White Collar Dreaming

A meteorologist squeezes clouds into his veins as the evening drops like a curtain over Melbourne. A journalist makes a couple calls on her way home to line up a cap for the weekend while her boyfriend, a graphic designer, calls into the needle exchange to get clean syringes. An academic takes a break between chapters, while a nurse shoots up in her station wagon before driving home from an early morning shift. And the anesthetist, well the anesthetist does what he does best. Puts himself to sleep. These are the users you don’t hear about. The white collars that so far have not been defined in tabloids as criminal scum who would sell their own grandmas if they could or idolized in art-house films as romantic waifs. Yes, most of them admit, they self-medicate. But doesn’t everyone?

So let’s start from the beginning. You find a vein, usually on the inside of your elbow, though some seek hidden places like in their feet, penis, or even stretch out their neck for veins in the rearview mirror, but usually the needle goes into the arm and it’s contents travel up the vein like a slug from a gun and bang, a metallic taste appears in your mouth. It’s good. Some people will need $50 worth to get high, others will stick $200 up their arms before they even get a buzz. The difference is that ‘junkies’ will do whatever it costs to get that hit, and the others, the white collars, well they don’t like being ripped off. So they walk, because they can.

The old cliché ‘nothing to lose and nothing to hide’ is inversed for using professionals– they have everything to lose and lots to hide. Some of the users even blushed when they admitted their habit, despite being surrounded by the obvious trappings of success and acceptance. Letters run after their names, they have about ten different passwords to different accounts and, well, they have a job. But a pinprick a fortnight has the power to change all that.

Dean* is a senior lecturer at a top Melbourne university. He has been revived three times. “It feels like hands are trying to pull you out of this really heavy mud.” He was first revived on his parents’ front porch while his mum was inside watching the Australian Open. It was done very quietly with his mate running up ahead to beg the ambulance men to turn off the sirens and lights. One Fitzroy youth worker soon got used to performing CPR on kids who dropped off. “It’s a weird feeling, a couple of pumps to the chest and a few blows on the lip, and they’re up and walking around again. It doesn’t mean much to them,” he recalls.

The last time Dean was revived was twelve months ago. He came around with the help of Narcan to find his lounge room full of ambulance workers and his partner crying on the couch. “I was just going to have a hit before following her up to bed,” he recalls guiltily. “I hadn’t used in months, so I guess I used a bit too much for my tolerance levels.” In a sense, the odd user is more at risk than daily users. They may not have an understanding of what is on the street and how pure (or impure) their gear is.

The image most people get of overdosing is in the cold after-hours down a dark alley, in a stairwell or a KFC toilet cubicle. But many overdoses happen at home. A nurse revived her son three times in his own bedroom. The fourth time she wasn’t home and he died. A parents support group out in Greensborough, north east of Melbourne, is contemplating writing a book of black humor on the antics of their drug-addicted children. One woman recalls meeting her son coming down the driveway pushing the wheelie bin. It wasn’t garbage night and even if it was, he wouldn’t know it. She looked inside the wheelie bin and found the TV, video recorder and stereo.

But the laughter is sort of manic. The sadness that lies underneath it all is palpable. Colin, a young man living in Footscray, says his mother bursts into tears whenever he comes home on heroin. “She thinks I’m going crazy, because when I get high I sort of twitch, like this.” Colin flicks his head repeatedly in a damaged jerky way. “So now I only use a tiny bit. Just to get a buzz, not the nod.”

The nod. The nod is the best bit, users say, and the worst bit, bystanders say. “You’re dreaming. You know that feeling of coming in and out of sleep? It’s beautiful,” says Tang, a twenty-four-year-old woman. A mother from the support group says she videotaped her daughter on the nod. She was on the phone to a friend and kept nodding off into her bowl of cereal leaving milk kisses on her cheek. Afterwards she forced her daughter to watch the footage. “She stopped using after that,” said the mother. “It’s funny but sometimes we just can’t see ourselves.”

