Jason00S2000
03-07-2025, 01:48 PM
How I quit hard drugs, 8+ years clean from cocaine:
Back in 2014, culture had been changing ridiculously fast.
With the proliferation of the smartphone, how people lived was being rapidly switched from living in the moment in the real world, to everyone living through their digital selves. Instead of people watching a concert, or vibing at a party, people had their phones out to record, completely filtering their lives through the device first. How many people ever go back and watch a fireworks show from 10 years ago on their phone?
Us old farts, we grew up using 286 computers on green screen monitors, our games run on floppy disks and we were jealous as fuck of the first kid with a 486 and a hard drive to install the Wing Commander voice-acted addon to. The first time we played DOOM on a 386 with a colour monitor, it was fucking mind-blowing. The tech explosion was altering our lives on a nearly daily basis growing up, and all of the old social mores we learned as kids from the boomers were abandoned for this human-engineered apple picked off the shiniest, newest trees. I’d often find myself torn between awe and a deep, aching nostalgia for those raw, unedited moments of connection. An analog soul feeling lost in a new, digital world.
Being a gregarious, douchey socialite who spent his time running with tons of different groups and a wide variety of people, I had seen how incredibly different social situations had become with the release of apps like Tinder. Online dating on your PC was a complete turn of events for sure, but being able to swipe on profiles while sitting on the toilet, or at a bar, or... anywhere? I knew this was a pivotal moment in culture and society. It was like watching human connection reduced to a series of desperate swipes- gritty, fleeting, and brutally modern. We went from free-range humans to being in our own little algorithmic cages. Our entire view of the world, and people around us, seen through a lens not crafted by our senses, but by a system that reduces us to binary code and filtered through what the masters of this new tech wanted us to see, feel, believe.
I accurately predicted the complete twisting of dating with my book in 2013, my own attempt at making sense of why it had become so easy to get laid by a new woman, yet so difficult to actually find one to be with. The way we had been conditioned to behave influencing us in ways that it took grey hair, and maybe a divorce for some of you to figure out. Dating since the 00's, unknowingly built the foundations for the "situationship," which wasn't even a word back then—had completely taken hold of many of our lives. Remember, incels were basically not even a thing back then, and if you recall growing up in the 90's and 00's, even ugly, short dudes could get girlfriends. Before the Taylor Swiftification of the female mind, and the Tate-takeover of the redpill, the soul of romance hadn't yet been bartered away for casual encounters connected through a digital dance.
It was around this time that women I met within a 10-year age range of myself were attracted to me like crazy, probably because of my ridiculous abandonment of the social rules. Our society in the 00's and early 10's was still in such a flux that nobody could really manifest or envision what they wanted out of life, myself included, because there was an abundance of everything. So at this point, I ended up dating a Jewish woman nearly 15 years older than me, because she had such a unique take on life. She was crazy as fuck and I loved it, but being 35-36, I started to get the feeling that something was missing in life. Inside my soul, a nagging feeling, like a rock in your shoe on a long hike. The longer I would wait to address it, the worse my limp would become.
If you remember the early 2010's, the Vancouver Olympics, it was the best time of Vancouver's history... next to the time when the first Fast and Furious movie was released. My glasses are the most rose-coloured for when life was a simple time of 5.0s VS fart-tipped Civics. Food was practically free, rent was cheap, people were sooooooo non-politicized, and NOTHING WAS WOKE! Holy shit, you could socialize with every crowd and crew, and if you went to a party of 50 people, you could have 50 different personalities to mingle with. Life was truly a serendipitous adventure every step of the way. But by a 1/3rd of the way through the 2010's, there was a feeling in the air, a great disturbance brewing. It may have been my age, it could have been the quick death of hipsterism, or maybe the rapid rise of the woke, but I knew the Jason00S2000 of the 00's and 10's was being squeezed from all directions, steadily crushing my soul in a world obsessed with control.
My lizard brain took over, and I was no longer interested in the older girlfriend and simply, easy comfort. I dumped her dusty ass- and during that end-of-summer vibe, I searched like a terminator for the most beautiful, younger woman I could find. Eventually, I met a gorgeous late-20something woman from a rich, upper-class family. It was mating season, and barely a few weeks after I met her, she made a phone call to me on a Monday afternoon.
