I HATE SUNDAYS. I never have any money. They feel dragged-out and boring; all I want to do is use.
While I'm on that topic let me state clearly: I still don't think I'm ready to stop. The best I can hope for is to do what the old age pensioners I know still using do: to keep it to a bare minimum.Once I was addicted to the heroin (and remember I was in my late 20s by the time it turned round and got me), I gravitated in general to people who were older than me. All of these had given up "grafting" (kiting (that is: cheque and card fraud) or bombing round shops "relieving" them of vast quantities of alcohol and other desirables... One of them, my now dead friend Lucky was dealing when I met her. I had phoned a massive Jamaican who had driven twice past me. So when I phoned him again he said "me friend comin' out for ya" and a tiny grey-haired woman appeared cooing "yoo-hoo!" That was Lucky and the beginning of a 10-year friendship. Though I was careful not to get too close. I noticed that over these years I was just about the ONLY person there at the beginning still there at the end. I don't know what it was: it certainly was nothing sexual, but she filled her flat with younger men who I suppose looked up to her. One actually called her "Ma" and she loved that. He died of a heart attack in her lift after running from a security guard. Of course the fact that he was high on crack didn't help save him...
Anyway the point I was making was, people who only told me crime "wasn't worth it" saved me from getting in far out of my depth.I don't know I'd ever have made a good enough criminal anyway. I'd always be thinking fingerprints, DNA, cameras, focusing on what could go wrong. I'd never be able to relax into it...
Re: the illustrations: top L is probably from a "safer injecting room" bottom L shows a Middle-Eastern man "chasing" his gear. Our gear in Europe comes as (smokable) middle-eastern heroin base and this is how you smoke it... Top R appears to be a pretty good batch of "B" (Afghan brown heroin base)... Bottom R: no it's not Christmas cake mixture, that would be "Mexican black tar", a product every bit as bad for injection as our "B" and similarly smokable...
Incidentally if you're wondering about heroin smoking: brown or white powdery or solid with a bitter, musty "opium" smell that melts into a transparent blob and runs along tinfoil: that is smokable heroin. Heroin hydrochloride smells of vinegar. This is more readily water-soluble (without citric acid or vit C) and not good to smoke... The exception to this is Mexican tar, which, so I'm told does smell of vinegar and yet ~due perhaps to its high content of opium residues ~ can still be smoked...
I'm posting this here in the name of harm-reduction, kids. Smoking equals no needles equals reduced threat of catching anything...
PS Following yesterday, here's the best link on that most mysterious drug, ketamine...
I don't know what else I was going to say here ~ but here's three videos of note:
SPARKY THE SWEARING PARROT
The full-blown Scottish accent's subtitled for those Americans who might be otherwise confounded...
THE GRAVE
THIS is my second-favourite Don McLean song, here montaged to WW1 footage... Very depressing... look at the state of all those trees ...
EVERYTIME ~ BRITNEY SUICIDE VERSION
I WONDER WHAT POSSESSED her to make a video marking her own death like this?... And several years before all that drugs-and-coot-head trauma...
Well giving me all this information is certainly putting me off ever trying heroin, not that I contemplated it, you know what I mean.
ReplyDeleteI keep hoping you will wake up one morning and find the will to give it up. :(
I really do too...
ReplyDeleteThe will to stop means more than repeatedly entertaining the thought of quitting. That might be enough to stop taking sugar in tea or something, but is nowhere near enough for heroin
Why o why i was ever stupid enough to start taking that shit really is beyond me...
We have an injecting room in Sydney. By far the safest way to do smack with medical help on hand and clean needles. We have a needle exchange too. You need a Sunday distraction then you won't dwell on it as much and might even get through Monday's.
ReplyDeleteYou can smoke tar, I wouldn't reccomend it but it's pretty common in Cali. Every time I had to do it, it was the last resort and it felt like such a waste. Extenuating circumstances!
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ReplyDeleteBAINO: I hope so
ReplyDeleteMELODY: Thanks for telling me that. Surely you must lose a lot? Maybe it's the gummy opium remnant makes it worthwhile.... Chasing our kind of brown is about half as strong as skinpopping.
We still get white gear you can smoke occasionally ~ a few years ago it used to be more commonplace; but my friend Pascal went crazy when he dropped China white on the foil ~ unknowingly ~ and the entire lot frazzled up on him!!
I've never smoked Heroin. I went from snorting pills, such as Oxycontin 80mgs, to shooting Hydromorphone 8mgs, to shooting Mexican Black Tar Heroin. If you miss when shooting the black tar, you almost for sure going to get an abscess. So finding a good vein, which is hard to do on me, even when I was skinny, and had never shot dope before, my veins are deep, and small. I had to go in my hand, and now all the veins in my hand are fucked, and I can't use them, so now I have to go in my wrist, which is painful, but worth it...if it weren't for the methadone, I would get high, and have no abscess's.
ReplyDeleteI was always told that smoking H is a huge wast of money.