Injecting-drug users are one of the most stigmatized groups in Western society with many users unwilling to take part in research for fear of their drug use becoming public. This includes the employed, those in positions of social responsibility and others concerned to protect their public image. Which is why when we hear and read about heroin users, we see the token ‘junkies’ rolled out for another round in front of the media, when an estimated two thirds or more users are elsewhere. These visible users are the homeless, the youth, streetwalkers and those in treatment – people who have nothing to lose being unemployed and/or with a criminal record. Many surveys abide the practice of paying money for research participation, and therefore attracting only those who have none to begin with. The usual price is twenty to fifty dollars to complete a government-funded or academic survey for participants. Just enough for a hit, say some.

Dr James Rowe, from the Centre for Applied Social Research of RMIT University, recently completed a survey to just get a taste for how many functional users are out there. At a discreet needle exchange in Melbourne (being one of several health services under the one roof so people could walk in off the street for any number of reasons) he conducted 150 interviews with a sample of long-term clients. Rowe discovered that nearly a third owned a home or lived in private rental properties. The same number was also in paid employment, with one public servant earning $80,000 pa. More than a quarter of participants had gone on to tertiary education and five had post-graduate qualifications.

“This means zero-tolerance policies will only serve to criminalize and marginalize visible drug users while allowing those who do not fit this category - academics, police officers, journalists, public servants, students, chefs - to continue using drugs within the confines of their own homes free from fear of prosecution,” he says. And in a sense why not, Rowe continues, after all the latter are, for all intents and purposes, model citizens of our mainstream society. Tolerance policies have certainly changed in the past decade – police are no longer required at the scene of an overdose to arrest the dead user as soon as they come to. “This means people are actually sticking around and calling the ambulance when a friend OD’s, instead of running off,” says Chris Morley, a youth worker.

Sofia’s* instincts and good judgment are very important to her. She is a nurse in a busy public hospital and has been for ten years. But every few weeks or so, she goes to St Kilda and scores. She admits there was a time when she ‘overdid’ it. “But that was ages ago and I was young and lost sight of a few things.” Nowadays she enjoys the odd high with her boyfriend in their city apartment. “We stay in and watch television,” Sofia laughs at the “boring-ness” of the event. In a sense, the many users of heroin are exactly that. Invisible and very domesticated. They use in the comfort of their own home, one user saying he often takes the opportunity to clean his fish tank when he’s high. “It’s such a chore when you’re straight,” he said.

*

Meanwhile at street level, the city needle exchange decreased dramatically before and during the course of the recent 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.  Foot patrollers who hand out clean syringes on the streets reported a 77% drop on needle needs. So where did it all go? Did the police just do a damn good job of cleaning up the city, or is an exhalation of ice shifting its way like a glacier down the back alleys?

Crystal methamphetamine or ‘ice’ as it’s known, is described by its users as ‘the cream off the top of a speed bake’. That lower economic users are switching from the sedate heroin to the adrenaline-fuelled ice in the past few years is a circumstantial one. Many street users cannot base their drug of choice on the aesthetic properties of a substance - rather it comes down to budget, whereas Dean laughs when I ask if he is thinking of switching to ice because of the price wars on the street. “No way! It’s the opposite of heroin, why would I want to take that?” He says. But for the visible users ice is cheaper, purer and lasts longer.

Australia’s heroin market has definitely gotten quieter, but workers just say it has ‘finally gotten back to normal.’ In the mid-nineties there was a boom of users, a great big mushroom cloud of heroin exploded over the country. But by the end of the decade things got a little sour with the sellers becoming anonymous and younger kids getting mugged for their drugs. Dealers starting cutting their gear down till some people were buying only 8 per cent purity - if that at all and not the scrapings of an aspirin or chalk. Today caps have leapt from street price $25 to $100. A price only the likes of Dean and Sofia can budget for.

