New Lows

The last time I felt compelled to write about the new lows I had been reaching in terms of shameless drug use was just over a year ago. At the time, I had recently left a nicely paid job working in financial recruitment with sizable pay-off and a healthy cocaine habit. The free time and large bank balance lead to the cocaine use getting dangerously acute. Luckily, I ran out of money before blood-vessels in my nose. At this point I had moved up from scoring off a one-legged guy in Bethnal Green. I was seeing a wonderfully cheerful Jamaican man called Charlie (probably not his real name) for my party prescriptions. He sold excellent quality gear, and provided cheery Jamaican chat about his many girlfriends. I picked up wrap after wrap which he handed over with a gold-toothed grin. The particular low point last year involved me smoking crack behind a bin in Hackney. I used to make my own crack, more out of a geeky love of drug chemistry than any desire to sell my possessions (although that was a slight side effect). I was smoking it crouched behind a bin because I did not think that inhaling inside the club would result in me staying in there for any length of time. A few tokes of the lovely plastic-candy tasting smoke and I was high as kite for about 7 minutes before crashing downwards. Luckily, I still had enough powder cocaine to prevent me falling all the way down into an unmediated crack-comedown which is notoriously intense. In the throws of a particularly bad one, suicide can become a viable solution.

Maybe I’m writing about low points again because they often coincide with the death of summer and the winter blues checking in to my soul department. New lows do not happen much in summer. It must be to do with mindset because I am sure snorting pills off a bin last June should have counted. So this winter I have become a Heroin ‘chipper’. A chipper is someone who ‘chips’ their heroin use so that they do not become physically addicted and risk suffering from withdrawal. This can be achieved fairly simply by not doing it more than 2-3 days at a time without having a 2 day break. It is a simple rule: ‘2 days on and 2 days off’. The use of the word ‘on’ is apt when on heroin. It is the sort of drug you can do it all day and still go about your tasks without too great a decline in performance. It gives you a wonderfully warm, fuzzy shield about yourself: a ‘big smacky cuddle’ as Russell Brand has put it. But there is a downside (well, there are loads that have been well documented but this is one is more amusing than life-crushing) and that is ‘nodding out’. The ‘nod’ comes when you have taken just a little too much and you fall asleep quite instantly. One minute you are awake, the next thing you head drops and the lights go out. You go straight into REM sleep and start to dream immediately. Reality and dreams mingle, I often wake to find myself talking on a dream blackberry or ordering food whilst sat in my room. You can easily loose up to an hour of your life in this fashion. My new low this time was nodding out whilst eating a mouthful of fruit and nut chocolate. I awoke 20 minutes later wondering why the fuck I had 20 minute-old half-chewed chocolate in my mouth. My grandmother regarded me with what seemed like suspicious pity, my story of being ‘very tired’ was quite strained at that point as I sat with a stupefied grin in her living room watching X-Factor. ‘It’s not as good as Strictly Come Dancing’ she said. I swallowed my chocolate and agreed