Did Russia invent the world's worst drug?

[DinoDoc]

There are people who use heroin and work in professional careers.

I would be interested in hearing about these addicts that manage to keep professional careers.

[DinoDoc]

More people doing drugs is an unintended benefit, but the important thing to remember is that the drugs will be better.

Drugs that eat the user sounds like a self-correcting problem.

[Colonâ„¢]

It means some people who would otherwise not do drugs will do drugs.

Can't you just say that more people will use drugs?

[Dinner]

I would be interested in hearing about these addicts that manage to keep professional careers.

Wall St is full of coke heads.

[Hauldren Collider]

"On the margin" more precisely describes the economic phenomenon.

[Hauldren Collider]

Wall St is full of coke heads.

I think that's probably exaggerated.

[notyoueither]

I would be interested in hearing about these addicts that manage to keep professional careers.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/14/nyregion/the-middle-class-rediscovers-heroin.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

The Middle Class Rediscovers Heroin
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
Published: August 14, 1995

Sign In to E-Mail
Print

In what some characterize as an act of rebellion against the flashy cocaine culture of the 1980's, New York City's middle-class drug users are turning in greater numbers to heroin, finding it cheap, potent, easy to buy and free of the harrowing stigma associated with the 1960's junkie.

When Patricia Marback, a stockbroker and mother of two, died of an apparent overdose last week after a night of snorting heroin with her husband in their Upper West Side apartment, friends and colleagues were shocked. But the death of Ms. Marback, who typified success in many ways, also exemplifies the drug's growing clutch on the professional class.

At rehabilitation centers and hospitals around the city, doctors and drug counselors report treating a growing number of professionals and college students for heroin addiction. At the same time, emergency rooms have seen a steady increase in heroin overdose patients in the last few years.

Although heroin's resurgence first hit the West Coast five years ago, when it was embraced by Hollywood trendsetters and grunge musicians tired of cocaine's manic high, the drug's popularity has made a bold leap from the ghettos of New York to the plush Upper West Side apartments of the city's young urban professionals.

"We're seeing more lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers," said Dr. Robert B. Millman, director of alcohol and substance abuse services at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. "It has become a frequent phenomenon in the affluent working population. Twenty years ago, people would run out of the room if someone had it. Now it's reasonable to think that young, successful people know someone else who has done it."

For many college-educated drug users, most of whom have experience with cocaine, switching to heroin is no longer as unconscionable as it seemed a few years ago for one primary reason: the drug can now be snorted.

Snorting the drug, rather than injecting it intravenously, has vanquished many users' fears of contracting H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, from dirty needles, and waylaid visions of dope fiends, track marks coursing down their arms, searching for a sturdy vein to shoot up. Heroin has been civilized in the eyes of many middle-class users.

Addicts and doctors say the growing fascination with heroin among the upper and middle classes is also rooted in distaste for the immediate past: a cliche image of the driven, money-grubbing materialism of the 1980's, a decade in which introspection was cast aside for corporate networking, social climbing and ruthless ambition.

In its place, they say, a counterculture has arisen, one that mimics the soul searching of the 1960's with its emphasis on feeling and decompressing.

"This is a cultural rejection of the cocaine 1980's," said one recently recovered 29-year-old college-educated heroin addict who is a musician. "Those values are repulsive to me. I hated everything about it. Cocaine makes people violent and righteous. Heroin makes you peaceful and lucid and calm and thoughtful, dare I say, clairvoyant. It's the greatest high in the world."

Indeed, much of heroin's mystique is wrapped up in nostalgia for a milder, more creative drug culture that harkens back to people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Miles Davis and Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead leader who died last Wednesday and had a relentless battle with heroin.

And in a drug world devastated by the harshness of crack -- cocaine in a smokable form -- heroin is also an attempt, among some users, to romanticize and reclaim at least one type of drug once again.

"Cocaine was always the drug of the affluent, said John Galea, supervisor of the street studies unit for the state's Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services. "Even freebasing cocaine was a rich person's habit," he said, referring to the practice of smoking cocaine powder treated with ether and reduced to a crystalline base.

"But when crack took over and became this monster it has become," he continued, "crack took the place of heroin on the totem pole. Crackheads are now at the bottom of the totem pole."

Dr. David M. Ockert, executive director of the Parallax Center, an outpatient chemical dependency treatment center, has noticed an increase in college-educated users. "We're coming off a generation where it was O.K. to snort cocaine," he said. "Now you have this white powder and no H.I.V. fears. It has taken it out of the ghetto. And this has allowed a lot of people -- the very broad middle class -- access to it without the stigma."

Heroin, although more expensive than crack, is cheaper than cocaine, and the high can last six hours or more, as opposed to just a short while. One glassine envelope, which usually contains somewhat less than a quarter of one gram of heroin, costs $10 on the street.

As of late, it has become just as easy to find in New York as crack, users and state substance-abuse employees say.

