Heroin Addiction

Whether or not people actually use drugs, they are fascinated by them. They are fascinated by what drugs and alcohol can make people do and to what lengths people will go to in order to get the substance they abuse. This is especially true of Heroin. Heroin has been around for a very long time and most people have heard tales or read articles (not very pleasant ones) about someone who has used heroin. Those who do have actual heroin addiction stories try to get the message out so others don’t fall into the trap, and urge them to seek treatment if they did.

Some people just enjoy getting off on other people’s misery. It’s a proven fact. It could be that they have wanted to try heroin and want to read stories of people who actually have or it could be that they just have some sort of fascination with it. Regardless of the reason, heroin addiction stories are always widely read. Maybe it makes people feel superior to know that their lives are so much better. They should not feel so freakin’ secure because a heroin addiction can happen to anyone.

Heroin and other opium related drugs don’t know prejudice or bias. It can hit low income, middle income and even higher income people. Male, female, old, young, black, white, heroin can strike anyone at any time. Heroine doesn’t care who you are as long as you keep using. Heroin addiction stories often end in tragedy. Maybe that’s why people like reading them so much; like a book, they remain enthralled with the story line to find out how it ends. Well, it always ends badly in one way or another unless the addicts go to treatment and recover from their addictions, which is often a story of its own. Even those who get out alive and off of heroin have usually paid a steep price for using. The stories are really tragedies, not unlike novels, which people read to either entertain or educate themselves.

With heroin making a strong comeback, unfortunately the articles and tales are not going to dwindle down. There are people who used heroin in the 70’s who still haven’t told their story. Now some of their children have stories of their own. Heroin addiction stories all have lessons for those who would hear them. These are people who have been to hell and back and want to spare other people the misery.

People read heroin addiction stories for many reasons but as long as they learn something from them, they should go on reading them.

I’m in a very unsteady point in a relationship with a woman who but two years ago was unquestionably the love of my life. Last year, something happened when she went to college in the mountains. She became distant and withdrawn, she left me for some guy she felt would be able to reprieve her loneliness. Things haven’t gone well for them… I’ve been in contact with her up to this day and I know the problem she entered into middle of last year. She has some friends, I can’t find out who they are and that’s probably for the best. I don’t know if she was telling me the truth when she claimed it was her idea to try it at first…

The point is, she did… The first time, she explained she didn’t feel well and saw nothing but spots and a headache. She’d gotten a bad batch, they convinced her to try again promising better results. They were right, the second time she explained the feeling of unimaginable euphoria. A total bliss, a feeling of sensuality missing from her life with her present companion. A feeling of love and desire not only from her but of her. That she could feel lusted for and loved, something she has difficulty believing with her low self image.

She claims that she wants to stop and I believe she is making the effort, but I am keeping it in mind that she has done it several times over the months and will have difficulty doing this on her own.

I need some advice from someone who has had more experience, not only of the help but the recovery from addiction. I’ve read so many things with different outcomes, some so unbearably nihilistic that I can’t help but to fear the worst. Some not so bad, that someone who entered the addiction for a cover up reason may generally break of it after sometimes only three years. Some have claimed that the most heartrending part of the withdrawal, the overwhelming desire and craving for it can be completely overcome in as long as 8 months.

From an honest and cold calculating opinion, I want to know from someone who has dealt with this before…

Do I give her a time frame to expect the worst with a gleam on the horizon, do any of you think that it will be a hope and a thread to grasp onto? Or do you believe that by giving her something like that, she will blanch and give up hope in the face of almost a year of pain?

Anything to help her no matter how much it hurts me, I need the truth but more I need an honest opinion from someone who knows more than I. I’ve overcome an over the counter anti-depressant and anti-psychotic cocktail addiction prescribed to me for years by someone I thought I could trust… I gave it up cold turkey and suffered through months of despair and paranoia, I know she can do the same… How can I help prove this to her?

She was a beautiful lady, smartly dressed and expensively adorned. Now, one can hardly bear to look at her, though a closer look still reveals her once glorious beauty. When I first met her, I was too intimidated to do anything. But Liz has an inviting personality and we soon got talking. I had been referred to her about a certain project. She offered me accommodation in her elegantly furnished home until the project could be completed successfully.

She had a good job. She earned quite a good amount, if the furnishings were anything to go by. Unique wall hangings and rare artwork made a delicate décor. Life in that house was nothing short of royalty.

Then one day she came home a little roughed up. Her hair was not in the usual beautiful bun and her jacket was all messed up. She was laughing strangely and bumbling about something I could not make out. She hardly ate a morsel.

She woke up the following day. She made herself up and went to work. I hardly got the chance to talk to her. That day, she returned home in a condition worse than that of the previous night. I was worried. I tried to enquire what was going on but passed out before she could tell me what was wrong. As I helped her out of her jacket I noticed them, recent piercings on her arms. I became alarmed.

I tried to raise the issue with, her but every time she found a way to evade the subject. The routine continued, with each day becoming worse than the previous. She started going to work late. It soon graduated to skipping work until it was total absenteeism. She was sacked. Whatever it was, it needed urgent attention.

