This was my experience of heroin addiction and recovery - I found it helpful to write about it and I hope someone might find it helpful to read about it. The title is a play on the old expression 'the University of Life' - for anyone reading who is not from the UK a polytechnic was a sort of second-rate learning institution, accredited to award degrees but with little of the academic or reputational merit attached to universities themselves.
I moved to London from the country in the autumn of 1999 with little more than the rucksack on my back, a place at university and £50 in my pocket - and a vague ambition to become a heroin addict. My student loan - a much less complicated affair in those days - was pending, and £50 back then went a lot further than it does now so I wasn’t worried about my reduced circumstances. I felt like a latter-day Dick Whittington, and as the titular character in my own rags-to-riches drama I was prepared for a few privations on my journey.
Like so many travellers before me, accommodation was my first concern. I had some family and friends dotted about the capital, but nowhere and with no one I wanted to linger. The struggle to find accommodation in London on a budget is well-documented so I won’t linger on my own experience, except to say that the situation then was not anywhere near as bad as it seems to be now - all things being relative though, and still with the proverbial provincial grass in my hair, the cost of renting a flat (or even a room) and the speed at which the rental market operated were daunting.
It was a mild October - an Indian summer, I suppose - and I had a sleeping bag with me so I gathered some cardboard for a makeshift mattress and found a spot to sleep in a stairwell behind the university. The entrance to the stairs was locked with a gate which I could hop over, and the stairs themselves were covered by a CCTV camera. In the stairwell I couldn’t be seen from the street and the gate and the camera (which may have been inoperable, for all I know) seemed enough of a deterrent to anyone wanting to join me down there. It was dry under the stairs in everything but very heavy rain, although the weather remained mostly warm and the evenings light until the first student loan payment landed in my account at the end of the month.
I found a room in an unfashionable area without a tube station, not far from the university. It was a bedsit in a boarding house where I was the youngest resident by far - the others were all much older men with depressing backstories who seemed to have fallen on hard times, for surely they would not have been in such a place at their time of life if things had gone better for them. The landlord lived in the basement and was fastidious about collecting the rent money - something of a Rigsby character. The water in the communal bath and shower rooms was heated by a coin-operated meter in the hallway, the operation of which evidently triggered something in his basement rooms because every time someone turned the immersion heater on he would appear upstairs to make sure it had been switched on intentionally and electricity wasn’t being wasted.
Despite his obsession with these details, however, he had missed the bigger picture which was the tremendous inflation of rental costs all over the capital, even in his obscure and ungentrified district. The cost of one of his rooms was far less than people would have been paying in the area five or even ten years earlier and as his tenants we entered into a tacit conspiracy to shield him from this knowledge, lest our fragile utopia be shattered.
My degree course was interesting without being too demanding and I was able to continue my routine of heavy drinking and hash smoking with little interruption. I spent a lot of time trying to find a reliable source of hash or weed and inevitably I gravitated towards Camden Town - the Amsterdam of London. While I invariably found something to keep my pipe warm I rarely got what I paid for - as the new kid in town I was always going to get ripped off, and I was scoring off the street where everyone selling cannabis seemed to be doing so to finance their heroin and crack habits. I considered myself experienced in the ways that drugs were bought and sold but this was a new world to me, and the stakes were much higher for the people doing the buying and the selling than in my home town. Of course I had long been aware of the influence of hard drugs but my provincial upbringing had shielded me from the worst of their effects, and my nocturnal wanderings around these less desirable parts of London forced me to confront the realities of the situation.
The capital had exposed its seedy underbelly and everywhere I went I started noticing disenchanted youths and embittered men and women gathering on street corners or huddling in bus shelters, waiting for their dealers to show up. Yet as much as this appalled and horrified me, I found myself in equal and opposite measure intrigued and fascinated. I had read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting some years before and the ‘anti-glamour’ of it had enticed me - I thought that hard drugs must have something going for them if people were prepared to endure such hardship in their name. I told myself that these hardships were the very privations I had steeled myself to expect during my London adventure, and resolved to take heroin at the earliest opportunity.
Back at Camden Town I approached the shifty-looking individuals who gathered around the tube station. Rather like my earlier attempts to buy cannabis from them, my attempts to buy heroin were also unsuccessful - much as I had predicted they would be. I was not so naive that I imagined a middle-class white kid with a provincial accent could approach a perfect stranger on the street and negotiate a successful heroin deal without complication. Even armed with this knowledge, however, I still fell victim to my inexperience. Those I approached who offered to help me quickly revealed themselves to be untrustworthy, departing with my money and promises to return - I was on a number of occasions left in a stairwell at a block of flats, or on the corner of a back street, with instructions to wait while the ‘deal’ was put together. I am ashamed to recall that I would sometimes wait for an hour or more before concluding that I had been scammed - hope really does spring eternal in such circumstances. Others who I thought were genuine would not take my money or even speak to me - they muttered darkly about undercover policemen, and one even pulled my white-boy dreadlocks in an attempt to dislodge what he believed to be a wig.
