William Monahan. "Heroin: What Your Uncle Ted Doesn't Know About It", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 17 (April 26–May 2, 1995), pp. 1, 18-20.
There's a school of thought about heroin, which has it that unless you've spent time scratching your scabs in a hovel, wrecked your life, and ended up a last-ditch gutter-Calvinist confessing your condition of permanent villainy before a hall of applauding losers, you're not allowed to say anything about it.
You haven't been there or something; you don't know what the fuck you're talking about; you're not allowed to have an opinion about heroin unless you have (or at least give lip service to) the received one, which is that it will fuck your life sidewards, is invariably addictive and ought to be avoided at all costs. And if you use it you've got like deep personal problems.
This is curious. The supposed expert on heroin isn't the person who uses it sensibly every once in a while, same as he uses bourbon or nicotine or coffee, who can take it or leave it. The expert on heroin isn't even a functioning junkie. The expert on heroin, believe it or not, is somebody who got flamed by it, had to be grappled off to detox. It's more difficult than it should be to point out that this is a lot of bullshit.
Say the subject under discussion was the stock market. You're a guy with brains and a few stray bucks. You read the financial weather right, venture successfully, turn a tidy profit and back out of the market in a disciplined way after having gotten what you wanted. You can take or leave the stock market, you're careful with it, you're aware that it can fuck you. So you play the market cogently, occasionally, and win.
Sounds to me like you're the expert, rather than some busted fuck in for securities fraud, mopping the rec room in federal prison.
But that's not the way it is with heroin. The talk about heroin has been co-opted by either nervous nellies who are afraid of everything, or victims who should have been. People who ride the tiger successfully are for some reason less pertinent than people who got mauled and had an arm torn off by the tiger --yet couldn't stop getting on it, despite having no talent for that particular ride. They're not really the people to be holding forth on tiger riding, but they do.
Heroin's a dangerous, attractive and highly addictive drug. But if you know that going in, and if you're not an idiot, you can use it carefully, extract pleasure, not get addicted and have a wonderful, controlled experience with a folk medicine as old as recorded history--and which, in my opinion, ought to be legal.
Of course everything ought to be legal, except stealing, assault, libel, slander, usury and murder. But a perfect society would be far too simple. I'm sorry I brought it up.
Until recently (the relevant U.S. narcotics act came in 1914, just before that other ultra-sensible experiment in parochial morals, Prohibition) people have always taken opiates whenever they felt like it. They had every right to do so, and their reasons were various, and pretty much up to the individual, which sounds socially optimal to me.
Ancient Thebes was famous for being surrounded by fast fields of poppies. You could cop anywhere in Thebes. Thebans used opium for the same reason the guy staring into his coffee at the next table just snorted a bag in the bathroom: it feels nice to be opiated. It's a relief from ordinary existence, which is a nice trick and necessary to human beings, even when your existence is just damned fine to begin with.
Your Uncle Ted who likes to unwind with 50 scotches after work and never misses a chance to complain about those damned people with their damned drugs, would be profoundly impressed by heroin. If you've done heavy opiates just like the average Theban, Queen Victoria and Perky Bysshe, you're a couple up on your Uncle Ted. It's more than country-club unwind; opiates are the classical Lethe, the waters of oblivion. And there's nothing wrong with that, in cogent moderation. There never has been.
Your Uncle Ted with his scotches tries for it by legal means, but he doesn't get it. What he gets is a divorce and a distended liver.
I came across a great recipe for oblivion the other day. No, it wasn't a shotgun, which is a bit permanent. It was a Brompton Cocktail. It was first concocted in the last century at Brompton Hospital in London. This "cocktail," which is still given to terminal cancer patients, is basically an alcoholic suspension of Class A narcotics. These are the ingredients:
BROMPTON COCKTAILHeroinMorphineCocaineGin
How'd you like to knock back a few of those men? There's definitely no fucking around with a Brompton Cocktail. You're doing a cannonball into the River of Forgetfulness with that gentleman, that obvious prince of drinks. Finish a day's work? Or can't finish a day's work, but can't work any more? Mind still racing? Pacing up and down and blowing 500 cigarettes? Haven't slept for two days? Have a Brompton Cocktail.
