You could die, or worse ( Heroin Overdose)

Drug addicts in their addiction seldom give any thought to the possibility of dying. So if your using you might consider the following true autobiographical story:

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One day while at Don’s (my connection) we got word that one of the local dealers had some new drugs that were especially good. Word like that spreads fast amongst drug addicts and it didn’t take long before we were over there. The dealer, a guy called Mel, was someone we occasionally bought drugs from. He invited us into the house and we payed the $25 each for a spoon of Mexican brown heroin ( which is what it cost in 1974) . He told us that we could fix there at his house if we wanted too. Of course, the less time we had to wait then the better it was as far we were concerned. Mel was in his 20’s ( as we all were) and he was living at his parents house, and he was dealing right under their noses. He told us to go back into his back bedroom to fix. I had my outfit (hypodermic needle attached to a plastic ice cream tube with a pacifier on the end) stashed in my sock. Mel gave me a blue ballon which was filled with heroin and knotted at the top. I unknotted it and poured some of the brown powder into a bent spoon that Mel laid out on top of his dresser. I pulled some water from the glass Mel has set on the dresser with my outfit, and squirted it into the spoon. It mixed into a dark brown sludge. Then I took my bic lighter and heated up the mixture until it bubbled. When it cooled down, I took a cigarette out of my pocket and broke the filter off. I pulled some of the cotton out of the filter tip and rolled it up into a ball, and dropped it into the clear brown liquid in the spoon. Carefully, I laid the tip of the hypodermic onto the cotton and sucked it up into the ice cream tube and into the pacifier bulb. I had a full syringe of good Mexican brown heroin.

I took off my belt with one hand and gave it to Don. He wrapped the belt around my bicep like a tourniquet. Carefully, I looked for a vein. One was bulging out in the ditch of my arm and I carfully inserted the hypodermic into the vein. I hit it and a dark spume of blood popped up into the syringe like a minature atomic explosion. Carefully and steadily I applied pressure on the pacifier bulb and the dark liquid slowly pushed into my vein. When it was all in, I started taking the needle out of my vein. I remember pulling it out of the vein and starting to get wobbly in the knees. I fell towards the dresser and heard Mel say “S**t, as he clutched me and kept me from falling into the dresser.”

“Get him the f*** out of here,” said Mel to Don. Don grabbed me under one arm and Mel grabbed me on the other. I was conscious as they walked me out of the bedroom down the hallway and into the laundry room. In the laundry room, they opened the garage and were walking me through the garage, and then I lost consciousness. It was the early afternoon.

The next thing I knew I was waking up in a different garage at Don’s house.
‘Its morning,” he said. “You’ve been out since yesterday afternoon. I wasn’t sure you were going to make it. You overdosed at Mels house. How do you feel?” Really, I didn’t know. After I woke up for a while my back felt sore but that was from how I was positioned in the garage. Actually, I didn’t feel too bad. Don hadn’t taken me to the hospital for fear of what they would do to him. So he did nothing. I was ok and didn’t die but many are not so lucky as I was. Strange to say Heroin addicts in their addiction seldom think of this possibility. According to the DEA about 4000 heroin addicts die each year. I didn’t find out until years later at an NA meeting that Mel eventually died of an overdose.

Not only do addicts give scant thought to the possiblity of dying, they even give less thought to an even more important matter.

Where do you spend eternity if you die of a self-inflicted heroin overdose? Something worth thinking about if you are still using.

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