The life of a functioning heroın addict
WHEN POORNA BELL DISCOVERED HER HUSBAND WAS HARBOURING A SECRET ADDICTION, SHE UNRAVELLED A STORY SHE NEVER EXPECTED… ›
It was early afternoon, on an unusually warm October day, and I was laden down with groceries for Sunday lunch.
“Rob, can you help me unpack?” I yelled upstairs. Silence. I shouted again. Further silence. It was then, my stomach dropping, I realised that my husband hadn’t left our bed again. It was the fourth weekend in a row.
Four years earlier, when I met Rob, I was struck by how different he was to men I’d previously dated. He was just so together. He owned a house and was a driven science journalist. He wasn’t afraid of commitment, or his own feelings. He had no qualms about telling me how deeply he had fallen for me, in just a fortnight of dating.
But this Rob, buried under our duvet, was different. He’d been changing slowly, very gradually, for months now. And he wouldn’t let me in.
His depression must have returned. That’s what I was thinking. He’d told me early on in our relationship that he’d suffered from it since he was a teenager. It all fitted: his insomnia, crippling stomach aches and this, how his bed had almost entrapped him, how impossible he found it to get out.
But when I walked upstairs, and sat on the edge of the bed, what he told me sent shockwaves through my spine.
He looked up at me, and said, under his breath,“I’m a heroin addict.” There was a pause. “I’ve been addicted for the past three years.”
We’d been married for two and a bit years. I’d known him for four.
I looked at him and, as if for the first time, really saw him. The pallid complexion. The red-rimmed eyes. Immediately, like sheets of code rewriting moments of our marriage, things that had been brushed away nonchalantly by Rob made sudden sense. His late-night trips to the corner shop for Lucozade. How he always ended up a sick, sweaty mess when we visited my parents. His progressive weight loss. Why there was never any bloody tinfoil in the house.
In that instant, they showed themselves for what they really were: trips to meet his dealer, his body going into withdrawal, him smoking heroin in our downstairs bathroom while I thought he was having a cigarette... Heroin had suddenly, violently, polluted everything.
I froze. Pulled my hand away. Stood up, and left the room. The curtains were drawn in my home office, the light remained off. I sat there in the darkness and tried to catch my breath.
How could this have happened to us? We were normal. We walked our dog, we fought over who did the dishes, we cuddled on the couch. And Rob was successful. He travelled all over Britain speaking at conferences. He paid his bills. He helped my mum with her gardening. He was from a loving, middle-class family. How could he be addicted to heroin? And how could I not have known?
I finally left the confines of that dark, dark room and confronted Rob. I asked him how he could do this if he loved me. And as he began to explain, I realised that what I thought I knew about addiction was utterly wrong. What little I knew about heroin was even more misguided.
Heroin is a drug we all think we know. Ideas cobbled together from films or crimes reported in the news. An addict is Renton from Trainspotting, with his clammy, yellowish skin, or the woman worn down to her bones, wrapped in a sleeping bag, begging on the steps outside your office.
But Rob showed me a different type of addict. A highly functioning one. He had such a confident air of having
things in hand that it never invited closer scrutiny beneath the surface.
Recent media cases have highlighted that there are plenty of smart, togetherseeming people whose drug of choice you’d never begin to guess – like Glee star Cory Monteith, who died from an overdose in 2013. Or Hans Kristian Rausing, the heir to the Tetra Pak fortune, and his wife Eva, who camped out in one room of their mansion for years, the numbers of their drug dealers scrawled across the walls.
Heroin can be found in the most unlikely of places. Even now, 20 years on from the ‘heroin chic’ look of the ’90s, rumours of catwalk models using it abound. Ask any drugs-rehab expert and they’ll tell you their clients include Hollywood actors, bankers and CEOs. The death of a Google executive who overdosed on his yacht in Santa Cruz blew open the growing heroin problem among the tech gurus of Silicon Valley. Because of the nature of the drug, if you have enough money to provide a steady supply of highquality heroin, enough to stop the debilitating withdrawal symptoms, you can use the drug without arousing much suspicion. For a while anyway. It made me realise that if Rob could hold down his successful life, and an addiction, there were probably more like him. And of course there are…
Catrin is shy. she speaks haltingly, pausing every now and then as if she’s afraid of her own voice. She is 28. She is tiny, pocketsized. And for 10 years she was a high-functioning heroin addict. She fell into the drug by accident at 18. At the time, she was at college. She lived for long runs and netball. Life was busy – in addition to studying, she also worked as a carer.
To blow off steam at the weekends, she started doing speed with a now ex-partner.“We’d be up from Friday to Sunday,” she says. One Sunday afternoon, still wired from the night before, she visited some friends who she often partied with. They pulled out squares of ripped-up tin foil and dragged a lighter beneath it, until the brown substance inside began to bubble. They promised her it would bring her down off speed and help her sleep. She didn’t ask what it was, she simply bent over, and inhaled the steady stream of silver smoke.
“I remember I felt better,” she said. “I went home and slept all night.”
Catrin was naive to the drug. Even when she found out what it was, she still didn’t realise what effect it would have on her body, or how addictive it really was. She just counted it as part of her weekend partying routine, and
almost immediately smoking heroin on Sundays became a regular pattern. She’d take speed, and then heroin to come down. It worked because on Monday, back at work, she felt mellow and happy – rather than before when she’d still be riding out her speed comedown for most of the week.
Six months later, she woke up freezing. Her body was shaking, the bones shuddering back and forth under her skin. This is called ‘clucking’ by users, and it’s a classic sign of heroin withdrawal. Her body now relied on heroin, and without it, broke down – causing unbearable pain. It felt like the flu, but worse. And only one thing got rid of it. If she wanted to maintain the rest of her life without anyone knowing – her workmates, her college friends and her parents, who she lived with – she’d have to keep using.