You see, I not only think that people ought to get fucked up once a week, I think they ought to get as fucked up as possible. If you do it on liquor you have a good chance of ending up smashing furniture, insulting someone important or waking up in a bed with someone you would have never tolerated if you were sober. In the end, as every smart drinker discovers, liquor's unesthetic. I don't like marijuana, either. So what do you do?
Well, if you're an old fart, you can go down and whimper about arthritis and get a scrip for Percs. If you're young, you could go in with your arm torn off, and the doctor would still look unhappy before scribbling a scrip for Tylenol Three. Liquor sucks, pot's dumb, crack's for boneheads, coke makes everything worse. But Lethe is still necessary every once in a blue moon, same as it was to the Thebans, same as it was to Keats, same as it was to 18th-Century ladies slugging patent medicines. So what drug do you opt for? Same one they did.
There are two ways to obtain opium from the Oriental poppy (Papaver somniferum). By the first method, the entire plant can be collected and chopped into "opium straw," then cooked down and treated. That's a method used by the pharmaceutical companies, and largely disregarded by those in the illicit trade.
The easiest way to get opium is the way it's been done since Demeter sought Persephone and lost her way in a garden of soporific flowers. One makes a laceration in the unripe seed-pod of the opium poppy. It exudes a milky resin, which dries into a gummy dark brown mass: raw opium, the most important drug in the history of the world.
How it has evolved into its current status on the Lower East Side is a little more complex. In 1805 a German chemist named Seturner, working in the provincial town of Paderborn, got upset by the unreliability, the un-German sloppiness, of market preparations of laudanum, and decided to try to isolate the active ingredient. He mixed opium with ammonia and observed that crystals formed then. He treated the crystals with sulfuric acid and alcohol. What he came up with was an alkaloid he named Morphium, after the God of Dreams. (It was the Romantic Age.)
Seturner caught mice, dogs, and other poor innocent animals, gave them Morphium and observed their reactions. Some people call this incredible brutality, others, of course, call it the scientific method. Anyone who thinks that it's appalling and inexcusable perhaps should sign a binding paper that they refuse to be given any of Seturner's Morphium when they're dying (like we all probably will) of cancer.
When Seturner found out how much of his Morphium it took to kill a large animal (yes, he did this by killing a large animal, so that he wouldn't kill anything that might produce a sonata), he and his friends then took lesser doses themselves. Hooray! This was dangerous, as well as fun, and Seturner OD'd one day while stolidly and Teutonically pushing the envelope. He took a grain and a half of Morphium (three times the maximum sensible dose), and fell over trying to dip his pen into the inkwell to record his observations.
Morpheus let him off, at least partially: Seturner survived to win every scientific award in creation, and to become (there are arguments about this, but I don't want to hear them) the world's first morphine addict. Why? Because it felt good and he wasn't careful.
The molecules of opiates, when introduced into the body, mimic the structure of enkephalins, or endorphins, which suppress pain by occupying certain receptor sites or nerve cells. Endorphins, as almost every running junkie or nice, normal health fascist could tell you, are released by exercise, shock, pain or exhaustion. They flood into the system when, during exercise, you go through the pain barrier. (Which you really have to be crazy to do, by the way.) It takes a long time and it hurts, but finally comes the easeful flood of junk.
A runner (rubber band in mouth as she makes a practical ponytail, then rigs the keys, mace, rape whistle) will fudge this endorphin-reward explanation for her behavior, but I used to run (believe it or not), and it's usually the case that what you're after is the pleasure that comes when you've hurt yourself enough. It's a natural little reward that Nature has for the sprinting maniac in the gel shoes. If you get through the point where any normal person would stop running if he wasn't being chased by a Bengal tiger or a horde of pen-waving virgins in black-and-white Beatles film, you get a burst of narcotic exhilaration exactly like being on heroin. That sense of well-being also happens, curiously, when you fall down a rock slope, get punched in the head by someone's spouse or break your pelvis snowboarding.
