DOSE:			Heroin
			Methadone

BODY WEIGHT:

76 kg

I'm a 20 year old man (boy), from just outside Liverpool (UK).
First, a bit of background. I've always been interested in altered states of consciousness, and as such, made it my teenage hobby to track down new, interesting highs. Starting with booze, then cannabis in my early teens, until by the age of 19 I'd got through pretty much all of the available illegal and legal highs out there, and, therefore, stumbled across the opiates, (and I do mean stumbled- a friend of mine got in the wrong car when he was intending to pick up some skunk, and instead ended up meeting the first of many crack and heroin dealers).

I was at University in Manchester when I first tried heroin, and, at first, I really didn’t see what all the fuss was about……yeah this feels nice (even when it makes you vomit), but you’d have to be an idiot to do it everyday. And, indeed, I didn’t do it everyday. For nearly a year I was quite content to buy the occasional bag, and, when my girlfriend wasn’t about, have a lovely day, chain smoking, lying in bed, listening to music, and drinking beer. Heroin was now very readily available, as one of my best friends at university had started using daily, pretty much from the first time it became available.

First year at uni ended, and my girlfriend, who by this time I had grown pretty f**king attached to decided to change university’s in favour of London life, (she was from a happy sunny Southern beach town to which rainy, deprived, Northern Manchester was just too grim). We split up at the end of that summer, and next term I moved into a house with 3 close friends, one of whom was the aforementioned smackhead. For the first few months, I pretty much held it together, yeah I was depressed, but that’s natural sometimes.

Then, after a several month break, I rediscovered heroin. That drug which had been so easy to turn my back on just last year, was now fast becoming ALL I could think about.
I started off just buying a £5 bag, and being able to make it last 2 bliss-filled carefree days.
-Fuck uni, fuck my ex, fuck my *rubbish* parents, fuck everything-
I’ve got gear, and sound friends, what more do I need?

£5 a day became £10 a day, £10 a day became £15 a day, £15 a day became £20 a day, and hey, I may as well push it up to £25 a day, ‘cos then I ‘save’ a fiver! By this point I wasn’t even getting high…..I was merely preventing myself from going into withdrawals. Any trip away from home had to be meticulously planned, and more often than not ended up with me getting sick anyway. I could no longer escape into a better world when I got high. For a while I was just doing my fix, along with a pretty stupid amount of Jack Daniels, then lying/crying until I’d got enough in me to knock me out for a few hours.
Wake up; repeat.

Of course, there’s only so long an unemployed ex-university student (I’d dropped out to pursue my habit), can go on spending £110-160 a week. I was always skint, food didn’t matter, clothes didn’t matter…..just gear, (and cigs and whiskey when I could).
To help finance what was now my life, I did stints of minimum wage work at various places, and started driving/dealing for one of my own dealers (now in prison).
‘Whiskey or Brandy?’

I was, of course, paid in heroin, not cash.

Home life was getting pretty shitty by this point. Out of the 4 people in the house, only one was not a heroin addict, and one guy was also now using crack everyday.

One rock of crack (about 5 minutes of fun), costs £20. Some days he’d buy 3, 4, 5.

Unsurprisingly, he’d started stealing from everyone else in the house to try and keep this going.

The end of our tenancy was approaching, this was getting ridiculous, I wanted out! After a fair bit of hassle I managed to get onto a methadone reduction program, and as I write this I’m down to 13mg/ml. I still struggle not to use (being in a reduction program barely keeps me from withdrawing), and spend a lot of my time in mild withdrawal anyway because I’ve used. But overall I am reducing, and I think I will make it, this September I’m starting at a different uni, meeting different people…..a clean sheet. I feel so lucky to have that opportunity. I honestly do think that if I didn’t, I’d be fucked, I would have switched to shooting full-time, purely out of economical reasons (Not good).

In conclusion; it’s pretty easy to use heroin recreationally when your life’s going ok, when you as a person are happy. But if you’re having a hard time, it becomes a different story. Saying no to a £5 bag of happiness when you’re feeling miserable is definitely not easy. Life, by definition, is comprised of highs and lows, if you must try it, choose your time carefully.

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 73135
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 1, 2016	Views: 7,223
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Heroin (27), Methadone (166) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Addiction & Habituation (10), Not Applicable (38)