MILLION-DOLLAR HABIT: A 28-YEAR BATTLE WITH ADDICTION

Roger, 44, has a million-dollar arm. The money, like 28 years of his
life, has been swallowed by heroin - more than $100 a day for almost
30years - and it has nearly all been paid for by retailers. You see,
Roger (not his real name) is a master thief.

He began hitting up in 1972 when Gough Whitlam was chanting "It's
Time" and Jimmy Barnes was about to leave his heart in Khe Sanh, and
just kept going. As others dropped off or died, he shoplifted his way
to what is probably Melbourne's oldest smack habit.

This is a man who has had the repertoire of the drug bureaucracy
shoved down his throat. He has been busted and jailed, detoxed and
rehabbed more times than he can remember. He has lost what most people
regard as sacred - a family - and been humiliated in ways that have
scarred and hurt him worse than any punishment.

And yet he stayed on the exhausting treadmill that is the junkie's
life; stealing and scoring, and skating on the edge of overdose. Roger
is walking proof that the war on drugs cannot bring down a determined
addict. If it could, he would be off dope and out of crime. His
single-minded survival, on the street and in shops, suggests that
heroin has a stronger grip than the long arm of the law.

Roger is a criminal, but he is not evil. That description belongs to
the non-addicted business types who commission him and other junkie
"shoppers" to selectively steal on request. They exploit an illness to
obtain sought-after goods for a fraction of their value. It is part of
a greedy underworld that rides on the back of heroin.

Roger's "fence" gives him 20 to 30per cent of retail value. If he was
a canny crook, he would get more. But as he explains: "You say to
yourself: `don't take it, don't let him treat you like a low-down
junkie'. But you're $10 short of a hit. They laugh at you while giving
you the money. You do it, or you get sick."

Younger, less experienced addicts get a lot less. Most use pawn shops
and if Andrew, the father of a 26-year-old user, is any guide, they
receive a fraction of the value of their stolen goods. Andrew's
daughter got $100 for his $1400 camera and $30 for his $1000 bike -
both taken without permission from his home.

If you're a good "shopper", like Roger, you get "orders". You shop for
the precise brand, color, size. If they want 501s, size 31, bootleg,
that is what you get.

"Myer is a pretty easy rort - no tags. You don't stop to think about
it," Roger says. "When you get an order, you just think about the
heroin. If you wake up next morning with it next to your bed you
think, `Grouse, I can get on'."

This is another aspect of smack. Hard-core users like Roger do not
hitup to get high. They inject to stop their bodies betraying them
with withdrawal. It is the relentless logic of a drug that is in love
with itself. Heroin addiction is a compulsive, fruitless, dredging
back to the past in search of the euphoria of the first hit.

"You have to be on the ball," Roger says. "There's a lot of work to
stop yourself hurting. You have to shower and shave, though you don't
feel like it.

"You want to `get on', but you've got to look good. You're thinking
what shop to go in, who's on today? Do they know me? Must not turn up
(eyes) pinned. You see the fence, hope cops don't get you, find a
dealer, hope he doesn't rip you."

Not everyone who uses becomes a junkie. But an estimated 15 to 25per
cent do, and with 2 per cent of the population said to try heroin,
that ensures a thriving industry for dealers, fences and do-gooders.

The assumption is that junkies like Roger are trapped by physical
craving. But while it is true that heroin is primarily felt in the
body, addiction is most evident in the mind.

"I need dope, not to be stoned off my face, but just to be normal Joe
Citizen," Roger says, his watery blue eyes darting around the room.
His body is hanging out for a hit but his mind is groping for another
way. It is partly because his second wife is giving him a chance to
come home if he is clean, and partly because he has found someone he
trusts and thinks understands his plight.

Around Bourke and Russell Streets, they affectionately call Ms Jo
Beckett, Wesley Central Mission's nurse and outreach worker, "that
hippie bitch". Roger calls the 30-something woman who has stuck with
him through several failed attempts at drying out a beacon.

Beckett, red-haired and rooted in drug lore, has told him it's OK to
fail. She has spoken to his wife, told her and him that he is not a
lost cause. She has seen him hit up and told him not to give up.

And now she is sitting with him as he makes another try to "get off".
"I've wanted to stop for 26 of the 28years," he says, "but never as
much as now." He wants to get into Moreland Hall, a Heidelberg
detoxification centre that he respects.

"They don't push things on you," he says. "It is like you are in
hospital, as if you're a sick person." Beckett makes a call. It will
be three weeks before he can get in.

It is a nervy, paranoid time for the thin, angular man with the floppy
brown hair and lopsided grin. But it is typical of what addicts go
through. Beckett says there are not enough detoxification centres, and
some of those that exist are too rigid. As well, there is little
support when users emerge clean from drying out, even though, with
their resistance lowered, they are more likely to overdose.

That is the heroin roundabout. Addicts are punished as if their crime
will cease by censure, when the evidence suggests the opposite. It is
tempting to vilify addicts like Roger, but blame does not work.

One thing that has not changed since Roger began using in the 1970s is
the psyche of hard-core users. Like Javo, the addict in Helen Garner's
1977 novel Monkey Grip, Roger hits up to feel better about himself.
People berating him for being a dirty junkie only make him want to get
on again. "It's funny," he says, "but you use dope to stop feeling
like a low-down junkie."

He is not a stupid man, yet he struggles to explain the addiction.
There are tears in his eyes when he talks about how two of his
children have taken up his habit.

Why did he retreat into what Garner calls the "peculiar medicine with
its handsome accessories"? Getting lost in a "feel for the steel" is
part of it. There are cool connotations, and the illusion of an
identity for someone who has felt a misfit.

Roger stares at his bitten nails. "I've always had trouble talking to
people," he says. Rather than foreign ground, using for him is
familiar territory. Getting clean won't be a matter of coming home,
but leaving it.

He would like to see heroin legalised. "My dream is being able to take
a heroin tablet every day, not to get high, just to avoid being sick,"
he says. "The first 10 seconds after a hit is a very, very good
feeling. Then it's gone."

It is the sort of arrangement the Swiss have adopted, and it appears
to have led to less overdose deaths and crime. Had such a policy
existed in Australia, it would have implied a different life for
Roger, who was, at the start of his habit, when heroin came free from
a dealer friend, able to hold down a $1200-a-week job.

The stealing and the problems with his family arose, he says, from
needing to score. Injecting rooms would not have helped. They don't
provide heroin, just a supervised setting, and Roger is not prone to
overdosing.

Fiddling with the fake mobile phone he wears on his belt ("so police
don't think I'm a junkie"), Roger looks haunted, edgy. He dresses
neatly - Italian-style shoes, blue slacks, suede jacket - so shop
assistants don't get suspicious. His cheeks are pinched and junkie
pale, and he has no socks. Like most addicts, his lips are dry and
cracked, his cheeks hollow, and his head is bowed.

Somehow, in his frenetic scrambling to steal, score and use, he must
ring the detoxification centre each day, or lose his place. He has no
phone, and is too jumpy, or out of it, to manage. "You don't have any
friends with heroin," he says. "Addicts will rob the dead. I've done
it."

Beckett will help him make the calls. She will drive him there, when
he is about to start. Otherwise he won't make it.

Roger has tried methadone and naltrexone, which cost him $180 a month,
and involved being clean for a week before he began. It did not help
him. But then, getting clean is a process, not a step.

A month later he is at the end of his detoxification stay at Moreland
Hall. The physical part of the drying-out is more or less over. He
looks healthy and optimistic, ready, he says, for the "mind games".

This is further than he has ever been before. He has not had a whack for
more than a week, and says he does not want one. Still, the memory of the
first blast lingers on. As Javo says in Monkey Grip: "You can't cut off the
past; there are good things connected with it too." Smack, Javo thought,
kept him warm on cold nights and made him feel physically young.

Roger, who has just spent days in bed sweating it out, is getting used
to the idea that he is middle-aged. He knows he can't have the smack
without the low lifestyle, so he is taking tentative steps out of blankness.

That means encountering the jagged edges that prompted his habit. And
that is not going to be easy. Heroin has stopped his passage to the
future. As American author Ann Marlowe writes, it is a symptom of the
fear of death and love of a predictable time. Roger looks down at his
arm, the limb that helped him stop the clock. "It's time. I really
think I can do it," he says.