We all know the sensation, the sort of ok goody feeling you get when you're seriously injured. In the case of traumatic physical injury there's a dreamlike and opiated interval before whatever real-time pain you're in for organizes itself and arrives like a bailiff. T.E. Lawrence, an odd cat whichever way you whipped him, could have told you that endorphins are released by a good whipping followed by a Turkish gang rape. If you've ever been in a fistfight and taken punches--and especially if you've lost a fistfight and been knocked down--you know that there's a point when it feels good. What it feels like (and I know this empirically, so don't fuck with me) is like being on heroin. Ever notice men make up after a fight? That atmosphere of saccharine Aw, you're an okay guy bonhomie? It's because everything's all right. You're virtually warmed with charity and warmth and love. Whatever testosterone and adrenaline and malevolence got you into this in the first place, in the aftermath, you're junked to the tits.
Your ex-girlfriend who did 2000 stomach crunches instead of having a drink like a regular guy? She was on heroin. The guy standing up trembling from the weight bench? He's fucked up on junk. Ever come back from skiing feeling sensual, tired, calm, benign, replete? You're on opium. What you've done, up there in Vermont, is spent a fortune for a bundle of sensations you can buy for 10 bucks off E. Houston St.
Seturner's Morphium or morphine didn't catch on generally for recreational use in the Romantic Age. The cheap and available drug of choice continued to be opium, in the form of alcoholic tinctures, ranging from the black drop the Quakers made in England (yes, the Quakers took time off from prayer and being persecuted to turn a buck as drug dealers) to various commercial cordials, carminatives and elixirs, which the working classes (Hogarth had it only partially right) frequently preferred to gin.
It was cheaper than gin, and it delivered more of what they wanted, which was Lethe: relief from the ordinary self. Tinctures of opium, in the form of "quieting syrups," were often given to working-class infants, before their mothers slogged off to the dark Satanic mills back there at the birth of the modern. Obviously there were overdoses. Children died; lots of people died. Seturner had chosen Morpheus as his patron, but it might as well have been Thanatos.
Last summer I was in a cemetery on Nantucket, reading headstones, and observed how many sea captains of the early mid-19th Century had outlived a number of wives. It struck me that the high rate of death for women in childbirth in the late 18th and early 19th Century may have had more to do with lavish dispensation of uncontrolled opiates, rather than any obstetrical mishaps. The suspiciously pale and neurasthenic ladies of the Romantic Age died in childbirth all the time.
I think the reason was probably laudanum. The poor thing with narrow hips of popular 19th-Century fashion probably went out less often with a Melanie Wilkes Christlike blessing and hemorrhage than with pinpoint pupils, a cold dusky skin and paralysis of breathing owing to narcotic poisoning. Women used more opium than men, and they got addicted recreationally out of boredom (I can see that: imagine sitting around the Dickinson house without getting fucked up) and through treatment of female complaints.
Long before you had to fumble with the childsafe Pamprin, there was actual Lethe. Laudanum was so good for the monthlies that women took it all the time; and when you started to really hurt, like in childbirth, you took more.
Byron used opium, but he was far from a fan, and reported that it, like alcohol, made him moody and suspicious, and that on the whole he preferred a dose of salts. On this evidence I think he might have been a cocaine man (the way the governor of Masschusetts and Pete Wilson's future vice president is a bourbon man), but coca was still mainly being chewed in leaf form by Amerindians dragging llamas up slopes. Shelly adored opium: it cured his nervous headache, which was probably a migraine, probably caused (like weep St. Kurt's dodgy stomach) by using narcotics in the first place. Charles Lamb took opium whenever he had a cold: (That sentence looks like "Charles Lamb took opium whenever he could," which is probably more like it.)
Keats wrote: "My heart aches , and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,/Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains./One minute past and Letheward had sunk..." The miracle of negative capability for the moment aside, what we have here is Keats on the nod.
While I was looking through some books on heroin--even the most adult ones seemed written in some sense for children--I came across one that really was written for children: Heroin, apparently funded by public money (a million here on unproved theories, a billion there, who gives a fuck, as long as it looks like we're Doing Something) composed by some modern equivalent of Parson Weems during the last legs of Nancy Reagan's Just Say No era.
Nancy Reagan was a major pillster, by the way, but she didn't want kids or Negroes to feel as good as she did when stoned off her ass on scrip dope and being pinned into a $50,000 war frock that she'd scammed free off some social-climbing 7th Ave. type. So, while crammed with the sort of drugs that rich, enfranchised old bags do, she had a little campaign against the sort of drugs that poor, disenfranchised people do. It was all right for Nancy to pop everything in the cabinet before tottering off to disgrace the United States by illogically curtseying to the Queen of fucking England (I never got over this personally), but it wasn't (and isn't) all right for you to get drugs without being some old clam who's married to the president.
