I am your
disease
I hate. I
destroy. I revel in your suffering. I wish you a slow and immensely
painful death.
Let me
introduce myself. I am the disease of addiction. I am cunning,
baffling and powerful. I am so patient, devious beyond your
comprehension. I have killed millions. I will never stop or relent.
I love to
ensnare you, to surprise you, to entrap your vulnerability and use it
against you.
I get great
pleasure from pretending to be your friend and lover. I have given
you pleasure and comfort, is this not so? Wasn't I always there when
you were lonely, afraid, confused, angry, bitter, broken and broken
again? When you wanted to die, didn't you call me? Wasn't I always
there?
I love to
make you hurt. I love to make you cry. Even more I love to make you
so numb you no longer hurt or cry. I am ecstatic when you can't feel
at all. This is my most glorious deception. I give you instant
gratification. All I take in return is your long term suffering. I
love to confuse and run riot through your pathetic emotions. I've
always been there for you.
When things
were OK in your life you invited me. You said you didn't deserve
these good things. I was the only one who agreed with you. Together
we were able to destroy all that was good and wholesome and well in
your life.
It's a great
cosmic joke. People don't take me seriously. They take heart
conditions, strokes, cancer, and even diabetes seriously. Fools that
they are, they don't even begin to comprehend that without my help so
many of these other ailments would not be possible. I am such a hated
and feared disease but even then I am denied, completely, absolutely
denied.
Graciously I
do not come uninvited. You choose to have me. Oh so many have chosen
to have me over reality, peace, serenity, health, love and life on
life's terms. More than you could ever hate me I hate your recovery.
I hate your Higher Power. I hate your twelve steps. These things
weaken me and prevent me from functioning in the manner to which I am
accustomed.
So as you
grow in your recovery, I must lie here quietly. You don't see me. But
I am growing bigger and stronger than ever. I progress with or
without you. I always did, I always will. When you barely only exist,
I live to the fullest. When you live to the fullest in recovery,
trusting your Higher Power and following those twelve steps, I only
exist.
BUT. I am
here. Growing, hating. And, until we meet again, I wish you continued
death and suffering. Jails, institutions and, always at the end, a
pitiful, ignoble, pathetic, weak, powerless and painful death. Deny
me, I dare you...
The following Article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald Today, under the heading:
Addicts know many fears, but the law is least among them
For five anguished, exhausting and educative years in the 1990s I, like thousands of ordinary Australians, was addicted to heroin. And I can honestly say that during that time the thought that heroin was illegal was very far from the top of my mind.
I was focused on protecting myself from violence, hoping to avoid overdose, battling overwhelming messages of shaming and hostility from society and simply getting through each day without collapsing. In this way, although I was never actually charged with using heroin, the criminal penalties attached to the drug would inevitably propel me further and further into a dark, unhappy, alienated and criminal world.
When society already hates and fears you, what is your interest in observing a law that seems so arbitrary (alcohol is legal) and unjust (addicts are the most vulnerable in the drug supply chain)? Everything has already been lost. What's a criminal conviction to someone whose body is screaming in pain and has nothing further to forfeit?
I'm not expecting pity for heroin addicts, though I believe sympathy, at least, is more useful than revulsion. What I propose is reconsideration of prejudicial legislation that is wrong, no matter that it is based in genuine concern for the wellbeing of society.
Criminalisation of drugs such as heroin simply does not make sense. Whether you view drug addiction as illness, affliction, vice, symptom or destiny, my experience was that I never intended to become a heroin addict. Legality wasn't my concern when I was one. And my suffering was truly punishment enough, if punishment were even warranted for what is basically a problem more akin to mental illness than criminal malice.
I never, ever, met a junkie scared straight by the law. ''You'll be next,'' a counsellor told me, pointing out a girl headed for prison. Even that dire warning couldn't permeate the slimy combination of shame, defiance and disbelief I was wrapped in. The drug owned me: it was that simple. All I could fight for was the dignity being steadily stripped by prejudice, poverty, desperation and illness.
Illegality did not deter me from heroin any more than it had prevented me and every well educated, employed and emotionally stable friend of mine from experimenting with other drugs. Soon I was not only a victim, a sufferer and a patient; I was also a fugitive and criminal.
Heroin is expensive, even in the 1990s when it was comparatively cheap. By the high point of addiction I needed several hundred dollars a day - every day. Black market economics grossly inflated the price. This ''prohibitive'' expense in turn pushed me first to petty pilfering, then illegal sex work on the street. There was simply no other way to finance my habit, nor could I defeat it.
I ended with a criminal record, not for heroin possession but for street soliciting. (This police record, incidentally, threatened my entry to the US several years later on a tour to speak about recovery and rehabilitation to drug users.) Others - usually males - turned to burglary, mugging and scams. Thus, one supposed criminality engendered real others.
Buying drugs on the street I risked rip-off, arrest and violence. The dealers I met were generally fellow users (or gambling addicts), as captive and hapless as I was. Unregulated supplies of potentially lethal drugs meant injecting unknown substances, abscesses of the veins, organ damage and dangerously fluctuating potencies. Being present at an overdose meant risking further criminal charges, from possession to manslaughter. Stricken people were left to die alone as their associates fled in fear of the law.
I shot up in lanes, on railway sidings, among rubbish and in cafe and bar toilets. Being a junkie doesn't mean you don't find rubbish smelly. Fearful of discovery, I fixed up hurriedly and therefore carelessly; there are public toilets in Melbourne that still fill me with a sense of humiliation and horror. If I had overdosed in a lonely, weed-grown lane, no one would have noticed for some time. Unconscious and vomiting in a public toilet cubicle, I would have traumatised an innocent discoverer.
Heroin addiction was a geography of exile. Becoming a pariah only made me seek the drug's consolation all the more.
Medical practitioners regarded me with degrees of sympathy or contempt. Magistrates sighed and made examples of me. Newspapers called for the extermination of my kind. My family wept; and terror grew in my heart by the year until it was all I knew. Hope, like heroin, was too expensive.
But none of this was soothed, or avoided, by the threat of criminal charges. No one, neither myself nor the community, was protected. Rather, it was shame, suffering, silence and stigma that flourished in the shadow of those punitive and futile laws.
Kate Holden is the author of In My Skin and The Romantic. Go to smh.com.au to join the WikiCurve debate on drug law reform.
For an interesting article published recently in Time Magazine about how sibling brain studies are shedding some light on the roots of addiction take a look here:
http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/03/siblings-brain-study-sheds-light-on-the-roots-of-addiction/
