Heroin – 2014, Part 2

            A few weeks back I wrote a blog about the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, which was caused by a heroin overdose. And my blog editor – a woman whose opinion I value a great deal – let me know I sounded “pretty harsh.” And I was. I was frustrated that “the news” was making a huge deal out of Hoffman’s tragic death while each day thousands of other men and women OD, a fair number die, and little or no attention is paid to it.

            And I pointed out in the piece that I knew little about the drug subculture. In my sheltered prior life, there were no heroin, or crack, or crystal meth addicts. There was drinking and we all knew the stay-at-home moms with the anti-depressants, but that was it.

            Then I got arrested. I saw young kids – eighteen, nineteen year olds – with track marks up and down their arms and legs. I met thirty year-olds Hep C positive from needle sharing. I saw and smelled guys cooking down crack, dissolving crystal meth, snorting heroin – all this I experienced behind bars. And, I saw a young kid – a heroin junkie – detox.

            It made me realize I knew nothing about drug use. My preconceived notions were all garbage. No one uses – or for that matter drinks excessively – because they enjoy it or they’re happy. No, the scourge of all those chemical enhancers is you use them because you can’t face your life. And soon that crutch, that dulling sensation takes over and destroys you.

            Heroin is rampant on this compound. There’s a young kid, a few beds down from me, who uses at least once a week, maybe twice. Fifty dollars gets you a chapstick cap full of heroin. He snorts it, then drifts off for the next six hours or so. The crazy thing is, he’s been “randomly” urine tested. But, guys in here know how to flush their systems with gallons of water. Unless the test is very sensitive – which these aren’t – you can beat it.

            The young kid gets high – just like he did on the street (that’s what he’s in for). Then, he goes to a weekly NA meeting – part of his “treatment” plan.

            He’s not alone. There are dozens of guys getting high every day here – pills, coke, weed, and heroin. And it keeps coming in. Every few weeks they’ll be an OD scare. They threaten with lockdowns. But, they can’t stop the drugs from coming in; they can’t stop the guys from using.

            Harsh? Maybe I was a little caustic about Mr. Hoffman. But, why don’t we care so much about all the addicts who are out there? Why do we send them – the poor ones at least – to prison? And why can’t we see the true reasons behind drug use?

            I’ve talked to the young kid a couple of times and he just laughs. “I got this,” he’ll say. I somehow think Mr. Hoffman thought the same thing.

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.