Eventually I was approached by an older black man in a leather trench coat - ’The Matrix’ had only recently been released and he did not yet look absurd. ‘JJ’ had witnessed my clumsy attempts to score and took pity on me, taking me to a phone box where he produced a ‘stem’ - a tubular pipe - and some crack, which we smoked together. I’d taken cocaine before but experienced nothing quite like this, and in our reverie we formed a brief fellowship for which I have never understood his motivation - months later he was to disappear forever with £10 I had given him to get me some weed, but this amount was nowhere near the value of what we consumed that evening in the red telephone box. Later that night we found some heroin and in a serious breach of etiquette I took off without repaying the favour - perhaps this was why he had no compunction about his later disappearance with my weed money.
The heroin itself was a disappointment: I smoked it on foil but was unfamiliar with the technique and consequently wasted more than I smoked, carbonising the powder before the fumes had been released. It would be some time before I learned to take the drug effectively and economically, and it was only after several months of sporadic use that I decided to embark on a serious habit. I returned to Camden Town where I had befriended a homeless Scottish heroin addict called Mark, who had a large black dog called Heather. Although I had initiated this relationship as a means to an end I had genuine affection for Mark and Heather and to this day I wonder what happened to them - although Heather, I’m sure, will have died in the intervening years, and unfortunately for Mark I don’t imagine his life expectancy could really have been much greater. I briefly practiced Mark’s lifestyle with him, and funded some of it, and for my part I was grateful to have a partner in crime - this being a phrase which is much overused these days for people who are no such thing to each other, although in our case this is pretty much what we were.
I remember Mark saying to me one evening that ‘crack had ruined the heroin scene’, which seemed a strange observation at the time, for what on earth could there have been to ruin? However I think now, looking back, that he may have had a point - crack had really exploded onto the (relatively) sedate heroin scene and meant that many users now had (at least) two competing addictions to manage side by side. From what little I could tell, having only just arrived on the scene myself, the way crack was aggressively marketed and supplied (alongside heroin) by mostly young, black guys who didn't get high on their own supply and worked for businessmen and gangsters who shared none of the risk had really changed the game. But that's a whole other story.
My bedsit was only a short bus ride away but may as well have been on the moon after one of our Camden nights, and I often slept in the back of abandoned vans or in tower block bin sheds (the trick is to block the chute before settling down for the night) next to Mark and Heather. The difference of course was that when the fun was over and the hard times loomed I could repair to my room and the relative normality of university life, while Mark had no such option. I had no wish to take him back to my place - he was an alcoholic and told me that he would wake up vomiting and in withdrawal, leaving him no option but to swallow his vomit in the hope that its alcohol content would recover him sufficiently to stumble to the off licence to get his first can of the day. Special Brew was his drink of choice and he maintained that Brew drinkers were a better class of alcoholic than those who drunk Kestrel or Tennents Super. I did take him home once and he immediately placed himself down directly in front of the TV, where he remained all night. He looked around occasionally to grab a can or chase some heroin, but after so long on the streets it was the TV that held his attention.
I see now that addiction had put Mark on the street and that living like that was in turn preventing his recovery from addiction - the twin problems of his homelessness and drug and alcohol use were inextricably linked, but at the time such an observation would have escaped me entirely: we were just drug users, that was all, and I had a place to stay and he didn’t. The following morning he waited impatiently for me to get up - I doubt he slept - so that we could continue the session, or ‘get back on it’ as we didn’t say then. I wasn’t feeling good and wanted only to sleep more - I didn’t have his appetite for self-destruction - and he left in a huff with Heather, who he had to carry down the stairs because her back legs were going by then. Like JJ, I never saw Mark again - a theme was developing.
I next visited a hospital in North London that operated a drug treatment centre: they provided me with needles and literature about harm reduction, safer injecting techniques and related injuries and diseases. I no longer needed to travel to Camden at this time, having met another homeless addict outside the supermarket near my home who introduced me to two much older, seasoned heroin users - Kathy and Allan. Also from Scotland, they were a double act who lived on my road and took me under their wing - they would often see me making my way up our road, coming back from university (they were never awake to see me on my way there) and would call me up to their top-floor flat for a smoke. They introduced me to a local network of dealers which was to be the next stage of my downfall - the distance between the place I lived and the place I scored (notwithstanding the odd night in a bin shed) had been the greatest protective factor against the steadily increasing frequency of my drug use, but now I could score virtually on my doorstep.
