SMACK IN THE MIDDLE CLASSES

NOT ALL addicts are street kids doing rorts to score. Roberta, 39, used for
15 years and never thieved, collapsed in a laneway, or lingered on the
corner of Bourke and Russell. She is a well-spoken former private schoolgirl
who, like tens of thousands of other middle-age professionals, hit up at
home with heroin bought to her door by a dealer she knew. Her earning
capacity and family have shielded her from most of the horrors associated
with the drug. Tall and slim with clear skin and light brown hair, Roberta
has, more or less, managed her habit. In some ways it is an armchair
addiction that defies the smack stereotype. As she says, the hysteria about
heroin has hidden its use among the well-to-do. Users she knows include tax
and social security managers, even, she says, a queen's counsel.

No one knows how many middle-class mainliners exist. But in 1997 a group of
clinicians, researchers, police and bureaucrats, estimated that Australia
had 175,000 occasional, injecting drug users. Addiction may be anchored
among the disadvantaged, but using has penetrated the professions. A
prominent psychologist who this week talked of ``covering for a junkie''
colleague was describing a not-uncommon occurrence.

Roberta, for instance, was able to work and do drugs without arousing the
suspicion of her employers or friends. Partly, it was cultural. She came
from an chic university milieu where heroin was ``cool''. Her hero, if she
had one, was American musician and smack user Iggy Pop. She admired hip,
heroin-savvy songwriters like Nick Cave.

Like them, she could pay for it, especially in her mid-20s, when her habit
started and she was earning up to $4000 a week as an artist, mostly in film
and TV. This was the ``happy user'' phase when dope was a buzz. Like poets
and painters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Brett Whiteley, it fuelled her
focus.

As ``a Miss Entrepreneur'' in the '80s, as she calls herself, Roberta (not
her real name) blew $100 a day on heroin, and had enough left over to live
in a desirable house, even buy antiques. Her eastern suburbs family knew of
her habit, and agreed to buy drugs for her. ``It was a real bonding
experience,'' she says. ``Like, this is my mum, and she knows it's not the
dope that kills you. It is the neglect that goes with it.''

Yet beneath the bonhomie lie fault lines. While it is true, as Turning
Point's Professor Margaret Hamilton, says, that ``drugs can be fun and
relieve nasty reality'', the pure relief does not last indefinitely. Which
is why, says Hamilton, ``traditional societies developed rules governing
their use''. As the happy-user face fell away, Roberta found she had no
rules, just an aching sadness that had been masked by opiate calm.

It was not the house she had shot up her arm that was unsettling her, or
even the hep C she had unknowingly picked up sharing a needle. It was
something deeper that anti-depressants could not touch. The fun had gone,
and the only thing that stilled her despair was hitting up. ``Heroin
probably saved my life,'' she says. ``I was so heavily depressed that I'd
lost the will to live.''

This is an unappreciated aspect of the drug. It is strong enough to weave a
cocoon to keep users alive when they are suicidal. Like other drugs, and
behavior such as aggression and bluster, heroin is a defence, an
unparalleled way of fleeing yourself. ``It all goes back to early
childhood,'' Roberta now believes. ``Damaged children are fodder for drug
dealers, that's for sure.'' This became clear to her from 1995 when smack's
numbing magic faltered. ``Before then, nothing was a problem. I had no
emotional issues.'' Methadone, a heroin substitute, she found ``much worse
than smack''. Counselling was better. It allowed her to tackle the guilt
addicts feel. They know they should give up, but can't. So they use to block
out guilt. Taking a drag from a cigarette in the bayside suburb where she
now lives, Roberta says counselling taught her to ``stop giving myself a
hard time''.

This came after she had read ``religion and philosophy books, everything'',
to try to understand her craving. ``My counsellor switched on the light when
she said heroin probably saved my life,'' she explains. ``It spun me out. I
was being chased by the black dog (depression), and heroin was keeping me
going.''

Ideally, she says, she would like to be free of opiates. But that is not yet
possible. New generation anti-depressants help, but not enough. So she has
the heroin-like opiate, morphine. It is legally prescribed by her GP for
back pain, something not normally possible for younger street users. It is a
privilege of age and class, and means she does not have to hustle for a hit.
It also means that, unlike addicts in laneways (and most dealers she has
known), she can contemplate a reasonably long ``shelf-life''.

