Nowadays, whenever I shoot up, I always leave a smidgen of dope in the barrel of the syringe to keep impurities out of my veins (that is, I don’t push the plunger all the way to the end). What kinds of impurities exist in a shot? It depends on a lot of things, such as the kind of water you use to cook up your shot, the kinds of chemicals your dealer has added to the dope, how the dope was prepared, where it was stored, the kind of surface you prepared your dope on, etc.

Just so you all know, I am not basing this information on any research. I found out that impurities travel to the back of the barrel of a syringe by accident. I was trying to empty an old syringe full of water that seemed to have some kind of growth within it. As I started to push the plunger, most of this growth, which looked a lot like fungus coincidentally, remained at the back of the barrel. I tried the same experiment by adding a bit of topsoil in the water and again, this stuff accumulated at the end of the barrel. The same thing happened when I replicated the experiment without a needle at the end of the barrel. I did this to prove that the dirt didn’t stay in the barrel because its exit was blocked by the needle.

I wish I had known about this a long time ago. Although there is no research about this, I believe that many injection drug users can avoid a lot of problems related to injecting, including endocarditis, cotton fever and abscesses. As this information has not been researched, I don’t have proven strategies to offer to avoid the kinds of problems I discussed earlier; that will come down the road. But for now, you can do what I do: Don’t push your plunger all the way down when shooting up. If your shot is too small and you can’t afford to leave anything behind, simply add some water and you’ll have the same option.

I was offered my first line of cocaine while I was serving time at Joyceville Penitentiary. I had just returned from a visit. Only a prisoner knows the emotional daze after returning from a visit. During the visit, entangled in the arms of your children and lover, you lose yourself to the fiction of the moment until the time of departure arrives. Then everything ceases to exist and you are left to sort out the conflicting reality of your existence. At such a moment, I was not going to refuse an offer of free coke, even though everyone I knew had recommended against using it.

“I feel nothing,” I kept telling my hosts, while they offered the second and the third line.

I didn’t want a free third line. Drugs are way more expensive in prisons and I didn’t want to take advantage of the generosity of my hosts. So I retreated to my cell and started to type a letter to my wife In fact, I was typing it to myself, trying to understand the emotional vicissitudes of the afternoon. Suddenly I realized my thoughts were going quite faster than my fingers could ever type. That happens naturally, but this time it was like my thoughts were riding a Ferrari, while my fingers were being driven by an old Skoda.

The adage that claims “you do cocaine once, you’re hooked for life” is certainly false in my own experience. During the next few years, I had dozens of offers to try cocaine, but I declined them all. A Columbian friend I’d met in jail invited me to his home for dinner. After dinner, he produced an ounce of pure cocaine and offered me to snort some, which I again declined. I was on parole then and didn’t want to jeopardize it through random urine testing.

I used cocaine a third time under a totally different circumstance. This time I had helped my boss buy an eighth-ball (3.5g) of amazing cocaine from Albert, another man I’d met in jail. Albert was not a dealer; he was a distributor; if you wanted to buy drugs less than a kilo, Albert was not your man. But he did this as a favour to me, and the coke was so pure, my fingers got numb when I touched them.

“You really don’t want any of this?” my boss asked in disbelief. I shook my head. He took some out, nevertheless, cut it into the tiniest particles, made two lines, and gave me a rolled $10 to snort with.

Fifteen minutes later I was biking home pedaling with a warm, intimate feeling. As if I was being cuddled by a warm blanket during a cold and cozy night. I got off my bike and started walking home. I wanted to talk with everyone who walked by me, but I refrained myself. We had family visiting from far away that weekend, and all I could think was to call my boss and buy some of that cocaine from him. By the time I saw him next morning, he said he had used it all. At the time I didn’t believe him. If it were now, I wouldn’t believe him if he said he had some left.

The fourth time I tried coke was with my boss again. This time, he injected the stuff into my veins. Boy, was the high different? The rush was something too. A “taste” that cocaine injectors fondly experience preceded the rush. My ears started ringing, and I withdrew from my world for a few moments to deal with this sudden infusion of energy. Finally I had experienced the rush people talked about and there was nothing scary about it. On the contrary, I felt great! My boss had reserved four more shots for me, but I was happy with two and gave him the rest. If it were today, I would have given him nothing; actually, I may have tried to persuade him to give me some of his.

