Voices in My Head
My Own Journey Along the Mainline to Addiction Hell
Opioid addiction and abuse know no boundaries. It touches the lives of all racial and ethnic groups, ages, gender, and every geographical corner of America. The following are statistics from the Center for Disease Control and an insightful story from National Public Radio last spring.
These introductory stories set the stage for a recollection of my battles with drug abuse in the late sixties. While I was able to conquer one evil, I soon learned that others lurked around the corner; whether it was another drug or alcohol. Sober more than seven years, I am pained by the reality of drug abuse across this country. While we hear much about how this epidemic has destroyed predominately white rural communities, other communities are also being affected but don’t receive the headlines.
From the Center for Disease Control (CDC)
Arlen Specter Headquarters and Emergency Operations Center, Atlanta, GA. (Photo Credit: James Gathany, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
“During 2015–2016, the age-adjusted death rates from drug overdose for the total population increased from 16.3 per 100,000 standard population to 19.8 (21.5%). The rate increased from 21.1 to 25.3 (19.9%) for non-Hispanic whites, from 12.2 to 17.1 (40.2%) for non-Hispanic blacks, and from 7.7 to 9.5 (23.4%) for Hispanics.”
QuickStats: Age-Adjusted Death Rates for Drug Overdose, by Race/Ethnicity — National Vital Statistics System, United States, 2015–2016. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2018;67:374. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6712a9
The CDC on Heroin Use
“The use of heroin has been increasing in recent years among men and women, most age groups, and all income levels. Some of the greatest increases have occurred in demographic groups with historically low rates of heroin use: women, the privately insured, and people with higher incomes.1 In 2016, nearly 948,000 people in the United States (12-years old or older) reported using heroin in the past year, which is an estimated rate of 0.4 per 100 persons. And in 2015, 81,326 emergency department visits occurred for unintentional, heroin-related poisonings in America, which is an estimated rate of almost 26 per 100,000 people.”
Read more about Drug Overdoses from the CDC HERE
National Public Radio: What Explains The Rising Overdose Rate Among Latinos?
Courtesy NPR.org
Opioid overdose deaths among Latinos are surging nationwide. People fall into it for as many reasons as there are addicts including my own past story.
“Opioid overdose deaths among Latinos are surging nationwide as well. While the overall death toll is still higher for whites, it’s increasing faster for Latinos and blacks, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Latino fatalities increased 52.5 percent between 2014 and 2016 as compared to 45.8 percent for whites. (Statisticians say counts for Hispanics are typically underestimated by 3 to 5 percent.) The most substantial hike was among blacks — 83.9 percent.”
Read the rest of the story at HERE.
My Own Journey Along the Mainline to Addiction Hell
I don’t remember his name. He’s been lost to my history book. His hands were smeared with too much pain, blood, and dirt. The smell of too many beers and cigarettes and pot and impending death in that stairwell in the South Bronx. 1968. It’s cold outside and inside. There’s no heat in this stairwell. I was nineteen years old. Someone had thrown a brown shopping bag out of their apartment, its content splattering a trail from their door to the steps below me.
“I just wanna skin pop. I don’t mainline,” I nervously said as the man with the lost name dug into a small black carrying case. He pulled out an eye dropper, the small needle with the red cap that was to protect you from being pricked. It’s a little funny now. Here I was getting ready to shove heroin (or what they claimed was heroin) into my body and I’m worried about my finger being pricked. Up until that moment, I had been snorting or popping (injecting) under my skin Smack, H, Chiba, Junk, Skag, Dope. It takes a little longer to catch the rush but I had been assured by the best dope street experts that I wouldn’t get hooked addicted strung out riding the white horse. No name wondered what was the point then. “Man, if you main, ya don’t have to use as much. Ya get high faster.” Main like into the main vein. Like direct to your heart. Your brain.
There’s a ritual. First, don’t worry about sterile. Ignore the dirt on the stairs, the old blood dripping down walls that haven’t been washed since the building began, the smell of old piss and dying garbage on the landing below you or the smell that you swear is “Man, did someone shit up here?” The man with the lost name had an old fifth bottle with water in it. “I cleaned the bottle man before I put water in it,” he assures me. I know he’s lying but I don’t care. He takes the rusting bottle cap off and sets it on those pissed on steps that have been here since before the building was born. If they could only talk, I know they would warn me. “Don’t take this ride on the main line home.” I’m starting to choke from the smell that’s floating up from below and above me and around me. There’s a small ball of cotton stuck to the inside of the cap like it’s permanently engraved there. “Gimme the bag,” no name practically begs me. I hand him the glassine envelope described in catalogs as “semi-transparent envelopes…ideal storage solution for stamp collectors, storage of negatives and plates from electron microscopes, and temporary storage of seeds. Also used in scrapbooking, crafts and wedding and party invitations.” Today, they store a five-dollar shot of heroin. Ideal for one person but the man with no name has the works (the tools for the injection) so we’ll be sharing. “Yeah, since we be sharing one bag, you gotta main or you ain’t gonna get high.” That convinced me. See how easy it is. I needed to get high. Otherwise, why be there in that cesspool stairwell if I wasn’t going to get high with my last five dollars until payday Friday.
Poppies
Into the bottle cap, he slowly shook the heroin. Careful that none fell outside the cap. Using the eye-dropper, he oh so carefully squeezed one, two, three drops of water. You don’t want to over-dilute it. Just enough for two shots when all you had was a five-dollar bag. The water he swears is clean (like at this point does it even matter?) slowly mixes with the off-white specks of heroin or at least the guy down the block in another garbage strewn hallway on the first floor of an abandoned building swears is heroin when he takes your five dollar bill and digs into a crumpled up paper bag that he had scooped out of a garbage can full of rotting smells, “Cops ain’t going in there,” and hands it to me. “Good shit,” he assured me. In dope world, everyone lies, cheats. It’s the bargain with the devil.
There’s a skill to prepare for that high that may or may not come because you’ve been beat with no heroin or it’s been too diluted with baby milk powder or rat poison and you’re going to die anyway so you don’t care. You cook it with a match underneath the cap until it all mixes together into a milky liquid. Practice makes perfect as man with no name wraps that belt around your upper arm looking for the main vein crying for the high that it knows must surely come and the muddy water sucks up through the thin needle from the bottle cap through that weeks old cotton ball up into the eyedropper back down through the needle that has invades your bulging vein while your blood percolates back up into the eye dropper and down you plunge and the rush of warmth and you know it’s all real and authentic imported from some foreign country smuggled across thousands of miles hidden in suitcase bottoms to apartments where naked women mix it with baby milk powder or worse into glassine bags into the hands of Paco down the block in the urine infected hallway into your hand into an overused rusting bottle cap with water you know ain’t clean into your main vein. This is not a trip home or into paradise. The man with the lost name will not save you. Only you can save yourself. Otherwise, you’re sailing into the long journey along the mainline to sure death cause this ain’t no fairy tale and you don’t live happily ever after.
