It’s late afternoon in Brisbane; the humid air collects into sweat which rolls down my back as the grey clouds above threaten rain. I sit on the back porch, typing idly into my laptop, a plume of smoke from my half-smoked cigarette curling lazily into the heavy atmosphere. I am reading a few of my favourite blogs, and reflecting on the nature of the addiction we all share…

And suddenly, a refrain from an old sixties protest song the aging hippies I had as teachers taught us in primary school, runs through my mind.  

“When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?”

I think of the behaviour of my fellow junkies and I, and I have to wonder. Will we ever learn? Or are we doomed to forever be haunted by the memory of the opiates… the kiss of steel and the opiate rush which seem, by now, so much a part of who we are?

Yoshi asked me this the other day. He is the age now, that I was when I started using heroin. (Lesser opiates had been part of my life, on and off, since my teenage years. But once heroin got its hooks into me, it’s been a rare week I’ve been without - except during my year in the United States. Ten years already, and it shows no sign of easing up.)

“Will this longing ever go away, or is the sweet rush of that opiate pleasure burned into our soul for good?”

As I told him, I’m older but no wiser… well aware of the tens of thousands I’ve shot up my arm in my pursuit of a little peace, or perhaps just peace of mind? But no wiser as to why the allure still remains. Regardless, I should know better these days. 

Word is there’s a heroin drought all up and down the east coast - people getting ripped off, even the best of dealers reduced to selling stuff much sketchier than they’d ever push at another time. The gear is, in a word, shithouse. 

Those of us on maintenance therapy, or without a severe habit, are the lucky ones. But something in us still screams for the score, for the hit, for the few precious moments of bliss… even if we know the price is too high in the end.

The price is too high, to keep seeking the high. But do we learn? Not easily, it seems, and none too well. Why?

“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”