"Jason, I'm pregnant."
Let me tell you, if you don't have kids, those words hit like a fucking mack truck doing 500 MPH in a BeamNG drive video, shattering the carefree aura I’d cultivated after the nightmare storm of my painful youth.
It was that day, after that phone call with my sweaty hands, that I made the decision to permanently quit coke. I had been a bit of an addict after being around circles like the BC TV and Film industry where EVERYONE did coke, or the mortgage brokers, or IT professionals, or, God save us all, the North Van firefighters who were sniffing more Bolivian marching powder than Bieber trying to forget being diddled by Diddy. Previously, I had dated an actress who basically just came to my place to do coke and bang all the time, which was certainly fun, but I knew I was in a place where the good times were coming to an end. The culture was shifting so rapidly, and, I felt it intangibly in my soul, that the coming years were not going to be changing for the better. That phone call was a brutal wake-up, a titan-sized hand reaching through my cellular device delivering a cosmic-scale bitchslap that forced me to reckon with the reality I’d been dodging for years.
That very next Saturday, on my Facebook, I got word that my dealer, East Van Mike, or Dagger Mike, as he was known at Funky Winker Beans, overdosed off his own supply and died. Nobody at the time knew this new drug called fentanyl that seemed to be floating around and getting mixed into other drugs. You can imagine the look on my face when I realized I would've normally picked up drugs on a Friday night and partied with my friends all weekend, as was normal for many people in the 00's and early 2010's; the shock and survivor's guilt gutted me like a stock D-series engine running 40 PSI on 87 octane.
Over the next coke-free 9 months until my child was born, I watched as nearly 10 of my friends and acquaintances dropped dead from poisoned drugs. Fentanyl was in EVERYTHING at this point, the overdose death chart rocketed up like a hockey stick, and the hipster community dropped faster than Elias Pettersson's goal output. Each loss was a raw, open wound, watching so many unique souls get swallowed up by Satan’s snort. PJSalt
With my newborn’s innocent eyes on me, I understood that the age of unbridled chaos was done, and that true growth in my own life meant honoring those losses by choosing a path of hard-won redemption.
But that's another story...
Back in 2014, culture had been changing ridiculously fast.
With the proliferation of the smartphone, how people lived was being rapidly switched from living in the moment in the real world, to everyone living through their digital selves. Instead of people watching a concert, or vibing at a party, people had their phones out to record, completely filtering their lives through the device first. How many people ever go back and watch a fireworks show from 10 years ago on their phone?
Us old farts, we grew up using 286 computers on green screen monitors, our games run on floppy disks and we were jealous as fuck of the first kid with a 486 and a hard drive to install the Wing Commander voice-acted addon to. The first time we played DOOM on a 386 with a colour monitor, it was fucking mind-blowing. The tech explosion was altering our lives on a nearly daily basis growing up, and all of the old social mores we learned as kids from the boomers were abandoned for this human-engineered apple picked off the shiniest, newest trees. I’d often find myself torn between awe and a deep, aching nostalgia for those raw, unedited moments of connection. An analog soul feeling lost in a new, digital world.
Being a gregarious, douchey socialite who spent his time running with tons of different groups and a wide variety of people, I had seen how incredibly different social situations had become with the release of apps like Tinder. Online dating on your PC was a complete turn of events for sure, but being able to swipe on profiles while sitting on the toilet, or at a bar, or... anywhere? I knew this was a pivotal moment in culture and society. It was like watching human connection reduced to a series of desperate swipes- gritty, fleeting, and brutally modern. We went from free-range humans to being in our own little algorithmic cages. Our entire view of the world, and people around us, seen through a lens not crafted by our senses, but by a system that reduces us to binary code and filtered through what the masters of this new tech wanted us to see, feel, believe.
I accurately predicted the complete twisting of dating with my book in 2013, my own attempt at making sense of why it had become so easy to get laid by a new woman, yet so difficult to actually find one to be with. The way we had been conditioned to behave influencing us in ways that it took grey hair, and maybe a divorce for some of you to figure out. Dating since the 00's, unknowingly built the foundations for the "situationship," which wasn't even a word back then—had completely taken hold of many of our lives. Remember, incels were basically not even a thing back then, and if you recall growing up in the 90's and 00's, even ugly, short dudes could get girlfriends. Before the Taylor Swiftification of the female mind, and the Tate-takeover of the redpill, the soul of romance hadn't yet been bartered away for casual encounters connected through a digital dance.
