HEROIN: A CURSE OR A SOURCE OF MEANING?

FOR a substance that started out as a family-friendly cough
suppressant and non-addictive morphine substitute, heroin has
certainly gained a fearsome reputation since the late 1890s, when
Germany's Bayer Company first marketed it.

There are still some elderly retired midwives around who fondly recall
heroin (available legally here until the mid-1950s) as a near-perfect
sedative for labour pains.

From pain-free birth to painful death, heroin has become one of our
most reviled and misunderstood substances.

I continue to meet people who assure me that heroin isn't just a drug,
it's an open invitation to crime and degeneracy, a squirt of anarchy
concentrate in a hypodermic.

Despite the fact that it is other substances such as alcohol and speed
that tend to fuel violent behaviour, it is heroin that has acquired
the sinister status.

And this is why many people become edgy when it is suggested (as it is
every year or two) that heroin is making a comeback.

In the late 1990s, as many as 80 per cent of the people we met
sleeping rough on the streets were heroin-dependent. Their
homelessness was often a byproduct of their addiction and these were
the days when the drug flowed so freely that the heroin overdose toll
was printed alongside the road toll in the local tabloid.

Collingwood's Smith Street was dubbed Smack Street, many young women
took to street sex work to support their dependency, and middle-class
families made a concerted effort to avoid the corner of Russell and
Bourke streets, then Melbourne's epicentre of drug dealing.

Are those days returning? Did we learn anything from the last heroin
crisis?

This decade, heroin has had more putative comebacks than John Farnham,
but open street dealing has never quite returned with the same vigour.
Until now.

Many community workers are reporting a notable increase in heroin use
among clients of housing and health services.

Evidently, the poppy fields of Burma and Afghanistan are fertile with
product and the road of supply is open again. Some commentators
believe that in recent weeks the purity of the drug has risen from 30
per cent to 70 per cent.

Heroin is stupidly expensive: five kilograms of it has a street value
of $9 million (although according to one drug educator I know, the
substance would cost about as much to manufacture commercially as sugar).

For the user, a single hit or "point" usually costs about $50. Because
the purity varies, they never know what they've got until it's inside
them. Sometimes they overdose, sometimes they die. A regular user may
need to raise somewhere between $800 to $2000 a week to support their
addiction. Hence the rise in prostitution, petty crime and dealing
during heroin's ascendancy.

It's this expense that creates many of the drug's social problems.
Scoring and paying for heroin becomes the user's entire focus. Finding
money for food, clothing or housing may no longer be a priority.
Homelessness and malnutrition are frequent side-effects for long-term
users.

But all this has been said before. What isn't understood often enough
is why some people find heroin so seductive. Heroin may have been
conceived as a painkiller, but it is also extremely effective in
killing emotional pain. Users I know have described the drug, not as a
curse, but as a source of meaning. "Without it, I would have topped
myself years ago," one 26-year-old woman told me.

Society is fragmented and it's painful to acknowledge that many people
experience sexual, physical and emotional abuse. Overcoming such
trauma may be a lifetime's journey. Some never manage it. I have no
doubt that the stoned serenity heroin promises is seen as a solution,
a tangible pathway out of despair. When he was director of Jesuit
Social Services, Peter Norden memorably observed that young people use
drugs in response to pain, suffering and isolation -- not because they
are aiming to be villainous.

In other words, heroin addiction may be best understood as the
consequence of profound social dislocation, rather than an
individual's weakness. Children do not ask to be traumatised and they
do what they can to survive the despair. This is why we've got to
reach out to users and offer more constructive therapies to address
their psychological injuries.

Ten years ago, widespread heroin use created pervasive outrage in
Melbourne and many people were contented with the short-sighted
premise that all problems begin and end with the drug user. Heroin
users I knew were bashed, spat on and called names such as "junkie"
and "dero". Ironically, the perpetrators were often young intoxicated
males.

It might help if we abolished words like "drug addict" and "junkie"
from the lexicon of social comment. Pejoratives do nothing but efface
the humanity from a situation where compassion, not condemnation,
would better suit the debate.

If heroin is back to stay, we need to be prepared to look past the
substance itself and recognise that this addiction is really a symbol
for more formidable problems. Heroin use isn't just the product of
crime, it's also the product of family breakdown, neglect and intense
feelings of hopelessness.