I don't need heroin ever again

SOMETHING IS CHANGING. Changing in me. I have felt it all week, all last week, the week before as a strange mixture of increasing desperation. I am attracted to and yet bored by drugs of the opiate and sedative types (as far as I know, all the heroin I have used lately has contained strong sedatives to make up for the low purity. Even the "good gear" nowadays is far weaker than it was a few months ago. This is thanks to the Great British Heroin Drought we find outselves in the midst of.)

As I posted yesterday I have found myself drinking heavily enough to lose track of what I've been doing. My life feels more chaotic than ever before.

I met a dealer for a free sample of heroin and crack this evening. Now hear this for some poetic justice or whatever it's called. My feelings, right from the start were mixed. It was so cold and the dealer tried to just drop the drugs into my hand. This is a stupid thing to do with something weighing a fraction of a gram because of course I could not feel it. Dropped it. Spent about five minutes scrabbling on the street with people walking past wondering what on earth I was doing. The heroin I never found, but the crack I did. I walked home, turning over and over the idea of simply flushing it.

And guess what? What I'd brought back wasn't crack at all, but a pinky-white lump of quarz that just looked like crack. Broke in half like hard crack. Nobody was ripping me off, I paid nothing for these drugs I lost. But my point is it felt like an ending. Instead of going crazy, I didn't really care. I had enough heroin for 2 hits left over from the morning. Because the drug contains so much sedative, whenever I take it I fall straight to sleep. I still have some residues lying on the TV. In a sec I will cook them up, cool them down (because some idiot put a little bit of something that turns into tiny crystals as it cools, and if you don't let the solution cool fully before filtering it will block the syringe). There is incidentally another way of getting round this problem, but it's potentially dangerous. Some of the gear a couple of weeks ago had about a hundred times more of this weird stuff in it. Within two minutes what should have been a liquid shot had turned into murky clods.

I pick up my methadone usually within half an hour of the chemist opening and for once I'm looking forward to a day on the "green". The thought haunts me over and over, as the madness of my drinking and drugging comes back and back that I never have to do this ever again. I am so lucky having methadone. An instant escape route. Even if it's not the best escape. Even if I feel lousy on it. Even if other therapies were more widely available here (but they're not) ~ methadone is with me. And with methadone, I never have to return to the madness of heroin. Ever again.

Illustrated: British green "methadone mixture" 1mg/1ml; this type of brown powder I fully intend to go on using till I die ~ cocoa powder