Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set from his New Society days but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.
Cold turkey in Harlem by Ian Walker
Heroin addiction is becoming an increasing worry in Britain. This is the New York scene.
Salvatore Domani—the surname means “tomorrow”—glanced round the bar to make sure no one was looking, then rolled up his shirtsleeve to show me a small scar on his inside left arm. “I reckon I musta shot $250,000 worth of heroin into there,” he said.
Salvatore, his friends call him Sal, kicked the habit five years ago. The State Department estimated that in New York City, during 1979, there were approximately 164.000 who hadn’t kicked it. Another 35.000 or so New Yorkers are now hooked on a lime-green liquid called methadone, invented by German scientists in world war two and now given out free to heroin addicts by the New York City Methadone Maintenance Programme.
This is a story about the effect of a drug on a city. About a life on the streets led by Sal when he was pumping $300 worth of heroin into his veins daily. About the administrators who run New York’s methadone programme. About some old Chinese men who were opium addicts when they came over to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s and who now meet every day in a room on the fourth floor of the Lower East Side Service Centre in Chinatown to drink methadone, smoke cigarettes and talk.
I met Sal in a bar in Brooklyn. His father was a Sicilian sailor who raised the family in the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn. “The streets were mean and I ran with mean people, tough kids who’d commit burglaries and homicide, no trouble,” said Sal, who started working when he was nine, as a butcher’s boy. Now, at 32, he works in the machine room at the New York Daily News. His father died young; so he was, he said, “the man of the house from the age of twelve.” Which meant he had neither the time nor the money to get involved in the drug culture till he was much older.
Sal remembers the first time he snorted heroin. He was at someone’s house. A friend brought out a plate with a mountain of heroin. “He said, ‘C’mon, you won’t get hooked just doing it once. You of all people.’ Me, the street-wise tough kid. I tried it and it was a big mistake,” he laughed. “But I only know that now.”
Whether they quit the drug or not, junkies have to live with the sensation heroin provides for the rest of their lives. The temptation never goes away. Even now, five years after he kicked, Sal gets almost ecstatic describing the euphoria: “An eighth or a sixteenth of a teaspoon of powder on the tip of a matchstick. Two or three inhalations and the feeling that comes over you is absolutely unbelievable. I can’t equate it with nothing. Not sexual orgasm, not winning money. It’s the greatest, the grandaddy of them all. There’s no other feeling, none . . . and when you get to the point when you send it into your pit [veins] no words can describe it.”
He continued snorting but, as is always the case, the dosage increases while the euphoria diminishes. Meanwhile, the amount of powder Sal was snorting was destroying the tissues in his nose. “On the street, the expression for getting a syringe is ‘getting your wings.’ Some junkies pride themselves on giving somebody their wings. Others will say, ‘I ain’t giving you any injection. I’m not gonna be the one to give you your fucking wings’.”
To inject heroin, junkies put the powder in a bottle cap with a few drops of water and “cook it up,” heat the cap over a lit match until the liquid starts to bubble: that’s the heroin solution. And that’s what is injected, first into the muscular tissue and then, just a short time later, into the veins. “You realise finally there’s only one way to do this thing and that’s to send it straight into your fucking heart, immediately.”
The ‘shooting galleries’
Wherever heroin is sold, Sal says, it’s used. In New York, it’s where the bureaucrats call the “core ghetto areas,” Harlem and the South Bronx and Bedford Stuyvesant. Sal would go along to “shooting galleries” in Harlem. “Heroin makes you an outcast because you spend the entire time looking for it, it’s all that’s on your mind. You will not seek out anyone’s company for any reason that doesn’t have to do with this substance. So you limit yourself to running around with junkies.”
The shooting galleries are storefronts, cellars, rooftops, wherever addicts converge to shoot heroin. “In Harlem, the galleries would hold as many as 40 to 50 people at a time. The way it works is you find the shill in the street.” [Shillibeer was a German in the hearse business. The word shill has somehow come to mean go-between or side-kick.] “There’s a look about him that you recognise and a look about you that he recognises, A passer-by wouldn’t see it.
