One sentence captures why it's so easy to get addicted to heroin
REUTERS/Albeiro Lopera
Susanne was 16 when she started dating Mike, two years her senior and already experimenting with heroin.
It was only after five years of using — years that included stealing from family members, ending up in jail, coming dangerously close to death, and having two babies that they had to give away — that the couple finally got clean.
Anna Sale tells Susanne and Mike's story on the March 2 episode of Death, Sex, and Money, an excellent podcast from WNYC. Their personal account captures what it feels like to be addicted to heroin and why people begin down such a perilous road in the first place.
Susanne tells Sale about the first time she tried heroin. She was a naive teenager who had never even smoked marijuana.
"I kinda had this voice in my head that was like, 'You know, it’s heroin, you can ruin your life this way,'" she said. "But ... I felt like pressured into doing it. So, I did. And then I fell in love, I guess."
The idea that slipping into a destructive, often deadly addiction feels something like falling in love is tragic, akin to getting swept off your feet by a killer you can't escape. It seems twisted, like that can't possibly be the right way to describe it.
But anyone who's ever fallen in love will recognize the feelings that Susanne says overcame her.
"It was the best feeling. I hated my life so much but that made me feel so good and so confident," she told Sale. "It kinda made it feel like I was invincible but nothing really mattered, if that makes any sense."
The overwhelming feelings that come with using heroin, the inability to think about anything other than your next fix, have been described in these terms before.
REUTERS/Albeiro Lopera
In 1968, Harvey Feldman, a graduate student earnestly trying to understand how people end up in the grip of heroin addiction, asked addicts about their experiences.
"Even the most articulate users lose their flow of words when attempting to describe the first time heroin took its comforting effects," he wrote. One user told him the first time he tried it he felt "like I was in heaven; I just fell in love with it."
On Erowid, a site where drug users can anonymously share their experiences, one user wrote about the first time he snorted heroin. "As soon as that first drip fell down my throat," he wrote, "I fell in love."
On the Death, Sex, and Money site, a commenter complained that describing heroin in these terms "romanticizes" a very dangerous drug.
But it shouldn't. There's nothing romantic about falling in love with heroin. If anything, it's downright chilling.
Unlike falling in love with a person, the love never lasts. It never ends well.
"It wasn't fun anymore," Susanne tells Sale. And it ruined their lives, fracturing relationships with family and friends, doing untold damage to their long-term health, and closing them out of most jobs forever.
"At that time, I'm really, really serious, I did not care whether I lived or died. It did not make one difference to me," Susanne tells Sale, describing an overdose that happened in the haze of her addiction. "I mean, I’m actually surprised that either one of us are alive right now."
There's an old anti-heroin ad that captures this inevitably tragic path perfectly: "You'll never have a high as good as your first. But feel free to die trying."
Susanne and Mike's whole story on Death, Sex, and Money is well worth a listen.
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