MY MOTHER FLEW HOME TO ARRANGE THE FUNERAL

Ecstasy led to heroin, and heroin to a close brush with death. One user who
is killing time to try to save his life tells his story in an interview
with CATHERINE CLEARY

"I was 20 when I started taking heroin to come down off ecstasy. Without E
there was no rave. I got into it with a girl.

We'd be going home after a rave at half two or three in the morning. We
started smoking heroin to come down. I didn't want to go home marble-eyed
to my parents.

I'd buy ecstasy in clubs and then we'd go back to where we knew we could
get heroin.

The heroin cost about £40 a deal then. You'd go out in daylight and go home
in daylight. The whole night you would have been out of it, in space or on
cloud nine. Then you'd sleep all day Sunday.

We got into smoking heroin two or three times a week. By Thursday you'd be
bored because there was nothing to do and you'd go back on E.

There was no drugs education but we knew how to buy it and take it. It
wasn't difficult to buy. You had blokes coming up to you offering stuff.

After a while smoking heroin I started injecting. In November 1994 I
overdosed. I don't remember what happened. Someone found me in Grangegorman
Salvation Army hostel and I was taken to the Mater Hospital.

The doctors told my father I had half an hour to live. My mother was flown
home to arrange the funeral. I have photographs of me hooked up to the
life-support machine.

In one of them I'm all bloated with the poison. There's another where I'm
down to five stone.

I was clean for 15 months after that, then I had a simple smoke. They say
one's too many and a thousand's never enough. I worried about my liver so I
kept smoking for about three months before I started injecting again.

It gives a feeling of overwhelming warmth. Then you go into zombie land.
One shoot can last a whole day when you start. But after six months it will
only last 20 minutes and then you'd have to have a syringe full of stuff by
the bed just to be able to get up.

Food doesn't have values. Nothing has values. Nothing, except heroin.
Friendships and family don't matter.

When addicts say they're sick, they're really sick. It feels like your
whole nervous system is completely open. You're always freezing. You can
see the goosepimps and the hairs standing up on your forearms, even if
you're wrapped in loads of duvets. . Even your own breath feels deadly cold.

Once when I was in prison I felt withdrawal coming on. Another prisoner
gave me a [cigarette] filter and said there should be enough heroin in it
to take away the pains. He told me to use orange juice to cook it up.

I squeezed an orange on to a spoon and filled a whole syringe, and injected
myself with it. Everything froze down one side. I couldn't breathe. It just
made me worse.

I've been on detox for three weeks now. It's my third detox. I'm the one
with the problem. I'm the one that has to sort my problem out. But it's
very difficult.

Using methadone is like an alcoholic giving up whiskey and picking up a
vodka bottle. Either there is some kind of after-care, some way of training
people, then addicts, including myself, go round in circles until I croak it.

The reason - no offence meant - that I stayed here talking is that I'm
avoiding going out. I know someone who has heroin and I know he'll offer it
to me. Hopefully, by the time I get there it'll be gone."