The Heroin Addict No One Imagined

Picture a heroin addict. Do you see a skinny, dirty scumbag covered in track marks that you avoid at all costs? Someone who immediately causes you to look down and hold tight onto your bag? Someone who will harass you for money until you give in- only to go and spend it on their high?
That’s what I saw. Until I met Mike. Sitting across from me in a trendy Brighton pub Mike looks just like many of my closest friends: a bright, young student with a love of music, films and the internet. And he is all that. Apart from the one thing that sets him apart from his peers: at aged 21 Mike’s a heroin addict.
“I understand where the junkie stereotype comes from” he says, “when people imagine a junkie they see the visible addicts, those you see begging on the streets, robbing from your local shop. You don’t see me. No one stops and thinks ‘oh look, there’s a respectable heroin user’. As in their minds there’s no such thing.”
But a respectable user he is. Currently enrolled on a methadone programme Mike isn’t out robbing old ladies to fund his habit. Before methadone, Mike was a driver for a heroin dealer, certainly illegal but by no means the worst crime he could have committed. Everyday Mike meets those in a worse position than him. Just after meeting me he meets a young woman who has been a prostitute since she was 13 - just to fund her habit.
In the three years he has been on heroin Mike has seen every type of addict. From those deep into a 30-year addiction to the hedonists just starting out, hoping they’ll be among those for whom addiction never takes hold.
And then there’s Mike, the addict you never imagined existed. His addiction, although consuming, hasn’t taken its toll. Still young and handsome Mike looks clean and healthy. He’s also extremely bright, funny and sharp throughout our whole meeting. I never once get the feeling that he’s itching to leave, dreaming of his next fix. To look at him you would be forgiven for thinking that Mike is a great advert for trying what is said to be the greatest drug on earth.
He disagrees: “If I had to give advice to someone who was thinking of trying it, I’d of course want to tell them not to. But heroin doesn’t really work like that, I know that when I was curious about trying it if anyone had told me not to I was so hell bent that I would have told them to screw it.
“There are people who can use and get away with it for a couple of years, not getting addicted. I was like that for months, but life is unpredictable and when it throws something at you and all you’ve got is smack, well you’re fucked for the next however many years. The thing I’d remind people about gear is ‘don’t get too cocky’.”
Mike first started heroin in Manchester. He cites curiosity as the initial reason for first trying it but now realises that unconsciously it was a form of self destruction: “I was always the rebellious kid in school and from a very young age when I was sneaking off for cigarettes, way before everyone else started experimenting, I just knew that drugs would be where I ended up.”
His first couple of months on heroin were “the best time of my life”,
“But what people don’t realise is that social side doesn’t last forever. After that it was like I was carrying a huge monkey on my back constantly harassing me for dope.
But this time it wasn’t as fun as it once was and we were all getting more and more selfish over the stuff.”
Since moving from Manchester the social side that was left of his heroin use has been abandoned completely. In his student halls there is no one who he can open up to about his habit: “can you imagine that? All my friends would go running” he laughs, “most of the people I am meeting only discovered drinking about a year ago, to them heroin is what they read in the papers: a dirty drug that you stay away from and if anyone you know starts using cut them out before they get you on it.”
Before meeting Mike many of my friends were worried for my safety, worried I’d come back robbed. Afterwards when I told them about our meeting and how much I enjoyed meeting Mike it is the small details that amaze them. They find it hard to believe that Mike has a mobile phone and an MP3 player- “must’ve been nicked” observed one of my friends- fooled by the media’s demonization of drug users. In actual fact Mike’s MP3 player is too old to have been stolen and his phone was a Christmas present, but these accusations are ones Mike has to face every day.
The public view him as a criminal so making new friends can be hard. Old friends aren’t an option to talk to about his habit either- he’s too scared he’ll lose them if he’s honest.
The fear of being shunned makes it impossible for Mike to discover the roots of his addiction.
“It really annoys me when the media make up all this bullshit about heroin. It doesn’t help anyone. All it does is demonize drug users and makes it harder for us to come off the stuff. Because of the media hype people can’t accept that a junkie may be a good person going through a rough time.
“Everyone thinks that heroin is this terrible drug and anyone who uses it is scum. They think they can try and fool us with methadone so people won’t see it for what it is: just another drug.”
The current methadone programme in his experience is “definitely not working. Almost everyone I know on the programme is using heroin on top. And it sucks cause they are all lying to their core drug workers about it, myself included: we can’t risk them knowing about the heroin as they’d cut our script.”
The methadone itself does very little to cure Mike’s cravings: “I am a heroin addict. I need heroin. Methadone isn’t going to stop me wanting it, all it does is take away the terror of where I’m going to get my next hit from. When I’m on it I don’t do anything illegal to get the cash for heroin.”
If the one benefit that methadone has is cutting back on crime many people believe it is the best thing for society; according to Mike, however, there is “no chance” methadone itself will ever allow him a stable life. Which means he shall probably go back to crime one day.
“When I first started I just had heroin when I had the cash, now I need it otherwise it’s all I think about. I can’t concentrate on my course, I can’t talk to my friends: all I can do is obsess about where my next hit is coming from. At the moment I’m alright for money with my loan and stuff but soon that’ll run out and there’s no way methadone will stop my cravings all together, I’ll have to get the money from somewhere. All morals go out the window when you’re jonesing for heroin.”
Morals are something which lay at the core of who Mike is: refusing to let me buy him a pint it’s clear that his integrity is important to him. He didn’t come to speak to me for payment, he just wants the world to sit up and listen to his views.