A few months later, I had physically become dependent on intravenous Dilaudid. There was hardly heroin in Kingston, and it was quite expensive. So was Dilaudid, but it was at least available. I had to sell drugs to finance my habit, and I did the mistake of selling cocaine. The next worse thing to doing too much cocaine is selling cocaine. Clients knock on your door at any hour of the day. Sometimes, I was awakened at 5:00 in the morning by clients who were partying for days and had no inkling of time. Other times, I had parents trying to sell their children’s Nintendo in exchange for a gram of cocaine. In general, few cocaine dealers deal with anything but cash. If you don’t have the cash, you don’t get blow – that simple. I, on the other hand, was owed money by people who were not going to be able to pay their debts; and soon I went broke. At the end of my foray in the cocaine business, I owed my supplier money and had developed a habit for cocaine as well.

Cocaine is one of the most powerful drugs to psychologically content with. I can have cocaine-induced stomach cramps even when I think about using the damn thing. Once I had to take myself to emergency because I almost had a heart attack IMAGINING that I had injected a huge amount of coke. Imagine that! And yes, there is that thing about bowel movement. The anticipation of injecting cocaine causes cramps. When I used to buy powdered cocaine, I had to either use it right away, or head to the nearest can to deal with my problem head on – or more precisely, bottom on.

If you have a cocaine habit, it is extremely difficult to wait anyway. Once I decided to do an experiment to prove to myself that I had control over my craving for cocaine. I bought an eight-ball of cocaine and promised to myself that I would space it out throughout the weekend. I was appalled by my weakness. I went through the 3.5g overnight. To boot, that night was the beginning of the end of my seventeen-year marriage.

This does not mean that people have no control over cocaine. Since then, I have had access to ounces and sometimes kilos of cocaine and have either not used any, or when I used it, I had total control over it. The good news about cocaine is this: one does not go through withdrawal like a habitual heroin user does. Actually, when one stops using cocaine, one could feel healthier. The implication is this: if you can battle the psychological aspect of this drug, you can control it.

I have used cocaine problematically during 2 periods since I started using illicit drugs. When I finally stopped using cocaine, I learned that during problematic use, this drug acted like a monster inside me. The more I fed that monster, the more it wanted to get fed and the bigger it became. But when I stopped feeding it, it became smaller, and it’s influence on me waned. For me, it took three to four days to make the monster so weak, it could hardly influence me anymore. But stopping for three or four days is not that easy but can be done. You have to have some supports, though. For example, If I really needed a break from cocaine, I left the city for a few days – went somewhere I could not find blow even if I had to swindle someone’s grandparents. Nowadays, I use cocaine only on certain occasions, and I make sure that I don’t use it two days in a row in case I awaken that monster in me again.

Cocaine: The Good & The Ugly:

Cocaine the good: For me sex rules supreme when I do cocaine. Do I become horny when I’m high on cocaine or what? I start reciting fantasies in my lover’s ears, each one kinkier and more outlandish than the one before. When I wake up the next day, I pray that my lover doesn’t remember anything I had said. Usually, though, she wakes up telling me, “you were so passionate last night!” My ears usually become crimson red, me trying to hide under the rug under her feet.

Cocaine the bad: Paranoia. When I started working in the field of harm reduction in Kingston in 1993, I used to deliver harm reduction resources to the homes of our service users and I used to be amazed by the paranoia of some of the coke users. There was this couple who would take turns looking out of the peephole after each shot. I used to wander why the hell would someone use drugs if it was going to make them be so fearful? I would never do that, I used to tell myself. Until, of course, I started to develop the same kind of paranoia.

After every episode of cocaine use, I used to promise myself that I was not going to become paranoid when I heard footsteps outside my door. “Your paranoia is irrational” I would declare to myself; “nobody has raided your house ever. Why do you keep scaring yourself?” But a second after my first shot, I would convince myself that there was the first time for everything. And that the car that stopped downstairs was driven by a cop. The paranoia compelled me to go through my drugs faster, making me vulnerable to overdose. Towards the end, I made a science of my paranoia and designed my use around it. For example, I used in the bathroom, behind locked doors. If cops raided the house, I still had time to get rid of my drugs. Soon, I had peace of mind, and more pieces to use.

Cocaine the bad: overdose! Fatal overdose (OD) from cocaine is rare. When people die of cocaine overdose, they usually have been using other drugs as well. In my opinion, there are two kinds of cocaine overdose: 1) acute OD and 2) Cumulative or Temporal OD.

