Editor’s Note: This is the first in of several articles exploring the use of heroin among the young people of South County, and how it affects their lives.
Great Barrington — Of my angrier friends in middle school — and remaining angry throughout eighth grade until they tentatively raged their way into the beginnings of their freshmen years in high school only to suddenly disappear — a significant number, it seems to me, had become heroin addicts.
The more they drifted toward this mysterious life and the more distant they became from me, the less I found the need to think about them – or care about them. I could never find them anyways and they clearly did not seem to need me anymore. Indeed, they drifted away so slowly, inch by inch, moment by moment, so that I had learned they were no longer my friends before they were fully gone.
Now, maybe just like you, I only see them pale and tiredeyed and nervous on the edge of the sidewalks, in the alley ways and the corners of the parking lots, and so, just like you may, I put them in dark alley ways and parking lots of my brain. They do not define my town, I try to tell myself. But still I know my town has a hand in defining them, that this is their home.
If they do not have a part in defining my town, then they are simply meaningless, and they cannot simply be meaningless just because you and I tend to forget their suffering. They do have meaning. They do define our town. If they are suffering, then they cannot be meaningless, and surely they are suffering, so what do they mean to us? What do they say to and about “The Greatest Small Town in America?”
From conversations with users and people who have known users, it almost seems that heroin creates an alternative world. Therefore, it seems the decision to take heroin, and the instant vulnerability to addiction, in part, stems from a sort of distrust, disdain, and anger with what we know to be reality. Or maybe reality as one naturally knows it is incomplete, unfulfilling, and one’s circumstances continuously beat one down.
“I was mostly just curious,” said Fauve Blaska, a former user who sat down with me to talk about her experience with heroin.
“I’m an anxious person,” she said, “and I also get sick of things really easily.”
“What do you get sick of?” I asked.
“Everything, just life,” she said.
Blaska fingered “Trainspotting,” a 1996 film by Danny Boyle, as describing the rush and escape as being like “an orgasm multiplied by a thousand,” but described “the world of heroin” as “Hell on earth. That’s the only way I can describe it,” she said.
She pointed out the difficulty in trusting friends.
“You can’t be real friends with a user,” she explained. “You will be around people who steal, and you will steal, and it’s all for that first twenty seconds. Just twenty seconds.” Blaska was glad to help with these articles, and noted that it would be more difficult to talk to a current user, as current users are only concerned with their one thing, but she still agreed that the problem is one that should be talked about.
When asked how the problem could be solved, she simply shrugged and after a pause, said, “I don’t see it being solved. It’s too powerful,” and, indeed, reality is quite stressful.
It seems this “curiosity” that made Blaska want to use stems from a sort of repression that has no release. We live in an odd, fast-paced, enormously constructed reality, which can be viscerally confusing in and of itself, and tempting to escape. Heroin seems to engage a complete release from the world.
“When I was using I was gone,” said Blaska. “It was really hard to get in touch with me. I was never around. It makes you disappear.”
From what she said, it seems that a heroin high makes reality unimportant to you, and it makes you unimportant to reality. You are trapped with yourself and the drug. It lowers you into an escape and then thrusts you back into the world.
From the conversation with Blaska, it did not seem that the feeling of heroin was the only thing keeping her addicted. In Blaska’s case, it seems the attraction was in part a matter of how drastically different it was from anything else, especially being sober. It is not just the fact that it feels good; it is the fact that it feels different.
When I asked her what the best experience was she had with heroin, she struggled to think of an answer, and finally said, “I don’t know man. Sometimes you get a big stack of money and you can get a lot of shit, but other than that — I don’t know.”
When I asked what her worst experiences were, she said, “I don’t know man. I lost a friend. She overdosed. I went to prison.”
Blaska continues work to stay clean, and is confident that she has been successful in beginning her process.
Still, she does not have as much hope for the community as she might have for herself.
“I don’t think they should be busting young pot dealers when it comes to the drug problem. This stuff isn’t caused by those kids. There’s tons of it being imported, probably from other countries and people who can just put new small drug dealers in the community.”
Ten years ago this summer, 18 people were busted — mostly young people — on drug charges, mostly for possession of pot, as the result of an elaborate sting conducted by the Berkshire County Drug Task Force in the Taconic Parking lot in Great Barrington. Among them, 18-year-old Mitchell Lawrence who was allegedly maneuvred into a school zone by an undercover police officer where Lawrence sold “about one joint’s worth of marijuana,” according to news reports.
I was a little kid when Mitchell Lawrence got busted, and in the years I grew up I saw and knew and heard about more and more people getting addicted to dope. When I see the hollowed out eyes of my former friends, their pale limbs dangling over the sidewalk — their sorrow no longer innocent — I cannot help but be insulted by small town drug convictions like Mitchell Lawrence underwent. They tend to deflect us from a far more serious problem, and give the impression that something is being done. But we cannot dismiss the problem of heroin and the underlying, mysterious madness of the youth here. What do people need to escape from when they need to escape this much, this far?
