Smack
Jack Marx
July 17, 2006 08:48 AM
The drug debate on this blog became so heated last week that it actually ran off the rails - over 400 posts between readers of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (and that's just the ones I let through) taking up so much time that I failed to deliver the last promised post. I suppose that's the expected fallout of dealing with drugs; things tend to run late, and promises become worth no more than the paper they're printed on (which, in this case, is none at all). Here, for what it's worth, is the last chapter: heroin, a drug whose publicist either needs to be sacked or given a hefty raise, for while there is no drug - legal or illegal - that has taken quite the belting in popular mythology as heroin, it's fair to say there are few that have been quite so romanticised, either.
Heroin
"The smell is the first thing I recall," says Cerise, who spent the better part of a decade chasing heroin's well-publicised bliss, and the better part of the last escaping from what he found. "This is connected to washing, or not washing. Junkies don't like water. They don't like water when they are stoned and they don't like it when they are hanging out. Washing in any way just straightens you up. If you are hanging out, water further intensifies the feeling of sickness. Perhaps it's the contrast between clean and dirty that is the issue - it highlights how sad the whole thing is. Besides, the water can hurt - it feels different to the cocoon of soot and sloth that represents not hanging out. The exception to this water thing is a warm bath and a handful of codeine pills. Although not for everyone, this can be quite soothing for some individuals.
"Apart from the smell of BO, rotting teeth and dirty feet, there's the sound of people using smack. It's usually either whining, or slurring. Neither is very attractive. If they need a shot, usually they are raving about some unworkable scheme to raise money to get dope or perhaps con a dealer - whatever it is, it's a repetitive and base conversation often involving crime, or at least a series of improbable lies. If it's not a 'score dope' rave, then it's the peculiar and unconnected gibberish stoned people are famous for - long silences punctuate unintelligibility, the result of nodding off. If asked to repeat or clarify, there is no response. Junkies don't make good conversationalists."
The manifold dangers and inconveniences of heroin are so well known that it would hardly break new ground to 'reveal' any of them here. But the question that remains so often unanswered is: Why take it up in the first place? With the negative publicity for heroin so overwhelming, what sane person would knowingly stumble into its grasp?
"For me," says Cerise, "it was like admission to the executive washroom. I'd always had this desire to go right to the edge in experiencing everything there was, and heroin had this grand history with all the best artists and writers and musicians, from Lewis Caroll to Nick Cave. I figured if I could just stay away from the scum, the guys in track suits with guns hanging from their hips, I'd be able to take my place in that history."
Andrew, who "only recently" went through the recovery network, has a similar theory.
"Apart from the allure of 'dicing with death', with is attractive to a lot of young people and always got me in, I always felt that the whole process of scoring was a really cinematic experience. There's no denying that it feels like you're missing it with the 'big boys' now, like you're in this dive with these heavy crims and you're handling it. The only time you've ever seen this stuff before is in the movies and now here you are. All your life you're watching these shitty little scenes glamorised in the movies for being so down and dirty, and now you're in the scene, only this time it's real. Only it's not, because the only reason it was glamorised in your own mind was because you've seen it in the movies. It's a bit of an Escher drawing.
"I know it's a bit of a long stretch to say those movies, like Trainspotting, the Guy Ritchie films and Tarantino and what have you, are responsible - I'm fully aware that I've been my own idiot. But anyone who says those depictions of drugs don't have an impact on the people who see them has got to be kidding."
And there's definitely something in that. I remember seeing Gus van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy with a friend who, at that time, had only dabbled occasionally with smack. Despite the film's arguably 'preachy' conclusion, his first comment outside the cinema was that the film had inspired him to "hook up and get some".
Which is not to say such film's should be censored - with the possible exception of Darren Aronofsky's relentlessly tormenting Requiem for a Dream (2000), the modern drug film simply tells it like it is, from both sides of the argument. But even Trainspotting, an anti-drug film for sure, featured an opening monologue so convincing (set against Iggy Pop's rollicking Lust For Life) that nothing Danny Boyle could show us - the overdoses, the withdrawals, the dead baby or the on-cue grin from a recovered Ewan McGregor - could change our minds about what we'd already been told: drugs are a rebellious barrel of laughs.
