Dedicated to my husband and the love of my life Nephalim, as well as my very good friends Heroinegirl and bi11i, as well as all the other junkylifers and others who’ve been into the belly of the beast and been shat out the other side, some of us innumerable times. May we one day find the strength to slay that monkey on our backs once and for all.)

I’ve been using heroin for nine years, on and off. I had a full-blown, serious, lifestyle-consuming, money-burning habit in the late 1990’s, but I have been walking the tightrope known as “chipping” for several years now. I used smack as others might use pot, or alcohol - for a buzz, an occasional escape from daily life.
All in all, I should have known better than this.
I should have known when to give using heroin a good old miss for a while … for instance, when I was running out of veins, when my easily-injectable “sweet spots” just didn’t work for me anymore. When my inner arms start to resemble part pincushion, part domestic violence scene, surely I should have known it was time to STOP.

Part of me, of course, did know. That little voice of caution, of course, hardly ever leaves me (although sometimes it grows fainter)…

You’re using too much, too often, and have been doing so for too long without a rest, that inner voice said. Three days using and then three days without (to avoid a habit) may have been someone else’s rule, sure. But going at it this hard for almost a week, after… HOW many weeks’ worth of pushing your luck? Come on, Peri. Something’s gotta give…

And so it was. I took my last hit, a small one, at about 9.30am on the sixth morning. I didn’t even feel it, but those few drops of heroin kept me healthy for a few hours. By late that afternoon, though, there was no denying it any longer. The impending nightfall felt unusually cold, I had the sniffles, and it felt like someone was rearranging all the bones in my legs… slowly… and painfully. The words of Mark Renton, character in Irvine Welsh’s novel (and the film) Trainspotting - “I’m no’ sick yet, but it’s in the post, that’s fir sure. The junky limbo.” Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts as we begin a slow descent into hell. We may experience some turbulence, and you would do well to expect a bumpy landing…

7.30am, seventh day.
Awake. No slow, gentle slide into consciousness this morning. Instead, I thud into consciousness with a bone-crunching snap…
Oh, FUCK. Someone get me OUT of this BODY! is my first thought, as the pain coursing through what feels like every single part of me. My mind instantly registers how sheerly and utterly awful I feel - my bones ache, my head is pounding, my skin is drenched with foul-smelling sweat, and my stomach is ready to leap straight out of my parched mouth.

There is no heroin in the house, and I have been through this whole loathsome cycle enough times to despise myself for even needing it. “Need” being the word here - simply requiring the drug, on this base level, to feel normal.

I don’t want to move, yet I am irrevocably awake now. No more sleep for me, despite the fact that I feel tired beyond endurance. I hurt too much for further sleep to be even a remote possibility.

My bones scrape against together in an unbearable cacophony of tremendous misery. The pain in my legs astounds me - for, no matter how many times you’ve gone through it before, every heroin withdrawal is different. Sometimes it’s the headaches and watery eyes, sometimes the nausea. One time, my blood pressure dropped to the point where I could barely stand up for days.
The author Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Every happy family is alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I believe the man had a point, and not just about families. Every withdrawal is a unique study in misery, and in my experience, they differ not only in duration, intensity, but in their special combination of symptoms.
The notable symptom in my case this time, it seems, is going to be bone-crunching agony. In no time at all, I feel as though I’ve aged eighty years and have an agonising case of osteoarthritis.

The fact that this is all self-inflicted, of course, makes the misery all the more singular. My nagging voice within is determined to make me suffer still further. You had to push things too far, didn’t you? It taunts. You stupid, stupid girl. Honestly, aren’t you old enough to know better?
You’re damn right I’m old enough. Right now, physically, I feel about one hundred and ten years old.

It could be worse. It could be a lot worse. I hate myself for letting it get this bad, however. I vowed never to be physically dependent on the drug ever again. So now, it’s time to ride this horse as hard as it’s ridden me, sweat through the withdrawals, and set my mind on the future… some point in the future… when I can wake up and not feel every fibre of my being screaming out to get on again…

Until then, what?

Music… television… and the internet. They will not soothe my ravaged body, but they can help my spirit. The spirit has to revive before true healing begins.

Nephalim, who has (thanks indirectly to junkylife, and more directly to a certain blogger) become infinitely more than just a name on a blogscreen to me, told me recently he can’t believe I don’t currently have a habit. But I don’t. No, I’m not on maintenance of any sort, I just use every once in a while (or more) and that’s it…

On reflection, I suppose I’m a little more unique than I thought. Is it self-control, lack of money, or just sheer laziness? A little of the first, a little more of the second and third, added to a tolerance which has dipped and soared over time… and the fact that I live in a city where the gear is (objectively speaking) atrocious.

Perhaps there is also the fact that I have seen the demon for what it is; I have known first-hand (for years on end) what the nightmare of addiction can do to a person, and it’s not an experience I care to repeat.

The thin white line of chipper vs addict… when does one fall over the edge and become the latter? For me, in almost nine years of dancing with the White Lady Heroin, it has been a game of changing rules. But there’s no denying when you wake up sick.

And the black hole that follows… the flat-out need versus self-loathing that becomes your life, the life of the addict, the cycle of scoring to avoid being sick… the hideous chasing of ones’ tail, if you would, just to attain some sort of equilibrium. The moment that you realise you’re too deep in it to just stop, and too tired to continue… until that next shot smooths out the edges of your ragged existence, and you find the strength to continue until the next – and the next – while your arms end up covered in needle marks, your teeth rot, and your health fails.

