Word: heroines
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...gathering tragedy is that Ralphie is not special. Heroin, long considered the affliction of the criminal, the derelict, the debauched, is increasingly attacking America's children. Part of the dread and the danger of the problem is that it spreads all too invisibly. No one knows how many heroin addicts of any age there are in the U.S. But in New York City alone, where most experts think roughly half the heroin users in the U.S. live, 224 teenagers died from overdoses or heroin-related infections last year, about a quarter of the city's 900 deaths from...
...heroin epidemic has hit us. We must face that fact," says Dr. Donald Louria, president of the New York State Council on Drug Addiction and author of Drug Scene. Dr. Elliot Luby, associate director of Detroit's addict-treating Lafayette Clinic, concurs: "Addiction is really reaching epidemic proportions. You have to look at it as an infectious disease." Epidemic, of course, is a relative term, but as a Chicago psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin Schwarz, says: "Now we're seeing it clinically, whereas before we weren't. The kids on heroin all have long histories of drug use." At the California-based...
...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 Then comes a "high," which may last for several hours, a lethargic, withdrawn state in which the addict nods drowsily, without appetite for food, companionship, sex?or life.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...