Acute overdose is when someone does too much cocaine at once. For example, when someone injects a huge hit, or smokes a huge rock. The first thing that happens with this kind of overdose is extreme accumulation of heartbeat. When you race to an uphill finish line, you won’t have that fast of heartbeat compared to the one I am talking about. People experiencing this kind of overdose KNOW that their heart cannot sustain this fast for a long while. When you or someone you love is experiencing this kind of overdose, I would recommend the following.

1. Call an ambulance.
2. Dim the lights, stop music or any noise in the surrounding. If there are lots of people, move them to another room or ask them to leave the apartment or your house – you want as little stimuli as possible. Don’t allow too many folks around the person who is overdosing. If it can be helped, the person he or she trusts most should be the only person guiding him through the overdose.
3. Speak with low, confident tone. Don’t let the person going through overdose think that you are afraid.
4. Calm the person down. Impress on her or him the importance of remaining calm; and…
5. Have the person take deep breaths. You want to make sure that you get as much oxygen as you can to the person’s heart muscles. A heart attack happens when you don’t get enough oxygen to your muscles. But also make sure that he or she doesn’t hyperventilate. The best way to do this is for you to take deep breaths, asking the person to inhale and exhale with you.
6. Have someone wrap a cold towel around the person’s neck for short intervals. The neck has several receptors informing the brain the amount of blood it needs to pump. The cold towel around the neck slows the heart rate. But keep it too long, it increases it. Keeping the towel too long also aggravates the person, increasing his or her heartbeat. Don’t leave the side of the person if there’s no one else to take care of this chore unless the person going through the overdose is calm and breathing properly.
7. Have the person drink water constantly.
8. If you have Valium or a similar drug, crush it and put it under the person’s tongue – provided it’s not more potent than the equivalent of 10mg Valium. Be careful not to give the person too many Valium. The half-life of cocaine is much shorter than Valium. When the effect of cocaine wanes, the person could overdose on Valium.
9. If by this point the ambulance hasn’t arrived, the person going through overdose will get exhausted and will fall sleep. That’s generally a good thing because he or she will be calmer when sleep. But keep an eye on her or him.
10. Sometimes, when ingesting a huge amount of cocaine, people start to convulse – in the cocaine using community this is called “doing the chicken”. From what I have seen, this happens more often among crack smokers. If you see friends doing the chicken, remove any sharp objects from their vicinity so that they don’t accidentally hurt themselves. Try to put a pillow under their heads if you can. Remain calm until the convulsion stops and read #1 to #9.

This has been a longer article than I wanted to write. But cocaine has such a rich heritage. It inspires and obstructs; it creates and destructs. It has affected people’s health, their culture, social norms and their economy. No wonder there are a million names attributed to cocaine; among them, snow, blow, Charlie, more, gin, zip, cola, snow bird, dama blanca, flake, line, stardust, line, and so on, so forth. If I had to give this drug one more name, it would be versatile.

Amin, one of my best friends, left this message in my voicemail in the summer of 1996.  He hadn’t done anything wrong – on the contrary, he had been helpful and caring.  He dotted over me during bad times as any good friend would.  But my cocaine use at the time had gotten so out of hand, I didn’t want to be with anyone that didn’t use drugs.

Amin (not his real name) was the last friend I had who didn’t use illicit drugs.  Actually that’s not true.  Amin smoked hash or pot every hour of the day.  But he had a hard time accepting my drug use.  Not that he was mean to me, or he was angry with me.  The man respected me, cared for me, and was glad to be around me.  But he always looked for signs of drug use.  When he asked me how I was doing, it was clear he wanted to know if I was using, and how much I was using.  When he saw me sweating, his face took a look of pity – as if to say, “why are you doing this to yourself?”  When he talked about my future, he always predicated it with, “When you get out of this stage, we’ll take our girlfriends and go to ….”.   There were times when Amin would put his hand on my shoulder and say, “When am I going to get the old Raffi back?”

If I had a nickel for every “old Raffi” I’ve heard, I’d have about 25 cents, maybe less.  But I’ve heard the phrase enough to infer that I’m less of a person now than I was before I used illicit drugs.

