Coke, ecstasy and crystal meth may well be some of the most fashionable drugs available to the student media, but few can match the intensity of squeezing a syringe full of heroin into the soles of your feet.
As a regular user, I’m often asked “What does it feel like?” Provided I’m not smacked off my tits, I tell them it starts off feeling like fucking an angel only to wake up halfway through and realise you’ve been copulating with a rotting corpse. Known on the street as shit, dope and skag, the narcotic has certainly earned itself quite a reputation. Whatever you call the drug, there is no escaping its tremendous misrepresentation in the press. With front page spreads of bloated, dead teenagers lying in various bodily fluids it is no surprise the public opinion of opiates is so low.
Clearly far too few people have felt the hit one gets after loading up and injecting, the high quickly reassuring you that that chunk on your front teeth was there before you gave your dealer a blow job in order to get a few quid knocked off your share. Indeed heroin is certainly very sociable; cooking up a wrap can create new friendships, sharing needles can verily intertwine the flailing destinies of two young people. There is truth in the old saying ‘You don’t know someone until they’ve given you hepatitis’.
The actual high itself is a unique experience, the floor gives way, your feet no longer touch the ground, you are flying. All the synapses in your brain are firing at once, the euphoria, the bliss is all consuming, the niggling pain,
a blood clot, haemorrhaging, you ignore it all as the junk consumes your soul. Of course, like all drugs, the low comes next, a horrible, slow realisation as the truth dawns upon you, you’re going on the game to feed your habit. With blisters on your genitals, matted hair and yellow teeth, you may feel like a member of the UCL Social Forum Society, but fuck you’ll feel great. For ten minutes.
Heroin isn’t necessarily as harmful as the mainstream media would have us believe; if you factor out the risk of HIV, the possibility of overdosing, choking on your own vomit whilst on a high, increased chance of mental health problems and collapsing veins it’s actually no different to having a sly fag or drinking alcohol. Furthermore, the old myth that drug use damages developing nations is precisely that, a myth. By helping to fund the cartels holding these countries in a vicelike authoritarian grip, you’re helping someone teach those dirty natives how to be civilised. Perhaps if they too knew the joy of nose diving into a pile of pure coke, they wouldn’t spend so much time whining about the rainforest either.