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Inside Heroin Addiction: Anonymous Journalist Writes About His Struggle With Drugs

MEDIA

February 1995

A recent edition of the Washington, DC City Paper carried a powerful story by an anonymous journalist about his struggle with heroin addiction ("Me and My Monkey," City Paper, Jan. 13, 1995, p. 16). The author eloquently describes his childhood, his introduction to drugs, his long and extensive experience using every manner of drugs, his thoughts on the nature of addiction, his attempts to stop using heroin, and his experience as a middle-class working professional addicted to drugs:

Billions upon billions of human beings throughout history agree -- getting high can be more fun than a barrel of monkeys. An unspoken, unspeakable truth ... Until the powers that be acknowledge this inconvenient fact, though, American drug education will never be other than a laughable waste of poster-board ...

What is heroin like? If I had a quarter (bag) for every time a non-addict friend asked me that, I'd ... well, I'd probably still be shooting dope. More than any other drug state, opiation may be the hardest to describe. Why do you think they're called hard drugs? ...

I have since gone AWOL in the drug war, of course. I choose no longer to use

 ... The party is over. The whole damned chemical convoy, it seems, has run off the neural highway, crashed into an abutment and burst into flames. Nothing left there even for even the most desperate wrecking crew to salvage . . .

Future generations can only gaze back on the cruel and self-defeating punitive prohibition that has so long characterized American drug policy with the same appalled embarrassment with which we today view the days of the Jim Crow apartheid. The absurd pettiness of the so-called war on drugs can be little short of astonishing. ... Make no mistake, this is a war on people. ... I've met scores of people much like me. Journalists. Doctors. Designers. Consultants. Bureaucrats. Executives. Republicans. I have sat in my dealer's kitchen and watched the evening rush of civil servants picking up their $50 bags of junk or chunks of rock.

This article is an excellent, compelling and authentic account of one slice of the contemporary drug experience.

[For this copy of the Washington City Paper, send $5 to Washington City Paper Back Issues, 2390 Champlain Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009. Indicate that you want the Jan. 13, 1995 issue that contains "Me and My Monkey."]