Now don’t ask me to write about my relatives.  Okay, since you insist…

My relatives stopped talking with me about my drug use very early on – not because they didn’t want to, but because I ran circles around their arguments, painting their mundane habits much more damaging than my puny drug use.

“Why do you keep talking about my heroin use?”  I would say.  “Look, you smoke in a roomfull of grandchildren, damaging their lungs, making our clothes smell; and tomorrow, when you have lung cancer, I am going to have to pay part of your humongous hospital bills.  At least I’m doing something that I enjoy.  If you think I’m hurting myself, at least I’m not hurting anyone else”,

Or,

“How many egg yolks did you eat this week? FOUR?  Fuck, you probably have so much cholesterol, your arteries are chocked.  Instead of worrying about my drug use, go get your blood work done.”

Then I’d start talking about harm reduction and how hypocritical they sounded when they drank like a fish and criticized me for using a little bit of heroin – by the time I shut up, everybody else did too.

Nowadays, when they really get courageous, some family members ask me, “Are you tired?  You seem tired?  Do you want to go sleep in the room upstairs?”  Does the door upstairs have a lock, I’d wonder, cause I could sure use another hit.

My family and friends live in another world, and I live in mine.  The two worlds are separated by misconceptions, recrimination, vilification, and discrimination.  Hate, fear, humiliation, deceit, and squabbles repel the two worlds from each other until the citizens of both worlds divorce from each other.  When sometimes one citizen refuses to abandon the other, self-imposed separation ensues.

This is called self-isolation, or if you want to sell the idea, you can call it, Social Isolation.

Social isolation does not happen to drug users alone.  “Birds of a feather, flock together”, claims an old English adage.  Many police officers socialize only with other police officers because they feel the average Joe doesn’t understand their need to indulge in donuts.  Teachers marry teachers and keep teacher friends because who else would put up with having to ask for permission to go to the bathroom?

These are mild cases of social isolation.  Police officers and teachers are not denigrated.  Most people – umm, I mean, some people look up to them.  They maintain contact with their parents, relatives, and schoolmates.   Drug users go through another kind of social isolation.  Something more sinister; something that affects our social, emotional, and physical well-being.

When we stop seeing our friends and parents, we no longer have their love and support.  Our psychological and emotional growth becomes stunted.  We also miss out on, for lack of better word, common-place life.  We miss out on employment opportunities.  We miss out on all kinds of things.  We are no longer able to have a ‘frame of reference’ – a way of comparing what we are doing against what others are doing.  We feel all alone in the world, and that can be quite dangerous.

Research shows that a social isolation causes “two- to three-fold increase in risk of mortality”, in terms of diabetes, cancer, and especially coronary disease (Social Isolation Kills, But How and Why?). When you live alone, you eat more, drink more, smoke more, use more drugs, sleep less or more, and, of course, watch better TV than if you lived with someone who loves watching Hell’s Kitchen or So You Think You Can Dance?

Social isolation can occur even if you surround yourself with drug-using friends.

Having friends around is good and well; but sometimes it can have its problems.

Being around drug users all the time will definitely affect the way you use drugs.  For one, you will use more.  But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.  Because drugs are illegal, our community is always poor, homeless, underhoused, sick, and tired.  Many of our friends do stuff that they wouldn’t do otherwise.  For example, ripping each other off, beating other people up for money or drugs, forcing others to do sex work, etc.  If you live in such conditions all the time, it is going to affect you.  Eventually you start to be depressed, or angry, or paranoid, or pessimistic.

If Social Isolation is so bad, why do we do it?

Most of the time, people push us away.  The language they use is quite hurtful: “Why are you so selfish?”  or, “It’s all a matter of willpower!  If you really want to, you can stop it!”, or, and this is one of my favourites, “why are you doing this to me, to you, and to your family?”  And so it goes…

I was at the wedding of my girlfriend’s sister.  I didn’t want to be at this wedding, but my girlfriend was adamant that I had to accompany her there.  At the time I sold drugs to pay for both of our habits, which meant that we had to use for seven days without making any money.  The trip actually broke the bank and we had to go through a horrendous withdrawal when we returned.

Anyway, during the wedding, I noticed that my girlfriend’s parents were doing everything to ignore me.  I am a parent, and I can understand why they didn’t want me to be with their daughter.  The fact was, their daughter was using drugs when she was 12, and was a drug ‘runner’ at the same age.  Also, her mother was a problem drinker throughout my girlfriend’s life and was extremely abusive towards her while in drunken tirades.  As for my self, I had started using at 37.  When I was in high school, the young women in my class used to lie to their mother whenever they were going out, claiming they were with me (I should be embarrassed for being deemed so safe; I am not!  Really I’d like to think that I had them all fooled).

