Heroin User's Handbook

By Francis Moraes, Ph.D.

Heroin is a fascinating drug to most people.It is often referred to as the hardest drug.” By this logic, people might start with alcohol, work up to marijuana and maybe LSD. Then they reach to cocaine or methamphetamine. And finally, at the end of the journey is heroin. But like most things about heroin, this is more myth than reality.

For non-users, this mythic power is exciting. And writers for the last century have been more than willing to pander to such readers in pulp and art novels all the way up to television crime novels. But it is rare for the most people to get a real look at what is, after all, the very core of what heroin is about for its users.

To users, the interest is obvious. But ignorance of the the details of drug use among heroin users is rife usually based on what the author calls old junkie tales.” The difference between such folklore and the truth is often the difference between life and death.

The Heroin User’s Handbook reveals the largely hidden world of heroin use based upon actual work with users and countless scholarly books and articles. And it does it in an extremely readable, non-technical manner even while providing detained and accurate information.

The book discusses all aspects of heroin use: the acquisition of drugs, the administration of them, health risks, legal issues, social aspects, and addiction and detox. It provides the non-heroin world with a detailed look inside a very rarefied subculture. But it also provides the those in the heroin using world life-saving information.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronin Publishing
• Release date: Sep 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781579512347

Book preview

Part One

What is Heroin?

1

Myths

The intent of this book is to educate the reader about all aspects of the use of heroin and to dispel the major myths by replacing them with accurate information. The particular focus is to help those who are already using heroin live happier and healthier lives. But there is so much misinformation surrounding heroin that it’s important to confront the major myths about the drug right away. This misinformation causes unnecessary pain throughout society; it kills people and destroys the lives of many more than the users themselves.

Don’t Try Heroin

In writing this book, it is not my aim to encourage you to use heroin—far from it. My experience with heroin has cost me a great deal and I am not alone. Involvement with heroin at this time in history is very dangerous, so let me start by trying to talk you out of ever trying this drug—if you haven’t already.

I known what you’ve heard: heroin is so good that if you try it once, you’ll never stop. You have to remember, however, that pretty much everything you know about heroin comes from two sources: government propaganda and screenplays. Information from he government is at best misleading and at worst maliciously dishonest. Screenplays are fiction; they may provide correct information but they are more likely to be highly misleading. Be skeptical of any information you possess about heroin.

Reason One: Heroin Makes You Sick

Heroin’s primary effect is nausea for the vast majority of new users. Many people are painfully ill for hours. It’s not uncommon for a person to vomit five or more times from a single dose of the drug. Most people eventually get over the nausea and experience heroin’s euphoric effects. For some of these people the nausea is an acceptable price to pay for the euphoria; for others, it is not.

The effect of heroin is not as great as you’ve been toldnd it will likely make you sick."

Reason Two: Heroin High is Subtle

Aside from the possible nausea, the new user may be unhappy with heroin because of its rather subtle effects. At its best, heroin fills the user with a sense of contentment and this is surprisingly easy to miss by users who are expecting to be smacked. No group seems to be more dissatisfied with its effects than regular cannabis smokers who are used to a high which is in no sense subtle.

Don’t fall for the line that a heroin rush is like a body-wide orgasm. The only time I’ve ever heard this is when it is coming from fictional characters or heroin researchers who have never taken the drug.

Reason Three: Heroin Can Kill You

So there are two practical reasons for not even trying heroin: it will probably make you sick and even if it doesn’t, you might not notice the high or get any feeling of euphoria. You might still think it is worth a try. You might get sick or waste a few dollars, so what? A bigger issue still is that you could die.

In Chapter 4, I will discuss sudden death associated with heroin use. The problem with this is that it is not at all clear as to why this happens. There are precautions that can be taken, but it is still possible to end up dead. Thousands of users die in this way each year.

Reason Four: Jail

Involvement with heroin can also cause you terrible legal problems. I have peppered this book with the fact that much of the harm that heroin causes in the lives of its users comes from its legal status. Heroin is not just illegal; it is very illegal. Even the attempted possession of it is a felony.

Heron may kill you – or just land you in jail."

If you are caught trying to buy it or possessing it, you won’t be handed a ticket, you will be handcuffed. If you were caught in a car, it will be towed and very likely seized to fund the War on Drugs. You will be taken to jail. If it is your first offense, you may end up in some kind of drug treatment program which may require that you quit your job because of all of the treatment sessions and court appearances that take place during the day. If not this, you will end up with a felony which can put you in jail for many years. In the opinion of prospective employers (and landlords and the guy who cooks your Big Mac), the label convicted felon puts you in the same category as child molesters and murderers.

If you want a scary but very accurate account of just what you open yourself up for when you do illegal drugs, you should read Drug Warriors and Their Prey by Richard Lawrence Miller. In this book, Miller shows that in modern America, illegal drug users are being treated and used just as Jews were in Nazi Germany. By becoming an illegal drug user, you begin a process that ends in your destruction. The process is identification (drug testing), ostracism (job loss under most circumstances), concentration (arrest), and annihilation.

