me, the realisation lands like a quiet incantation:
I falter, balter, and dervish over the edge of The Wall of Paradise
With a grateful heart and with open eyes — all three of them realise
With a grateful heart and with open eyes — all three of them realise
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I know I made it through the darkest, most treacherous terrain of my life, and so does my body. Yet unlike the institutional model that relies on perpetual defensive hyper-vigilance, I refuse to live a diminished, fearful existence — fearing my own inner light. True recovery cannot be measured merely by the passive absence of a substance; it must be defined by the active reclamation of one's fire, autonomy, and edge.
Years ago, I came to the realisation that to feel fully, madly, unapologetically alive, I have to be chasing something — rather obsessively, one might add. Some call that relentless drive a passion, while some may call it an addiction, depending on what is being chased. Approaching fifty years old, however, I look at my fleeting life and realise that the fire is still burning. The spark never went out; it just evolved, only to die with me when my time in the physical world comes to an end. The impermanence of life compels me to want to live it on my own terms بالطول و بالعرض, diagonally too.
Some experiment with a vast variety of “substances” just to find that baseline spark. For me, chasing sunrises and horizons became one trusted alternative. The best part? Natural highs don’t have lows. The chemicals in the brain don’t go through a violent, exhausting crash afterwards. They linger, subtly rewriting your perspective.
The truth is, half the mental health crises we carry around in modern society stem from a brutal, systematic disconnection between human beings and the wild. We forgot the basic biological fact that we are nature. When you disconnect from the environment, you inevitably disconnect from yourself.
Years ago, I came to the realisation that to feel fully, madly, unapologetically alive, I have to be chasing something — rather obsessively, one might add. Some call that relentless drive a passion, while some may call it an addiction, depending on what is being chased. Approaching fifty years old, however, I look at my fleeting life and realise that the fire is still burning. The spark never went out; it just evolved, only to die with me when my time in the physical world comes to an end. The impermanence of life compels me to want to live it on my own terms بالطول و بالعرض, diagonally too.
Some experiment with a vast variety of “substances” just to find that baseline spark. For me, chasing sunrises and horizons became one trusted alternative. The best part? Natural highs don’t have lows. The chemicals in the brain don’t go through a violent, exhausting crash afterwards. They linger, subtly rewriting your perspective.
The truth is, half the mental health crises we carry around in modern society stem from a brutal, systematic disconnection between human beings and the wild. We forgot the basic biological fact that we are nature. When you disconnect from the environment, you inevitably disconnect from yourself.
May you always value and cherish the simple little things in Life. For they make a significant difference, and hence are the most essential.
Inside, Outside, Offside: Keep following the sun until you become the sun.
What a ride that I would never exchange for ANYTHING.
─── ✵ ────── ✵ ────── ✵ ───
ACT X: The Solitary Gnosis and the Latest Sunrise
Inside, Outside, Offside: Keep following the sun until you become the sun.
What a ride that I would never exchange for ANYTHING.
─── ✵ ────── ✵ ────── ✵ ───
ACT X: The Solitary Gnosis and the Latest Sunrise
“As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.”
— Vincent Van Gogh
For the past four weeks of intense daily work, I have been carving this heavy piece of literature while sharing a summer house with my family on the North Coast of Egypt. Delving back into this sprawling, chaotic topography and recounting the warfare word by word in this memoir, my every nerve ending remembers the physical voltage of those days. It is emotionally draining to relive it all fifteen years later using nothing but words. Under the breezy Mediterranean summer sun, the tears flow naturally down my face; for tears are how the soul cleanses itself. And the final result is a monumental, alternate level of catharsis — a peaceful emotional release observed through my older, wiser eyes.
Recounting the minute details of the struggle and of surviving the trenches to my mother, the weight of the phantoms rushed back into the present. “I saw it,” I told her in tears, recalling that pristine, illuminated, illuminating reality of my own non-addicted light first glimpsed in that Amsterdam hotel room. She calmly held my face in her hands, looked into my eyes, and encouragingly whispered: “And you did it.”
That profound maternal validation perhaps serves as living closure to the warfare. No loving hands would have never held my face inside any sterile programs or clinical institutions. If they had listened to me or tried to help me, it is because they are paid to. Nothing like a validation from my own mother who said she respected my will and passion to dissect myself to the public, to stand naked before you — knowing fully well that you cannot be blackmailed by your past if you are the one holding the megaphone.
