The Fix

I HAVE TRIED TO FIX MYSELF IN COUNTLESS WAYS; and I'm not just making tawdry puns about drug-injections. Recently I took to viewing videos keyworded "heroin" on youtube. Some of the best embeddable ones you'll see scattered about here. I think it's in the Khun Sa link I gave a couple of days ago, there's footage of Thai and European/Western ("farang") addicts at the famous Tham Krabok monastery near Chiang Mai where patients are given vomiting drinks and told how to restructure their lives. One among them told how he'd injected his savings then his car then a house. (I know someone who smoked nearly an entire house (as crack) and injected the rest (as heroin) in little more than a year...) This particular man said he spent every day using telling himself it was going to be the last.

Contrary to what you might assume (as a nonuser), once heroin's got you, when you're clean and basically tilting downwards towards withdrawal your only fixation's going to be getting getting getting your heroin. Once you've the luxurious swirl of opiates in veins and brains THEN thoughts turn to the terrible habit that's gripped you and how you really must do something (this or that, whatever the newest thing to do happens to be). But that's the luxury of being high and a vast step removed from truly feeling the realities of any situation.

A good illustration can be found in the Carlos and Dadinha vid. You needn't watch far. Just a couple of minutes into it you'll see her swaying on a mattress declaring "we've lost everything". Look at it and see how little she appears to care. That's heroin in a nutshell. A drug for those who wish not to care...

This is why heroin addicts find it so difficult to stop and stay stopped. Other drugs might be far more exciting and intense in their effects. There is nothing very exciting about heroin, even at the start. What it does best is kill pain, give confidence and knock off life's harsher edges. Heroin becomes a very mundane part of life ~ almost like having a cup of tea. The hits mark punctuation points in the day. The eventual effects are subtle, so subtle you might easily say living with them is a bore. The problem is, living without them is agony.

I don't know whether I really am ready to stop, even now. Still not sure.

Burma's Heroin Trade video

Here's the Wat Tham Krabok official site...

... here's the Wikipedia article that (strangely) suggests the Thai Govt suspect the place of being a centre of international narcotics distribution... well clickit and see...