flacky
Bluelighter
Untitled Retrospective Work on Heroin and Drugs in General, Part 1
Note: Title change (Untitled Retrospective Work on Heroin and Drugs in General, Part 1)
I lift my head off the table, the burning turns into an encompassing warmth, and my head tilts back, pointed eyes closed, as the world floats away. It's that weekly routine; the Thursday shuffle, dancing with the devil again. I look back down, put it away, shelf it until a few hours later. Chores out of the way, and with time to relax, my body hangs back motionless on the top of a wave, moving up and down as crescendos of warmth surge through my body... The heroin high always confused my friends, and I was always the worst at explaining it. No matter how hard I tried, I could never really convince them that, despite my vaguely empty facial expression, I was feeling better that I had ever felt in my entire life.
With more use and more thought, however, I think that I would describe snorting heroin kind of like this. Right after you snort it, your nose burns a bit. It's a very familiar feeling that isn't quite like the burn from snorting just anything else. Slowly that pain becomes a warmth that spreads across, and encompasses your whole body. You feel your breathing and heart rate slow down, and then the heroin smacks you in the face and you feel better than you've ever felt in your entire life. Line up the best orgasm, the best happiness, the best anything that you've ever felt and heroin will blow each one clear and far out of the water. You close your eyes and you feel the world floating away from you. All of your needs dissolve and you're content; more content than you've ever been. It's just you. You and your mind. Lying down on your bed with your eyes closed and that warm energy rushing across your body. At peace with the world. Then, the rush subsides. You interact with reality like you normally would, but you feel wonderful. In fact, you wonder why you haven't been feeling like this your whole life. And that’s how you stay for hours, feeling great and alternating between being alert and sedate.
If you're lucky, or you just did enough, you'll be sitting down and your eyes will suddenly close. The next thing you know, you're shot into the most vivid dream you've ever had before. You just sit there with your eyes closed, stuck between levels of consciousness, until your eyes shoot open, you gasp and you jump in your chair. You look down at your clock and notice that anywhere from 30 seconds to ten minutes or more have gone by, and the whole time you've been sitting there with your head hanging low. It's the passed-out stupor that opiate users affectionately call the nod, the cornerstone of the opiate high. If there was an opiate food pyramid, the nod would be at the top. Like the sugars and greases of food, the nod is the deadly pleasure of heroin. You don't get a lot of it in your heroin diet, but when you do, it's pure ecstasy; and if you do too much it will be your last nod ever.
Luckily, I've never come too close myself, save once. I probably owe that to my pattern of use. Since I've started, I've limited myself to once a week. A pattern that I've managed to hold myself to for a while now. That Thursday shuffle. Of course, it isn't always Thursday. Can't let heroin control everything. The one time, though, that I did come close to going over was the night before Halloween. Loaded on heroin and Benadryl, I smoke some weed with my friend. Later, in his room, I manage to catch the strongest and longest nod that I've ever caught. After being out for ten minutes straight, my breathing becomes shallow and audibly raspy and my friend shakes me awake. Ironically, I was more pissed that my nod got cut short than I was happy to be alive. In retrospect, I probably would have been fine, but to this day it's still disconcerting that I thought of it that way.
That night will be a perpetual reminder to myself that, even in the absence of addiction, heroin exerts an indescribable control over the human condition. Waiting between doses of heroin, or "dope day," as I semi-affectionately put it, I think about heroin every day. I think about its warmth, its sweet embrace, and most of all, I think about the rush. I've always been told by people who use the needle that the rush from snorting isn't really a rush. They say that although you perceive that feeling as a rush, having felt nothing comparable before, it really isn't. Thinking about that has always made me a mixture of thankful and disappointed. It makes me thankful because thinking about the pitiful rush that I know still sends chills up my spine, and disappointed because the needle sounds so much better.
Slowly but surely, I've come to the realization that the needle is the thin line that separates my manageable habit from a devastating addiction. I did come close once, but not with heroin. I've been known to dabble in psychedelic drugs and one day, with only a small amount of a designer hallucinogen left, I decide that there’s no way to get anything out of it without putting it directly into my veins. A trip to the drug store later, I weigh out my powder and dissolve it in a milliliter of water. The powder dissolves very, very slowly. Next, I go to my bathroom. Sitting down on top of my toilet, I ball up the torn-off end of a Q-Tip and flush it with water. I drop it in to the mix and draw up half the contents. After rubbing some alcohol on my hands and part of my arm, I take off my belt and wrap it around near my shoulder. My veins pop up, and I bring the needle close the site. On the way there, it barely touches my skin. I feel its sharpness, and a million images flash before my eyes.