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| Dare to create your own rituals. Not for anyone else to follow, but for your own zen well-being |
As for Cairo, I had to teach myself not to blame the city for whatever I went through while there. With every short trip back over the past twelve years, I would actively remind myself of all the other great memories and wonderful relationships from ever since I was a child — because there is far more to this life than just the addiction. It is always easy to point fingers at your passionless jobs, your parents, your environment, or even your phantoms as the cause. But the reality is, we only become fundamentally free when we stop blaming anyone or anything for whatever happens in our lives — and actively own it all. When we transcend all bullshit, especially our own. Living in Dahab now, away from my family and few friends, is no longer an escape; it is a conscious choice toward my own well-being.
If it took fifteen long years for that emotional release to find its final resting place, then so be it.
To those currently trapped inside the dark, heavy trenches of the machine anywhere in the world, I offer no unrealistic promises or pre-packaged institutional templates — as we have established earlier with the “no bow tie” honesty. True recovery cannot be safely prescribed in a corporate clinical pamphlet, likely not on One Lucky Soul.
Truth is, support is indeed essential to the healing process, especially at the beginning stages. But constantly looking for an entity outside oneself to tell you how to navigate your own waves of life and regulate your own emotions impairs growth as much as it threatens freedom, independence, autonomy, and critical thinking. Because it implies to your every nerve ending that you are not enough to simply know yourself; that you need someone who supposedly knows more to lead you to salvation, enlightenment, or whatever it is you may be seeking. It’s an infantilising mindset.
On the other side of the coin, the compulsive, relentless need to save people that we see across the current healing industry — The Messiah Complex — often originates from an egoic and somewhat fallacious position of vanity and assumed authority and responsibility. The trick is, we cannot really heal, save, redeem, or awaken anyone. We can help only by loving them. Perhaps also by unknowingly inspiring them to find the love and the light within them; to become their own healer and saviour, independently of a doctor, healer, guru, spiritual figure. This is not established through any associations nor formal teaching, advice, instruction, doctrine, ritual or ceremony. But instead, by sharing our bliss, grace, peace, passion, sensibility, awareness, groundedness as well as our experiences — our energy. Self knowledge is a bottomless pit, and it remains a solitary and often pathless endeavour.
Truly, if one is still waiting for some leader, guru, middleman, partner, or even certain institutions, strategies, methods, rituals, books, rules to offer them spiritual significance and to make them feel whole and safe and protected, they have not yet discovered the Tao to their full potential. For those means, like the lighthouse beams, are mere tools which could only point to the entrance of the cave, but one must enter by themselves; so that they own their truth. As such, each realised man and woman ought to be a light unto themselves. The more illumination on the individual level, the more illumination on the human collective.
The only real ethos is to think for yourself — that is the ultimate act of rebellion; to remain fiercely, unapologetically true to your own internal make-up. Become your own relentless researcher. Question everything, including yourself. Take total custody of your own neurochemistry and recognise that you are the sole sovereign authority over your own flesh. Only you can tame your own monkeys.
And just like that, our multi-decades, multi-continental journey together draws to its natural end. For the lawless flâneur who just casual-strolled his way through a gruelling twenty-two thousand words of raw street Gnosis, the pavement is finally clear, the sun is shining directly over, above, through, and from the forehead. The horizon is wide open. Keep on keeping on.
I leave you with the below poem. One Love.
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| Bonding over the music, the fire, and the full moon amid the elements: The living manifestation of yet another community built from scratch — Dahab, 2026. |
— ☙ ❊ ❧ —— ☙ ❊ ❧ —— ☙ ❊ ❧ —
When The Sky Spoke Back
Flirting madly with the moon
Dancing naked in the sun
Sometimes a wild loon
Others son of a gun
Forever faltering and baltering to his own tune
Terrifyingly free yet unbearably all alone
That goon مجنون has no one to call his own
Kept seeking left and right before realising he was the one
Kept searching wrong and right then one day it was all done
You are The One, murmured a soothing voice
You are the one who has the choice
The one to ride the wave of life with all its ups and downs
Madcap laughters with sleepy children but also with sad clowns
Help dry his flowing tears to flash a smile and not a frown
Merry-go-round - Merry-go-round
Mary go round - Mary go round
The sound resound follow the hound
Through Le Rabbit Hole underground
Echoing in timeless caves
Humming in endless raves:
O’ Brother, you are The One
The one you’ve been waiting for
To liberate you — just point to the door
Step now into the darkness
Fear not, there is no harness
Magickal warrior of your own rhythm
Forget big words and their ism and schism
You are your fiercest enemy and your dearest ally
You are a sage and you are a lunatic
You are also The One who rises above both
Choosing which to side with the most — no lie
You are never alone, whispered the gentle voice
Feel IT all around you, silence the background noise
You are one with the Consciousness of Mankind
You are one with the tress and bees
You are one with the cats and dogs
The entire natural world with its sheer magnificent beauty
The earth, water, air, and fire
One with the Muses, Sirens, Nymphs, and Mermaids
You are the cosmic melody to which the faraway stars, planets, galaxies are swirling
and whirling — with no aid
Your hopes, dreams, fantasies, orgasms, and desires
Your fears, pains, doubts, sorrows, and addictions
Are all but mere manifestations of the Youniverse
Fleetingly and momentarily experiencing itself in the singular
Trust the process. Embrace it all. For Love is The Way
Or so they say
You carry the torch of your species and you always have a choice
Now own it, kiddo, giggled the Orphic voice.
