ANDREW'S STORY (FORMER ADDICT)

When you're jumping a counter or doing a burglary you're feeling adrenalin
and very apprehensive. But that fix means more to you than anything else.
What heroin does is it pulls a blanket over your emotional centres.

You're on a one-track mission to get out of your head. I went to any
lengths. I stabbed people. I tortured a bloke once. I poured petrol over
him and set his feet on fire. I bit the nose off people in fights. I beat a
person to a pulp, and I sold heroin. I used to be known as the Blackrock
cat burglar.

All the junkies that they locked up for syringe robberies, they become
psychotic. It's pure madness. You don't care about anybody. Drug addicts
come out a lot more psychotic. Then they lock them up again and pretend
they've cured it again.

Drugs were never the problem. The problem was why people needed to use
drugs. Counsellors are full of shit and sympathy. All addicts tell them
lies and manipulate them.

There's no treatment for junkies. There's just control. They stabilise you
in a clinic and then push treatment out to doctors. You wrap yourself in a
bubble because if you stop taking methadone you get withdrawal but then
everything you started taking drugs to avoid comes back. If the junkie
doesn't conform to the clinics he'll end up in prison.

Drugs are an emotional illness brought about by an uncaring society. If you
take drugs like alcohol and you're emotionally balanced then you won't get
addicted. And there is no emotional counselling for junkies. They just use
medication to blank it out.

Your next backlash will happen around Christmas or just after Christmas
when a lot of people are due to get out. The concerned parents can't
maintain vigilance. The whole drug treatment programme is designed to hide
it from the public and frighten the junkie with the alternative of prison.

They keep harping on about stability. But there is no treatment in this
country for drug addicts. They can drag out methadone programmes for 10
years, making every taxpayer a secondary drug dealer. I don't think people
realise that their taxes are paying for this methadone.

They keep putting the pressure on the hardcore junkie and forgetting about
the 14- and 15-yearolds. But what they don't realise is that they're on
their way to becoming the hardcore junkies everyone hates.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)