EADD Heroin discussion v.21 -- Big shout out to kkattastic :)

[5StarSquatHotel]

I must be one of the lucky ones, because crack has almost no effect on me.

Jess loves crack, but I can take it or leave it; and frankly, I'd rather leave it and have more gear instead.

You ever smoke the stuff from a decade plus ago? That was Crack, bell ringer from every pipe, sweating hot and after you don't want another one.......you NEED another one although there is a good 15 mins 1st where you would not be able to smoke another pipe for money. The best place to get the decent stuff that is ammonia wash and decent quality is off the Yardies, not the random black kids but the Yardy adults, its a different ball game all together. I am not in touch with the scene directly myself anymore but this is what everyone say who still uses and we live a short journey away from the Brizzle frontline.

 

[da man]

yeah yardies always seem to have decent,round my way if u know the right ones, tho tryna take directions on the phone from em is a nightmare, tryna decipher there accent is a skill. tho ive had some bell ringers of asians aswell. and anyone whos had proper crack will know exactl why u call it a bell ringer. does anyone know what causes that effect id be interested to know. and does anyone get distorted sounds aswell after the bellringer.

 

[DS_]

I always get good stuff off the Somali geezers here.

 

[CbRoXiDe]

The ringing in your ears is quite literally increased pressure in your bloodflow, it's basically the sound of your head nearly exploding :D.

 

[Ismene]

Be careful as that's how most of us addicts started. First it is just maybe once a month then it becomes each weekend then a mid week treat and before you know it you will be doing it every day.

It depends on the person max. This idea that there are drugs so addictive people are helpless before them is just anti-drug bullshit. They first called alcohol the drug so addictive no human being can withstand it's temptation. Then heroin. Then crack. Then meth. Then the next drug.

To get yourself addicted to heroin takes hard, gruelling work every day for months on end. There are very few people willing to put in such incredible effort, money and time. I'm working 5 days so I havn't even got time to take it every day even if I wanted to. I don't enjoy feeling foggy headed either so once a week is the most I'd ever use it. The potential of addiction for me is about the same as my potential to become an alcoholic - absolutely none.

 

[smackydowners]

^^^how long have you been using heroin recreationally?

seriously, this post is irresponsible . heroin deserves its fearsome reputation fully. if youve been using it responsibly for an extended period, you are in the very small minority.

 

[Sprout]

^^^how long have you been using heroin recreationally?

seriously, this post is irresponsible . heroin deserves its fearsome reputation fully. if youve been using it responsibly for an extended period, you are in the very small minority.

Agreed. Though it is true it takes a concerted effort to become a Junkie.
I've had troubles with alcohol, Crack, Meth, Heroin and 'the next drug', through my own fault. That, however, doesn't remove the extraneous pull these substances had in the first place.
Whilst very new to 'sobriety', I would pose the idea that the first warning sign of addiction is denial of the insipid nature of the substance in question.
Stay safe.

 

[Ismene]

Link to an article about the idea that you can't take heroin recreationally. This isn't the whole article but you get the gist:

In 1992 The New York Times carried a front-page story about a successful businessman who happened to be a regular heroin user. It began: "He is an executive in a company in New York, lives in a condo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, drives an expensive car, plays tennis in the Hamptons and vacations with his wife in Europe and the Caribbean. But unknown to office colleagues, friends, and most of his family, the man is also a longtime heroin user. He says he finds heroin relaxing and pleasurable and has seen no reason to stop using it until the woman he recently married insisted that he do so. 'The drug is an enhancement of my life,' he said. 'I see it as similar to a guy coming home and having a drink of alcohol. Only alcohol has never done it for me.'"

The Times noted that "nearly everything about the 44-year-old executive...seems to fly in the face of widely held perceptions about heroin users." The reporter who wrote the story and his editors seemed uncomfortable with contradicting official anti-drug propaganda, which depicts heroin use as incompatible with a satisfying, productive life. The headline read, "Executive's Secret Struggle With Heroin's Powerful Grip," which sounds more like a cautionary tale than a success story. And the Times hastened to add that heroin users "are flirting with disaster." It

conceded that "heroin does not damage the organs as, for instance, heavy alcohol use does." But it cited the risk of arrest, overdose, AIDS, and hepatitis -- without noting that all of these risks are created or exacerbated by prohibition.