We haven’t arrived at the annihilation (final solution) phase yet. But I have heard politicians and pundits call for the death penalty for illegal drug users. Most notable is the former Los Angeles Chief of Police Daryl Gates’ statement before Congress, All casual drug users should be taken out and shot. What is more amazing is that these words caused very little dissent. Gates’ point was that we are at war (Drug War) and that drug users are traitors. In general, America’s response was: good point!

This should give you some idea of the hatred that doing any illegal drug, but particularly heroin, will unleash upon you.

Reason Five: Heroin Catch-22

For me, none of these reasons—illness, subtlety of effect, death, and jail—compares to the fifth reason for not trying heroin. This is what I call the Heroin Catch-22.

If you don’t like heroin then you wasted your time and money.

If you do like heroin then you are in danger of allowing heroin to become the most important thing in your life. This is how heroin can become very dangerous.

Any time you allow something to become the most important thing in your life, you put yourself in a dangerous position. The question is, what are you willing to do to get this thing? A person who likes heroin finds himself in a very difficult situation once he becomes addicted. It is one thing to fight the urge to do a drug that makes him feel good; this may be difficult, but even if he succeeds in this endeavor, he has another battle to fight. When he stops, he finds that he is physically sick. This can make him frantic which can lead to his making choices that he would never before have thought possible.

It takes a great deal of discipline to use heroin without becoming addicted. This is because heroin is a highly addictive drug. Most heroin addicts that I have met do not have what most people would call addictive personalities. The fact of the matter is that if you do heroin enough, you will become physically addicted; it doesn’t matter who you are.

Just being a heroin user has the effect of cutting you off from the rest of society because of the opinions that the majority of society hold regarding heroin. Few people who do not smoke cannabis will have a problem with you if you do. This is not the case with heroin. If you use heroin, you will be forced to hide it from every-one but those who also use it.

If you use heroin, you will be forced to hide it from everyone but those who also use it.

This book contains a great deal of information which will be of interest to people who do not use and do not intend to use heroin. In a weird kind of way, this book will do more to keep people off heroin than all of the evil and misinformed anti-drug propaganda littering the bookstores and libraries of America. The reason is simple: I provide the reader with objective information about heroin. A brief perusal will show that using heroin takes a lot of work and that it is simply not worth it to the vast majority of people.

If you are already a user or you have already decided that you want to become a user, this book can be profoundly helpful. The saddest fact of heroin is that most users don’t know any more than what the screenwriters and propagandists have told them. As a result, many heroin users become addicts who normally might not. And, when it comes to heroin, misinformation can mean death.

Heroin is Just Morphine

Heroin is a narcotic. There are a lot of definitions of the word narcotic. The most common is that a narcotic is any illegal drug. For the time being, I am interested in the medical definition of this word. Narcotics are defined by the highly useful, if governmentally biased, The Encyclopedia of Drug Abuse as central nervous system depressants with analgesic and sedative properties. Analgesic is medical shorthand for a drug which relieves pain without loss of consciousness.

All opiates are derived from the opium poppy. From the opium poppy we get, with little work, opium. The primary ingredients in opium are morphine and codeine. Codeine will get you high but it is a relatively poor high compared to that of morphine, and since morphine is the largest constituent of opium, it is reasonable to say that when one ingests opium he is doing so primarily to get the morphine.

The human body has opiate receptor sites. These are sites in the brain, spinal cord, intestines, and possibly elsewhere that recognize opiates and tell the brain to feel the way opiates make a user feel: content and safe. The body produces its own morphine-like substances called opiate peptides or endorphins. These substances seem to be used by the body to control pain and mood. In other words, morphine stimulates the same parts of the body that are normally stimulated in your brain when you feel happy. This may be a primary reason why morphine itself has relatively few deleterious effects on the human body even after long use.

Heroin is created by combining morphine with acetic anhydride. Chemically, this converts the morphine into diacetylmorphine which is just the morphine molecule with a couple of diacetyl groups tacked on. Figure 1 shows the similarities. Once in the body, chemicals strip away these diacetyl groups and turn the heroin back into morphine. This process takes place very quickly: heroin has a halflife of about three minutes in the human body. Heroin itself does not affect the body. It is only after heroin has been converted into morphine that it becomes effective. Heroin is only a transport chemical—an effective way of getting morphine to the brain.

Heroin and Morphine have almost identical chemical structures.

Heroin and Morphine have almost identical chemical structures.

Heroin is more potent than morphine because it crosses over the blood-brain barrier—the separation between the circulatory system and the brain—more quickly than morphine. This fact has been mistakenly taken to mean that heroin has a greater rush associated with it than morphine. This is not the case. It means that for an equal concentration in the blood, three heroin molecules will cross the blood-brain barrier for each morphine molecule. But if the concentration of morphine in the blood is three times the heroin concentration, the rate at which each cross the blood-brain barrier would be the same. As a result of this, heroin is a stronger opiate than morphine, not a faster opiate.

Heroin is a pro-drug—it doesn’t get you high.

