Junkie Love Read Online Free Page A

knowledge that if I didn’t get my arse in gear soon, then very quickly I’d be incapacitated and more or less incapable of hustling for the next fix.
    Long-term addicts develop an acute sensitivity to minute changes in the body’s metabolism: it’s a survival mechanism, I suppose, like a clock or a timer ticking away in your veins. As the level of artificially-induced endorphins begins to fall, all the alarm bells in your body go off at once and you begin to plot and scheme, to think of ways of obtaining more of this preciousand elusive drug. If your search is not successful, and real withdrawal begins, you will start to experience a most unpleasant feeling in the pit of your stomach, more accurately the bowels: first, of body-doubling cramps, then a sensation as if your insides are coming apart, as if everything in there has turned to mush and jelly. And this is pretty much the way it is. After days, weeks or, in some unhappy cases, months of constipation (this being a well-noted side effect of regular opiate consumption), nature finally has her way, and you are forced to endure a period of sustained and prolonged diarrhoea that strongly discourages you from straying from the close vicinity of a toilet for more than five minutes at a time. It’s as if the wondrous, golden liquid that you injected into one part of your body has corrupted everything within, not just physical but spiritual as well, turning all of it rotten, degenerate — as if the foul-smelling, brown liquid that comes chundering out of the other end is, in some sense, a metaphor for the state of body and mind you have gotten yourself into.
    In addition to this indignity, you will also be subject to regular hot and cold flushes of particularly pungent sweat, extremely offensive to the olfactory senses of anyone in the vicinity. The traces of this seem to permeate all clothing and bed-linen (usually soiled and unchanged for weeks at a time, in any case), and to float about your person in a miasmic, foul-smelling cloud of bodily and spiritual putrescence. You will also ache in every muscle and joint of your body, and will find it impossible to attain comfort in any one position that you happen to arrange your limbs into — a fact that will necessitate constant changes of posture, while inducing involuntary and spasmodic twitching motions of the arms and legs, as you try in vain to escape from an inescapable, all-encompassing sensation of non-localised pain. Almost as unpleasant will be the constant running of the nose and eyes, the over-stimulation of the mucus-producing glands, and the hacking, consumptivecough that most users develop during withdrawal. For as the cough mechanism of the diaphragm is given free rein — after being suppressed for so long by the daily intake of opiates — the immune system will fall prey to all kinds of bacteria and minor infections that the heroin had previously kept at bay. Of course, symptoms vary slightly from person to person, and one or more of them may be more, or less, pronounced depending on individual metabolism and physical characteristics. But whatever the case, most addicts would find it easy to agree that withdrawal is an extremely unpleasant experience, and one which is to be avoided at all costs, if at all possible.
    My own strategies for avoiding this state were many and varied. They ranged from the pawning or selling of all superfluous and not strictly necessary possessions — most, that is, of what in any normal household would be considered essential: furniture, pots and pans, records, books, clothes, musical instruments, wedding rings, electrical appliances, television and radio sets, stereo systems, works of sculpture and decorative art — through running and small-time dealing, up to street crime and petty theft. I needed about fifty pounds each day to keep high, more if possible, though twenty pounds would get me straight and ward off withdrawal symptoms for ten to twelve hours. Any less, though,