I am/was a junkie and I never shot up.
But I did almost every fucked up thing imaginable to get drugs (robbed family, robbed strangers, lied, cheated and stole). Surprisingly I never offered sex for drugs but I'm sure if there was someone out there who woulda gave me free opanas to fuck me in the ass I woulda did that too.
Yeah it's definitely possible for one to become a junkie and not shoot up, but I do believe that the stereotypical junkie is one who shoots up...
I knew a kid who came into some money, quite a lot of money, after collecting on the settlement he was awarded for some car accident when he was a kid.
He began to deal dope, as he could now afford to buy stacks at a time from his guy and then sell the bags at an inflated price, being that we all live in the 'burbs and have no dealers of our own.
His girlfriend was okay with their drug-dealing and their using (she was already into pills) but had one stipulation: no shooting up.
They sniffed their dope, but make no mistake, man, they were junkies. If they had played it straight and
not been such junkies, then they would never have run out of money; but that's what happened, they ran out of money and they very quickly began beating all their customers.
I'll never know for sure without asking him, and I don't talk to him anymore (or her), but I have to believe that they were using something like maybe four or five grams a day between the two of them. I remember meeting him in a parking lot one time, and I guess it's where he used to hang out for an hour or two each day, well it looked like a damn ticker-tape parade... but it wasn't ticker-tape, it was all his empty bags all over the parking lot.
I remember him getting out of the car and trying to pick them all up... it was nuts lol