From dealers to users to health workers, everyone’s got a theory about the world’s heroin market and what’s happened to it. America has a cameo role in each theory. Some say that in the 70s the States had the opportunity to give money to Burmese freedom fighters but instead poured millions into the Burmese Government, which in turn went to the drug trade and helped strengthen the golden triangle, a place where donkeys laden with saddlebags full of sap travel rocky conical underpasses up mountains. Farmers lead the animals to dens that unfold into laboratories. Them and a thousand others have spent the season slitting gashes into the bulbs of poppies and smearing the thick sticky black sap into plastic bags. Then later, perhaps in a shipment of tinned water chestnuts heading for Australia, a tomb of heroin lies in the centre of a container.

Others say that now America has shifted its focus from the War on Drugs to the War on Terror, the Taliban’s efforts to wipe out all opium crops has since been overthrown and Afghanistan is back into the game. When the Taliban was in power, word in the media was that there was a heroin drought. Today Burma is in an actual drought.

Health workers and emergency wards are lamenting ice’s newfound popularity. “I never thought I’d say it – but bring back the good old days of heroin,” says one worker sadly. “Kids on ice don’t sleep for days on end and when they come down, they get seriously paranoid and violent. A lot more suicides happen on ice too.” One ice user, Yvonne, says you feel ‘singed’ after a week of ice. “You can’t sleep and your head just won’t shut up. Not even heroin can get it over with. I’ve only smoked ice four times and I got a cyst in my lungs from it,” Yvonne said. “It was no big deal though,” she adds in regards to the cyst, “You just swallow lots of salt water.”

And while people call heroin the classic capitalism - you don’t consume it, it consumes you – ultimately heroin is a minimalist’s drug, whereas ice signifies a somewhat violent return to society, even if it is only the outskirts. On ice you got to keep moving; be it between clubs or just speeding through the streets in somebody’s car. Heroin doesn’t need accessories, aside from a syringe, spoon, bottle of water and a cigarette filter (used between the spoon and syringe to draw out any impurities). In terms of merchandising – not much else is required, not even company. You score, you use. You just assume your position on the couch. Hell, you assume your position wherever you can get it. One addict pronounces to be so proficient he can score, use, and throw the fit away all in one city block and ten strides.

“A lot of workers burn out in the system and the kids have to keep retelling their stories to new health workers,” Morley says. And for some addicts, that means reliving the same traumas they are trying to hide under a blanket of heroin. According to Dr Rowe, without a real understanding of drug users in society, the reasons that lead the visible minority into kamikaze drug use will never be dealt with. “Functioning drug users show us is that drug dependence is often a consequence of lifestyles defined by disadvantage and abuse… and stereotypes about who uses drugs allows policy makers to avoid addressing the causes of drug addiction such as lack of housing, education and employment opportunities.”

In the substance abuse health industry, most workers’ say decriminalize heroin. Get rid of the black market. In Denmark, where heroin is legal, there is a notable decrease in users coming up through the ranks.  “Heroin addicts don’t become this mysterious absence in society. They stay alive and most of them look pretty shit in their fifties going into the local chemist for their hit. That puts kids off,” says Morley.

Programs for young addicts are more like maintenance projects. “We aim to keep them alive,” says Morley. “You learn to celebrate the small victories. Like making them smile. With half a dozen suicides in eight months and overdoses on top of that, you begin to understand that some will die.” Morley used to visit one addict who couldn’t leave his bed. “He had bottles of his own urine next to the mattress.” Another addict disappeared and was found dead in the tip. She had been murdered working in St Kilda’s red-light district. She was seventeen. Another kid overdosed when Morley was taking a well-deserved holiday. “I felt shit about that for a long time. If I had been there maybe he wouldn’t have died.”