I talked to a friend who has had family members who struggle with heroin.
“It’s not really talked about in the family,” he said. “My dad still never talked to me about it. The word heroin isn’t really mentioned in the house unless it’s under someone’s breath.”
His mother struggled with heroin throughout his childhood. She took a hit of pot off of someone’s bowl in a parking lot outside of bar, not knowing it was laced with heroin, and got immediately hooked. The secrecy of her habit sometimes seems to have made most clear the destruction involved in it.
One of my friend’s first encounters with heroin, it seemed, was long after his mother started using, when she called him at school to tell him she was going to jail. Even then, it was not made clear why she was going to jail to the kids. My friend said it had not been made clear to him, that the rest of his family told him she was an alcoholic, until just a year ago, as his mother tried to come closer and closer to a clean life, she opened up.
“I was too young to have a direct experience with it,” said my friend, but the indirect experiences are countless.
Once, he and his brother were in his bedroom when they were children and their mother came into the room, telling them that the police were at the door and she did not feel like talking to them, so she sent the kids to tell the officer that she was at the grocery store.
“I don’t know if it was heroin or other drugs, but I’m pretty sure she got arrested that night,” he said.
“What do you think it is that makes people take heroin, knowing the reputation and risks of the drug, aside from the addiction?” I asked him.
“So many things come into play,” he said. “Why does a 30-year-old mother do it? I don’t know. Confusion about the world, about themselves. Heroin is so powerful it drains you. It drains everything, relationships, everything, till you’re chasing your last nickel and dime.”
Therein seems to lie the power of the drug. If someone is already confused about the world and about themselves, as my friend put it, and they take a drug that forms for them an entirely new, simpler world to find contentment within, their mind will need — or the person will feel it needs — that drug all the time.
I’ve never done heroin or anything like it but I have struggled with depression. If you are a depressed or anxious person, you live under what feels like a dark blanket, and altered states of mind feel as though they lift that blanket for light and air.
A common question to ask a depressed person is, “What do you think about that makes you depressed?” To a depressed person, you may as well just ask: “What did you think about today?” Heroin seems to take the blanket completely off for the duration of the high, and then thicken its darkness when it throws the blanket back over. As my friend said, “confusion about the world and the self” seem to play a huge role in the giving of oneself over to the drug.
“My mom never really put us in any dangerous or sketchy situations, and did a really good job of hiding everything, but it led to arrests and it still affected us. I remember being confused all the time,” he said. The drug seems to almost entirely take the place of the person.
“I also think it’s only a specific class of people here, right?” he went on. “Most of the people I know who start doing it are poor, and a lot of them are poor kids. There’s not much around here for poor kids.”
My friend said he noticed about his stepbrother, also a user, that most of his friends are poor, and were before they started using. He said that he remembered taking random trips to Holyoke with his brother, mom, and mother’s boyfriend, to wait in the car, not knowing why. He later found out that they were stealing from pharmacies things like Asprin, or anything they could grab, running out, and taking the stolen goods to a bodega in Holyoke where they could sell everything for, “six to ten bucks, and that was enough to get high.”
My friend’s stepbrother started using because he wanted to buy Percoset but the dealer did not have it, and heroin was cheaper anyways, so he bought that instead.
“There seems to be something working for the economy in people being addicted to heroin,” said my friend, and pointed out that heroin keeps people coming back to the pharmaceutical industry, rehab, methadone clinics, and drug busts, and someone is profiting off all of these.
We continued to talk about his relationship to his mother. I ask him if his mother had ever overdosed, and he said, “I would say almost definitely. If you’re a user for that long you’re almost definitely going to overdose at some point.”
But he did not know for sure. We cannot be sure if she overdosed, but we can be sure that the drug seemed to ruin, if not stunt, the development of communication in the house. Later, my friend brought up again the fact that he and his father have still not been able to talk about it.
“Does your dad know that you know?” I asked.
There was a moment of silence and he said, “Yeah, I mean yeah, I guess. He’s tried to talk to me about it I’m pretty sure, but I don’t know. He has a hard time talking about things.”
We talked again about the secrecy of the habit, and the fact that he couldn’t know for sure if his mother had overdosed. It seems that once the drug enters your life, it will consume your life in some way, act itself out harmfully somehow. The drug is more powerful than other people, other things in your life, and provides a more immediate relief than any of those people or things. It is a complicated, messy and persistent problem in everyday life.
This brought us back to the question of overdosing. “After having all those feelings, maybe dying isn’t the scariest thing,” said my friend. He noted that his stepbrother had told him that he was at peace with dying, that he has more or less accepted it as part of the life of an addict.
