From: ( Brian Giggs) Subject: Re: Advice for Recreational H use Date: 1996/04/11 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard In article <4kf3hn$9fo@newsbf02.news.aol.com>, crystllthr@aol.com (CrystlLthr) wrote: >I'm a heroin chipper and would very much like to communicate with other >users or even ex users. What I don't want is a sermon. >Thanks >Derick It does seem to be all about planning. That is you get a diary of your week and you identify the leisure times that you want to enhance with H. For example, one woman blocks off all day Saturday and most of Sunday. She goes shopping in the morning, takes her daughter to her parents for the day and night, she is a single parent. She gets a few videos in and settles down on the couch with all her equipment (foil etc) and gear (2 x £10 bags brown H). This takes her through to Sunday morning when she drinks a 100ml bottle of Codeine linctus, has a long lie in a hot bath listening to classical music and sipping hot tea. She then has a walk around the local park, picks up the newspapers, takes the videos back and prepares the Sunday meal. She then picks up her daughter from her parents. They eat together with her lover who brings wine etc and she then has an early night with her lover and gets up for work on Monday. She usually does this at least one weekend a month and really likes the isolation and peace. At other times you can find her down the pub with her mates or at a nightclub dancing on Ecstasy tablets. This has been going on since last summer ('95). ==================================================================== Subject: Recreational heroin use From: smisch Date: 1996/11/08 Newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard In article , drughelp@lifeline.demon.co.uk (Reg Frombury) wrote: > For what its worth my first stab at a definition of a recreational heroin > user is someone who has been using approx once a month over two years and > has never sought help of any kind, never been arrested in relation to their > use, never had to use in order not to feel sick etc...etc... That would be me. This past May was my 2nd "anniversary". I have used in "oscillating intervals" since then: about four times the first month, none for about two, once a month for three months, none for about five (with about a 2 use/month supply of Canadian codeine), to a spat of about 2 to 3 times per month for four months, skipped three (w/a little imported "light" opiate preps, eg. codeine, Tem, methadone), then once or twice for two months -- and then only three times over the whole course of '96. (Of course, the unit of "using" must be defined. I am counting it as "completion of purchase", or "continuous intoxication for a maximum of 2 days" -- whichever comes _first_. And these numbers are not exact: let's just say I've "used" well over 20 times in 29 months). I never experienced withdrawal. Never had any legal trouble related to using. However, by the end of '95 (about 1.7 years in), even with the irregularity of use, I had developed quite a tolerance. A day's nod reached a cost of about $50 -- discounting rip-offs. Factoring in blanks, fakes, and "escapes", it came to about $100 per day. 300 mg codeine was about as euphoric as a couple of Advil. I reached a threshold of diminishing return, and I basically "quit". Also, the "cost/benefit analysis" involved more than money. Given the fact that I sniff exclusively (needles are a pet nemesis, and I never could master chasing), it got to the point where the sheer quantity of powder I had to inhale made me a sinusital wreck for a week or two after each "weekend indulgence". I also _hate_ being constipated -- regularity has always been a coveted (but difficult to attain) goal for me. (Interestingly, I always _liked_ the dermal itching.) And I genuinely _love_ the high. From the lucid dream "hallucinations" (the "Insta-Dream effect"), to the total anxiolysis, to the ecstatic release of a heroin puke, to the utter euphoria of a backrub, to the feeling of love for all mankind. Before "discovering" smack, I had always liked codeine, Percocet, Demerol -- whatever I had been given for cough/post-surgical pain as a youth. But smack was just better. Much better. So how have I managed to achieve such apparent "control"? The cost/benefit analyses are only part of it. Such considerations, especially in light of monetary limits, do weigh heavily in the decision to cop or not to cop. But there is also a similar phenomenon at play to that in my use of psylocibin mushrooms -- which I also love(d). There is something so profound about using heroin for me, something emotionally/psychically/physically debilitating in its profundity -- which involves not only the high but even the buy, and even the _idea_ of using -- that dope is just not something I can do everyday. At least not now. I never dare prophesy that i might not someday be "bitten". (No more than I assume i will never die crossing the street). I smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, I am on a moderately generous diazepam script (and I _have_ experienced _that_ withdrawal), and I know how gradually and unpredictably these "needs" can develop. Still, heroin occupies no greater a part of my life than expensive Thai food. It occupies much less of my life than any other drug I like to "play" with, even though it remains my current favorite, as it has been for nearly two and a half years. (And I'm certainly not totally abstinent, now. Recently, I had some time and cash to spare in NYC, I was a little drunk, and