Going ‘cold turkey’ (called that because during withdrawal, blood is pumped to the internal organs leaving the skin white and covered in goose bumps) is - although excruciating - not the hardest part. The hardest part, say addicts, is staying off it. “It’s like trying to wean yourself off your greatest love,” says Sarah, a 26-year old addict, who waits in the methadone queue at a Brunswick chemist. “The world is flat without it.”
It is lonely too. “No one sends you flowers in detox,” says another health worker. “Kids are often hassled to get jobs as soon as they come off heroin, and too often, because of their skill levels or criminal record, they find themselves working in factories alongside people who read the Herald-Sun, hate junkies, and are racist. They’re doing all the right things, superficially that is, and they feel lonelier than ever before.”

Up north, some people disappear offshore on prawn trawlers to have a break from heroin, but in the cities it’s difficult to get away. Taking methadone or naltrexone (a drug which blocks the effects of heroin sometimes resulting in a headache after hitting up) is the most common way addicts abstain from using heroin, while some also attend Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings. At NA, addicts are encouraged to do ‘ninety meetings in ninety days’ in the first few months of getting clean. However without much of a star system in Australia, it is hard to come by closed meetings or anonymous rehabilitation programs for the working professionals whose using has gotten out of control and don’t want to lose the only thing they got going for them, their job.

The Victorian Doctors Health Program is a confidential service for doctors with drug, psychiatric or alcohol problems that compromise health practice or medical registration. In the first three years of its establishment in 2000, 220 doctors, interns and medical students used the program’s services, either fronting up by themselves or being anonymously tipped off by a work colleague. While less than half of these doctors who had let themselves become patients had substance abuse problems (mainly alcohol, pethidine and heroin), the director of the program, Dr Jack Warhaft, has stated that in the same period of time some addictions have gone unnoticed or untreated, resulting in 3 deaths in the state industry.

White collar dreamers are good are passing through the office undetected. Their only apparent downfall is a not-so uncommon pattern of calling in sick on Mondays. If they overdose, work colleagues are bewildered. One museum curator recalls being told her supervisor was found dead in his car in the work car park. “We were told it was a heroin overdose, but it was so unbelievable, that I don’t think it ever sunk in for us. None of us knew.” 

But not all heroin use ends in death. For many it just ends the week, or the month. Some health workers believe it is the shame and stigma that surrounds heroin that often leads to death. The shame of hanging around when someone OD’s, sharing needles to avoid the scorn of a pharmacy, or for white collars, the fear of being recognized at a needle exchange. There is a saying that heroin addicts are the only people that can look down on you from the gutter. Some parents respond by saying they hope their children are still looking down on them from the heavens. It is a saying that mistakes complete submission for pride. It is also a saying that reveals just an inkling of curiosity about what is it about heroin that these people have discovered, the knowledge of which overrides everything else in their life.

When I ask Dean if he ever feels compelled to dispel the ‘junkie’ stereotype and out himself as a user, he wrings his hands. He’s thought about it a lot of times. But, without a job and his family, he just may well perpetuate the theory. “I think it is horrible that visible users take the rap - and it is the visible users that current laws are based on. Laws that lead the public to believe drugs will turn you into a hopeless, homeless, sex-working 'junkie' so we need to crush the fuckers and all associated with them,” he pauses. “The fact is, that heroin and most other drugs for that matter, can be found in places other than where people are putting their hands up. I mean don’t tell me that the Government really believes homeless street-urchins support a multi-million dollar industry in Australia?”

There is something else too. Like the lengthening of a shadow that signals the end of a sunny day, his face darkens. A tightening of the jaw suggests it’s not easy keeping it together, that not handing yourself over entirely to the dreaming is a daily drawing of strength. Perhaps if Dean starts to introduce himself as a heroin user, he just may come to believe it - above everything else. Above his being a father, a lover, a son, a teacher, a commuter and a voter.

In the western districts hospital three Buddhist monks enter wearing orange saris. A Youth Outreach worker greets them solemnly. They are here to turn off a boy’s life support. His veins coagulated shooting up sleep gels – a chemist-bought alternative to when good heroin is scarce– and his brain hemorrhaged. One addict I spoke to described being on heroin as “probably the feeling Buddhist monks get after twenty years of meditation.” I wonder if these monks agree.

*names have been changed