Shit. That powder took a while to dissolve, didn't it. What if it's not really dissolved in there? That was really little powder. What if it's just a suspension and I can't see the tiny particles. Fuck. What if I have some undissolved shit floating through my veins. That doesn't sound good. Holy shit. What if this works too well? No shit, it's going to work. I mean, what if I like this too much. What if I start shooting my dope. Fuck. Fuck. What if I start using every day? Withdrawals. Thousands of dollars a month. Close to a hundred thousand a year if I really trip up. Money that I'll never get back. Shit. Homelessness or crime. Nodding on the street somewhere or robbing a bank. Fuck that. Selling pot is enough for me.
I take the belt off, lift up my toilet seat and shoot the solution, every last drop of it, into the toilet. I even pour out the rest that I have, cotton and all, and I flush it. Darting back to my room, I take each and every one of my rigs, including the one that was almost in my arm only seconds before, and throw all of them down the trash chute. I felt alive. Later, I'm sober and disappointed. I'm kicking myself for not doing it but, in the back of my mind, I know I did the right thing.
What newscasters and addiction specialists across the country fail to realize is that opioids and, to an even larger extent, heroin specifically are not drugs -- they are a culture of people held together cohesively by a common struggle that defines their lives. People like me, chippers (infrequent users), are held together by the constant craving that we live with. Regular users are held together by a stronger force. They share the common experience of living in addiction, and most of them share at least one experience with the inexplicable pain of withdrawal. People who've quit, like chippers, share their constant craving, but for them it's much worse.
The reason that I say that this is true for heroin to an even larger extent is because heroin has an indescribable uniqueness -- a pull that other opiates unequivocally lack. Scientists have postulated about the source of this phenomenon, but they have never definitively tracked it down. The biggest going theory is that one of heroin's metabolites in the brain is the cause. Heroin is essentially morphine with two simple groups added on to its ends, the acetyl group. The reason that heroin comes on faster and stronger than morphine is these two groups. Basically, the brain is separated from regular blood flow by the purposefully named blood-brain barrier. Being more lipophilic, the acetyl groups in heroin cause it to pass this barrier faster. Once it's made its way past, heroin undergoes metabolic conversion to 3- or 6- acetylmorphine and then goes under the same conversion again to morphine. Although the morphine at the end of the chain is the cause of most of heroin's effects, scientists have discovered that 6-acetylmorphine binds to a subset of the mu opioid receptor that no other opiate is known to bind to. They have hypothesized that this intermediate metabolite's action at this particular subtype may be responsible for heroin's perceived unique subjective effects.
Those two acetyl groups also make a big difference in absorbance and onset. Although morphine is essentially the end result, without the figurative "means" that make heroin what it is, it would not be a viable drug. The reason that legions of addicts don't substitute morphine for their heroin is that heroin comes on comparatively faster. Plus, if the standard was morphine instead of heroin, sniffers like me wouldn't exist. Another added benefit of those two acetyl groups is that they allow heroin to be well absorbed in the nose, unlike morphine which is only absorbed at a meager 30%. Ironic, isn't it? A scientist somewhere in England doing a routine experiment in 1874 mixed some morphine with some acetic anhydride and invented heroin, never expecting that he would be the father of a new revolution in drug addiction.
Needless to say, his work has yet to be matched. Since heroin was first synthesized, scores upon scores of other opioid drugs have been successfully synthesized and tested and there has yet to be a single one that can match the sheer power of heroin. That is not to say, of course, that stronger opiates have not been invented. The first name that comes to mind is fentanyl. First synthesized in 1960, fentanyl boasts a potency of about 50-60 times that of heroin. Fentanyl is so potent, in fact, that amounts invisible to the human eye are enough to cause an effect. However, this is where the line between the objective potency and the subjective power is drawn. Fentanyl has been used time and time again as a substitute for heroin on the street level. However, despite its potency, almost any heroin user will tell you that fentanyl's effects fail to compare to the heroin's sweet embrace.
Any addict will also tell you that, because of that particular sweet embrace, the dope fiend's ballad usually ends the same way; addiction, incarceration or death. Some of the lucky ones escape with rehabilitation. Luckier ones, like myself, escape without ever making it to addiction. However, people like us live in a constant state of uncertainty. Whether we know it or not, addiction is waiting around the corner to tackle our poor souls to the ground. We just have to pray that we're strong fighters, because addiction hits hard and fights dirty.