The campaign, you'll recall, was huge, and part of it was this odd children's book Heroin--which contains some surprisingly useful information. If the average at-risk 12-year-old didn't know how to chase the dragon before reading Heroin, he'd know enough afterwards to save the flex straw from milk break and cop some tin foil off Mom. Also, it would tune his cop-radar ("Heroin is an illegal drug in every country. If you are caught carrying it, you are in big trouble."). But mainly Heroin reads like any pseudo-informative "hard-hitting" let's-save-the-world/American-family/Aryan-race propaganda primer. For example:
Heroin is often sold by people who are already addicted to it. They tell you that heroin can solve your problems, and that it isn't really dangerous. They are lying.
Sure. Take that first sentence and substitute "Communism" for "heroin," and we pretty much know where we are with this book. As far as drug dealers doing a door-to-door salesman thing, corrupting unwary youth with false promises, have you ever heard a drug dealer do anything but whisper "Express, Express" to people who are already looking for it? I haven't. Those damned drug dealers of popular public fiction have a curious (and important) resemblance to the dark character Goodman Brown met in the woods. No one's battling drugs here--they're battling Satan.
Heroin is taken by millions of people all over the world. Some of these--draw close, Dick and Jane--are already what you might call "junkies"-in bad health, dirty clothes, no jobs, nowhere to live.
Well, be fair, some people might call them "junkies." Others, of course, call them "Musicians."
Others seem like ordinary people who you think would never touch the stuff.
The reason, Dick and Jane, they seem like ordinary people even though they do heroin is because they are ordinary people who incidentally do heroin. But it's not in Heroin's order of business to amplify this disturbing contradiction. Instead, it throws in reprints of tabloid headlines like HEROIN BRIT WILL HANG and HANGED: Women Sob as Drug Brit Goes to the Gallows.
There may be normal people doing heroin, you see, but it gets you homeless or hanged. Why do people take heroin? Nancy Reagan's Voltaire knows: They take it because, for a short while, it seems to bring pleasure and calmness... But the peace and relaxation of heroin are false.
That's not true. There's nothing false about heroin's effect of mental and physical relaxation. GUINNESS GETS YOU DRUNK, and HEROIN RELAXES. But what society is battling here is Old Scratch, the father of lies, with his sinuous attractions, the things he shows from the mountaintop. It'd be a bit better if they simply said, "Dear Kids, people do heroin because it feels good, and it does feel good, but if you're not careful you can get really fucked up (if you're, like, predisposed to get fucked up), and you should never carry too much of it in Malaysia..." But no one's less interested in the truth about drugs than someone in a war against them.
Heroin may make you feel different for a short time but in no way is it a solution. It's a chemical that affects the brain. It is not a way of handling the tougher parts of life.
Well yeah. Neither is French cooking, drinking decent wine or reading novels late at night when you're due at work at nine, yet some people go fucking off into illogical and destructive excesses in those departments, too. It's like saying we ought to ban Parcheesi because your aunt went mad for it in the 1930s. The others, who are capable of moderation, don't they count? Not when society's a mad dad, and we're all his children.
Why do people get addicted? I don't know. You don't know, either. We don't even know what addiction is. Everybody says they know what addiction is, but we don't even know if there's really such a thing as addiction--that is, a physiological need that is dissimilar from an undisciplined voluptuary craving. The concept of addiction, like the concept of God, is a way out of a mystery. Substances, neutral in themselves, are named evils. There's nothing intrinsically evil about a glass of scotch there on the table, or a bit of white dust on the edge of a credit card. If you can't stop doing something, whose fault is it?
The standard (hysterical) figure on rates of addiction is that out of every 10 people who so much as try heroin, two become addicted. I almost wrote "hopelessly" addicted, and that's symptomatic of the perceptual problem. No one's ever hopelessly addicted to anything. In fact, if you can kick a thing, armed with nothing more than willpower, over any given weekend--which you can do with heroin even if you've done it for 20 years--are you actually addicted in any sense worth naming?
