From: pez@manhattan.com (Gizmo) Subject: The Adventures Of Smacks Past (Part 25) Further Musings Date: 1996/10/04 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard THE ADVENTURES OF SMACKS PAST (PART 25) FURTHER MUSINGS Heroin has been described as being like a woman. And an evil mistress at that. I think this description is pretty accurate as far as analogy's go. One thought that comes to mind, that I'm sure any of you who have done dope will recall, is how if you are on dope, or doing dope, or about to do dope, you are totally absorbed by the drug. This is obvious enough, but triply so, if you are doing it around a girlfriend who is not into it. If you have a relationship going on with a woman, who's not a heroin user, you're gonna have trouble beyond the obvious reasons. To the woman who's not using it, it's worse than if you had cheated on her. It's worse than if you were fucking someone else right in front of her. Ten times worse. Ever wonder why this is? I have. And I've lost a few valuable relationships over it. Nothing will piss off a female more than her man fucking around with another woman. But "piss off" is nothing compared to what she'll feel if you shut her out and do some dope around her. Another woman she can fight. Dope, there's no fighting. You and smack are one. No one can get in there. So your "girlfriend" is left totally abandoned and rejected. That's dope, for the real lover of the drug. When you want it and you do it, there's nothing else in the whole world that will suffice. In research literature they describe various drugs has having different degrees of addictiveness. They will say, that high level opiates are totally "reinforcing." It may take a year or more to get really strung out on alcohol. But heroin, it can happen in a month or so. Another aspect of this may be reflected in how you treat your equipment. This is more a throw back to earlier times. I know that today, disposable diabetic syringes are a dime a dozen, and are sold openly over the counter, or in states where that's not allowed without a prescription, they can be had right where you cop your dope. But back in the early days, the 60's and before my time, "works" where a prized possession. At least they were to me. I've described these earlier "works" before in one of my first story's but it's worth mentioning it again. Back in the 60's you didn't have, or no one ever seemed to use diabetic syringes. You either were very lucky and you had a real glass syringe, or you made do with the homemade variety. They also had disposable plastic ones, but they sucked and were good for only a few times before you had to "grease" the rubber gaskets with Vaseline to make them slide smooth. There was nothing worse than using an old plastic set that got real hard to move. You could go out of your fucking mind, plus possibly blow the shot, if you had to jimmy the plunger while carefully making sure that you didn't move the whole set. Move it a fraction of an inch and you could be sending your shot right into your skin! But the works I remember most where the ones we made with eyedroppers. This was a neat setup. It went back to the early years of injecting street drugs at the turn of the century. What you did is buy an eyedropper from either a hobby shop, or drug store. Then you bought a baby pacifier and cut off the large round part that was designed so that a little toddler wouldn't swallow the whole thing. Sometimes there was a hard piece of plastic in the part that would go in a child's mouth. You had to get that out. Once you had these two items, you took off the normal rubber piece that came with the eyedropper and replaced it with the top of the baby pacifier. Then you used a rubber band to make an airtight seal around the top of the eyedropper. Next you got your spike. Usually a size 25, .26, or if you were lucky a .27 mm. In order to get the spike to make an airtight seal with the other end of the eyedropper, you had to make a "collar." Since spikes/needles where not designed to fit tightly over the small end of the eyedropper, you had to seal the air leak somehow. What you did is, you tore an end off a dollar bill that was, maybe, a quarter inch in width and about three inches in length. After wetting this with water, you wound it around the narrow end of the eyedropper and carefully "screwed" the larger plastic end of the spike to the collar. Once you did this, you were ready to shoot dope. The neat thing about this set up was that you never had to do any manipulation of a plunger, as you would with either a plastic or glass set. All you needed to do was tie your arm off, dissolve your dope, draw it up, and get a hit. Once you got the hit, your blood pressure would send a "red plumb" into the eyedropper. Achieving that, you loosened the tie on your arm and squeezed the dope into your vein. The only downside to this equipment was that if you "lost the hit," more than a once or twice, you could have so much blood in the eyedropper, that seeing if you had a hit the third time around could be a bitch. Although, I stopped using eyedropper syringes along with everyone else, I still remember them fondly. They were something that you "protected" and took care of like a good woman. The other common piece of equipment was the cooker. Spoons could be to cumbersome to carry, so a lot of used to use the bottle top off a soda bottle. Once you pealed the little plastic insert out, you could take a bobby pin, and bend the ends so that it wrapped around the bottle top and voila, you had your cooker. Put a piece of cotton inside for a filter and you were ready to go. Yea, the secret life of a heroin user, was very cult like. Indeed, you were part of a small sub-section of the rest of the world. A world known only to yourself and the other members of this little club. When I first started using dope, you could still find bags for $1.00 each! And I remember guys who had been doing it a lot longer that could remember when a capsule sold for 25 cents. Those were the days. Copyright 1996 Gizmo