THE OVERPOWERING DESIRE FOR HEROIN

The City may be shocked by the overdose death of Oscar Scaggs, but I'm not.
Of the 18 guys who ran with my gang as a kid, 15 were dead by the time I
reached 18. I've sat in a Harlem drug pad and watched my fellow addicts pick
up the frozen corpse of a pal who had OD'd and heave him out the third-floor
window to the alley below. A good friend was someone who would bother to
drop you off at an emergency room when you overdosed. Mostly, though, you'd
just be left cold on the curb.

I started smoking pot when I was 11. I learned early about needles, shooting
speed and acid with my peers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When I was
15 I was earning a living stealing cars and selling them to a well-seasoned
17-year-old junkie in the Bronx. He told me never to start taking heroin,
then he gave me my first taste.

Snorting smack didn't make me high; it only made me sick. Rather than
retreat from the drug, I promptly cooked it up and put it in my vein. In the
next few seconds, my life changed forever.

My God, how did I ever live 15 years without this? I had an instantaneous
revelation that I had finally found my meaning and purpose in life.

Heroin produces an illusion where for the first time in your life you feel
right with the world. You will realize something about yourself or you will
die in the arms of Morpheus.

But there's a high entrance fee. Things got ugly pretty fast.

I dropped all the other drugs. I wouldn't spend a penny on anything other
than heroin. I changed my friends - abandoning the hippies who conned
themselves into thinking drugs offered spiritual revelation and embracing
the hard-core kids who knew about heroin and where to find it.

On my 16th birthday, a Sunday, one of my black friends took me to Harlem and
introduced me to his connection. Now, instead of spending $5 for enough
heroin to stay high all day, I could achieve the same thing for $2. It was
cheap back then. And it was good.

Within two weeks I had a jones. I had gone from one bag a day to 15. I
didn't think that was a problem.

Then I went back to visit my Jewish hippie friends. We had an acid party.
When I woke up, I felt like I had a serious case of the flu, only there was
something new. My brain was screaming, "Gimme heroin!"

Over the next few years, I developed a skill that all serious heroin addicts
know: kicking the drug, if only for a period of time. My particular method
involved red wine and salted peanuts. I would stay drunk for a week or so,
and emerge clean.

There was a downside to it. I became an alcoholic. I would switch
intoxicants like radio stations: For a few weeks or months, I would drink.
Then I'd put the bottle down and pick up the needle. Back and forth. Back
and forth.

I left New York to get away from the drugs and the lifestyle. I was
accompanied by a Sicilian friend who had a peculiar problem: The Mafia was
killing off his family. His dad, a mid-level mobster, was on the verge of
turning state's evidence. They had already nailed my buddy's mom. Later they
got him, too.

He was strung out totally on heroin, and I was drinking myself to death. But
we got here, unlike our other friend who decided to emigrate to the West
Coast. The next morning he robbed a liquor store for traveling money. The
owner shot and killed him.

You can't run away from heroin. My patterns continued in San Francisco and,
combined with my personal penchant for rage, they got me in trouble. I went
before one judge three times in a week for drinking and brawling. He ordered
me into a program for drunks.

That was OK with me. I wanted to get off the booze so I could start shooting
smack again. Then a funny thing happened in treatment: I realized, for the
first time, that I am an addict. I had never planned to stay off of heroin,
but I did.

That was in March 1976. I haven't had a fix since then. Yet my problems
weren't over.

What people don't realize, including many in the recovery movement, is that
we become addicted to substances for a reason. If that fundamental,
underlying problem isn't addressed, the addict is not healed.

For three years after cleaning up, I continued to experience uncontrolled
rage. Once, at a Blues Brothers concert, I beat the hell out of a guy. He
had thrown candy at me.

The solution that I found was martial arts. Working with an aikido master
led me to a physical and psychological balance that made my recovery
complete. Other addicts, battling demons of their own, will have to find
their own answers.

I resumed my truncated education and became a registered nurse. More than
once, while working in the ER, I have seen an old acquaintance from the
streets come through the doors on a gurney. More than once, I have seen them
die.

Of all the junkies I have known, I'm the only one who seems to have survived
somewhat intact. Much of it was luck. Even people who get clean might
eventually succumb to hepatitis, a lethal artifact of their earlier life.

My wife, Heidi, is also a nurse. Together, we are developing a treatment
methodology that we hope will enable addicts to address all aspects of their
addiction.

And we won't be surprised by who asks for help. We know that, unlike the
common perception, heroin is not merely a drug for unwashed street people in
rat-infested shooting galleries. We know a lawyer who recently died of an
overdose. His father and brother - both physicians - are also junkies.

And I know that recovery is possible. When I go to work tomorrow, there will
be 16 vials of morphine sitting on a shelf in front of me. People say, "My
God, how do you do that?"

And I say, "Well, I don't do drugs." Richard Poccia, 48, is a registered
nurse in the department of psychiatry at San Francisco General Hospital. He
lives in San Francisco with Heidi Davis, his wife of seven years.