Note: Title change (Untitled Retrospective Work on Heroin and Drugs in General, Part 1)
I lift my head off the table, the burning turns into an encompassing warmth, and my head tilts back, pointed eyes closed, as the world floats away. It's that weekly routine; the Thursday shuffle, dancing with the devil again. I look back down, put it away, shelf it until a few hours later. Chores out of the way, and with time to relax, my body hangs back motionless on the top of a wave, moving up and down as crescendos of warmth surge through my body... The heroin high always confused my friends, and I was always the worst at explaining it. No matter how hard I tried, I could never really convince them that, despite my vaguely empty facial expression, I was feeling better that I had ever felt in my entire life.
With more use and more thought, however, I think that I would describe snorting heroin kind of like this. Right after you snort it, your nose burns a bit. It's a very familiar feeling that isn't quite like the burn from snorting just anything else. Slowly that pain becomes a warmth that spreads across, and encompasses your whole body. You feel your breathing and heart rate slow down, and then the heroin smacks you in the face and you feel better than you've ever felt in your entire life. Line up the best orgasm, the best happiness, the best anything that you've ever felt and heroin will blow each one clear and far out of the water. You close your eyes and you feel the world floating away from you. All of your needs dissolve and you're content; more content than you've ever been. It's just you. You and your mind. Lying down on your bed with your eyes closed and that warm energy rushing across your body. At peace with the world. Then, the rush subsides. You interact with reality like you normally would, but you feel wonderful. In fact, you wonder why you haven't been feeling like this your whole life. And that’s how you stay for hours, feeling great and alternating between being alert and sedate.
If you're lucky, or you just did enough, you'll be sitting down and your eyes will suddenly close. The next thing you know, you're shot into the most vivid dream you've ever had before. You just sit there with your eyes closed, stuck between levels of consciousness, until your eyes shoot open, you gasp and you jump in your chair. You look down at your clock and notice that anywhere from 30 seconds to ten minutes or more have gone by, and the whole time you've been sitting there with your head hanging low. It's the passed-out stupor that opiate users affectionately call the nod, the cornerstone of the opiate high. If there was an opiate food pyramid, the nod would be at the top. Like the sugars and greases of food, the nod is the deadly pleasure of heroin. You don't get a lot of it in your heroin diet, but when you do, it's pure ecstasy; and if you do too much it will be your last nod ever.
Luckily, I've never come too close myself, save once. I probably owe that to my pattern of use. Since I've started, I've limited myself to once a week. A pattern that I've managed to hold myself to for a while now. That Thursday shuffle. Of course, it isn't always Thursday. Can't let heroin control everything. The one time, though, that I did come close to going over was the night before Halloween. Loaded on heroin and Benadryl, I smoke some weed with my friend. Later, in his room, I manage to catch the strongest and longest nod that I've ever caught. After being out for ten minutes straight, my breathing becomes shallow and audibly raspy and my friend shakes me awake. Ironically, I was more pissed that my nod got cut short than I was happy to be alive. In retrospect, I probably would have been fine, but to this day it's still disconcerting that I thought of it that way.
That night will be a perpetual reminder to myself that, even in the absence of addiction, heroin exerts an indescribable control over the human condition. Waiting between doses of heroin, or "dope day," as I semi-affectionately put it, I think about heroin every day. I think about its warmth, its sweet embrace, and most of all, I think about the rush. I've always been told by people who use the needle that the rush from snorting isn't really a rush. They say that although you perceive that feeling as a rush, having felt nothing comparable before, it really isn't. Thinking about that has always made me a mixture of thankful and disappointed. It makes me thankful because thinking about the pitiful rush that I know still sends chills up my spine, and disappointed because the needle sounds so much better.
Slowly but surely, I've come to the realization that the needle is the thin line that separates my manageable habit from a devastating addiction. I did come close once, but not with heroin. I've been known to dabble in psychedelic drugs and one day, with only a small amount of a designer hallucinogen left, I decide that there’s no way to get anything out of it without putting it directly into my veins. A trip to the drug store later, I weigh out my powder and dissolve it in a milliliter of water. The powder dissolves very, very slowly. Next, I go to my bathroom. Sitting down on top of my toilet, I ball up the torn-off end of a Q-Tip and flush it with water. I drop it in to the mix and draw up half the contents. After rubbing some alcohol on my hands and part of my arm, I take off my belt and wrap it around near my shoulder. My veins pop up, and I bring the needle close the site. On the way there, it barely touches my skin. I feel its sharpness, and a million images flash before my eyes.
