Drug Abuse

I've just had the most relaxing of bank holiday weekends. However I'm black and blue because of it.

On Saturday, during some improv with ComedySportz in Manchester's Comedy Store, I jumped from the stage and misjudged the placement of my feet. In turn, my shin scraped along the edge of a step. "Oooh that smarts" I thought. Though it wasn't until I went to bed that night that I realised that my shin had actually swollen and that my leg was lumpy. A fine purple, black and blue specimen of a bruise followed and I was off to continue my weekend of relaxing, tidying the house and playing with the cat.

Until yesterday that was, when during a fit of child-like insanity I was running through the house and managed to ignore the fact that door frames are hard. More pain to me and you'd think that would be my lot for one weekend. However it was not to be when I was walking in through the back door and managed to twat my kneecap against the frame (again! The frame!) with enough force to make pictures fall off the wall. The pain was intense. I felt my body going into shock as the colour left my face and I was taken over by an overwhelmingly intense feeling of nausea.

In bed last night, trying to get to sleep, ignoring the pain, it made me think of when I separated my shoulder at the end of 2005. I had recently been dumped by my girlfriend of two years, was alienated from my friends and had a lonely Christmas to look forward to. Lonely that is, apart from the company of lots of very strong prescription painkillers.

Which is a rather nice segue into pro wrestling. Prescription drug abuse has been a problem in professional wrestling since the existence of prescription drugs. Wrestlers on the road taking bumps night after night, miles away from their families must be at very low points in the morale stakes. The security of my depression within the walls of a middle class household seems positively desirable compared to the situation countless wrestlers have, do and will, find themselves in.

This is possibly explaining how easy it is to become entrapped by "personal demons" (as the industry seems to put it), rather than excusing it or even justifying it. I'm put off taking over the counter painkillers even when I have a headache because of my past with painkillers in general. So why do countless wrestlers continue to abuse drugs of all descriptions despite the endless list of deaths from drugs in the industry? In particular, people like DH Smith, who will have seen his own father die young because of years of drug abuse.

Any thoughts as to why drug abuse is so abundant? Put your thoughts as a comment if you're lovely.