A neighbor of mine was a Heroin Addict for many years but I didn't know it at the time. He was dropped out of several of the best colleges in the country in his 20s even though he was smart and friendly. I didn't learn about his Addiction until he overdosed in the bathroom of his workplace and almost died. That fact spread through the neighborhood. He always wore long sleeves, even in the dog days of August, and I often thought he looked as though he had a bad night's sleep, but he held down a job -- working on computers -- and he was friendly to dogs and children. After the overdose he went to a famous treatment center, where he was cured, got addicted again, got cured, got addicted again and got cured. As far as I can tell he has been clean for several years. He's married and has two young children.
If this isn't a straightforward success story, it's probably as good as it gets for a Heroin addict. He says he has beaten the habit, and we can only hope that he has. What's striking about his Addiction is that it began when he attended an elite private high school in Manhattan. He wasn't alone. Many of his friends had the same problem. None of these sophisticated rebels born into affluent families thought they could get hooked. All of them did. Some triumphed over the addiction, others did not. Still others have long periods of being Mr. Clean only to succumb once more to the dirty habit. The young men believed they could take a lot of hits before they became trapped in addiction. No matter how intelligent they were, they were totally ignorant of the ravages of the drug. They accepted the Drug propaganda of their friends, equally privileged adolescents who were looking for ways to rebel against a bourgeois family.
These were not kids mired in poverty or the heartbreak of broken families. Alienation was an abstract concept. The "environment" didn't make them do it. I was thinking of my neighbor when Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the White House Drug czar, announced this month that "heroin is back." Federal statistics confirm the bad news. There are an estimated 600,000 Heroin users in the United States. Nobody seems to learn from history. "The new modes of Heroin abuse smoking and snorting -- give the illusion of safety but the same certainty of danger and death," says McCaffrey. "It's cheaper, more potent and more deadly than ever." How did this happen? "One of the most important factors in the recent Heroin epidemic -- which is not well-publicized," says the Drug Enforcement Agency, or DEA, "is the fact that international Drug traffickers have made a strategic marketing decision to push Heroin as an alternative to cocaine."
Between 1992 and 1997 Americans entering treatment centers for Heroin rose from 180,000 to 212,000, higher than cocaine. The biggest use is found in Northeastern and Western states. Heroin is "the high" of choice for users from the suburbs as well as the working class. Once Cocaine was exposed as a deadly drug, nothing like the safe recreational Drug we once were told it was, Heroin staged a comeback. The DEA keeps a fascinating exhibition at their offices near the Pentagon depicting how different drugs become chic or hip. It's not only a question of supply and demand, though it is that. It's also an issue of myth, law and fashion.
A specific glamour of Heroin rose with the jazz musicians in the 1940s. Charlie Parker's genius on the sax and his full-scale Addiction made him legendary. He hated being dependent on the drug, but that didn't persuade his followers, many men and women who were part of the jazz scene and overdosed. The brilliant blues singer Billie Holiday, "Lady Day," lost first her voice and then her life to drugs. When a judge asked her why she started with heroin, she replied: "Always looking for a thrill." William Burroughs, the beat novelist, was another perverse Heroin hero. He wrote about junkies and in fact was a junkie himself until one day he went cold turkey and kicked the habit. Heroin and Cocaine were popular drugs at the beginning of this century. Then President William Howard Taft called for a war on drugs and won it. "The original `war' on drugs was so successful that we have no collective memory of that era," writes Jill Jones in Hep-cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams.
Can we do it again? The enemy is stronger than before. Such a war requires a total effort, which we simply haven't made. We need something to terrify the young and a smarter way to catch the international traffickers from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. In 1997, 80,000 Americans used Heroin for the first time. The future of those people who are in the group of 1.0 to 1.1 percentages of children between 12 and 17 who tried it between 1996 and 1997 is miserable.
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