Writing about a topic like one’s own dalliances with hard drugs is a difficult thing to do, and I want to do the best I can, without pulling punches when needed.
To my detractors: leaving me comments in all capital letters, liberally laced with expletives, will get you deleted. Please, go join a support group if you need to. But leave me alone to blog, you sanctimonious small-minded people.
To my supporters: I apologise for the backlog of comments which were awaiting moderation, I hadn’t realised there were quite so many. Since I’m writing here on a 3-year-old laptop computer which just required a brand new hard-drive, as you can imagine, my productive computer time has been limited over the past few weeks. But now, onwards and upwards…
The following reflections upon a theme are reconstructed from notes in my pen-and-paper journal, and while that was written mainly for myself, I herewith have adapted it in an attempt to explain some of the allure of strong opiates, from the perspective of someone (i.e. yours truly) who has never really known when to stop chasing that bliss.
The relative cool of the evening, the stillness of the air - not even the hint of a breeze - the hundreds of stars visible in the clear and cloudless sky beyond my back porch…
Somehow all of these things, combined with the slow curl of smoke from my cigarette, make me turn my mind towards introspection, and of writing down the musings that come to me on this dark autumnal night.
The not-inconsiderable amount of heroin which I have injected in the past half-hour, only adds to my pensive mood. The heroin also, however, holds me currently in her tender, all-too-seductive charms and breathes to me, silently, her sweet nothings… or is it the blissful absence of pain which soothes my racing mind long enough for me to commit my thoughts to paper?
It would, right now, be all too easy to lie back and submit to the lassitude of the drug, to ease into that state known as “going on the nod”. It is, this particular batch, very good gear.
Heroin is rarely, if ever, a purely euphoric high; rather, it floods the endorphin receptors in the brain with the kind of unspeakably wonderful feeling that one gets when lying in a lover’s arms, just after a particularly intense session of the best, most intimate kind of physical lovemaking. I liken the shot in the arm to the first thrust of love, the initial euphoria as an orgasm which evelops mind, blood and body in a kind of silent exhultation… but like the sexual act (or the emotional entanglements which ensue), heroin is bad for me. Both can play havoc on my mind and emotions long after the shooting of the smack or the consummation of the sexual act… yet despite the guilt, I continue (albeit sporadically) to indulge. So… is this the mark of an addictive personality? Perhaps.
But this, regardless, is the buzz that heroin can bring, this is the sense of floating peace which I crave from the off-white, powdery rock - Lady H, my drug of choice. So beautiful it is, yet so terribly fleeting; but even now, so curiously seductive. And the true “high”, so elusive - maybe one in fifty shots, for me, will result in this particular sort of dreamlike perfection. Nights like these, they remind me all too clearly why I seem unable (or just unwilling?) to give up for good that maddenly fickle mistress, the White Lady. And while it is true that chemical addiction is a battle I have fought (and lost) more than once in my nine or so years of using, nowadays I can keep it at bay by using the drug only on average once or twice a fortnight.
Once experienced, the “Perfect Hit” is one of those things (spoken about with awe, by many users) that we heroin users find a very difficult experience to forget. It remains something that we who use the drug, however irregularly, that we continue to search for. It is, truly, a search for the elusive, some would say the illusive - despite the law of diminishing returns, which would state in this case that we are chasing something we will never quite have again.
But on nights like this, I believe I have come close to that Holy Grail. Stoned enough for bliss, not stoned enough to nod out and miss all the good parts… and certainly not stoned enough to overdose and thereby “drop” (i.e., to stop breathing) - something I have only ever done once, thank goodness.
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