She continued going out early in the morning and coming back late, all messed up. One day she came home earlier than usual. She told me that she had bought me a present. From her handbag, she removed a neat package. The clear package revealed a white substance, which she told me was heroin. She also produced two syringes, one meant for me. She then took a rubber glove and tied it around the upper part of her arm. That was more than I could bear to watch.

Soon, expensive artifacts started disappearing from their prominent locations. And each day, the once elegant house looked more and more like a shell. Most of the assets that once stood proudly in the great living room were no more as they had quickly been turned to heroin.

With nothing more to sell, no job and nothing more to lean on, and no prospects of getting a job, she was desperate. She desperately wanted her life back together. So, finally, she admitted to having wasted her life. We set off in search of the town therapist.

“Hi, I’m Jessica and I’m a sex addict.”

“Hi Jessica.”

“Hi, I’m Phillip and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi Phillip.”

“Hi, I’m David and I’m addicted to heroin.”

“Hi David.”

Sitting down I could swear one of my kidneys has popped and that my left leg is on fire. This Subutex crap they’re giving me doesn’t do anything and it’s certainly not helping with the fire ants crawling around my inner thigh, but the questions they ask here are striking many chords, a fucking Beethoven symphony to be a bit more precise – tears and all.

At forty-three and with the divorce having happened twelve years ago I’d never have thought it could be the basis of my newest relationship; heroin usage. I say relationship because that’s what having heroin addiction is. It’s that person who at first makes your life brighter and without whom, ultimately; there can be no light at all.

I started using heroin about a year ago. I was in the projects just before the holidays researching my latest book when I saw her; a teenage girl with a look of endless bliss on her face like something I’d never imagined; a part of me asked if it could be real. She looked about 18, pretty, and the nonchalant way she sat against the wall, forearms resting on raised knees and slender hands draped like cloth, drew me to her.

“Fuck it, its just research,” I told myself.

After that conversation with Nina I knew I’d be back. Even walking away from her after saying goodbye I knew that within a week I’d be right back there. Everything about her was so free, so soft, so all right.  I asked her what she was so happy about, she didn’t exactly live in any area to smile about, and she said she couldn’t say. I told her I was researching for a book and she said,

“come back sometime and I’ll show you.”

A week later I was sitting watching as Nina inhaled a thin stream of white-grey smoke through an empty kitchen-towel roll off a piece of tinfoil. I was holding the lighter as she’d asked me to and watched as the saline solution swirled and steamed round the little brown grains.

“Now you,” she said. And then it was I. It was too much for me to say no to, this beautiful young thing, wanting to do something with me, the bliss on her face and the calm in her eyes. And so I held the tin foil level and breathed through the paper-roll while she held the lighter underneath. The calm that washed through me like a wave of purifying light and the way our eyes connected and whispered, “yes, that’s it,” was like nothing before, or since.

And that’s how it began.

As I watched the other girls in the tank that evening, I noticed the scared young girl who had come in a couple of hours earlier.  She reminded me of another young girl just a few years earlier who had sat in jail cell much like this one…me.  Back then I was in for shoplifting.  Not having a dime to my name or any family to speak of, I was desperate and hungry.  I was also caught.  Not even 21, I was arrested for the first time in my life.

A woman befriended me in the tank that evening after I was arrested.  I was surprised when she told me she was 30, she looked older, as if time had stamped her with every one of life’s trials and tribulations.  She wasn’t going to be in long.  She had been booked at the same time as me and already had someone coming to bail her out.  How?  I wondered.  As if reading my mind, she told me she was a prostitute.

“How can you do that?” I asked her.  “Easy” she replied.  I have a little help from a good friend.  She told me about using heroin and that it helped her get through the ticking of the clock as she did what she had to do.  Besides, she liked sex and that helped a lot.  “So do I” I told her, but I couldn’t do that.
“Not even for about six hundred bucks profit per day?” she asked.

As my eyes grew wide she explained that she spent a lot on heroin but it helped her to always be ready for when a client was ready to go.  I mumbled something about wishing I had the nerve.  Right then they called her name.  She was being released.  As she walked away, she turned and asked me if I was serious.  “Hell, yeah!” I said.  I was desperate.

About an hour later my name was called.  I was being released!  Surprised, I walked out and saw the woman I had just been talking to an hour earlier.  She had bailed me out.

She took me to her hotel room and gave me some heroin. By dawn the next morning, I had done my first trick.  Before long I was so hooked on heroin I would take a trick at any price just to get the money together, spending it as fast as I made it just to get that feeling that heroin gave me.  Eventually, I felt nothing except during the most high of highs and here I was, in the tank, this time with what would be my second prostitution charge.  I found out heroin starts with a p…for prostitution.

I looked at the young girl.  She was terrified.  I could tell she had never been in jail before.  She jumped nervously as I walked over and sat beside her.  I calmed her down with a smile and we got to talking.  Just as Linda had done back then, I was giving this young girl my story.  She asked how I could sell myself.  As I started to tell her it was easy because of the heroin, I hesitated.  She didn’t deserve to be led down that path.  She was in for writing a couple of bad checks.  “I don’t remember how I got started” I lied.  “I just know I need to get clean.”

I talked to her till they called her name.  She was being released..  Hopefully she was walking out of there with just a little life lesson learned.  As for me, I couldn’t wait to get out, either.  I was itching for a fix and knew exactly where to find the perfect john to get me one.