The general thrust of the piece was: Here is a privileged man who is tempting fate by messing around with a very dangerous drug. He may have escaped disaster so far, but unless he quits he will probably end up dead or in prison.

That is not the way the businessman saw his situation. He said he had decided to give up heroin only because his wife did not approve of the habit. "In my heart," he said, "I really don't feel there's anything wrong with using heroin. But there doesn't seem to be any way in the world I can persuade my wife to grant me this space in our relationship. I don't want to lose her, so I'm making this effort."

Judging from the "widely held perceptions about heroin users" mentioned by the Times, that effort was bound to fail. The conventional view of heroin, which powerfully shapes the popular understanding of addiction, is nicely summed up in the journalist Martin Booth's 1996 history of opium. "Addiction is the compulsive taking of drugs which have such a hold over the addict he or she cannot stop using them without suffering severe symptoms and even death," he writes. "Opiate dependence...is as fundamental to an addict's existence as food and water, a physio-chemical fact: an addict's body is chemically reliant upon its drug for opiates actually alter the body's chemistry so it cannot function properly without being periodically primed. A hunger for the drug forms when the quantity in the bloodstream falls below a certain level....Fail to feed the body and it deteriorates and may die from drug starvation." Booth also declares that "everyone...is a potential addict"; that "addiction can start with the very first dose"; and that "with continued use addiction is a certainty."

Booth's description is wrong or grossly misleading in every particular. To understand why is to recognize the fallacies underlying a reductionist, drug-centered view of addiction in which chemicals force themselves on people -- a view that skeptics such as the maverick psychiatrist Thomas Szasz and the psychologist Stanton Peele have long questioned. The idea that a drug can compel the person who consumes it to continue consuming it is one of the most important beliefs underlying the war on drugs, because this power makes possible all the other evils to which drug use supposedly leads.

When Martin Booth tells us that anyone can be addicted to heroin, that it may take just one dose, and that it will certainly happen to you if you're foolish enough to repeat the experiment, he is drawing on a long tradition of anti-drug propaganda. As the sociologist Harry G. Levine has shown, the original model for such warnings was not heroin or opium but alcohol. "The idea that drugs are inherently addicting," Levine wrote in 1978, "was first systematically worked out for alcohol and then extended to other substances. Long before opium was popularly accepted as addicting, alcohol was so regarded." The dry crusaders of the 19th and early 20th centuries taught that every tippler was a potential drunkard, that a glass of beer was the first step on the road to ruin, and that repeated use of distilled spirits made addiction virtually inevitable. Today, when a kitchen wrecked by a skinny model wielding a frying pan is supposed to symbolize the havoc caused by a snort of heroin, similar assumptions about opiates are even more widely held, and they likewise are based more on faith than facts.

Even if addiction is not a physical compulsion, perhaps some drug experiences are so alluring that people find it impossible to resist them. Certainly that is heroin's reputation, encapsulated in the title of a 1972 book: It's So Good, Don't Even Try It Once.

The fact that heroin use is so rare -- involving, according to the government's data, something like 0.2 percent of the U.S. population in 2001 -- suggests that its appeal is much more limited than we've been led to believe. If heroin really is "so good," why does it have such a tiny share of the illegal drug market? Marijuana is more than 45 times as popular. The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse indicates that about 3 million Americans have used heroin in their lifetimes; of them, 15 percent had used it in the last year, 4 percent in the last month. These numbers suggest that the vast majority of heroin users either never become addicted or, if they do, manage to give the drug up. A survey of high school seniors found that 1 percent had used heroin in the previous year, while 0.1 percent had used it on 20 or more days in the previous month. Assuming that daily use is a reasonable proxy for opiate addiction, one in 10 of the students who had taken heroin in the last year might have qualified as addicts. These are not the sort of numbers you'd expect for a drug that's irresistible.

Despite its reputation, then, heroin is neither irresistible nor inescapable. Only a very small share of the population ever uses it, and a large majority of those who do never become addicted. Even within the minority who develop a daily habit, most manage to stop using heroin, often without professional intervention. Yet heroin is still perceived as the paradigmatic voodoo drug, ineluctably turning its users into zombies who must obey its commands.