Shit. That powder took a while to dissolve, didn't it. What if it's not really dissolved in there? That was really little powder. What if it's just a suspension and I can't see the tiny particles. Fuck. What if I have some undissolved shit floating through my veins. That doesn't sound good. Holy shit. What if this works too well? No shit, it's going to work. I mean, what if I like this too much. What if I start shooting my dope. Fuck. Fuck. What if I start using every day? Withdrawals. Thousands of dollars a month. Close to a hundred thousand a year if I really trip up. Money that I'll never get back. Shit. Homelessness or crime. Nodding on the street somewhere or robbing a bank. Fuck that. Selling pot is enough for me.
I take the belt off, lift up my toilet seat and shoot the solution, every last drop of it, into the toilet. I even pour out the rest that I have, cotton and all, and I flush it. Darting back to my room, I take each and every one of my rigs, including the one that was almost in my arm only seconds before, and throw all of them down the trash chute. I felt alive. Later, I'm sober and disappointed. I'm kicking myself for not doing it but, in the back of my mind, I know I did the right thing.
What newscasters and addiction specialists across the country fail to realize is that opioids and, to an even larger extent, heroin specifically are not drugs -- they are a culture of people held together cohesively by a common struggle that defines their lives. People like me, chippers (infrequent users), are held together by the constant craving that we live with. Regular users are held together by a stronger force. They share the common experience of living in addiction, and most of them share at least one experience with the inexplicable pain of withdrawal. People who've quit, like chippers, share their constant craving, but for them it's much worse.
The reason that I say that this is true for heroin to an even larger extent is because heroin has an indescribable uniqueness -- a pull that other opiates unequivocally lack. Scientists have postulated about the source of this phenomenon, but they have never definitively tracked it down. The biggest going theory is that one of heroin's metabolites in the brain is the cause. Heroin is essentially morphine with two simple groups added on to its ends, the acetyl group. The reason that heroin comes on faster and stronger than morphine is these two groups. Basically, the brain is separated from regular blood flow by the purposefully named blood-brain barrier. Being more lipophilic, the acetyl groups in heroin cause it to pass this barrier faster. Once it's made its way past, heroin undergoes metabolic conversion to 3- or 6- acetylmorphine and then goes under the same conversion again to morphine. Although the morphine at the end of the chain is the cause of most of heroin's effects, scientists have discovered that 6-acetylmorphine binds to a subset of the mu opioid receptor that no other opiate is known to bind to. They have hypothesized that this intermediate metabolite's action at this particular subtype may be responsible for heroin's perceived unique subjective effects.
Those two acetyl groups also make a big difference in absorbance and onset. Although morphine is essentially the end result, without the figurative "means" that make heroin what it is, it would not be a viable drug. The reason that legions of addicts don't substitute morphine for their heroin is that heroin comes on comparatively faster. Plus, if the standard was morphine instead of heroin, sniffers like me wouldn't exist. Another added benefit of those two acetyl groups is that they allow heroin to be well absorbed in the nose, unlike morphine which is only absorbed at a meager 30%. Ironic, isn't it? A scientist somewhere in England doing a routine experiment in 1874 mixed some morphine with some acetic anhydride and invented heroin, never expecting that he would be the father of a new revolution in drug addiction.
Needless to say, his work has yet to be matched. Since heroin was first synthesized, scores upon scores of other opioid drugs have been successfully synthesized and tested and there has yet to be a single one that can match the sheer power of heroin. That is not to say, of course, that stronger opiates have not been invented. The first name that comes to mind is fentanyl. First synthesized in 1960, fentanyl boasts a potency of about 50-60 times that of heroin. Fentanyl is so potent, in fact, that amounts invisible to the human eye are enough to cause an effect. However, this is where the line between the objective potency and the subjective power is drawn. Fentanyl has been used time and time again as a substitute for heroin on the street level. However, despite its potency, almost any heroin user will tell you that fentanyl's effects fail to compare to the heroin's sweet embrace.
Any addict will also tell you that, because of that particular sweet embrace, the dope fiend's ballad usually ends the same way; addiction, incarceration or death. Some of the lucky ones escape with rehabilitation. Luckier ones, like myself, escape without ever making it to addiction. However, people like us live in a constant state of uncertainty. Whether we know it or not, addiction is waiting around the corner to tackle our poor souls to the ground. We just have to pray that we're strong fighters, because addiction hits hard and fights dirty.
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