Can long-term hard drug usage improve your life?

[Peter McDermott]

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Yes. Some addicts actually have good jobs (stockbroker is a common one) and can have a habit for years without major problems.

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I've lived and worked with addicts for the last thirty years and have known many hundreds of them. I've never met a single stockbroker out of the lot of them.

I have met doctors/lawyers/journalists/academics but all of them had [censored] their life up to some degree or other.

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Having ready access to money means they don't have to spend all day trying to score and can shoot up the good stuff in as sanitary a method as possible.

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Not really. It's a little easier for them because they don't have to rob or hustle to raise the money. However, they either have to score themselves, which puts them at risk of being robbed, getting busted or just not getting served because they don't look right. Or alternatively, they have to pay somebody to do it for them. This strategy usually works for a little while, but as the person they are paying is another addict, it tends to not be very long before the person who is scoring starts ripping them off -- either by cutting their dope, or blowing all the money on crack, or whatever, and our wealthy junkie either has to look for someone else to do it, or they go back to doing it themselves.

There are some people whose lives are improved by heroin addiction though. They tend to be people who live in abject misery: people who live in war zones, people who have been seriously sexually abused and can't get over it, people with serious organic pain of one sort or another, people who are long-term homeless, etc.

While heroin addiction might not be an optimum long-term strategy for such people, they'll tell you that the pain relief that it affords them actually *does* improve their life -- they wouldn't do it otherwise. Regardless of what the media might tell you, heroin users are no more irrational than the rest of us. They tend to know what the risks and consequences are, and choose dope.