NEWS: The Age - 22/06/09 'Heroin: a curse or a source of meaning?'

Heroin: a curse or a source of meaning?
Chris Middendorp
June 22, 2009

FOR a substance that started out as a family-friendly cough suppressant and non-addictive morphine substitute, heroin has certainly gained a fearsome reputation since the late 1890s, when Germany's Bayer Company first marketed it.

There are still some elderly retired midwives around who fondly recall heroin (available legally here until the mid-1950s) as a near-perfect sedative for labour pains.

From pain-free birth to painful death, heroin has become one of our most reviled and misunderstood substances.

I continue to meet people who assure me that heroin isn't just a drug, it's an open invitation to crime and degeneracy, a squirt of anarchy concentrate in a hypodermic.

Despite the fact that it is other substances such as alcohol and speed that tend to fuel violent behaviour, it is heroin that has acquired the sinister status.

And this is why many people become edgy when it is suggested (as it is every year or two) that heroin is making a comeback.

In the late 1990s, as many as 80 per cent of the people we met sleeping rough on the streets were heroin-dependent. Their homelessness was often a byproduct of their addiction and these were the days when the drug flowed so freely that the heroin overdose toll was printed alongside the road toll in the local tabloid.

Collingwood's Smith Street was dubbed Smack Street, many young women took to street sex work to support their dependency, and middle-class families made a concerted effort to avoid the corner of Russell and Bourke streets, then Melbourne's epicentre of drug dealing.

Are those days returning? Did we learn anything from the last heroin crisis?

This decade, heroin has had more putative comebacks than John Farnham, but open street dealing has never quite returned with the same vigour. Until now.

Many community workers are reporting a notable increase in heroin use among clients of housing and health services.

Evidently, the poppy fields of Burma and Afghanistan are fertile with product and the road of supply is open again. Some commentators believe that in recent weeks the purity of the drug has risen from 30 per cent to 70 per cent.

Heroin is stupidly expensive: five kilograms of it has a street value of $9 million (although according to one drug educator I know, the substance would cost about as much to manufacture commercially as sugar).

For the user, a single hit or "point" usually costs about $50. Because the purity varies, they never know what they've got until it's inside them. Sometimes they overdose, sometimes they die. A regular user may need to raise somewhere between $800 to $2000 a week to support their addiction. Hence the rise in prostitution, petty crime and dealing during heroin's ascendancy.

It's this expense that creates many of the drug's social problems. Scoring and paying for heroin becomes the user's entire focus. Finding money for food, clothing or housing may no longer be a priority. Homelessness and malnutrition are frequent side-effects for long-term users.

But all this has been said before. What isn't understood often enough is why some people find heroin so seductive. Heroin may have been conceived as a painkiller, but it is also extremely effective in killing emotional pain. Users I know have described the drug, not as a curse, but as a source of meaning. "Without it, I would have topped myself years ago," one 26-year-old woman told me.

Society is fragmented and it's painful to acknowledge that many people experience sexual, physical and emotional abuse. Overcoming such trauma may be a lifetime's journey. Some never manage it. I have no doubt that the stoned serenity heroin promises is seen as a solution, a tangible pathway out of despair. When he was director of Jesuit Social Services, Peter Norden memorably observed that young people use drugs in response to pain, suffering and isolation — not because they are aiming to be villainous.

In other words, heroin addiction may be best understood as the consequence of profound social dislocation, rather than an individual's weakness. Children do not ask to be traumatised and they do what they can to survive the despair. This is why we've got to reach out to users and offer more constructive therapies to address their psychological injuries.

Ten years ago, widespread heroin use created pervasive outrage in Melbourne and many people were contented with the short-sighted premise that all problems begin and end with the drug user. Heroin users I knew were bashed, spat on and called names such as "junkie" and "dero". Ironically, the perpetrators were often young intoxicated males.

It might help if we abolished words like "drug addict" and "junkie" from the lexicon of social comment. Pejoratives do nothing but efface the humanity from a situation where compassion, not condemnation, would better suit the debate.

If heroin is back to stay, we need to be prepared to look past the substance itself and recognise that this addiction is really a symbol for more formidable problems. Heroin use isn't just the product of crime, it's also the product of family breakdown, neglect and intense feelings of hopelessness.

Chris Middendorp is a program co-ordinator at Sacred Heart Mission.

The Age