But taking heroin is not always such a considered decision.
My own experience with smack amounts to perhaps half-a-dozen episodes, none of them particularly good. For me, as with most people one way or another, the most instructive and permanent in the residue it left upon me was the last.
I was living in Sydney's Kings Cross in the mid-90s when, drunk and out of sorts, I approached a prostitute in search of cocaine. On the proviso that I purchase her a cap of heroin, she took me to the nearby apartment of a dealer she knew, a tiny bedsit furnished with a mattress in one corner and a pile of dirty clothes in the other. This was clearly no place for the health conscious, particularly seeing as the dealer himself, a grizzled 30-something who had obviously been a junkie for half of his life, made it clear he was not happy to see a stranger in his home. When he declared he had nothing on him but heroin, it really was my cue to leave. But, in such a state as I was, you tend to propel yourself forward, to score any victory at all rather than simply accept defeat and go home. I recall very clearly promising myself I would never do this again.
Despite impressing on my company my need for very little of the stuff (I was never capable of injecting myself, for some reason), I overdosed, awaking in the hallway outside the apartment with ambulance officers shining lights in my eyes. They said somebody had called them - presumably the same person who had sold me the gear. I was lucky, they said - I'd been blue when they arrived, and a few more minutes would have seen me to the other side.
The tawdry little miracle that had just occurred wasn't lost on me. Would it not have made more sense for my two 'friends' to have dumped me outside in then laneway, rather than to bother drawing attention to themselves by alerting the authorities? My survival seemed so unlikely that, to this day, a tiny, superstitious part of me wonders if I didn't pass away that night after all, my reality today just some parallel existence that extends me another chance at everything that was lost to the dead guy on the floor.
The weird post-script to this tale is that, a few weeks later, I saw the prostitute working the street and approached her to express my thanks. She said it was, in fact, the dealer who had called the ambulance and that she'd pass on my thanks him if she could, only that be had overdosed himself just a few nights before and was no longer with us. Not long after that, the prostitute herself disappeared, my inquiries on the street as to her health or whereabouts revealing nothing at all. All things considered, it is highly unlikely that she's out there somewhere, having turned over a new leaf.
And so, when I view the scene that night through that cinematic eye - three people in a room, two seasoned drugs users standing over the prone, blue-lipped newbie on the floor - it seems entirely absurd that I'm the only one still here. Particularly knowing what I now know.
Excluding my own family and people with whom I was intimate, I have shared homes with sixteen people, not all of them from my own class or culture (in one home I boarded with a family of four). Two of the people I've lived with - more than 10% - are dead from heroin, and it's significant that neither of them were 'junkies'. Like me, they were simply up for whatever they could get, and heroin found them.
In fact, I think I've been familiar with more people who have died from heroin than from any other misadventure. This thought alarmed me at first, but it is in keeping with what I know of the world of rock and roll, where more people seem to have died from drugs than car accidents.
This entire blog exercise began as a somewhat flippant look at the downsides of drugs, death and misery exempt. But after a week of dealing with responses, both online and off, I feel as if I've come out the other side of an intensive Narcotics Anonymous meeting, to the point where I'm not even sure if my feelings about drugs - their place in society, how they're dealt with by the law and the rights and wrongs of the 'war' upon them - are the same today as they were this time last week.
Those who've pulled me up for excessive use of metaphor are going to hate this, but the whole thing seems to me analogous of the entire drug experience - what starts out as a big, noisy joke most commonly ends up in a mess of confused and tearful contemplation.
As one ex-user so eloquently put it:
"I always feel like some some kind of RSL dude, returned from the war. Like, it was the adventure of our lives, but I'm f**ked if I'm going to let my kids go."