The idea that drugs cause addiction was rejected in the case of alcohol because it was so clearly at odds with everyday experience, which showed that the typical drinker was not an alcoholic. But what the psychologist Bruce Alexander calls "the myth of drug-induced addiction" is still widely accepted in the case of heroin -- and, by extension, the drugs compared to it (see sidebar) -- because moderate opiate users are hard to find. That does not mean they don't exist; indeed, judging from the government's survey results, they are a lot more common than addicts. It's just that people who use opiates in a controlled way are inconspicuous by definition, and keen to remain so.

https://www.heartland.org/policy-documents/surprising-truth-about-heroin-and-addiction

 

[smackydowners]

lol see you in the meth clinic then, ismene.

please prove me wrong tho, i wouldn't want to see you become hooked.

some drugs are much more addictive than others. i agree that its the person that makes the addict, not the drug, but it seems opiates have a special pull about them because theyre such a strong anxiolitic and euphoriant.

and i sort of disagree that it takes a concerted effort of months to become an addict. taking heroin when you have money in the bank isnt exactly hard work.

 

[Ismene]

I dunno smacky - I don't find the high anywhere near mushrooms or acid (taken in a split dose 30 mins apart). Psychedelic euphoria is in a different league for me.

It's hard work taking it every day when you've got any other obligations tho - what do you do if you have to walk the dogs? Get high and take them out? If you have to drive anywhere? Drive stoned out of your mind? If you have to meet someone? If you have to go to work and handle heavy machinery? I can't imagine how you get to the stage where you go "Er..no..I'll let the dog shit in the house because I'm getting high".

I'm sure I will be injecting in the vein under my cock before long

 

[maxalfie]

I've yet to meet someone in my nearly 15 years as a heroin addict that stayed a casual user.
I've tried lots of different drugs over the years without becoming addicted to any of them. Heroin has the reputation it has for a reason.
As for finding the time, I held down a full time job for 12 years whilst using heroin daily before being made redundant so finding the time isn't too hard once you are addicted.
I'm sure most of us addicts thought we would be the one person that wouldn't get addicted but if you keep using you will become an addict. Listen to people who have lived and are living as an addict rather than an article from a newspaper.
Is it worth the risk Ismene?

 

[maxalfie]

I dunno smacky - I don't find the high anywhere near mushrooms or acid (taken in a split dose 30 mins apart). Psychedelic euphoria is in a different league for me.

It's hard work taking it every day when you've got any other obligations tho - what do you do if you have to walk the dogs? Get high and take them out? If you have to drive anywhere? Drive stoned out of your mind? If you have to meet someone? If you have to go to work and handle heavy machinery? I can't imagine how you get to the stage where you go "Er..no..I'll let the dog shit in the house because I'm getting high".

I'm sure I will be injecting in the vein under my cock before long

Where do you get the impression that being 'high' on heroin means you can no longer do all your daily activities.
I worked full time, got married and had a mortgage and two dogs and I was using gear every day and it didn't stop me doing the things I had to do.
Not every heroin addict ends up as a down and out homeless thief.

 

[smackydowners]

i know what you mean, bob. like if youre in the state of mind to try heroin, despite its reputation, you must be in a pretty lousy situation anyway. i agree with you on some levels, but heroin addicts are individuals, who use it for different reasons. i get told at NA meetings that i really dont look or act like a typical smack head because i dress well and talk quite eloquently.

for me, prohibitionists telling people all drugs are bad and classing MDMA and LSD the same as heroin (class A) is one of the deadliest things. some people assume that because mdma etc is quite safe, then the government must be lying about everything, including smack and crack, and trying them and finding out the hard way.

some people, like ismene, make a good case and keep their use recreational for a while, but imo theyre kidding themselves. there are exceptions apparently, but ive never met any.

 

[Ismene]

Where do you get the impression that being 'high' on heroin means you can no longer do all your daily activities.
I worked full time, got married and had a mortgage and two dogs and I was using gear every day and it didn't stop me doing the things I had to do.

