A Portrait of Desperation: Risking Everything for Their Addiction

Linda is 41. She is middle class and white, with a degree in psychology, a successful background in business and a raging heroin habit going back to when she was 12.

That first time, her older brother wielded the needle. “It hit me and I threw up, but I felt wonderful after. It was the best feeling I’d ever had, and I immediately fell in love with it.”

Her boyfriend, Hank, is 57, a former restaurant manager and cook who struggled most of his life with alcoholism. It was Linda who introduced him to heroin three years ago, and now he is devoted to her, to her habit and to his own addiction--and not necessarily in that order.

He’s going out to find drugs, and it scares him.

“The cops are after you, the dealers are after you,” he says. “There’s no respect. There’s no camaraderie. It’s a miserable game and the guy with the money is the guy they want to kill.”

Linda tries to explain why she and Hank risk so much. She has stolen from friends and family, shoplifted, been fired from jobs and busted for dealing, and sometimes gone homeless. Twice, she nearly died from overdoses.

Still, she cannot turn away from heroin.

“It’s all you want, all your waking hours. You spend all your time trying to get it. ... You prostitute yourself. Not just sexually; it’s a life prostitution,” she said.

*

There is a certain dull familiarity to the lives of Linda and Hank. Through much of this century, heroin has been bane and temptation, and its users have degraded and humiliated themselves.

But experts in the field say the number of heroin addicts in the United States now is 2 million, up from about 500,000 in 1970. They are rich and poor and in between; they come in all colors and with every accent.

The rise in heroin addiction is attributed to plummeting prices (Linda says the cost of a bag has dropped from $30 to $10) and increased purity.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says Colombian drug traffickers are manipulating cost and quality to steal market share from Asian gangs.

By raising heroin’s purity, from 10% to nearly 100%, they enable new users to snort and smoke the drug, making it more tempting for those who would shun needles.

Hank and Linda do not shy away from needles. And their use of the drug predates “heroin chic,” recent advertising campaigns that glamorize the drawn, emaciated look associated with heroin addiction.

The lives of Hank and Linda are nothing like a blue-jeans advertisement.

*

Hank has been searching for hours, driving around Lawrence, Mass., but his dealers are temporarily empty-handed. One promises a new shipment from New York by evening, but that’s four hours of withdrawal away.

Rather than wait, Hank visits Cathy, a 39-year-old prostitute addicted to heroin and cocaine. Her apartment serves as a shooting gallery.

Hank joins Cathy at her kitchen table, which is littered with razors and traces from lines of cocaine. She looks tired and her arms are swollen and bloody; she’s been shooting up most of the day.

Normally, her apartment is a safe haven for a dozen addicts who store their drugs and use them there.

But the night before, Cathy’s husband was arrested for dealing. The police didn’t take any of the drugs, however, which Cathy says is a sign they’re staking out the apartment.

“The pleasure here is we like the high. But it’s scary. There’s consequences,” Hank says--but he admits the risk adds to the excitement.

Cathy nods in agreement as she persuades another addict, a homeless man dying of AIDS, to shoot her up. It takes him 20 minutes to find a vein in her arm, probing with dirty hands and a needle he licked clean.

“You never know when you’re gonna get busted,” Cathy says, leaning her head back as the rush hits her.

*

Linda’s apartment is in Haverhill, Mass., just over the border from Hank’s home in Hampstead. It is meticulously decorated. Lace doilies cover every piece of furniture and porcelain cats crowd every table and shelf. The outside is not so nice--it is Haverhill’s drug zone, a neighborhood of decaying homes, blaring music and car alarms.

She gets Supplemental Security Income payments for disabled addicts and earns extra cash from odd jobs.

Linda’s childlike face belies the needle tracks on her arms and neck.

The same brother who introduced Linda to heroin also had raped her when she was 9--an attack her abusive mother accused her of inviting, Linda says. After that, drugs and alcohol were her escape.

“At first, heroin made me happy. It lies to you and tells you you’re wonderful, you’re beautiful, you’re confident. It gives you some of those things, but only for a little while,” Linda says.

On the surface, Linda appeared successful for many years. She owned successful hair styling and catering businesses and held good jobs.

But through it all, she used heroin.