"There is much more heroin on the street than I have seen before," said the musician, who lives near the East Village. "It's all over the place. It's literally available on my doorstep."

Investigators said that they found two glassine envelopes of heroin in the Marbacks' apartment and that Mr. Marback told them he had bought those and three others that the couple had already consumed at 106th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, not far from Columbia University.

In their quest to lure more customers away from cocaine and increase their profits, heroin makers and dealers have refined and marketed the drug in a way that makes it seem less harmful and dangerous to most new users.

Ten, fifteen and twenty years ago, users usually needed to inject the drug intravenously because of its low quality. Back then, the drug they bought was only 3 percent to 10 percent pure. The rest consisted of dilutants.

Today in New York City, a major marketplace for some of the country's most powerful heroin, the drug's potency has in some cases reached 80 percent. The heroin recovered by the police from the Marback's residence tested nearly 80 percent pure, said Patrick Harnett, commanding officer of the Police Department's narcotics division.

But the drug has also become more dangerous for new users. Higher potency increases the likelihood of overdose, especially if people treat heroin like cocaine, which requires larger doses to get high. In addition, buyers don't always know what has been mixed with the heroin.

In the last two weeks alone, eight people have showed up for treatment at the Metropolitan Hospital Center on the Upper East Side after overdosing on heroin that was cut with scopolamine, a drug used for motion sickness and nausea, said Dr. Rania Habal, an emergency room physician at the hospital. The heroin's street name is Black Magic. Some of the emergency cases had just started using heroin, Dr. Habal said.

For some new users, there is also a certain thrill in braving the barrier between the routine and the forbidden: the intermingling of Wall Street with the hardcore avenues of drug addicts can be just as alluring as the powder itself.

"One of the things I found myself missing most is the adventure of copping," said one woman, another recently recovered addict, about buying heroin on the streets. "Having grown up in a middle-class Midwestern suburb, the fact that I could handle brutal kids dealing brutal drugs and not get killed or held up is an achievement."

What also makes heroin so appealing to users is the drug's subtlety, doctors and former addicts say. Unlike hallucinogenics, and to a certain extent cocaine, heroin works upon the body in more subdued ways. Users can still complete their legal briefs, do the laundry and sit around a table with friends at a restaurant, and the odds are no one will ever know.

That false sense of security, however, belies the drug's intense hold on the body and mind. With no frame of reference, former cocaine users mislead themselves into thinking they can handle heroin's clutch. They are almost always mistaken, former addicts say.

The young woman, an administrative assistant for a human rights group who kicked the habit after a one-year struggle, said she was aware of the potential for addiction, she just didn't realize its power. At one point, she even injected the drug because it was less expensive to get high that way.

"Your whole world revolves around copping your next bag," she said, adding that no other drug can offer a comparable high. "Nothing else matters."

Breaking the habit, something few new users consider when they experiment with the drug, is unlike stopping cocaine or quitting cigarettes. Former addicts describe going into convulsions, vomiting and feeling their nervous system go into shock.

"It's the most horrible thing there is," said the musician, who was curious about the drug and comfortable about snorting it. "That was the biggest mistake I ever made. Once you try heroin, you are hanging from a rope."

[DinoDoc]

I'm not sure I would count Patricia Marback as a drug addict success story, nye.

[notyoueither]

Most people are not going to raise their hands when being asked about hard drug use, but we can see that people other than poor junkies seek treatment for heroin use.

[notyoueither]

It's interesting that your focus is on that woman. I'm going to make a wild guess and suggest that if she had access to a legal, consistent supply of her drug she would still be alive.

That's sort of the point.

[DinoDoc]

It's interesting that your focus is on that woman.

She was the only addict who presumably up until her death due to the drugs she so loved (more than her 2 kids apparently) saw nothing wrong with her habit. The rest of the people quoted were recovering addicts talking about how awesome the drug is. "That was the biggest mistake I ever made. Once you try heroin, you are hanging from a rope" are how one person described the wonderful experiences he had with it.

[Dinner]

I think that's probably exaggerated.

Think all you want but its true.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/drugs-and-todays-wall-street/?_r=0

[DinoDoc]

Think all you want but its true.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2007/12/...l-street/?_r=0

There are few statistics to back up this claim, Mr. Granahan concedes,

[Colonâ„¢]

"On the margin" more precisely describes the economic phenomenon.

In what way does saying "more people will use drugs" fail to describe your belief that more people will use drugs?

[notyoueither]

She was the only addict who presumably up until her death due to the drugs she so loved (more than her 2 kids apparently) saw nothing wrong with her habit.

That's a huge presumption.

In any case, the existence of former addicts in higher socio-economic demographics allows us to presume there are current addicts.

I think we would benefit far more by legalising certain drugs thereby reducing the human costs and criminal activity that are part of the maniacal war on drugs.