Roberta has realised - as did Freud who toyed with cocaine before giving it
up - that strong drugs don't live up to their promise. Yes, Thomas De
Quincey wrote on opium, and Rolling Stone Keith Richards played on heroin.
But as guitar hero Eric Clapton makes clear, art cannot survive on smack.
Belatedly, Roberta agrees. ``I think it has really damaged whatever it is
that makes you creative. I don't know how, it just did.'' Maybe it has
something to do with the arrested maturity that characterises addicts. As
Roberta says, ``I still feel like I am 20, mentally. It is like I'm frozen
emotionally at the age I started using.'' She looks around the bare room,
``I have worked hard and ended up with nothing. I've lost a lot of beautiful
things, antiques, and that's a regret. All I can say is that life begins at
40 for me.''

Roberta's story defies the stereotype of the junkie. She has a point when
she talks about heroin hysteria. The drug, as a Smith Street needle exchange
manager, Craig Mercer, observes, has become a ``social construct''. Drug
expert Margaret Hamilton agrees. ``Worrying about heroin allows Australia to
avoid the pressing issues,'' she says, pointing out that ``addiction makes
us uneasy because it goes against the notion of free will''. It is true.
Addicts are seen as irrational and ineffectual, anti-work and living outside
the professions. Yet they often have good reasons for choosing addiction,
and do work in offices, as well as at the demanding job of scoring dope.

Users are stylised as either street scum or manufactured cool. But neither
the ``dirty junkie'' nor ``junkie chic'' image is accurate. The media,
particularly Hollywood and rock music's star machine, use the cult of the
anti-hero to market their products. The way the media portray heroin
suggests rebellion, which is, of course, magnetic for the young. But smack
is not a rebellion. It is slavish devotion to consumerism. Which is why
opium was used by the British Empire in China. It both created a market for
a product the British wanted to sell, and kept the Chinese compliant.

Heroin, which first came to Australia in volume during the Vietnam war, when
some say it was tolerated by the US military to keep its soldiers on the
firing line, shifts our focus away from the source of the problem. As a
counsellor who worked with Roberta says, ``I don't see people who grew up in
stable, happy families. Nearly all have suffered gross family abuse ...
sexual and emotional. There's murder and violence there, the whole box and
dice. These are people who have endured the unendurable.''

The counsellor is aware of the prescription drugs available to combat
addiction, including several new ones being tested by Turning Point. ``No
drug is a cure,'' she says. ``Methadone has got a reasonable success rate.
But heroin's a whole of life problem - not something you can grapple with
using just pharmacology.''

Getting on might be a matter of aping Keith Richards, but getting off is
like quoting Samuel Beckett. You have to learn to fail and fail again. As
youth worker Bernie Geary, a member of the State Government's heroin
taskforce, points out, some need to detox 20 times. The repeats are Geary's
heroes. ``They're the ones,'' he says, ``with the guts to go through
soul-destroying experiences.''

Detox, which did not work for Roberta, involves addicts being given a small
amount of medication, mainly to stop muscle pain, and being left to dry out.
Like much in the heroin armory, it is inadequate and indiscriminate. As
Wesley Central Mission's drug worker and nurse Jo Beckett points out, all
addicts, no matter whether they have been using six months or 20 years, get
six days in detox (except those from Melbourne Magistrates Court, who get
seven). ``There are some 120 detox and rehabilitation beds,'' she says.
``But we get 100 users on site a day, and we are just one agency. Some wait
six months, even though there are empty detox beds because of nursing
shortages.''

Just before she got off, Roberta had a dirty hit. It can happen even to
well-to-do old-timers. Heroin is like that. If it tastes sweet, it is
certain to be fake. If it tastes bitter, it is probably smack. But you never
know. Like Roberta, Jo Beckett knows she is fighting a dirty war. To get off
the battlefield you have to twist the rules. ``You have to try every dirty
trick to get them in,'' she says of her struggle to find detox beds. She
changes addresses and lies about ages. Roberta sighs at the thought of it
all. She has survived the war, and now wants to live the life she had on
hold.