Word: heroines
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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 Then comes a "high," which may last for several hours, a lethargic, withdrawn state in which the addict nods drowsily, without appetite for food, companionship, sex?or life.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...
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...
...with?there was so much drugs that everybody was using them. My friends would say let's get high. I didn't want to say no, so I got high with them. I'd just say all right. I got started through drinking and then smoking reefers. I started heroin when I was 14. I wasn't really strung out [badly addicted]. I wouldn't get sick and upset. I used to take money from my father's drawer and ask for money on the street, some change sometimes. I used to get heroin from anywhere...
...couch. We just figured he was tired. He could have stayed right on the couch and died of an overdose. We wouldn't have known." Adds his father: "Last summer, we thought Billy was on something. We hoped it was pills or pot. What if it's heroin? What can you do then? You just kind of wish it away. Now I feel as if I have nothing left...