CINTRA WILSON

RIDING HORSES NOT A PRACTICAL HEROIN SUBSTITUTE

Dear Cintra:

In response to the girl who wanted to try heroin - from what I understand
from being a policeman's mother, and friend and relative of many
drug-curious loved ones who either struggled miserably due to drugs or died
young - the most important reason not to try heroin is that it forever
alters the endorphin level in the body. Endorphins are our bodies'
feel-good substance, which controls pain perception, mood, and alertness.
After trying heroin once, the body never again has the capacity to feel as
good as it did before heroin. The endorphin level never returns to its
original high point. Further use of heroin causes a continual drop in
endorphins, which is why heroin is soon needed by the body for normal
maintenance. So the only high on heroin is the first time, but that surge
shortly brings a person lower in spirits than ever experienced before, and
you never feel as good as you did before heroin. So if you think you need
heroin to feel better, think again.

For those who are drug curious, please, there are alternative highs
running, yoga, martial arts, horseback riding, lifting weights, swimming,
singing. Be curious to find out what it is that gives you a natural high
without causing harm to yourself or others - and learn to do it with skill
and joy. Life is filled with risks, that's for sure, and we sometimes try
for dreams and have to let go of them, but why give in and sit around
medicating ourselves? If you are full of life and full of curiousity - or
if you are depleted and despondent - the last thing you want to do is look
to drugs to enhance your life. Ask any addict who's hit bottom if life is
enhanced by drugs. - Concerned

Dearest Concerned:

Yours would be a compelling argument, if it were factual. According to a
doctor (who chose anonymity) that I interviewed who works at the adult
rehabilitation wing of New York's Beth Israel Medical Center, continued and
prolonged heroin use will eventually affect your body's ability to produce
endorphins, but using heroin once, or even a few times, will have no
noticeable effect on your endorphin level. Anybody looking for a dope high
at 2 a.m. while drunk in the inner city is probably not going to be
dissuaded from their mission by anyone's suggestion that they devote
themselves to horseback riding, or other such costly long-term forays into
productive discipline.

Part of the big excitement about doing drugs is the thrill of blatant
self-destruction, which fuels itself like a brushfire with shame and guilt
and self-loathing. Hopelessness is a big reason for heroin use, as is
restlessness and dissatisfaction and boredom, and a general contempt for
all things sedentary and mundane, which the drug-addled person has
forgotten how to enjoy. Once a person has earned a "druggy" reputation,
they've usually learned to find some kind of romance in the new persona. It
is easy to feel so unbearably miserable that you need something to take the
whole brain away, now, and drugs are really the only "quick fix," which is
unfortunate for today's world.

It is too easy to tell people that life is a spectacular gift and worth
living unadulterated by opiates; the most obvious reason for the attraction
to drugs is that life is apparently not fun enough without them for serious
drug users. The "drug epidemic" is a complex problem that requires the
endless patience and inexhaustible funding of a vast, nonexistent body of
free inpatient clinics - with tests and counseling constantly and easily
available - before anything can really change.

In order to dissect the problem, one really needs to investigate the
malaise that causes people to go overboard into habitually altering their
consciousness. Why do we become so uncomfortable in our own skin? Why are
some people biochemically predisposed to addiction? Until people stop being
so reactionary and moronic about drugs and are willing to look at them with
some clarity and sophistication, it is always going to be an "Us vs. Them"
topic, spun and controlled largely by those on the legal end of the matter,
and there will always be an endless parade of drug addicts either dying
young or filling our jails because we as a society are too ignorant,
prejudiced and irresponsible to figure out how to really help them.
Pollyannaism, in this case, isn't just annoying; it kills.

Junkies: Please send your insights 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