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Heroin itself is a nightmare almost beyond description. By any of the names its users call it—scag, smack, the big H, horse, dope, junk, stuff—it is infamous as the hardest of drugs, the notorious nepenthe of the most hopeless narcotics addicts, the toughest of monkeys for anyone to get off his back. On heroin, the user usually progresses from snorting (inhaling the bitter powder like some deadly snuff) to skin popping (injecting the liquefied drug just beneath the skin) to mainlining (sticking the stuff directly into the bloodstream).
First there is a "rush," a euphoric spasm of 60 seconds or so, which many addicts compare to sexual climax. Then comes a "high," which may last for several hours, a lethargic, withdrawn state in which the addict nods drowsily, without appetite for food, companionship, sex—or life. Heroin, says one addict bitterly, "has all the advantages of death, without its permanence." After the high ends, there is the frantic scramble for a new supply in order to shoot up once again, to escape one more time into compulsive oblivion. As the junkie develops tolerance for the drug, he must use ever increasing amounts to reach the same high—thus the price of a habit can run as high as $100 a day. If he shoots too little, he does not get the kick he wants; if he shoots too much, he risks coma and death from an overdose. An overdose depresses the brain's control of breathing, slowing respiration to the point where the body simply does not get the oxygen it needs. If he tries to stop suddenly—cold turkey—he must endure the screaming, nauseating, sweating agonies of withdrawal.
Junk has been common even among teen-agers in the ghetto for 20 years. Around 1950, Harlem-bred Claude Brown writes in Manchild in the Promised Land, "horse was a new thing. It was like horse had just taken over." Now, says Criminologist Roger Smith, director of a drug therapy center near San Francisco, "the emerging junkie of the 1970s is a middle-class junkie as well as a junior junkie." Here are some of those contemporary junkies who have shaken the habit—at least for now:
SHEERA is 14, red-haired and wholesome-looking, the teenage girl next door. Her father manages a restaurant in New York City; her mother works in the records department of a city hospital. "I didn't start using heroin until I was 13. I guess I started using drugs to be like everyone else. There were older kids that I looked up to, but there were kids my age, they were also using drugs. I wanted to try it too. I messed around with pills and pot. Then I went to Israel for a summer and came back, and all my friends were on heroin. I snorted a couple of times, skinned a lot, and after that I mained it. I was sent to a school for emotionally disturbed children. Getting drugs there was easier for me than on the streets. Except for heroin. There wasn't too much of that.