Recreational chemistry

Last friday we had a rather interesting series of lectures on drug addiction by Angela McAdam, probably the most engaging lecturer in the university's department of pharmacy. Having gone to art-school and moonlighted as a goth/punk in the dispensary, she is proof that you can be a pharmacist and not be boring. Perhaps a little like Albert Hoffman, but without the incendiary hallucinogen discovery to her name.

Firstly, to prove a point, an assessment of the risk-taking potential of the classmates was conducted via individual questionnares. I scored 7, which means I must have been an accountant in a previous life. It was found, rather unsurprisingly, that the results of the class in general, instead of being normally distributed, were skewed somewhat towards the conservative end. Mind you, some of the questions were a bit silly:

Do you often arrive for a train at the last minute? (Yes, because disorganisation is genetically encoded into my DNA)
Do you wear a seatbelt? (Yes. Have you seen the end of the film Very Bad Things?)
Do you often go out of the house leaving it unlocked? (Yes, I'd like to hang onto the precious few things of value I have)
Do you often drive fast? ('I can't drive' wasn't given as an reply option here, so I don't know...)

Then we were given a glossary of all the different street names for all the different drugs and their paraphernalia:

'Bombita' - A mixture of cocaine and heroin (another name for speedball, in other words)
'Big Chief' - Mescaline (never hear of that nickname before)
'Uncle' - Federal agents (ditto)
'Busted' - Arrested on a drug-related charge (never would have guessed)
'Score' - To locate and purchase a quantity of drugs (Oh please)

It went on. And on.

Then we were given information on 'safe injecting', which provided the foundation from which we were supposed to advise users of a needle exchange programme. That particular part of the class was rather bizarre, giving us detailed step-by-step procedures on how to inject intravenous narcotics, along with some rather eyebrow-raising facts: Ascorbic acid is a better solvent for heroin than citric acid, as the latter burns your veins and leads to problems at the injection site. Also, did you know that the penis can be used as an injection site? I'll bet you could have done without that picture. For anyone interested in trying it, a masterclass in use was practically the order of the day.

Finally, a methadone pharmacist came in and told us some more about withdrawal management and working in addiction clinics. He was interesting enough, though he didn't hold out much hope for complete and utter recovery from heroin, being of the opinion that it was better to get people onto methadone and maintain them on that for the long-term. Both another classmate and I told him that we didn't consider that a recovery by our standards, as methadone is more addictive than heroin in some ways. He had a tendency to shrug it off, saying that people generally don't stay off heroin in general for very long, and seemed to have a rather Daily Mail-esque view of drug dealers: 'They're businessmen. Even if you try and give up, they'll come after you and try and get you hooked again. And anyway, all your normal friends will be gone and you'll just have other heroin users left'.

I asked Angela about this during an intermission. It seemed that all users (we can't say addicts any more, apparently) were depicted as occupying one of two opposite poles: Those who had tried it once, and at the other end, those who were so addicted, the focus at the centre of their miserable and wretched lives was the acquisition of the next fix. I asked her if there was such a thing as an intermittent user, whose life continued as it was before they had encountered it. She said there most likely was, but there were too many deaths from it for the popular media to allow such a portrayal, or for suburbia to accept it.

It reminded me of the film Drugstore Cowboy, which had a cameo from William Burroughs in it, playing an heroin user who was also a defrocked priest. At one point he waxed (I'm paraphrasing, because I can't find the bloody screenplay on the internet) about how the idea of people being long term users and not meeting with an ignominous end was anathema to some idiots, which goes back to what I was saying earlier. Having said that, all the characters in that film were living in a squat with no money, and were faking epileptic fits inside in pharmacies to lure the manager out from behind the counter so they could plunder the controlled-drugs cupboard. Living? Maybe, but not like that of Riley.

All in all, it leads me to wonder just how addictive something like heroin really is. Is the depravity to which some addicts sink related to the intensity of the withdrawal experience, or because they tended towards risky behaviour all their lives?

We're having workshop on Friday coming, where we get to meet ex-users. It should be interesting. I'll have more than a few questions.