“The thing that annoys me about current policy is it is so black and white, it’s like if you’re ‘willing to come to us and tell us you’ll stop for good, we’ll put you on the methadone and support you but if you come to us and say I’m going to keep using, I just want to remain steady, constant in my use without having to turn to crime we’ll tell you to leave.’ But no one can be forced to give up. I know I’ll have to hit rock bottom before I’ll willingly quit.
“I know so much more about the effects of heroin, how methadone makes you feel than my core worker. But no one listens to me when I say that methadone is working for no one, that the only thing to do to get users in control of their habit is to give them heroin. But to them I’m just a stupid smackhead who wants to get his kicks for free. What they don’t get is now the pleasure I get from heroin is so minimal it’s pathetic, I enjoy my first cigarette of the morning more than I enjoy smack. I wish more people would listen to what addicts themselves are going through rather than some stupid minister who’s probably never even seen brown. But no one does and that’s why they don’t have any control over the situation.”
Heroin, to Mike, is now what insulin is to a diabetic. He needs it each day to keep going.
Diabetics, however, did not make a conscious decision that made them ill. Well aware that most people believe he deserves the mess he is in, Mike explains that the reason you go down that path isn’t simple:
“People forget that what you do to your body isn’t always down to you, stuff in your past, stuff happening in the present effects the way you do things. No one judges a self harmer, they recognise that they have deep down issues which make them act the way they do. People are willing to help those who self harm and trying heroin is the same sort of self destruction. But this time people aren’t willing to help, to them you’re a selfish person who has dug his own grave.”
Mike is a self harmer but has moved on from cutting himself to release the pain to self medicating heroin to erase traumatic events in his past. His family life was chaotic and has always influenced the life choices he has made along the way.
“My Dad was a big drinker and I’ve always been following in his footsteps. In a funny way I am almost grateful to the heroin for getting me off the drink, I am so much more in control with heroin than I ever was on alcohol.
“My Dad loved alcohol more than me so maybe when I first started to drink I was drinking to discover what was so great about it that stopped him from loving his son.
“I’m trying to look into the reason why I am an addict but it is impossible to evaluate your life or your choices when you are a 'street' addict. Your entire day is spent in the quest for money and drugs, there is no time to think about more important matters.”
Mike recalls vividly a day when his whole mind was consumed by his next hit: it’d had been over 24 hours since he’d last had heroin and after a sleepless night he headed into town to try and score. It was the first really cold day of winter and overnight yesterday’s rain had turned to ice. Slipping his way down Brighton’s quiet streets, shuddering and desperately trying not to be sick Mike searched for an old hippy he knew would be able to help him. Indeed the hippy could and took him under his wing like a lost toddler. His saviour was waiting on a huge delivery. Mike eagerly began the long wait for its arrival. It never came. So he carried on hunting all over town, desperately needing a cigarette but shaking too much to roll one and well aware that the first drag would cause him to vomit. Six hours later and finally Mike’s friend found them a bag. Rushing to the nearest high rise tower block, they began climbing their way to the top floor. It was a brilliantly sunny but icy cold winter day and they found the perfect spot beside a huge window overlooking the sun drenched city. Mike was far too cold and sick to inject himself so he just sat there looking over the golden city and sea, his bare arm outstretched. Suddenly rush, waves of relief. Pure and utter relief washing over him again and again. Growing warmer with each wave Mike really felt that it had all been worthwhile. Until he pegged it down the stairs and his feelings of longing for another hit began all over again.
Each day for Mike is different but the same, an endless desperate hunt to relieve him of his pain.
“Prescribing heroin to addicts is not about letting them gouch out all day, it's about giving them a large part of their lives back, and, often for the first time in years, giving them the time to start thinking about their lives again.”
Methadone does not give Mike the chance to confront the woes behind his addiction and begin living his life again. Instead it turns him back to his first love: alcohol.
“When I kick heroin for a couple of months and am just on methadone. At those times I drink so much more. But no one pays any attention to that, I reckon half the people I meet in the clinic are alcoholics but the clinic only care about getting you off heroin, they don’t care that everything is just a substitution for another addiction.”
Another love of Mike’s was the girlfriend he left behind at the beginning of his addiction.
“Once heroin entered my life my sex drive disappeared. I did love my girlfriend but I had a new love now. Essentially I was fucking my arm every day.”
This infidelity with his ‘other women’ was too much for Mike’s girlfriend to take and she walked out on him. A move which spurred Mike into the next realm of his addiction.
“I became a regular user after we split up, it was a conscious decision spurred on by the depression and anxiety I was feeling at the time. This is what I mean by heroin being fun when you don’t have anything to worry about but life is always going to have its ups and downs, and when I was on a downer I knew that heroin would temporarily make all that disappear.”
When asked if he was ready for a new girlfriend Mike politely informs me that yes, his sex drive is back and yes, he would like to meet someone but is also painfully aware that no women would come near him if they were aware of his secret- unless “they were covered in tattoos and piercings” he says with a wry smile.
“It’d be nice to have someone to talk to, be close with. The embrace that heroin offers me used to be enough but now I’m just lonely, embroiled in a bitter love affair with drugs. I hate to love them and love to hate them. I see no way out.”
After the interview Mike stays for another pint and we chat about our different courses, football teams and taste in music. By the time we have to leave I have almost forgotten that the boy sitting with me is a heroin addict.
Asked how he will spend the rest of his evening Mike’s response jolts me back to reality- “off to score” he says with a shrug. Regular student nights like watching the football in the pub or studying late in the library are all out of the question for Mike who, until he can exorcise his demons, will be spending his nights with the only true friend he has: heroin.