“I had a bag ready in the morning,” she says, “to have a hit, because I couldn’t get out of bed. By the end, you’re taking it just to get on with your day – you don’t get any pleasure. It just got rid of all the aches and pains.”
Sian, 46, has short dark hair, a huge smile and square glasses. She’s used heroin for 10 years. Not that you’d know. She has a wholesomeness about her that’s comforting, and very little about her, from her dewy skin to youthful energy, gives away her past.“Most people are shocked when they hear I’m an addict,” she smiles ruefully.
It was when she was 25, and working 37 hours a week as a nurse, that she developed an addiction to codeine that she took as pain management for endometriosis. The pain was so bad, it was spreading to her lower back and affecting her ability to walk. Then her father died, and she moved back to her tiny home town in Wales where she met her now ex-partner who was a heroin addict. She’d taken drugs before, on the rave scene, and began smoking it with him at home. For a short period of time, it made her sadness and anger go away.
“I’m an educated girl,” says Sian.“I’ve seen the mess heroin leads to, but I still went into it knowing what could happen. I think it’s that ignorance as well, of thinking, ‘Oh well, it won’t happen to me – I’ll just do it every now and again.’”
At first, it was just the occasional binge. Smoking for two or three days, followed by a break, using her boyfriend’s methadone to curb the rough patch that followed. But soon, the breaks between became less and less and she was using every day.
“I’d only need a £20 bag a day, but if you’ve got the money and you can buy more, then you’ll buy more,” she says.
No one in her life suspected a thing. She worked in a pub, so didn’t struggle for money, and her mum lived an hour away. Whenever Sian went to visit, she’d use first thing in the morning, so she showed no signs of withdrawal.
Iremember those days when I first fell in love with Rob. I wouldn’t just describe it as happiness – it was the most intense set of emotions I’ve ever felt for someone. That, I’ve been told, is what heroin feels like. Its chemical structure
“I couldn’t get out of bed without a hit”
acts similarly to endorphins, producing, at first, a feeling of euphoria. It also helps blot out pain, like being wrapped in a fluffy cloud where trauma cannot touch you. For Rob, this was key – he was self-medicating his depression with the drug.
It’s these positive feelings, as well as the anaesthesia for negative ones, that draw you in, but your body quickly becomes dependent. You stop producing the natural endorphins that minimise pain and unhappiness. It’s also a short-acting drug, meaning that it takes effect very rapidly but leaves the bloodstream quickly. Which is how Rob got caught in the trap of just using in order to function. Not using results in an absolute sickness of the mind and body, and taking heroin is the only way to feel normal again – a feeling the majority of us take for granted.
And it’s this that so many people don’t understand. That it isn’t possible to just stop. When I learnt about Rob’s addiction, I tried everything I could to help him with his recovery. I gave him space to do so, judgement-free. But he kept relapsing. And lying about it. It pushed me to ask for a separation.
Other areas of his life also began to crumble. He pushed away friends who tried to help, and he was on the verge of bankruptcy as he had lost a huge work contract due to his increasingly erratic work patterns.
No one around him understood what would compel him to knowingly keep doing something that was destroying his life, from the inside out.
Because while it is possible to be a highly functioning addict, you’re walking a tightrope – and, at some point, sooner or later, you’ll inevitably come tumbling down.
Sian had to give up being a nurse – a job she loved – because she couldn’t deal with juggling her addiction and working long hours. For the past 10 years, she has worked in pubs and cafés. Catrin lost her job as a carer and eventually also lost her driving licence. She found herself utterly destabilised and isolated.
Rob paid the ultimate price. In May 2015, he took his own life in New Zealand. As for me, I’ve spent the years since then recovering from his death, and went on to write a book that, in part, tries to educate non-addicts about the realities of addiction, rather than placing addicts in a box of judgement and stigma.
Every day, outside pharmacies across the UK, there is a line of people queuing to choke down a shot of sticky green liquid. Methadone has been the UK’s leading heroin addiction treatment for more than 20 years. It’s a highly addictive opiate, more addictive in fact than heroin itself, but it survives in the digestive system and does not need to be injected.
Addicts must take it every morning, and they have to go to their local pharmacy to do so. They have to structure their daily lives around this one thing – and what if their boss saw them there? Their friends? It’s this that stopped Rob from seeking help. He found the idea too shameful.
The other option is a blocker treatment, such as Suboxone or Subutex, for which both Catrin and Sian have a prescription. But it’s expensive, and not the NHS’s preferred option – it can be taken at home, but both had to jump through hoops to get it.
Compared to the rest of Europe, we’re incredibly behind when it comes to how we treat addiction. Switzerland, for the past 20 years, has distributed heroin to long-term users legally. It allows them to wean themselves off the drug slowly, while providing their bodies with what they need so they can hold down jobs and families. The death rate among addicts has decreased to less than 1%, and the treatment has been credited with improving the mental and physical health of addicts. Portugal has decriminalised all drugs – their use is prohibited, but the consequences are different. Instead of facing a prison sentence, users who are caught are evaluated, and if they are found to have a problem, are admitted into a rehabilitation clinic. They treat drugs as a social, not criminal, problem – dramatically reducing the stigma around seeking help. Treatment uptake has risen by 60% as of 2012.*
I’ll never know what finally broke Rob – depression or addiction – nor will I ever know how things would have turned out were drug dependency dealt with differently in the UK. Progressive policies are controversial, and not without their own problems, but we can help in our own way by understanding heroin addiction better. By rethinking our ideas about users. It is a formidable, scary drug, but shutting people who use it out is only making things worse.