Lawyers suck. Never tell anyone you are hooked.

Maybe Dante was right about Hell.

In “The Divine Comedy,” Dante’s Inferno describes nine different levels of hell. I guess it’s not good enough for the powers running the universe that there is merely a Hell. No, there has to be nine different levels to the place, and each one, according to Dante, inflicts increasingly greater punishment.

He goes on to inform us that, whether we wind up on the sundeck of this cruise ship of misery, or nine floors down in the engine room, depends on how wicked we are in the life we are all living right now.

Presumably nobody has ever been to Hell and back (although Oxy Hell might come close), so we’ll never really know if Dante’s description of the place is accurate. All I can say is, should his description be inaccurate, then he is one sick bastard. He describes maggots sucking the blood out of those condemned to the place, the putrid sewer water of the river Styx, and bizarre tortures that would turn the stomach of even the most avid bondage lover. If Dante is right about hell, then you sure as hell don’t want to go to hell.

Sometimes though, it seems like hell is right here.

A friend of mine is going through a nasty divorce. Yeah, she had her Oxy Hell a few years ago, just like millions of other Americans have had, and the millions more who will. She got professional help though and managed to live, recover, and claw her way out of Oxy Hell and back.

Her account of life in Oxy Hell, and the divorce that followed, is quite similar to Dante’s though.

In her account, the maggots are there just as they are in Dante’s hell, except that they show up as lawyers, and the stench that emanates from the river Styx is no more vomit inducing than the river of nasty words that spew forth from angry, vengeful spouses.

My friend and her spouse had dealt very responsibly with the OxyContin problem several years ago. She came clean to her partner, one of the most important steps anyone in a relationship can take when chemical dependency rules your life. She let him know all the sordid details, pleaded for forgiveness, but most of all she begged for help to escape from Oxy Hell. As a couple, they seemed to handle it quite well. She got professional help. She did whatever it took. She wasn’t perfect. She stumbled like everyone is likely to do, but she got back up, and with the support of her spouse she lived to see today.

Unfortunately, living in Oxy Hell necessarily entails the need to hide the unending refueling of its fire.

Dante never explains the nature of the energy source that keeps the hell fires burning, but for anyone who has been to Oxy Hell, that fire must be stoked hourly, daily, weekly, or forever, until the walls come crashing down. In a relationship, efforts that kept alight the red hot glow of Oxy Hell usually entail a breach of trust.

When the private walls of Oxy Hell are reduced to cinders, and its victim is left standing naked, exposed, singed and broken, there can be nothing less graceful, less humane nor more repugnant and grotesque than those who would exploit, humiliate and shame the bare soul who asks for nothing more than to be allowed to recover in peace.

My friend and her spouse survived Oxy Hell. The walls collapsed and she stepped away from the ashes, her lover reaching for her hand, providing her with cover from her nakedness, and allowing her to heal in private, far from the eyes of the beasts who would shame her for having fallen in to the pit to begin with.

But just escaping from Oxy Hell isn’t enough to be forever free from it, evidently. For my friend, long after escaping, long after reconstructing her life from the ashes, the hand of Oxy Hell reached back up to humiliate her. And, in that way, perhaps Dante was right: there are many different levels to hell.

For my friend, Oxy Hell didn’t end with her recovery, but she thought it had. A few years later the marriage began to crumble under other weight. To be sure, addiction puts a huge-ass chink in a relationship, but as a friend of mine once said, "Addiction is a symptom of some greater problem." How many people have fallen prey to Oxy because of some greater underlying pain that needs to be fixed.

I will not drag this point out too terribly far. My formerly hooked friend went through a divorce. Although she and her husband had dealt with the problem in a humane way, when the divorce came about, the Oxy habit resurfaced.

Lawyers, some of which are the lowest scum that could ever scavenge the depths of a toilet, look for every advantage they can. Her husband's lawyer decided that a trip through OxyHell would be an excellent advantage to his case. Upon discovering that my friend and her husband had rafted down the river Styx together, the lawyer presented such as an opportunity to degrade and diminish my friend.

Yep. You read it right. An email from the ex-husband's attorney wound up in the hands of the attorney representing my friend. It described in glorious detail how the demise of their marriage was due to the addiction my friend had acquired. The husband's lawyer used this as an attempt to exploit a part of divorce law (in most community states) that allows a punitive action against the addicted or formerly addicted spouse. Yes, our laws allow you to be punished because you somehow wasted the resources of 'community property' in the futherance of your addiction.

The result is that you will not only be portrayed as some sort of freakish drug addict, but that whatever rights you have to your half of your property can be diminished because Oxy gave you some sort of refuge from the hell you were living in.

Do not trust anyone with your addiction. Whoever your spouse is today, might become a legal opponent in the future. You can count on some sleazy lawyer to use it against you.

As if the hell of addiction isn't bad enough, there are actually human beings out there who will take money from someone else and tell the world how bad you are because you were a junkie.

Should any of us ever actually see Dante's hell, the only pleasure we'll find there is observing dead lawyers manning tillers on the boats paddling down the Styx.

See you in hell, as you approach the bar.

Peace,

Gus