My Drug Story: Part 1: Genesis

BECAUSE A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE ASKED this and because it's a complex tale to tell (with an extended flirtation in the beginning spanning several years until I ever became familiar enough with it ever to feel casual enough around heroin to become a daily user ... I have a lot of memories to sort through in my head, a lot of remeniscences I'd actually really rather forget. And a lot of explaining to do: to myself, really, not to you. but it's all a tangle and prising the bundled-up lot of it undone and laying it out in chronologial order let alone summoning the sense to explain half of it is going to take some doing. And though I may find myself doing this; I'm rather loathe to post in two or more parts (stop press: I'm going to have to...) unless so doing definitely makes sense ... (stop press: it does ...)

So please bear with me as I dig (it's a complicated history with all manner of stop-starts in the beginning) dig deep shovel my muck out and try to make at least some sense out of how the squarest boy in my class at school could wind up a decade later as an injecting heroin addict. Whilst the others are settled down, married homeowners with kids, careers and divorces under their belts: all the normal stuff. I must pause and ask the question: How did this happen to me~??

Actually (and think of how bizarre is this!?) I was an inpatient in a mental hospital when an item came on the evening news about drugs programmes in women's prisons. And who should they feature? But the same little girl (a grown woman now, of course) ~ hair dyed but definitely the same person and looking good considering ... who I used to walk to primary school with for a time ... Here she was, in prison for a three-year stretch. Why? Because of the same stuff that had pretty much put me in hospital: heroin. Just like me she was a junkie. They say at NA that addiction's an illness with a chronic course whose ends are always the same: jails, institutions and death... Death, the last of these, has taken too many people I've known. Jail I've avoided by stubbornly refusing to get involved in dodgy schemes. So it was the "institutions" that got me ... Living with a mad woman I'd met on the street it didn't take too long till I went crazy myself ...

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GENESIS. HOW IT ALL BEGAN:
I FIRST HEARD OF "DRUGS" aged about 13. Leafind through a 1960s medical text I came across a write-up of the substances available at the time: " ... LSD, amphetamines, barbiturates, cocaine ... heroin ... " I don't remember reading about the dreaded "pot". But it must have been there. It was never around me and so never an issue.

In my teens drugs were taken by scruffy, rough people who I had nothing to do with. And the drugs of choice (this was 1980s rural Wales) seemed to be cannabis (back then ~ mosty hash I'd guess) and magic mushrooms. These grew in profusion in the Welsh countryside and hit the local "cat pu tree" newspapers when police raided scruffy hippies' caravans, pulling out hundred of the dried little "liberty caps" into daylight ...

Aparently the local cows and sheep graze these, standing wide-eyed at their water troughs and watching faeries dancing on top as the world goes paisley-patterned by (or whatever it is tripping livestock see ...) They get very territorial voer their mushroom patches and will aggressively shoo away hapless humans who come to pick their stashes ...

So anyway I took no drugs at all at school. Between tehn and university my one experience of drugs was watching some Dutch guitar-strumming musicians passing a herbal ciggie to and fro in France. I suppose I must have known what was in it, but cannabis never held any appeal to me. Unlike most people, I suppose, the idea that a drug was "weak" made it less appealing. If I was going to try anything, I wanted something strong!

When I went off to university everything changed when a girl form my course, who looked like Daryl Hannah, asked if I'd ever tried ecstasy. Just looking at me the answer was so obviousy "no" but she invited me to a party that weekend nonetheless.

A couple of days beforehand we made an appointment for me to try a spliff. I duly turned up armed with notebook and pen (such a student! I don't know why we didn't set up a reel-to-reel tape recording as well to really immortalize the experience! Seriously!!)

Cannabis, it transpired, was just a cigarette that made me dizzy. To try proper drugs, I'd have to wait till that weekend ...

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And here endeth part one. Seriously: remembering ... You don't know how tiring this is!!

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to be continued ...