It was around this time that women I met within a 10-year age range of myself were attracted to me like crazy, probably because of my ridiculous abandonment of the social rules. Our society in the 00's and early 10's was still in such a flux that nobody could really manifest or envision what they wanted out of life, myself included, because there was an abundance of everything. So at this point, I ended up dating a Jewish woman nearly 15 years older than me, because she had such a unique take on life. She was crazy as fuck and I loved it, but being 35-36, I started to get the feeling that something was missing in life. Inside my soul, a nagging feeling, like a rock in your shoe on a long hike. The longer I would wait to address it, the worse my limp would become.
If you remember the early 2010's, the Vancouver Olympics, it was the best time of Vancouver's history... next to the time when the first Fast and Furious movie was released. My glasses are the most rose-coloured for when life was a simple time of 5.0s VS fart-tipped Civics. Food was practically free, rent was cheap, people were sooooooo non-politicized, and NOTHING WAS WOKE! Holy shit, you could socialize with every crowd and crew, and if you went to a party of 50 people, you could have 50 different personalities to mingle with. Life was truly a serendipitous adventure every step of the way. But by a 1/3rd of the way through the 2010's, there was a feeling in the air, a great disturbance brewing. It may have been my age, it could have been the quick death of hipsterism, or maybe the rapid rise of the woke, but I knew the Jason00S2000 of the 00's and 10's was being squeezed from all directions, steadily crushing my soul in a world obsessed with control.
My lizard brain took over, and I was no longer interested in the older girlfriend and simply, easy comfort. I dumped her dusty ass- and during that end-of-summer vibe, I searched like a terminator for the most beautiful, younger woman I could find. Eventually, I met a gorgeous late-20something woman from a rich, upper-class family. It was mating season, and barely a few weeks after I met her, she made a phone call to me on a Monday afternoon.
"Jason, I'm pregnant."
Let me tell you, if you don't have kids, those words hit like a fucking mack truck doing 500 MPH in a BeamNG drive video, shattering the carefree aura I’d cultivated after the nightmare storm of my painful youth.
It was that day, after that phone call with my sweaty hands, that I made the decision to permanently quit coke. I had been a bit of an addict after being around circles like the BC TV and Film industry where EVERYONE did coke, or the mortgage brokers, or IT professionals, or, God save us all, the North Van firefighters who were sniffing more Bolivian marching powder than Bieber trying to forget being diddled by Diddy. Previously, I had dated an actress who basically just came to my place to do coke and bang all the time, which was certainly fun, but I knew I was in a place where the good times were coming to an end. The culture was shifting so rapidly, and, I felt it intangibly in my soul, that the coming years were not going to be changing for the better. That phone call was a brutal wake-up, a titan-sized hand reaching through my cellular device delivering a cosmic-scale bitchslap that forced me to reckon with the reality I’d been dodging for years.
That very next Saturday, on my Facebook, I got word that my dealer, East Van Mike, or Dagger Mike, as he was known at Funky Winker Beans, overdosed off his own supply and died. Nobody at the time knew this new drug called fentanyl that seemed to be floating around and getting mixed into other drugs. You can imagine the look on my face when I realized I would've normally picked up drugs on a Friday night and partied with my friends all weekend, as was normal for many people in the 00's and early 2010's; the shock and survivor's guilt gutted me like a stock D-series engine running 40 PSI on 87 octane.
Over the next coke-free 9 months until my child was born, I watched as nearly 10 of my friends and acquaintances dropped dead from poisoned drugs. Fentanyl was in EVERYTHING at this point, the overdose death chart rocketed up like a hockey stick, and the hipster community dropped faster than Elias Pettersson's goal output. Each loss was a raw, open wound, watching so many unique souls get swallowed up by Satan’s snort. PJSalt
With my newborn’s innocent eyes on me, I understood that the age of unbridled chaos was done, and that true growth in my own life meant honoring those losses by choosing a path of hard-won redemption.
But that's another story...