Getting back to the wedding fiasco, when it was time to take the family photos, both parents didn’t even pretend that they did not want me anywhere near.  They even cajoled my girlfriend into believing that the family photos were to be taken later – that these were just park photos.

Although I didn’t really care for my girlfriends’ parents at the time, their behaviour totally floored me (things changed later, btw.  As they got to know me, they hired someone to have me killed.  Just kidding.  We got along just fine).  Anyway, that was the first time I was so bluntly rejected.  Until then, I had another perception of myself.  Now I was facing the facts.  (BTW, I should be honest and say that both my girlfriend and I were covered in track marks in the summer and showed up late to the wedding and on the nod).

Another scenario:  A few years ago, Amin, with whom I eventually reconnected, and I tried our luck on making serious dough.  Amin persuaded me that we could make millions by selling health information to Saudi Arabia: brochures, videos, catalogues, that kind of stuff.

Once my feet were wet, I jumped into this venture with body and soul, even though I still was coordinating COUNTERfit.  Every evening, I used to join Amin and write letters, email to different organizations, get quotations, send quotations across the world.  In short, I was clocking 4-5 hours every night on top of my work at COUNTERfit.

One of those nights, I was talking with Amin, when he said, “You know, if you were well, we could go to the top!”

“What the hell do you mean, ‘if I’m well’?”, I protested.  “You don’t have a job.  I have a job and I work even more than you do on this venture!”

“Well, yes, but,” he stated while his lanky fingers were rolling another joint.  “you could be doing so much better.  You would be doing better than me”.

“Amin, you’re a fucking grifter.  That’s your job and I don’t judge you!  But how is it that you’re better than me?  I fucking work at the best needle exchange program in the world.  Why are you better than me?  You smoke a pack of cigarettes and at least a gram of hash every day — not to talk about the bottle of wine you polish every night.  How is THAT better than what I do?”

He closed the argument when he muttered, “I have way more money than you do!”

True, he had more money because he cleverly embezzled a bank, and all the more power to him.  He lived in posh dwellings, drove the best cars, wined and dined at the ritziest restaurants, and read books like, “How to Make a Great First Impression?”  But Amin is an intelligent man.  He knows that more money doesn’t make a better person.  What he was really telling me was that he was a better person because he didn’t use injecting drugs.

Being an illicit drug user means having to put up with these kinds of attitudes all the time.  We experience these attitudes in the pain in our parents’ eyes, or in the anger of an ignorant brother or sister.  We see them when we are getting our methadone.  We feel them when we are denied jobs, or evicted from our homes.  As long as drugs are illegal, society is going to look down at us.

When you study sociology, you will inevitably be taught about Charles Cooley’s ‘Looking Glass Theory’.  According to Cooley, when people keep telling you that you’re stupid, or lazy, or nefarious, you eventually believe that you are stupid, lazy and nefarious.  Because you start seeing yourself as they see you.  They become your mirror and you start to reflect back what they think of you.  It’s called a ‘self fulfilling prophecy’.

And people tend to try not to look into mirrors if mirrors are not going to be kind to them just as I refuse to get on my scale because I don’t want to see the pounds I’ve been putting on watching other people eat ice cream (yes, really, I don’t eat nothing.  I must be like Mary – divine intervention – I’m carrying the next messiah).

I was visiting my parents the other day, and my father took my arm and gently pulled me aside.  “Son,” he said, “I am not going to tell you to stop using drugs.  Use, but every time use less, until you either don’t need to use, or if you do, it doesn’t ruin you”.

If there were no people around, I would have bawled.  There was a period in my life when I refused to see my parents because I did not want them to get hurt anymore.  But I started to visit them again when I found out that not visiting was worse for them and I.  And because of these visits, because I did not close the door completely, my 85-years-old father was preaching harm reduction to me.

“Sure thing, Dad, sure thing,” I said, while I put my arm around his stooped shoulders.  “I already am. And look, am I ruined?”  He turned his head towards me, looked up, and pinched my cheek as if I were a boy.

“No, you aren’t” he said.  Did I tell you that I love my dad?