Flirting madly with the moon
Dancing naked in the sun
Sometimes a wild loon
Others son of a gun
Forever faltering and baltering to his own tune
Terrifyingly free yet unbearably all alone
That goon مجنون has no one to call his own
Kept seeking left and right before realising he was the one
Kept searching wrong and right then one day it was all done
You are The One, murmured a soothing voice
You are the one who has the choice
The one to ride the wave of life with all its ups and downs
Madcap laughters with sleepy children but also with sad clowns
Help dry his flowing tears to flash a smile and not a frown
Merry-go-round - Merry-go-round
Mary go round - Mary go round
The sound resound follow the hound
Through Le Rabbit Hole underground
Echoing in timeless caves
Humming in endless raves:
O’ Brother, you are The One
The one you’ve been waiting for
To liberate you — just point to the door
Step now into the darkness
Fear not, there is no harness
Magickal warrior of your own rhythm
Forget big words and their ism and schism
You are your fiercest enemy and your dearest ally
You are a sage and you are a lunatic
You are also The One who rises above both
Choosing which to side with the most — no lie
You are never alone, whispered the gentle voice
Feel IT all around you, silence the background noise
You are one with the Consciousness of Mankind
You are one with the tress and bees
You are one with the cats and dogs
The entire natural world with its sheer magnificent beauty
The earth, water, air, and fire
One with the Muses, Sirens, Nymphs, and Mermaids
You are the cosmic melody to which the faraway stars, planets, galaxies are swirling
and whirling — with no aid
Your hopes, dreams, fantasies, orgasms, and desires
Your fears, pains, doubts, sorrows, and addictions
Are all but mere manifestations of the Youniverse
Fleetingly and momentarily experiencing itself in the singular
Trust the process. Embrace it all. For Love is The Way
Or so they say
You carry the torch of your species and you always have a choice
Now own it, kiddo, giggled the Orphic voice.
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| Salute to your Souls — all Suntimentally |
——————————————————————————————
ALSO VIEW:
✵ The Intertwining Series
The Intertwining of Genius and Insanity
The Intertwining of Music and Sexuality ― A Djembefola’s Tale
The Intertwining of Pain and Pleasure
✵ The Primal Psychonaut Field Research
The LSD Experiments of the 1950s and 60s [Videos & Documentaries]
Out-of-Body Experience and Ego Death on a “Heroic Dose” of Mushrooms
Surviving the Madness of Sakarana — Hyoscyamus muticus (aka Deadly Nightshade)
Amphetamine, Methamphetamine, and Crystal Methamphetamine — A Psychonaut’s Review
Geeking Out Over Ψ 400: Drugs and Human Behaviour
Placebo Effect & The LSD Prank
Surviving the Madness of Sakarana — Hyoscyamus muticus (aka Deadly Nightshade)
Amphetamine, Methamphetamine, and Crystal Methamphetamine — A Psychonaut’s Review
Geeking Out Over Ψ 400: Drugs and Human Behaviour
Placebo Effect & The LSD Prank
Animals Getting High: Weird Nature ― Peculiar Potions [Documentary]
✵ The Fire of Addiction & The Gritty Realities
Opiated Then Hatin’ It
Addiction Talk: My Correspondence With a 31-Year-Old Reader Before He Passed Away
Banged Up Abroad — My Few Days @ The Don Jail
Banged Up Abroad — My Few Days @ The Don Jail
Codependency: What Being Addicted to Someone Means
Are You Addicted To The News?
Paycheque Addiction and COVID-19
✵ The Spiritual Integration, Philosophy, & Solitude
The Millennium Eve Spent Alone at the Mosque
Who Are We?
My Journey Towards Self-Transcendence
Dance With Your Demons
Theory of Mind: Thinking About Thinking and the Benefits of Observing the Observer
A Dialectic With Myself: Practical Yin Yang Approach to Coincidentia Oppositorum
The Healing Powers of Storytelling: A Personal Experience (2026)
A Superpower on the Couch: Reflections from the Ten-Year North American Trip (2026)
Losing It 𝘉𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘧𝘭𝘺 At Full Lunacy: First Burst of Anger in Over 12 Years (2026)
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