Heroin
Extract
from Paul Little's Arrested Development: The
Aaron Cohen Story
Heroin
has never improved the life of anyone who has used
it.
Humans
have always used drugs. Whether for religious purposes,
health reasons (`Purely medicinal, y' understand')
or as social bonding agents. `Have a drink?' `Like
a fag?' `Wanna score?' These are all important functions
but because we are built to survive, we have for
most─although not all─of our history
recognised the dangers of irresponsible drug use
and surrounded consumption with rituals and customers
to ensure it is done safely.
Drugs
are among the things─like laughing and art
and foreknowledge of death─that separate us
from animals. When one takes alcohol and nicotine
into account, the number of people who never use
recreational drugs is a minority in Western cultures.
In
the beginning there was opium, a native of India.
Remnants of stored seeds and pods have been found
in Swiss archaeological sites of the fourth millennium
BC. By the second millennium─1000 years before
the Bible was composed─it was known throughout
Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
In
the 19th century in England opium was a widely available
panacea for everything from women's problems to
infants' complaints. It came in many forms of patent
medicine and the eventual restriction of its supply
to licenced pharmacists was more a political move
than a moral or health measure.
Morphine─the
good bit in opium, which when isolated is ten times
the strength of the poppy─was identified in
the early 19th century when it was welcomed for
its superior ability to ease pain and marketed as
a cure for opium addiction.
Heroin,
several times stronger again than morphine, was
synthesised in the late 19th century, when it was
welcomed for its superior ability to ease pain and
marketed as a cure for morphine addiction.
It
was named heroin because of its heroic properties.
Nothing was stronger than this. Mighty heroin, vanquisher
of pain and suffering, bringer of a bliss nothing
could disturb.
Few
drugs are more potent or more addictive.
One
smoke, one shot of heroin will not make anyone an
addict. Nor two. Nor three. But it is estimated
that daily use for two weeks will do the trick.
And what an addiction.
For
heroin brings with it its own mean paradoxes. While
it gives pleasure and removes pain, it also lowers
an individual's pain threshold so that increasing
doses are necessary to have any effect. This is,
perversely, called tolerance. After a certain period
of regular use─it differs between individuals─in
order not to feel sick, an addict will need a dose
of heroin that would kill a first-time user. And
a person who has been an addict for, say, 10 years,
has probably not experienced the heroin high that
first made them fall in love with the drug for the
last eight of those years. They have been purchasing
and consuming it merely to feel `normal'.
Why
bother?
Heroin
was formulated to alleviate chronic physical pain.
It also relieves, with a wonderful and complete
finality, psychological pain. Many people sample
it, few become addicts. Its appeal is primarily
to those who crave oblivion. Most heroin addicts
started using it seriously to blot out some great
pain blighting their hearts and souls. Abuse, bereavement,
failure, loss─the mainstays of the emotion
industry are the real raw materials of the heroin
trade. The hard sorrows which a better equipped
person, a whole person, could deal with in less
life-threatening ways, the potential addict can
only deal with in chemical fashion.
No
drug is more prized nor more feared. There are more
dangerous substances people can ingest to alter
their reality, but they tend, like angel dust, to
have properties which do not permit an addiction
to develop. The recreational dabbler sees heroin
as the end of the road. It is the ultimate drug
of choice because it takes away the ability to make
choices.
Yet
heroin is a very boring drug. It does not make anymore
more interesting. It is not a drug one consumes
in order to do things. It is a drug one consumes
in order not to do anything.
Strangely,
all of this contributes to its status as the ultimate
drug. Its mystique and the stigma surrounding it
are two sides of the same coin. That which makes
us fear it─its strength─ makes it attractive.
That which makes it attractive makes us fear it.
Another
reason for the black mystique is the intermediary
between the drug and its user─the needle,
a potent symbol which can represent both the promise
of health in the form of life-saving medical treatment
or the lethal injection that ends a life. Most drugs
are taken directly into the body as pills, powders,
liquids. Many heroin users smoke or sniff the drug.
But the image of the tying-off, jacking-up junkie
fumbling in pain for a vein─ stabbing himself─remains,
and is less than appealing.
Also,
heroin kills people.
Or
does it?
Most
deaths by overdose (and many people overdose without
dying) are caused by two factors─unwitting
consumption of more (purer, stronger, less cut)
heroin that one's system can tolerate, or use of
heroin in combination with alcohol or barbiturates.
It is rare if not impossible for someone who knows
what they are doing─and exactly what they
are consuming─to die as a result of using
heroin with no other factors involved.
How
much of the harm done by heroin is a result of its
illicit status is also an open question. Its illegality
makes it more profitable for the producers, whose
prices are subject only to a very pure form of supply
and demand. The illegal drug industry is enormous.
So is the anti-drug industry─the US spends
US$30 billion a year on its war against drugs.
Some
of the worst problems associated with heroin─HIV
contracted by sharing hard-to-obtain needles, crime
as a way of life to support an
expensive habit─would not exist if it were
legal and its sale controlled. But legalisation
would do nothing to solve the problems that make
individuals' prospects for addiction in the first
place.
This
is the final, deadly paradox of heroin: in the process
of stopping pain it stops feeling, acting, thinking,
caring and everything else that makes a human a
human. It is more than good for nothing. It is fantastic
for nothing.
