CAN'T GET ENOUGH HEROIN? HERE'S MORE

CINTRA WILSON

Dearest Darkly Fixated and Pulpy Readers:

Welcome again to yet another installation of "HEROIN," the topic that would
not die. The harder I try to get back to my usual platform as Your Moral
Arbiter, the more interesting the letters from junkies and ex-junkies get.
Frankly, I simply cannot get enough of these controversial tales of
confessional squalor:

Dear Cintra: I'd like to squeeze one more vignette into the heroin collage.
Many years ago in Berkeley, my girlfriend and I became unlikely junkies.
She was 21, just graduated from Cal, and had not used any drugs other than
a little weed. I was 24, had shot speed a few times, and heroin twice.
Neither of us were druggies - but we weren't afraid to experiment. The
first time R. and I shot heroin together (her first time ever, my third),
she absolutely loved the stuff. At that time, I didn't like it very much,
but it was a lot of fun shooting heroin with R., because she dug it so
much. Fast forward one year later - we're full-fledged junkies with
big-time habits. We discuss the problem logically, and we decide to quit
what has become a very limiting lifestyle. R., the woman who loved the drug
like a bee loves honey, is able to bring up the willpower to quit
cold-turkey and get on with her life. She did this even though it meant
leaving me, who she truly loved, in order to do so. I, on the other hand,
was unable to quit. I spent many more years scrambling until I finally
found a secure legal niche in methadone maintenance.

The point is, R. loved the heroin high much more than I did, but she was
also able to quit, alone, without resorting to Narcotics Anonymous or
methadone or any other substitutes.

I never really liked the high, but the opiate addiction itself apparently
satisfied or "fixed" something in my psyche. People use heroin for
different reasons.

By the way, it's been 20 years since R. shared (or used) needles, and more
than 12 years for me. Six months ago we were both diagnosed with Hepatitis
C.

If there's a moral here, I'm not sure what it is. - J.J.H., San Francisco

Dearest J.J.H.: Congratulations, sir, on your hard-won clarity. Yours is
another story that upholds the old AA philosophy that alcoholism (or other
such addictions) is an actual disease shared by those more predisposed
toward such abuses than others.

Your girlfriend was not a super-being of unflappable willpower, and you
were not a sorry suck-dog compulsively returneth-ing to its own vomit.
Kicking is simply easier for some; addiction is a much bigger bitch for
others, and that's why many homeless people are strewn loveless and filthy
over city streets, living on Funyuns and Gillette Afta. We Americans need
to demand federally funded inpatient clinics for the wretches so cowed by
chemistry that they'd give their only horrible shoes for a dose of whatever
substance rendered them snivelling and worthless in the first place. The
time for mercy toward dull-witted, urine-saturated mendicants is NOW.

Dearest Cintra: I am convinced that you are a drug-addicted super genius,
writer, and philosopher.

All I can say is that I wish I were your boyfriend. I would be your sex
partner 24 hours a day. I would provide mental and physical stimulation,
whenever you required it.

Right now my girlfriend is a reformed prostitute, as I rescued her from
that life, and she is now a drug whore sleeping around for days at each
drug dealer's house in The City, and of course never has sex with me. -
Ciao

Dearest Ciao: This letter, while charming, was not nearly so as the one I
received recently from David Jensen (J-37887) in Solano State Prison, a
junkie who has "been there and back" and writes that now that he is on
"legal medications - Prozac and Stellazine antipsychotics" he is pursuing
his current goals of "attaining friendship" and "maintaining universal
flow." You should write to me again in about a year; should the Gods fail
to smile on Mr. Jensen's April 1999 release date, I'm certain I could use a
boyfriend as majestic and giving as yourself - your letter and Mr. Jensen's
having caused me to see the blinding light of my own sexual and personal
needs and made me banish my fiance. God, I wish you were with me now, Ciao.
Maybe your girlfriend the drug whore and I could also be lovers and we
could have a rapturous, narco-basted threesome, happily sweatin' and
itchin' and scab-pickin' and throwin' up into the full ashtrays of our
weekly rate hotel-room home. Bliss.

Any better offers? Write to: CINTRA WILSON FEELS YOUR PAIN, San Francisco
Examiner, P.O. Box 7260, San Francisco, CA 94120, or e-mail the Psychic
Supergenius at zintra@aol.com

1998 San Francisco Examiner Page D 19

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)