“The shill will say, ‘You lookin’? You lookin’?’ In Harlem they sell dope in quarters, but it doesn’t mean $25. I don’t know what it means, if it’s some specific weight, but a quarter in Harlem these days is $70. And they come in these big envelopes, about a headed teaspoon of white powder. White Harlem dope has a lot of quinine in it. When you inject yourself, it makes you itch. Brown Mexican dope doesn’t have so much quinine. They cut it with bonita, a horse laxative, which is very bad. It’s similar to cocaine and it jolts your fucking heart.” That’s why heroin’s called junk and that’s why many people believe that the provision of pharmaceutical, pure heroin would be a better option than methadone.
“You go into where the shill sends you. There’s a guy standing. He takes your money, disappears a moment, comes back and gives you your package. For convenience, they also sell throwaway syringes and needles. So if you want a whole set-up you tell them, ‘Set me up would ya?’ And he gives you something to cook the dope up in, a clean bottle cap with a little piece of cotton in it. You go into a room where there’s a whole bunch of mattresses or pillows. The place is dimly lit. It stinks. All over the floor are opened up and discarded envelopes, bottle caps, wads of cotton, blood on them. All around there’s cups of dirty water with blood in them that they used to clean their syringes.”
Junkies use belts as tourniquets; but as time goes on, all the available veins collapse. They start injecting all over their body: “I seen a nice-looking young girl, but she had the tombstones in her eyes, take her pants down and inject herself right here,” Sal pointed to his groin, "not two inches from her bush. I seen another guy hit himself in the vein in his neck. I seen a guy stick the needle in his cock. I seen people looking in the mirror stick it in the vein under their tongue. Most incredible sight I ever saw was a black guy who sat down in his chair like this,” he stretched out both his arms. “And he had a girlfriend on either side. Each cooked up a bottle-cap for him and each shot him up simultaneously.”
Sal was using heroin from 1968 to 1974. At the peak, for a period of 18 months, he was pumping $300 worth a day into his system. I asked him how he got hold of that kind of money and he said he hustled, dealt, conned, borrowed and never paid it back. “I went through every aunt, uncle, neighbour, friend, and I would rotate it . . . I tell you I had clothing, books, great collection of jazz records, jewellery, stereo, TV, pots and pans, candlesticks. As you begin to methodically pick your house clean, you have the entire inventory in your head: what things are worth and in what order you should get rid of them. The day comes when you put the key in the door and there’s a bare apartment and no toilet paper in the place.” When that day came, Sal went and slept in doorways.
But the day came when Sal ran out of friends and relatives and street contacts to hustle. “I was so sick, so sick. I needed that shot so bad, so bad I needed it. I just didn’t have the money and my next step was to go out and pull a gun or clock an old lady. I couldn’t do it. So I managed to scrape up $10 or $12. Now I thought of buying with that. But $10 or $12 of heroin? It wouldn’t even have relieved my nose running or my diarrhoea. After a while, $300 is just enough so you are well enough not to throw up.”
At a methadone clinic Sal scored a bottle of methadone off someone he knew. “I said to myself, you’re a slave and the meth is worse because you’re putting yourself in the hands of the establishment.
“I said man, you’re fucked. I drank this 80 milligrams of meth and since that day 1 have not shot dope, bought dope, looked at it, sniffed at it. I have nothing to do with meth, opiates, any. of that shit.” He recited that piece with the force of a man who still needs an iron will to stay away from powder and needles.
Sal has endured the withdrawal tortures, the sweating, the sickness, the aching, the convulsions, and pulled through. People I talked with later, on the methadone programme, used words like “miraculous” and ‘unbelievable” when I told them how Sal kicked the habit. Only rarely do they meet anyone who’d gone into sudden “cold turkey” withdrawal and made it.