Given this, it makes no sense that heroin cannot be prescribed in the United States when it is identical to morphine in effect and yet is less toxic. The fact that Dilaudid® can be prescribed is even more amazing since in addition to it being a more effective drug (three times as strong as heroin) there is less nausea associated with it—as a result of this, Dilaudid® is particularly prized by opiate users.

The emphasis of this book is on the practical matters associated with heroin use. If you are interested in more information on brain chemistry and how heroin affects the brain, check out my books The Little Book of Heroin and Opium.

2

Heroin Compared to Other Drugs

There is little question that heroin is the drug with the most street cred. It has often been referred to as the hardest drug. When I was growing up in and around the drug subculture, the conventional wisdom was that any drug was worth trying—except heroin. But these perceptions of heroin came from people who had never used the drug.

Drug Hardness

The attitudes about how hard a drug is, derive primarily from the method in which the drug is commonly administered. The order is as follows: eating (including drinking—eating liquids), smoking, snorting, and injecting. This is not a fact that I base upon some elaborate sociological experiment; it is based upon my keen observations over many years. But if you consider recreational drugs, and how people think about them, you will see my point.

The eaten drugs are alcohol, caffeine, and even most prescription drugs although their association with doctors and hospitals confuse matters. To most people, these are relatively safe; you don’t generally have to worry about people finding out that you use them. Next we have the smoked drugs: mostly cigarettes and marijuana but even opium although it is very rarely seen in the United States. It’s interesting what a big difference there is in the perceptions of opium and heroin even though they are pretty much the same thing. These two categories seem relatively safe because they are familiar in our society: everyone eats and a lot of people smoke. To most people, the acts of eating and smoking do not imply that a drug is being ingested (although this is pretty much always the case with smoking).

Now we get to the category of hard drugs. For snorting, we have primarily cocaine and speed. Although these drugs are considered hard or serious, they are perceived as a very significant step down from heroin—mostly because heroin is seen as always being injected. This is interesting in that both cocaine and speed are commonly injected and heroin is commonly smoked and snorted. In fact, opiate addicts only use heroin because of the laws and black market economics that result from them. Before there were laws against opiates, almost all addicts where addicted to opium—instead of heroin or morphine—which they administered mostly by drinking. Heroin addiction and the syringe are the result of laws, not of the powerful draw of heroin.

There are exceptions to this model, of course. LSD is eaten, for example. But overall, people do decide how dangerous a drug is on its administration route. My purpose in presenting this model of drug perceptions is to allow you to see that the people around you do not guide their thoughts about drugs on facts. This might be considered good by the drug warriors who think that it will keep people from trying the harder drugs. In fact, while it will keep some people from using these drugs, it will also cause some people to use these drugs. I know that much of my interest in trying heroin originally was my belief that it was the hardest drug.

Drug Effects

So what does make a drug hard? This is an ill-posed question. Anyone who wants to think about drugs seriously should ask several different questions: 1. How profoundly does the drug affect thinking? 2. How much damage does the drug do to the body of the user? 3. How likely is the drug to cause misbehavior? 4. How bad is the withdrawal from the drug? Let me take on these questions one at a time.

Thinking Ability

How profoundly does a drug affect thinking? The drugs that have the greatest effect on cognitive ability are the psychedelics: marijuana and the LSD drugs. LSD is a powerful hallucinogen so most people won’t question me here. But marijuana, that golden child of the illegal drug world which is almost legal? Yes. Very small doses of it have a profound effect on the cognitive abilities of the brain. One hit of middle-grade pot and I can barely talk. And this was true even when I was doing $200 of heroin per day.

Heroin does not have a great effect on the cognitive abilities of the brain. This is due to how morphine works. It is active mostly in the lower part of the brain, the brain stem. People do not think much differently on it than off of it. They do, however, think much more slowly.

Bodily Damage

How much damage does the drug do to the body of the user? There is no question that the most damaging drugs on the body are alcohol, speed, and cocaine. All of these drugs beat up the body excessively. Alcohol is a potent poison which greatly taxes the liver and kidneys. It is also very effective at destroying brain tissue. The white powders destroy the kidneys even faster than alcohol destroys the liver.

Heroin can be damaging to the body in that it is possible to overdose on it and die. But most of the deaths that are attributed to heroin overdose are really due to other causes such as impurities and drug interactions (heroin and alcohol together, for example, is a prescription for death). The actual overdoses that occur are mostly due to the inconsistent quality of the drug. Otherwise, heroin is relatively gentle on the body. There are basically no long-term deleterious effects of heroin use. There are, of course, huge health effects associated with the lifestyles of heroin users, as we shall discuss.

Heroin itself isn’t that damaging to the body, but it can kill you—so can the lifestyle.

Misbehavior

How likely is the drug to cause misbehavior? When it comes to the drugs that most cause misbehavior, we’re talking about everyone’s favorite: alcohol. Alcohol makes people more aggressive; it has a high association with violent crimes. The good side of this is that it can act as a social lubricator by allowing normally shy people to be more outgoing. But this also makes people more prone to be belligerent and more likely to turn