I thought some dope would make a six-hour bus ride a little more "pleasant". So I paid $100 for about $20-worth of sinus-burning garbage. Yeah, I copped around the Port Authority -- in a peep-show booth. No laughing! And it _was_ good for the trip...) An observation about the relative rarity of controlled heroin use compared to other drugs: For the most part, people either use heroin like fiends or they don't use it at all. It's not a "social drug" (except insofar as using tends to build little "communities", mainly for the sake of convenient access to the drug). But "social" drug users -- the vast majority of all users -- tend, for obvious reasons, to use only those drugs available in common social millieux. The rest of us, the "real druggies", tend to be the only ones who use heroin at all. It is as though smack lies so deep within the drug market that the only ones who ever get that far are already "there". This is all put as a matter of statistics, where outliers will lie -- on both sides of the distribution.(And, I might add, to use myself as a representative subject would be ludicrous.) But still, the dispropportionate rate of heroin addiction seems as much a social phenomenon -- confounded by these "base rate" problems just described -- as a pharmacological one. Both sets of factors are at play. But I still cringe when I see heroin portrayed as an "incredibly addictive", "evil", [insert epithet here] drug. ==================================================================== From: (Peter McDermott) Subject: Re: 'chipping' Date: 1996/11/19 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard monde@sirius.com (Monde Kontrolle) wrote: >Dr. Death wrote: > >> I honestly cannot believe that people are still mindlessly asserting >> that there is no such thing as a recreational heroin user. I have been a >> specialist researcher on illicit drug use in England since 1983, and >> co-authored "Living with Heroin" (1988). To be sure, compared with most >> other drugs, a much higher proportion of people who try heroin end up >> dependent on it. Many try it a few times, but do not like it, and cease >> use. But a substantial minority prefer to use it on an occasional >> basis, a typical "chipper" pattern in my experience being use on two or >> three days (weekends) a month, with spaces of one or two weeks >> inbetween. I have interviewed people aged between 30 and 60 years who >> have managed to use heroin in this way for decades, and have NEVER >> slipped into dependent use. > >the operative term mhere is 'substantial minority'. Well, thats why he uses the term. To imply its more than that would be false. > >> Unfortunately, because of the major taboo about heroin use - even among >> users of other illegal drugs - successful chippers usually prefer to >> remain anonymous. > > >i find that this 'anonymity' is very difficult to maintain. especially >amongst people who have any familiarity at all with heroin's effects. >a person starts nodding off in the middle of conversations, has his or her >pupils pinned on occasion, hangs around people who do it, and it becomes >pretty obvious that they're doing it, too. No, it's difficult to maintain by regular users. Chippers, by definition, are people who can manage to maintain a pattern of use at appropriate times, ie, when they don't have to go to work or to family occasions, etc. >> It really is about time we put the myth of >> "inevitable addiction to heroin" to rest in the grave of ignorance - >> along with the cannabis amotivational syndrome and the escalation >> theory. So, all you people who lost it on heroin, listen up: stop >> projecting your own psychological relationship to the drug onto all >> others who may try it. Grow up, or better still, give up - once you've >> been hooked on heroin, then it is very difficult to ever be a chipper. > > >it is also very difficult to be a 'chipper' for very long. the line >between occasional use and physical addiction is so thin that i often >wonder if just a few uses can swing you from one to the other. This is only true for addicts. Once you've been addicted a few uses can get you readdicted. However, I managed to use for five years, often daily for many weeks at a stretch without ever getting physically addicted. Chippers, by definition, are those people who don't cross that line. >i know that drugs have different effects on different people and i'm sure >there ARE some people who can manage to pull off 'chipping'. but most >can't. it just gets more of a cellular hold on you than other drugs do. Well, again, the research doesn't support your claim. It would seem that as many people do as don't. However, they are far less visible, and those who get addicted tend to spend all their time in the company of other addicts who have a much higher incidence of use. This skews their perceptions. You can only really get an accurate picture through research. >also, it's worth noting that i've noticed most 'chippers' -- actually >everyone i ever knew who was an 'occasional user' -- was pretty damn >miserable during those intervals between 'using days'. This whole issue is the junkies version of what researchers call 'clinicians error'. Because clinicians see the most fucked up segment of the using population, they extrapolate from that that everybody who uses is equally fucked up. People who are addicted see a similarly skewed population and subconsciously exclude all those cases that they come across that don't fit their model, which renders their judgement equally susceptable to such fallacies.