I started buying my heroin from Kathy and Allan and injecting at home - I never did it around them, for fear of contaminating a needle or an injection site in the unhygienic and unsafe chaos of their flat. I initially injected tiny amounts, so concerned was I of overdosing; a seasoned addict would have laughed at the measures I cooked in my spoon, but had I overdosed in my bedsit it could conceivably have been many days before someone found me: probably it would have been my landlord after his rent. Nevertheless I got myself incredibly high - although probably ‘low’ would be more accurate - even to to the point of having to walk myself around the room like a sick horse being trotted around its stable in order to prevent my eyes rolling back into my head and the drug taking me from consciousness. I didn’t realise at the time that ‘gouching out’ can be one of the more pleasurable side effects of heroin use, but it speaks volumes for my naivety and ignorance that I believed if I passed out following an injection I wouldn’t wake up.
My life became a ritualised sequence of waiting, scoring, injecting and sleeping. I stopped attending university, I lost contact with my friends, I blew my student loan and my arms and the backs of my hands became dotted with puncture marks and grew bruises the size of eggs. Despite the many fresh veins I had to choose from I was not adept at injecting and I eventually missed a vein, accidentally shooting my fix into the soft tissue of my upper arm: a large lump appeared and on visiting the GP I was told to keep my arm elevated above my head for forty-eight hours or risk amputation. It occurs to me now that the doctor was perhaps playing a trick on me in order that I might take some time to reflect on my situation - certainly this period triggered in me what I believe alcoholics refer to as a ‘moment of clarity’, wherein one is compelled to question the wisdom of one’s actions. I stopped injecting heroin but continued smoking it for several more months until my student loan ran out.
There was no question of committing acquisitive crime to fund my addiction, so once the money was gone that was that. Again this was something that separated me from the few people I knew on the scene - I had been playing at it, really, flirting with it, and when all was said and done I would head home and resume my old life. This was not an option for the people I met during this time - this was not a diversion from their life, but the actual life that they were living every day. This was a sobering reflection and the thought that accompanied me as I drifted away from them and out of their lives.
I managed the withdrawal symptoms with codeine linctus, a preparation that used to be available from pharmacies as a cough syrup and is now enjoying a resurgence as a recreational drug in America where it is a key ingredient - along with Promethazine - of the cocktail known as ‘lean’ or ‘drank’. It’s much harder to get hold of in the UK these days, largely because most of the people buying it from pharmacies were heroin users trying to avoid withdrawal, so chemists became wise to their game and stopped supplying it. Alternatively I would buy kaolin and morphine, another over-the-counter preparation intended for the prevention of diarrhoea but equally effective at managing withdrawal symptoms. The morphine is separated from the kaolin suspension by refrigerating the bottle until the morphine separates and rises to the surface, where it can be drawn off and drunk or - with some preparation - smoked (I had read about this in Will Self’s short story Scale). As a last resort I would take codeine tablets from my parents’ medicine cabinet at their home, the downside being that many brands contain high doses of paracetamol/acetaminophen preventing the user from ingesting large numbers of tablets at once. My heroin use didn’t stop entirely at this time, but I learned to only use it intermittently and never for more than three days at any time - my body never forgot the old days, and punished me heinously every time I slipped up. For all I know it still would today.
In the end I finished my degree - a lot later, and at considerably more expense than I would have liked - and left London. I always intended to return, perhaps to resume where I had left off, but life gets in the way and probably just as well that it does, sometimes. However for many years afterwards I remained acutely aware of the presence of heroin wherever I went. I had developed a sort of spidey-sense that would tingle whenever I saw a rat-faced youth lurking furtively in an alleyway, or a teenage cyclist with bulging cheeks pedalling frantically along a canal towpath. It seemed to be everywhere I looked and I would have given anything not to notice - I never used to, and it got in the way of my recovery. It was a long and lonely path to find my way back from addiction and I didn’t feel that I was entitled to any sympathy or congratulations during the journey or on reaching my destination, because I knew that I never should have been on that path in the first place.
Despite everything I don’t really have any regrets - heroin addiction was not the worst thing that has happened to me, and if I could do it all again knowing what I know now, I really don’t think that I would have done it much differently. A little more education on the pitfalls of injecting and better preparation for withdrawal episodes, maybe. I had a lucky escape - a series of lucky escapes - which really were down to luck rather than judgment, but the experience illuminated a dark side of the street that I otherwise never would have noticed, and I really can’t say that I would have wanted to miss out on that.
These days I have a professional career and even worked in a substance misuse service for a while, but my personal experiences did not stand me in such good stead in the profession as I'd hoped - I had the habit of seeing people's experiences in terms of my own, and struggled to understand how people who had clearly long ago arrived at the conclusion that drug use was ruining their lives could not stop repeating this harmful behaviour. I think the difference for me was in having a strong 'first world' - supportive family, secure housing, good education, employment and relationship prospects - that drugs took me away from, but which I always knew was there to return to when I'd finished fooling around on that dark side of the street. If that hadn't been the case and drugs were helping me to shelter from a cruel, hard world that I had no desire to return to I don't know how I would have found the emotional resources to stop using.