I went down to City Hall to meet two of those running New York City’s shrinking methadone programme, the administrator, Sylvia Bascall, and, the director of training, Nick Titakis. The programme was set up in 1970 with a budget of $12 million a year to deal with the growing number of heroin addicts (no one knew exactly how many there were in the city; estimates ranged from 150,000 to 500,000) and the street crimes committed to pay for the habit, before cutbacks, there were 39 clinics in the city. Now there are 31, supplying methadone to 10,000 ex-junkies. Two other programmes in the city have 20,000 patients.
Officially, there are 30,000 methadone drinkers in New York. In fact, there are more than that: it’s common for patients to get a bit of extra pocket money by dealing it in the street.
The crime rate of those joining the clinics drops by approximately 80 or 90 per cent after the addicts have been on methadone for six months. “They don’t have to pay for their own drug, that’s where it’s at,” said Nick Titakis. “We take people off the street, put their lives together.”
Once junkies are on methadone, not heroin, they receive no euphoric effect when they use the latter. So after a while most give up trying. The difference between heroin and methadone, a synthetic opiate, is that heroin’s “action cycle” is four to six hours, while methadone’s is 24 to 36 hours.
Similarly, during withdrawal, the pain lasts longer with methadone. “In sudden, cold turkey withdrawal,” said Nick, “the symptoms from heroin are more severe but shorter in duration. On heroin you can get the pains of death for two, three, four days. With methadone, it’s a slower pain over two, three, four weeks.”
But what research has been done into the long-term side effects of methadone? “The Food and Drug Administration found no significant long-range side effects. Opiates as a class, if you don’t kill yourself with them, are probably the safest drugs there are,” was Nick’s reply. “You can’t overdose on methadone,” said Sylvia.
Heroin is a big problem wherever it is sold and used. The question remains: how much less of a problem is methadone? The citizens of a city queue up each morning to receive a swig of a lime-green fluid, without which they can’t function. So I went down to a methadone clinic on the Lower East Side to see what they are like.
The restaurateurs in Chinatown were dumping black plastic bagfuls of last night’s leftovers on the street as I walked down East Broadway towards the Lower East Side Service Centre. This is how the methadone clinic euphemistically describes itself, in white paint, on the first floor of one of those five storey buildings which have iron fire escapes zig-zagging down the back.
On the fourth floor of the Service Centre is a room that’s called the Chinese Lounge. It looks like an opium den, except that the old Chinese men who frequent it have been weaned off opium and on to methadone. Outsiders in their own community because of their drug use, these men can meet in the lounge to make lunch, chat, smoke cigarettes.
“They’re all very lonely sad people,” said ° Rebecca Sanger, who wants to be a dancer, but at the moment still works as Outreach Coordinator (“reaching out” to the community) in the clinic. “They left behind families in China when they came over in the 1920s and 1930s and haven’t been able to establish lives here because of their drug habit.” Every day they sit around in the lounge from 10.30 am to 4 pm.
I tried to talk to the people sitting in the red plastic chairs which line the clinic on the ground floor. But everyone was more interested in getting their drink from the black nurse in the white coat standing next to the lime-green liquid. This was bubbling in one of those glass cases self-service cafes use for orangeade and coke.
The centre, Rebecca told me, had 1,000 patients and comprised two methadone maintenance clinics (the other one was just down the street), a mental health clinic and a residential methadone-to-abstinence building where people live 24 hours a day for a year and a half to try and get detoxicated. For those who stay in residence, the success, rate is very high, but many leave. All the counsellors on the residential programme and about half in the clinics are ex-heroin and/or methadone addicts.
Rebecca does not love the methadone clinic. She thinks the mental health clinic, to which addicts are referred, is doing very useful work and she has particular respect for the residential centre which she sees as “really positive,” freeing people from their enslavement to drugs. But she has become disillusioned with that solution which, for her, is no solution, methadone; “Some people have been coming here for years . . . methadone slowly destroys you."
Meanwhile, the methadone addicts will continue drinking the lime-green liquid until they either die or try and kick the habit.