Maybe in the past that might've worked max but if you're caught driving a car on heroin these days you get your license taken away. That would put quite a crimp in my working. I suppose by the time you've reached the stage that you're taking heroin just to feel normal again then you can carry on as normal. Takes a while to get to that stage tho and you need to go through a few barriers first like driving while you're stoned, talking to your loved ones while stoned, operating heavy machinery if that's your job etc. That's an awful lot of barriers - I wouldn't dream of talking to my loved ones while I was stoned, I'd feel it was a complete insult and disrespecting them.

I think the article was saying that not everyone who uses heroin becomes an addict. Obviously once you're an addict it becomes a different situation - I'm sure there's lots of people who can handle secret heroin addiction just like there are lots of people who can handle being alcoholics.

Heroin is "known" to be the drug most associated with addiction.

Maybe Bob but reputations in anti-drug propaganda are easy to come by and hard to shake. Most still believe you jump off a building if you take acid because there was an urban myth about it once 50 years ago. I'm sure it's addictive in some people just like alcohol.

Or is it simply that the pull of heroin is too strong and compulsive and so it has gained it's rep somewhat deservedly.

Not for me no. I've a few experiences with H, quite a few with morphine and lots with poppy tea/codeine. Nice high but certainly nothing I could become obsessed by. It's not even a high entertaining enough for me to sit down and enjoy, I tend to use it as a replacement for speed when I need to get the housework done.

i know what you mean, bob. like if youre in the state of mind to try heroin, despite its reputation, you must be in a pretty lousy situation anyway.

For me it wasn't despair tho - if I needed a lift I'd go to mushrooms or acid. It was just something to help do the housework. But I get your gist smacky - perhaps some people find the high more attractive than I do. Don't you find the high the next day is shit tho? And you need to take more and more? That puts me off as well. The fact that you're chasing highs. Perhaps people who come from a drink/pot background are more likely to want to get stoned every day. For someone from a psychedelic background it's pretty much taken as a fundamental that you can't get stoned every day.

 

[p-helix]

Is there anyone here who uses heroin recreationally rather than being addicted to it?

It is possible with a lot of discipline. Weekly is too often in my opinion because the lure of heroin is bound to magnify over time for most people, myself included. As a former addict I would say it is possible to benefit from occasional use if the use is infrequent enough not to become the focal point of your week. Weekly use is bound to push up tolerance over time too.

I remember years before I tried heroin an older more experienced person telling me heroin is okay, meaning not particularly damaging to your overall health and life structure, if it is used occasionally... once a year but even that might be too much! The sentiment was that heroin can be enjoyed without causing problems but it needs to treated cautiously and with a great deal of respect. Do not underestimate its lure basically.

I think that because it is not physiologically harmful like speed and cocaine are, when taken in safe doses, it can be used as a fairly harmless occasional 'holiday' type of experience but... do not repeat dosing the following day. Or for a month at least, in my opinion.

It can be taken, like psychedelics, as an occasional medicine. DMT is far superior as a medicine of course, but heroin can provide a holiday of sorts when life just needs unwinding from. Any drug if it is used safely and for the overall benefit of the individual is acceptable, in my opinion.

 

[kkattastic]

I have found that most addicts who DO manage to quit,often turn to alcohol.
I see that most frequent users do it to numb some kind of physical or emotional pain
I know that's how I started and many others will say the same thing
unlike psychedelics,you just want to numb yourself from life

 

[gannetsarewe]

Jesus talk about rationalisation, I only take heroin to get the housework done.

 

[BecomingJulie]

Is it normal to lose your sense of temperature regulation after discontinuing opiate use?

 

[Shambles]

Dunno but I certainly have so you may just be onto something there, Julie.

 

[trip2themoon]

Just outside Prague the Cheques grow poppies for seed for their wee bread rolls. A small group of addicts steal enough poppy to make into smack to maintain their habbit. These are well experienced addicts with long term habbits and the gear they make is so strong it makes them puke. Don't think I've had a whitey in about 14 years. What surprised me most was the message that appeared on screen say the Czech Republic's street smack only has a 1 to 5 percent purity average. Czech Republic is way closer to Afghanistan than us in the supply line, I don't think our gear is so weak. Here's the vid: