JUST ANOTHER UPPER CLASS JUNKIE

For most people, this week's obituaries of Frederick John Hervey, the 7th
Marquess of Bristol and Britain's most notorious heroin addict, who was
found dead in his home at the weekend, must have seemed full of almost
uniquely sad phrases. Here was the "charismatic" heir to a "beautiful
Suffolk estate", a "highly generous" aristocrat possessed of an "arrogant
and dashing charm" who nonetheless squandered his "immense fortune" on
"drugs, lavish parties, cars, helicopters and yachts" before dying a
"pathetic" semi-cripple at 44.

To anyone who has been a heroin addict, these facts and phrases are not
uniquely sad. They are, on the contrary, predictable and familiar. The more
bohemian purlieus of Notting Hill, Mayfair, Chelsea and beyond are full of
tragic cases like Johnny Hervey. Walk down the King's Road or Ladbroke Grove
and you will see them: moneyed junkies wasting trust funds and legacies,
estates and inheritances, on class A drugs.

Some are genuinely aristocratic (like the Marquess of Blandford), some
merely rich; some of them have famous parents (like the late Olivia
Channon), some are infamous themselves. Many have Johnny Hervey's "arrogant
and dashing charm", all lead desperately limited, desperately repetitive
lives - mostly spent sitting by the phone in squalid flats waiting for their
dealers to return their calls, or trying to locate Daddy to arrange another
loan so as to afford the next quarter of an ounce.

I well know this type, the upper-class junkie, because for several years I
was also a heroin addict in London and I ran into more than a few of them.
It is impossible not to. Central London's hard drug scene (and by hard drugs
I mean, primarily, cocaine and heroin) is like a small town within a town, a
hidden and incestuous village, a tightly knit network of dealers, contacts,
clinics and "well-known addresses".

The drugs underworld is also surprisingly egalitarian: the need for drugs is
a great equaliser. Thus it is possible for the crackhead from Hoxton to use
the same dealer as the junked-up ambassador's daughter from Kensington, or
the poor little rich coke-snorter from Belgravia to end up sharing a needle
with the homeless Glaswegian car thief.

I might have been a fairly ordinary, middle-class addict but I think I once
saw Johnny Hervey doing coke in a smoky basement flat in Fulham; I can't be
sure because I was too stoned. I do know that I have bumped into the
Blandfords and Channons of this underworld. I have stared blankly across the
same glass-topped tables. I have used the same rolled-up UKP20 notes to
sniff the same "China white". I have sat waiting for the same courier to
deliver the same cocaine in the same Hampstead penthouses.

Usually the glass-topped tables and Hampstead penthouses were theirs.
Upper-class junkies are nothing if not "highly generous" and hospitable.
They hate to feel alone in their vice, and doing heroin can be the most
desperately bleak, sad, godless, solitary existence imaginable.

Why, then, with all their chances and opportunities, with the best
educations and circumstances that money can buy, do so many rich and
well-born people fall prey to hard drug addiction? It is easy to understand
the appeal of a powerful analgesic such as heroin to someone stuck on the
seventh floor of an inner city tower block. It is easy to appreciate how you
might want to numb your mind and senses if all you could see ahead of you
was another week on the dole. But why would an Eton-educated millionaire,
heir to a Caribbean villa and a castle in Scotland, want to do the same?

The answer is that the two ends of the social spectrum share one curse:
unemployment. People who are rich already have little to do except to make
more money. Second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) generation rich people
have even less to do: their money and status are taken for granted. Ennui
and boredom are therefore the most feared enemies of the poor little rich
girl or boy. And you can only have so many "cars, helicopters and yachts"
before even cars and helicopters and yachts start to pall.

Which is where heroin comes in. As anyone who has tried the drug will know,
heroin is a sovereign remedy for taedium vitae. On heroin, time ceases to
exercise its grip. Hours, days, lives can fly by and all you have done is to
sit in your flat and dribble. Weeks can pass and all you have done is to
repeat the endless but somehow comforting cycle of the drug addict's life:
score, consume, get stoned, score, consume, get stoned. For people with no
job, who do not need a job, who would never conceive of demeaning themselves
with something as common as a job, heroin addiction is a job. It gives shape
and purpose to otherwise shapeless, purposeless lives.

The second reason that I believe heroin appeals to the rich, noble and
leisured is its dangerous "glamour", its subversive image. For those stupid
enough, like me, to try heroin in the first place, it exercises an allure
because it is seen as somehow chic, as intriguingly nihilistic, as amusingly
antisocial and transgressive. And it's so easy. If you want people to see
you as cool and cynical, as sophisticated and daring, but you are too lazy
or dim to do anything serious about it - like become a soldier, or train to
be an artist - how much easier simply to take heroin.

This spurious attraction of heroin as a short cut to "coolness" is assisted
by the fact that the drug reinforces the addict's self-esteem, by paralysing
any self-critical faculties that might lurk in the psyche. Thus the
painfully anorexic junkie sees herself as fashionably thin; the desperately
boring addict sees himself as suavely aloof.

The upper-class junkie might seem a modern phenomenon, but there are
historical parallels. Consider the obsession with duelling in the 18th and
19th centuries. Here was another dangerous, possibly fatal, certainly
pointless activity. Here was another ludicrously nihilistic pursuit
condemned by polite society but indulged in certain upper-class circles.
Like heroin, duelling had glamour; like heroin, it relieved the awful
boredom of the leisured life. The French toffs of Les Liaisons Dangereuses
would, these days, be smoking freebase in Cadogan Square instead of
slaughtering each other with sabres.

Lest I seem to be glamorising heroin myself, however, I should add that
there is one big difference between the two upper-class vices. When
18th-century aristos were not murdering each other at dawn, they were
running the world and discovering vaccines and writing Don Juan. When modern
upper-crust junkies are not doing junk, all they are doing is trying to find
more junk so they can do more junk so they don't have to go out and find any
more junk for a while. As the wretched Marquess of Bristol would no doubt
attest if only he had the chance, cocaine and heroin are, in truth, about as
glamorous as meths. Only more expensive. And more moronic. And more pitiful.

Heroin - the facts

USERS agree that heroin is seductive, pernicious and now the most
fashionable of all the so-called recreational drugs with the young.
Diamorphine, to give the killer its clinical name, gives a sense of
extraordinary wellbeing and security before relentlessly destroying every
victim too weak to quit.

TODAY the drug is easily available in every city and town in the country.
And "smack" is cheap too; at UKP20 a gram it is a third cheaper than its
class A rival, cocaine.

THE drug can be snorted, injected into veins or smoked - "chasing the
dragon". Addiction is as inevitable as death and taxes.

MAIN producers of the opium poppy, from which heroin is produced, include
Turkey, Mexico, Iran and Lebanon. But the big fields are in the so-called
Golden Triangle running from Laos through Cambodia and Burma.

THE hazards of heroin use are appalling: appetite loss, convulsions,
vomiting, loss of bowel control, sleeplessness, rotting teeth, impotence in
men, infertility in women, and death.

Extant former users include Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Charlie Watts,
Eric Clapton, Jamie Blandford, Lou Reed and several supermodels who cannot
be named for legal reasons. Among those who paid the ultimate price: jazzmen
Charlie Parker and Miles Davis; Jim Morrison of The Doors; Sid Vicious of
the Sex Pistols.