Have you ever shot up morphine, you know how it gets all gooey, and its hard to get the liquid out, and you have to take one shot, and then boil up the goo again, and do that shot, and keep doing it until you have gotten all the Morphine out of it?
Well I have, and first of all i hate shoot Morphine, first and foremost, I hate that pins and needles feeling, it hurts and burns, and it makes my head throb. its almost like cotton fever, so I think I'm allergic to Morphine, but if take the pill orally I get high. It takes a bit longer to get high, but I don't get pins and needles, burning, head throbbing pain,
So I wonder, if you smash up a 200mg morphine pill...time released, and put water on it, and let it get to its gooey substance, could you smoke it, and get high off it?
I never tried it, because I didn't want to wast the Morphine pill, in case I got sick, and if I smoked and it didn't work, I'd be fucked.
Why can't I ask a question in a simple, shot manner? My questions are always long drawn out, pointless nonsense, and take forever to get to the actual question.
I'm sorry glendwood.
You did a good thing, keeping at least one person off the needle is a good thing. You may have saved a life with this post.
Well, I always thought heroin was what powder and I often wondered how it was injected. Now I know.
ReplyDeleteAs for that budgie...goodness me. Obviously he gets it from his owner...
PUSS IN BOOTS: in Australia, so I hear the heroin was traditionally such high-grade "China white" you just stirred it cold into water, filtered through something as thin as the corner of an alcohol swab and that's that... with "brown" you add about half as much vitamin C, about half to 2/3 of a 1ml syringe of water and cook by bringing briefly to the boil under a cig lighter. The result will be usually a deep brown liquid which you filter through a cotton-bud end or a cut off half-cm cigarette filter halved again... it's not of course "injection quality" so the acid burns veins and prickles a lot if you skinpopped it or missed...
ReplyDeleteBUDGIE?? Come on it would be a bloody huge budgerigar!!... that's a parrot!... (African grey? surely ?? come on you're the Aussie the parrot experts. You have them flying abour your back gardens. OK not "African" ones but y'know what I mean...
ANNA GRACE: I'm thankful for nice long comments bc for 1 thing at least I'm not the only one leaving them...
ReplyDeletethat pins and needles we get from "morphiney gear"... it's a sign of a good hit on "B" when you get that. i had it this morning... all across my forehead and temples though it dan strike anywhere... backs of my ears... my back...
1st time I injected myself IV I bought a good £5 worth of white rock heroin. this guy had bought a "sixteenth" (of an ounce) so he did me a good deal as he got beer & cig money/etc back from me I thought "this is too small to skinpop" (as I used to do at the time) so with pounding heart I held still and pushed it into the crook of my arm... bingo! it blood rushed in as I pulled back... I pushed in and the felt like I was running through stinging nettles naked ~ a feeling of course that fades within 2 mins and the heroin cushions it out...
those "Dilaudid" and morphine 200mg pills don't go around the junkie scene seemingly anything like as much here as they do in America. When we want "opes" we buy v readily available heroin.
The 2 alternatives were "DFs" (dihydrocodeine) that nobody bothered shooting up bc it was 30mg per pill and you need 4 every 4 hours typically they say each pill is equiv 4mg methadone... or methadone itself as a 1mg/1ml green linctus NOT worth injecting in that weak a solution though of course it holds you nicely round the clock
I was wondering about smoking "tar" I'm not a chemist but our heroin NEVER smells of vinegar ~ which is supposed to be a sign it's heroin salts not base. Being as we nearly always get base here we're used to its properties: these being as described yesterday, it rolls down foil and you inhale vapours.
This is about 50% as strong as skinpopping and so well worth doing. Lots of people never get beyond smoking it.
You can also smoke off a crack bottle not with ashes but with squiggly washing-up gauze on top. THIS I think really is weak and for people who cannot even coordinate hand-eye to "run" gear along foil. I've never except ONCE seen anybody look really intoxicated from smoking this way...
I would suspect, from what I hear, that "black tar" smokers are getting less off it than we get off brown which is MEANT to be smoked ~ that's why it's washed 3 times rather than 4 (hence the name "number 4" China white) which is straight injection quality gear...
I don't think you could smoke a morphine pill...
If you click my sidebar (top) you'll get the info I base my current knowledge on... but at the beginning of heroin manufacture you get a product called "brown morphine base" which you CAN smoke... medicinal morphine is sulphate or sulfate this is water soluble and if the normal rule applies base=smokable, salts = injectable and not good for smoking
I did - I thought it was Christmas pudding!
ReplyDeleteDid I tell you - i don't think I did about a man in Zac's? He was trying to get into rehab but he said, 'I have no problem stopping. I can stop at any time. But then I start again. That's my problem.' Which seems to me to be saying he's not ready to give up because he hasn't recognised that he's not stopping when he thinks he is. If that makes any sense.
Thanks for the comment on my blog. I think it's great you are documenting your addiction, I just hope the people who need to read it find it.
ReplyDeleteGood luck :o)
PS as for t'moors, aye we go for a ramble bar t'at every now and again!
I hope that you get off the stuff. I guess that I just don't have the "addictive" personality. Thank God for that.
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