Gentle benzos

I looked down at the prescription, and remembered the warnings I'd read about benzodiazepines. "So basically I'm a junkie now?" I said sarcastically.

"This isn't addictive," the doctor replied. "This is habit-forming. There's a difference."

"Which I'll find out if I ever try to quit these things?"

"Would you rather go back to the way you were?"

I had no answer for that one. As pills go, this one looks fairly innocuous: smallish, white, tasteless, a regular Al Franken of a drug, and one has gone down the chute, so to speak, almost every day for five years now. I suppose the habit has now been formed.

Actually, I know it has, since I missed one day and was rewarded for my lack of diligence with a nice case of night sweats.

Still: "Would you rather go back to the way you were?"

I'm not sure. On the one hand, I resent like hell having to rely on artificial sources of equilibrium. But limping about with a cane is presumably better than going nowhere at all.

So I take as low a dose of this stuff as I can, and hope that the placebo effect is even stronger than the actual drug.

(Prompted by Aldahlia.)

Posted at 6:30 AM to General Disinterest