‘Vintage’ Heroin

If you avoided talking about the merits of that prodigious drug, heroin, 30 years ago, it was either because you were too young back then or you were one of those innocent souls who stayed on the right path. There was no way of escaping someone you knew telling you about the hallucinatory sensations produced by that substance, which some called “the White Horse.”

You didn’t have to be among the underclasses to hear that hagiography. Sometimes it was a schoolmate who you ran into on a street corner and, as one thing led to another, you ended up going for a drink. You paid, of course, and if the conversation moved on to the subject of old times — because young people have old times too — your friend felt that it was the right time to ask to borrow some money from you. I must say that nobody has ever offered me heroin. Something in my appearance seems to cause people to not offer it to me, but yes, I was victim of being sponged off of by some people. I may have been even more of a victim when I did a friend the favor of taking a package to a friend he had in Paris, taking advantage of a trip I had to make I had told him about. I was an innocent person, but I must say that a guardian angel was watching over me the entire time, because only a guardian angel could perform the miracle of saving me from that endemic environment.

Despite having read studies and articles analyzing addiction around that time, I never heard anyone talk about heroin with as much accuracy, intensity and exaltation as those that took it. Part of the language they thought of as their own had been borrowed from the cultural romanticism surrounding those baggies; strangely, it so happened that after years of addiction, all junkies spoke the same language. A small-town junkie babbled similar words to an urban junkie. Heroin was something that unified these junkies, acting in the same way as in the minds of believers. Each person expresses themselves in their own way, but all of them say the same thing: Anyone who is not part of their religion does not experience the pure essence of life. Although it may have been difficult to explain, it was easy to feel like an idiot listening to that type of revelation.

To anyone who did not experience it, it may seem easy to not have let oneself be misled by that environment. But for those of us that lived with that dangerous distraction, the puzzle is why some of us fell into temptation and others did not. There were victims who were amazingly intelligent and others who were as dumb as a rock; some were very susceptible, but others were not at all. Perhaps what made them equals was that particular fearlessness of those people who are always the first ones to throw themselves into the deep end.

The death of the actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman this past Sunday has left us speechless; primarily because he was a special actor who was admired by the public, respected by critics, profitable for the industry and a master of something which, as noted in The New Yorker, has created a style that is different from that of Brando or Pacino. Unlike these other charismatic actors that seem to be playing themselves in each role, Hoffman had been a specialist in making himself disappear and be absorbed by the character that he was playing.

In the wake of Hoffman’s seemingly unthinkable death, it has happened: The drug is once again all over the front pages of the American press. The New York Times had already warned a while ago about this revival, which had already claimed its first group of victims in rural areas. This very week, there was talk of a “generational amnesia”; those 40 years during which a sense of oblivion has been created among those who were not born to witness what was a devastated landscape.

Personally, I really hope that Hoffman’s death serves as a warning, and never as an incentive, and I really hope that those of us who saw and heard about the way in which all those young people were overcome do not utter a romantic word about it. It was not the best or the most susceptible people that died, but those people that did not have the strength to battle their addiction. They were not alone: Many of them had a family who supported them as much as they could, paid for their treatment and were also victims of their lies.

Psychiatrist Dr. Lamela told me that sociologists believe there has been a romantic revival of the ‘80s, which includes heroin as a vintage object. In the ‘90s, other drugs arrived that were associated with opulence. Therefore, heroin fits better with our present state of mind. The withdrawal symptoms, the familiar damage and AIDS, which has now become a chronic illness, are still in this oblivion.

Oblivion works so much in favor of the drug’s return that old perceptions are already returning: Hoffman suffered terrible loneliness after his wife asked him to stay away from the children until he was clean. Is there no journalist that remembers what it was like to have a heroin addict in the house? Is there nobody who contemplated how orphans dealt with the death of their parents due to heroin? Fortunately, in our country the return of this drug has not been received warmly, even though there is an idealization of an age which formed part of the struggles of our youth. Is it not time to grow up and tell the truth?