You can't win

by Jack Black

Then I tried skipping two days and got by with it, but on the third day I was tied in a knot with cramps and aches and nothing but hop would put me on my feet.

All this time Mrs. Alexander, my kindly landlady, was urging me to go out in the sunshine during the day. She said it would do me good to get more air, and she could see no reason why I wouldn’t do it.

So at last I went out one afternoon.

I went to a little park where it was quiet and lay on the grass. It was so good to touch and smell the grass again that I couldn’t get enough of it. It seemed to me that grass was the most beautiful thing in the world. I felt as though I could eat it.

I lay there in the sunshine and ran my hands through it and pulled a blade or two and chewed it. I had not been in the sunshine nor been able to touch anything green and growing for over six years. I wouldn’t have spoiled that lawn, put a cigarette stub or an orange peel on it for anything in the world.

After that I went out three or four afternoons a week and lay on that grass in the park. I could feel that I was getting stronger, I could eat with good appetite, and every night I decreased the opium according to my schedule. I finally got the dose down to an eighth of a grain.

Even that amount, even the smallest particle that I could get on the end of a toothpick, would make the difference between sleeping all night or not.

I don’t believe in those radical cures. It stands to reason you can’t cure in three days a habit that it took you five or ten years to build up. I think any man can cure himself. He must first be cured mentally, he must want to be cured. If he doesn’t want to be cured, all the treatments in the world aren’t going to do it. You can lock men in prisons and deprive them of hop, and they will come right back and get it again because they don’t want to be cured. But the man who wants to quit can.

It took me six months to get the dose down to nothing. Even then for months more the thing might jump out at me at any minute, like a wild beast and tear me to pieces. I would go half crazy for the time, I would be mad to get hold of some hop. But that would last only a few hours, and every time I got through it safe I knew it would be easier next time.

Every minute I was out of the house in the daytime I kept watching for people who knew me. A good many men had been through Ingleside jail in the six years I was there and Vancouver was full of them. None of them ever saw me, because I saw them first. I tried to see every man in the block ahead of me the minute I stepped on the curb.