Smack my bitch up

What with it being poppy season in England, plus the resent media attention on the high society train wreck surrounding Eva Rausing's death apparently from a heroin overdose, it seems a good excuse as any to broach this subject. Then I came across this Dispatches documentary on YouTube, first aired on Channel 4 over ten years ago. I recommend everyone and their dog watch it.

I have casually used heroin in the past, many years ago, but heroin 'chippers' are not great headline-grabbing fodder for moral panic so I'll spare you the boring details other than to say that I have never resorted to mugging, burgling, defrauding or stealing from anyone as a consequence. I had a decent job in IT at that time, and I would spend far more money on my car, buying records and going out to overpriced clubs and bars than I ever did on heroin. In hindsight I should have spent all that money on lead, timber and bronze for boat building and I would have a small galleon to live aboard by now but c'est la vie...

It is an ingrained meme in our society that drug addiction is a Very Bad Thing, which is only somewhat justified. The main problems of addiction to heroin  primarily relate to those of illicit supply, and of social stigma and exclusion. It is by those means that we create the 'drugs menace'.

Heroin itself is easily produced. Papaver somniferum will grow pretty much anywhere, although the highest yeilds are in climates where there is a cool spring followed by a warm, dry summer. Opium is extracted from the poppies, and from there the opium yields morphine base with use of simple and readily available chemicals, and this morphine then processed into heroin using acetic anhydride. It is not a complicated or particularly skilled process; it is done sucessfully everyday by some of the world's poorest people in rundimentary conditions the mountains of SE Asia and Afghanistan. There is no real practical problem with offering the heroin addicts a cheap and clean supply of heroin if there was the political will to do so.

It seems obvious that the reason why opium is rarely available for consumption outside the poppy growing regions is that the perverse incentives created by prohibition drive the growers to process a relatively mild, non-injectable opium stereotypically beloved of 19th century poets and chinese immigrants into heroin. It is no co-incidence that when opium prohibition was taking hold in the first half of the 20th century, heroin use grew and opium use declined. In the black market traffickers tend towards a small bulk and high value product; from the weaker 'natural' substance to stronger 'chemical' substance and finally to dangerously unreliable and adulterated substance once the resulting street heroin is 'stepped on' at the other end of the chain - bulked up with glucose, synthetic opoids, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, quinine, anything to line the pockets of the dealers.

I don't think it's desirable for anyone to have an all consuming dependence whether it's on a drug or whether it's gambling, sex, emotional validation, etc. What I am left wondering though is how certain forms of dependence became transformed from a personal or medical problem into a criminal issue detached from proportionality and cascading into all kinds of new social ills created by that very process of criminalisation. Is there some hypocritical puritanism in our culture that leads to the kneejerk repression of the very human desire to chemically alter one's state of being? The sort of mentality that used to tell schoolboys that wanking upsets Jesus and will make them go blind? I would prefer to believe that it's down to a pathological cultural idiocy than believe it's a multi-faceted conspiracy by criminal cartels to maximise profits, by governments to exercise arbirary control over their citizens (in particular ethnic minorities and youth who often get harrasment from the police under the guise of fighting the 'drugs war'), and by chest thumping politicians wanting to look 'tough on crime'. Stupidity is usually the more viable explaination for a set of circumstances than conspiracy, but in the case of the demonisation of heroin it is probably a little bit of both.