Addicts of the schooled sort deal with not having any individual responsibility by in some sense giving up individuality itself. There's a little psychological trick in the Anonymous thing: it's an abdication. If it works, of course, it works, but I don't like religions. I don't like people not figuring things out for themselves.
Heroin-diacetylmorphine, the interesting ingredient in the Brompton Cocktail and the stuff that had me pinned and wigged the other day crossing Union Square with sunglasses on, is produced by treating Herr Seturner's Morphium with acetic anhydride. That may look like the name of a cab driver to whom you have to give explicit directions, but it's some sort of chemical.
Heroin was once used medicinally to relieve pain and diarrhea, to suppress coughing spasms, and as a cure for morphine addiction. The only way it could cure morphine addiction, pretty obviously, is by forming a heroin addiction.
Heroin is an effective little preparation of opium. Since the government and that nation, stuffed with hypocrites and Christian wing-nuts, think you're not grown-up or smart enough to decide when, or when not to use folk medicine, you now have to be awfully careful with the stuff you get on the street, on account of it coming from criminals, rather than off the shelf in the form of Mrs. Goolsby's Cordial.
Not long ago, instead of coffee and a cigarette and starting to worry and work as usual, I got out of bed, had a beer, and snorted some heroin. A good deal less expensive than going snorkeling in Jamaica--which, in terms of hedonistic release, it resembled.
Keith Richards (your man to trust in the matter) described heroin really well: he said it was like you'd been out in the cold your entire life, and suddenly you'd come into a warm room. You know how you haven't felt really good since you were five or six? Always some small nagging pain, your back hurts, your career is totally out of control, you don't have a career?
On heroin, you can feel marvelous about not having anything going for you, which is why some people keep doing it, just like others do religion. If you do actually have something going for you, all you have to worry about from heroin is feeling marvelous physically--at the center of pleasure, in a warm room, utterly relaxed. One's anxiety level on heroin is so low you could have a gun stuck in your face and not give a shit; it's what the full range of legal antidepressants try for, unsuccessfully.
You think it's decadent, and bad, an invariably dangerous and subhuman and wrong? Well it isn't. It's illegal, but so is driving too fast or opening diplomatic relations with Cuba. It's very human to do opiates when you feel like it--that is, if you can get opiates, which isn't too hard in New York.
Sure, before the day was over I ended up vaulting out of a tea shop and puking into a dirty snowbank, but I spent most of the day feeling like His Most Serene Highness the King of Spain translated to heaven and getting a tag-team blowjob from Cibo and Matto on his birthday. and I'm telling you I needed it.
I managed half a cup of tepid tea. I sat there for a while, pupils pinned, talking rubbish, started staring at something on the table, and then nearly nodded off again, and then sat upright with a jolt. At that point I felt something like a soft alligator trying fairly discreetly to get out of my stomach. I excused myself, pushed out of the restaurant, and wobbled a little way down the sidewalk. I hung out for a while in a fairly sophisto way by a trash barrel, and then leaned over and vomited about four quarts of tan scum.
It was painless. It was almost nice. Dope-puke. It was 30 degrees outside on the street and I'd left my leather coat inside, but I wasn't cold. In fact, the February wind, which should have been lacerating and intolerable, felt like a balmy tropical breeze. As far as sensations were concerned, I was on vacation, had just played some tennis, had a champagne lunch, and was wearing sunglasses on the beach, at an expensive resort, shortly after being voted in unanimously, to thunderous applause, as Emperor of the Universe.
The next day I was normal.
John Lennon once said in an interview that he'd always needed a drug to survive. A lot of us do, for one reason or another. You can't always be falling in love or making art or climbing Everest or calmly considering a beautiful landscape or running a marathon. As Prozac users and their doctors could tell you, there's nothing wrong and a good deal psychologically right with chemical relaxation.
People go off like raped apes if you say that heroin feels nice and might actually be as harmless as cheeseburgers, handled properly. I'd go a bit further and state that if heroin can indeed be "nice" at the beginning, it can obviously be damned nice in moderation. People are afraid to say that. That's reason enough to say it.
And so, the readers of New York Press did go off like raped apes. For weeks in the letters columns. It's a great essay.
