Heroin 2014

The news channel devoted hours the other day to analysis (or what rubber-necking at an accident scene is now deemed as analysis) of the overdose death of forty-six year-old, academy award winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Given that entertainment news dominates our collective psyche (“Did you hear the latest on Justin Bieber?”) it didn’t surprise me that within minutes of his body being discovered, syringe still protruding from an arm vein, hand-wringing, pretty blond newscasters read dozens of tweets from equally distraught celebrities lamenting the loss.

            I don’t mean to sound callous but why does an actor deserve such mournful attention when our prisons, our cemeteries, are full of thousands of junkies: heroin, crystal meth, molly, crack? Why do we only care when it’s a morbidly obese, multiple failure at rehab celeb who happens to be in some movies we watch?

            I knew nothing about heroin use until I watched a young black man detox at the jail. As I’ve described in numerous blogs and short stories, I have never seen anyone sicker. I came away from watching that young man violently retch and lose bowel control realizing every pre-conceived notion I had about drug abuse was absolute bullshit.

            It isn’t about willpower; you can’t just “walk away.” Heroin, crystal meth, and the others invade your mind, poison your psyche, and enslave your body. You develop a junkie mentality. I see it here every day. It’s easy to spot, guys who will hustle for anything, sell anything, lie, cheat, gamble, steal, anything for a nasty “roll up” (a rolled cigarette) or a pill from the med unit. Guys literally sell their souls for spice (synthetic weed), let alone crack or heroin. The junkie life: dirty, disorganized, bad teeth, bad health, bad futures.

            Three bunks down from me is Cal. He’s twenty-two with a baby-face who doesn’t look old enough to shave. He’s a polite kid, comes from a family that raised him “the right way,” with “good old” middle class American values. He’s been in three years with little more than a year to go. And, he was strung out on heroin. That’s right, Cal was a junkie. See, drugs don’t know race, economic status, or your kid’s GPA. We make all these assumptions about drug use and they are almost always wrong.

            I live around guys in their twenties whose teeth are rotted out from crystal meth use. Most of them are redneck white kids looking “to get high.” Their arms are covered in tats to hide the scars where they used to pick apart their skin while strung out. I live around crack heads, black guys in their forties, fifties, and older who can’t remember their kids’ names but can still name the guys who’ll sell them dime rocks. Their brains are fried; they are incapable of retaining anything new. And, I live around needle junkies who have Hep C and worse, all a result of shooting up poison.

            That’s prison. Philip Seymour Hoffman had a name, and money, and fame. He didn’t go to prison. He sat in his apartment on the East Side and shot up and died. And people mourn him. No one mourns the millions living on the edge doing the same thing. They go to prison, not rehab. They get out and die and no one at CNN gives a shit.

            Heroin doesn’t care if you win an academy award. Neither should we. I’ve seen enough of the results of our nation’s drug war in here to know we don’t have a clue about any of this stuff. And the only time we seem to care is when some celebrity dies.