This is how I spent far too long. Getting high every once in a while turned into a nightmare maelstrom from which there seemed no escape.

So last week, when I realised I’d taken things a little too far lately, I gritted my teeth, filled my script of Xanax, and bit the bullet. No way was I going down THAT rabbit hole again. Using just to stave off the sickness, using just so as you’re well enough to eat - that’s no fun at all.

But withdrawals aren’t fun either, as any junky will tell you.

More tomorrow…

“The information you will learn here will not only help keep you safe, it will help keep your friends safe, and by extension, the wider community will benefit.” Edith, one of the facilitators of the course, told the assembled fifteen or so people. We ranged in age from teenagers to middle-aged, and even more widely in drug using preferences. Some had been using for years, some for months. One or two people didn’t use at all, but for their own reasons, wanted to help those who did.

My boyfriend, S., and I met at a state-run user group and needle exchange in the inner suburbs of Brisbane, in the mid nineteen-nineties. He and I were the beneficiaries of a free five-day “peer education” course which taught us the basics of needle exchange programs, peer education, user outreach services, resuscitation and what to do in the event of an overdose. It even covered vein care and better injection techniques. It was this information, as well as vigilance on our part and semi-regular health checkups, which I believe saved our lives. Well, it saved mine, anyway. I haven’t spoken to S. in over four years, but the last I heard, he was free of both HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C, the two major blood-borne diseases which are the bane of any junky’s life. At time of writing, I have tested consistently clear of both viruses.

Junkys are not known for being the cleanest or most organised of people, generally. More occasional injecting drug users, who come into contact with the more hardcore, regular, and generally infected population, therefore run all sorts of risks. Addiction, police sanctions and overdose are just a few of these risks – but blood-borne illnesses like Hepatitis C are in the long term, perhaps, a more sinister threat, due to their long-lasting effects.

Hepatitis C is a blood-borne viral condition which causes inflammation of the liver, leading to liver cirrhosis and other serious life-threatening problems in many people who have the disease. The most common way in which people get Hepatitis C in Australia is by sharing drug injecting equipment, but it can also be transmitted by other blood-to-blood contact. The most common mode of Hepatitis C transmission amongst intravenous drug users is sharing of injection equipment – not only needles and syringes but spoons, swabs, filters, tourniquets… anything to do with the injection process and therefore possibly able to transmit blood. Even tiny amounts of blood, invisible to the naked eye, can result in Hep C transmission from person to person.

Around sixty percent of injecting drug users in Australia are thought to have the Hepatitis C virus. The number of new cases each year increased by 45% between 1997 and 2001. Figures from 2001 state that prevalence of the disease amongst people reporting less than three years of injecting drug use was almost three in ten, therefore, naturally, the risk of infection increases with length of using time. I started injecting drugs in 1996, and almost every user I knew (apart from my boyfriend and I) was Hep C positive. Reading these statistics (the most recent available) recently, though, was truly alarming.
It seems I really was one of the lucky ones, to inject for as long as I did and still come out of it pathogen-free…

As a naïve young injector almost a decade ago, I knew a little about the risk of HIV/AIDS, but almost nothing about Hepatitis C. And yet it is this latter illness which is, even today, so prevalent amongst the intravenous drug using populations in Australia and elsewhere. Thanks to more relaxed laws relating to the supply of needles, as well as needle exchange programs introduced (and funded by governments) from the late 1980s onwards in Australian states, Australia today has one of the lowest rates of HIV/AIDS amongst IV drug users in the world. But by the mid-1990s, it had become evident that the strategies which were keeping injectors from contracting the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, were not working anywhere near as well for Hepatitis C.

“A new fit for every hit!” exhorted the posters seen at many needle exchanges. This and other slogans had drummed into users the importance of being careful with their injection equipment, using brand new syringes and needles wherever possible. And, it was true, as availability of needles had increased, the rate of HIV infection had decreased. But the same had not been anywhere near as true for Hepatitis C, which turned out to be a much hardier virus, able to survive outside the body for far longer periods than HIV, thus making it much more able to be transmitted from user to user.

The training S. and I received has indeed kept us safe. Information shared is knowledge gained, and a little knowledge is a lot better than none at all. The information about Hepatitis C which was given to us in our peer education course, helped S. and I develop routines and injection practices which, even when we became addicts ourselves, saved us from taking the sort of risks that would probably have led to us becoming infected with Hep C, and then infecting others. A little knowledge about how to inject safely was indeed, as Ingrid had said, not only beneficial to ourselves, but to others we injected with.

Sadly, a decade on from our training, simply far too few injecting drug users are aware enough of the risks of Hepatitis C, and the infection rate amongst the drug-using community continues to rise.
I know too many people younger than myself, with much less injecting time behind them, who are infected with Hepatitis C - for which there is currently neither vaccine nor cure -and who may indeed have their lives (and the lives of the people close to them, whether those people were ever injectors themselves) affected dreadfully in the future by the insidious nature of this illness. It’s hard not to feel saddened. It’s also one of the reasons I believe so passionately in the concepts and practice of harm reduction, peer education, and needle exchange programs.