Whenever she stopped, she’d be overwhelmed by depression and would start using again to numb her emotions. At the height of her addiction, Linda says she was shooting up about 20 bags of heroin a day at a cost of about $200.

But after realizing she didn’t feel a thing even as she watched someone stabbing a friend of hers to death, Linda decided it was time to stop.

For five years, Linda successfully controlled her addiction. She went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and even got a job as an addiction counselor. But the lure of the drug proved too strong and she lapsed again.

In fact, Linda met Hank at the addiction clinic where they both worked.

Like Linda, Hank grew up in an abusive home. He was kicked out of the house when he was 16. By then, he knew he was an alcoholic, like his mother. “I was abused by alcohol for the first 16 years of my life, and I abused alcohol for the rest of it,” he said.

Ten years ago, he was nearly crippled by a strain of pneumonia that damaged his knees and ankles and left him with chronic pain.

After his health insurance company denied him surgery that could have relieved the pain, a doctor gave him a prescription for Percocet, a synthetic opiate. But the pills quickly lost their effect.

Then Hank met Linda, and heroin.

“Within two days, I was hooked. But it was the first time in years I was without pain in my body. . . . Within several months, [Linda and I] were like everyone else, doing whatever we had to do to get it,” Hank said.

But not forever, Linda said. Six months ago, she decided once again to aim for sobriety and began weaning herself down to four or five hits a day.

“I’m going to stop tomorrow. When I had my five years [of sobriety], it started on the 25th of March. And I have a lot of hope today will be the last day I use and keep my old sobriety date. It seems as good a time as any,” she said.

Hank returns to Linda’s apartment hours later than expected, and enters smiling nervously. Cathy’s connections came through; he pulls a handful of tiny heroin bags from the lining of his coat.

Moving into the bedroom, Hank and Linda begin the ritual that will be repeated every 30 minutes until their supply runs out.

Sitting in front of a coffee table draped with a silk cloth, Linda lines up the half-dozen ceramic boxes in which they store their “works.” Hank lifts the cover of one and reveals two silver teaspoons, about a dozen syringes and tiny balls of cotton.

After dissolving the powder in water, he draws the solution into a syringe through a cotton ball. Linda mistakenly believes the cotton will filter out bacteria and impurities.

Hank prepares another needle and inserts it into his arm. When he releases his grip, it jerks in rhythm with the beat of his heart. As the time between tremors shortens, heavy drops of sweat roll down his forehead.

After injecting 22 cubic centimeters of cocaine--twice his normal dose--he withdraws the syringe from the crook of his elbow and inserts another, this one filled with heroin.

“If I do a [hit] of coke, I’ll have a heroin made up . . . and ready to go. [The heroin] will bring me down fast and bring me back to normal,” he explains, panting and gripping the sides of the armchair.

Linda, kneeling on the floor, keeps one eye on Hank and the other on the needle in her own arm. Drawing the plunger back and forth, she mixes the heroin with her blood inside the syringe.

“I’m getting too high. My heart’s pounding and my head’s swirling. I’ve got to come down quick,” Hank says, giving Linda a panicked look as he strains to breathe.

Linda runs to the kitchen and comes back with a handful of ice to swab his neck and chest. “The ice cools the system down, slows your heart rate, slows your pulse,” he says.

When his breathing slows, Linda relaxes and returns to her own needle. Another overdose averted; time for another hit. When they are done, they promise each other that they will stop using heroin, once and for all.

*

A week later, they are at Hank’s house in Hampstead, which he shares with his wife. She knows of her husband’s relationships with Linda and the drug, but seems to have stopped trying to end either one.

They still are using, and they are disappointed with themselves. Linda asks him to go to Lawrence to get more drugs. Hank thinks doing so may kill them both.

He wonders: Is he holding Linda back, keeping her from getting clean?

“The drugs are holding me back,” Linda says, staring at the floor.

“You know I’d go out and [buy drugs] for you. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to do drugs without you. I don’t want to do drugs with you, either. I can’t take it anymore. I hate myself,” Hank says.

Linda nods: “I want to have a life. Because right now, when I’m in full-bloom addiction, that is my life. That’s all there’s room for. I feel horrible. . . . I don’t want to lose any more.”