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REVIEW:
TERRIBLY ALIVE
The
Times Educational Supplement (London) July 31 1987
Brian
Deer on a new study which explodes the popular
misconceptions about heroin
The
New Heroin Users. By Geoffrey Pearson. Blackwell
£17.50. 0 631 15396 9 £6.95. 15621 6.
Whatever happened to the heroin crisis? Has the
media run out of fresh angles on addiction, leaving
us all bored with the subject and leading us on to
Aids and child abuse as new topics for moral concern?
Or did all those Government television commercials
warning us that the drug "screws you up"
have the intended effect and persuade the country's
youth to "just say No", as another common
message advised?
For
sure, journalists are fed up with the subject. After
the panic got underway in 1984 we had long spells
when any reporter who had nothing to write about
would knock out a story on heroin. First it was how
all the nation's teenagers were "chasing the
dragon". Then young mothers were giving birth to
addicted babies. And eventually the "junkie
grannies" were discovered, squandering their
pensions to finance their habits.
All
this has been replaced by other fixations, but it
certainly isn't because the Government's "public
information" commercials caused heroin to go
away. Considerable recent evidence suggests that the
advertising had no beneficial effects at all and may
indeed have made things worse by stimulating
curiosity and adding to the drug's
"glamour". They did give us the impression
that something was being done, but they don't appear
to have persuaded the kids.
The
alarm over heroin may have done a lot for the careers
of journalists and politicians, anxious to appear
"socially concerned", but what diminished
their contribution was that many of the assumptions
from which they started were often little short of
fantasies. Heroin use has never been as widespread as
they claimed, is not nearly as addictive as nicotine
and, in the opinion of some experienced doctors, can
actually make you look younger.
Had
we grasped these things, rather than some of the more
wilful deceptions that are peddled around, we might
have been some way down the road to understanding why
heroin is a problem and how we might deal with it.
Drug users and their friends know when they are being
lied to and can easily compare their own experiences
with what they see on television and are told by
their parents.
Geoffrey
Pearson, professor of social work at Middlesex
Polytechnic, is one of several recent investigators
who have gone back to the most appropriate starting
point and examined the genuine experiences of real
people caught up with heroin. The New Heroin Users
is a welcome effort, if a little late to have much
impact on those opinion-formers who should have
absorbed such material two or three years ago.
Pearson's
method is essentially an extended version of what
market researchers call the "qualitative
survey", where instead of counting numbers you
get individuals and groups to discuss an issue. He
has travelled widely, collecting a series of long
anecdotal histories which, when broken up and
constructed into themes, have produced some
reasonable generalisations upon which he comments.
In
the face of this approach, the myths start tumbling.
Yes indeed, heroin affects all social classes, debs
do fix in Oxford colleges and Boy George was a
junkie. But there is nothing new in this. What is
different, and what justifies a belief that Britain
does have a heroin crisis, is that the new users are
heavily concentrated in those areas already blighted
by unemployment, poor housing and poverty.
Likewise,
there are "evil pushers" who deliberately
draw young people into addiction for the sake of
profit. But anyone who has mixed widely with heroin
users, as Pearson clearly has, knows that drug
dealings become inseparably woven together with
friendship patterns and that much of the difficulty
of giving up drugs is that it means giving up the
friends who use them.
For
some people, heroin is quickly addictive. But not in
the way that cigarettes are. I have many friends who
have tried heroin and didn't like it much. Others use
it about twice a year, with not the slightest
difficulty. Users are all different and addiction
usually creeps up after a period of problem-free use
- first as a social habit, then as psychological;
dependence and finally as a physical addiction.
For
those who have masterminded Britain's reaction to the
heroin crisis, these are dangerous ideas. The
connection between poverty and other social problems,
such as drug addiction and ill-health, is strongly
disputed in some quarters. The official line declares
that heroin use is a crime and therefore those who
indulge are criminals who should be punished, rather
than victims who ought to be helped. Take heroin
once, we are told, and you're on the slippery slope
to sickness or death.
"Dramatic
pronouncements about death seem hardly relevant to
what the experience of the new heroin users most
typically amounts to," Pearson writes.
"Rather it is an experience of being terribly
alive, caught up in a drab and stressful treadmill,
waking up each day to the gnawing preoccupation with
where the next £5 'bag' of heroin will come
from."
If
more people get to understand what life on heroin is
like, Pearson will have done us all a favour. But
it's a pity that his interviews are confined to the
pages of a book, rather than offered to the mass
audience of television. Not only because more people
would quickly benefit, but because there are inherent
difficulties in using question-and-answer techniques
in printed interviews.
Take
this account of a discussion between a Yorkshire
mother and daughter about how a parent can spot a
drug problem:
Cheryl
- "We used to be reet obvious. Like I'd get up
in a morning turkeying and I'd be reet quiet wouldn't
I? Reet bad-tempered like..."
Mother
- "And if I said owt, she'd scream and
shout."
Cheryl
- "I'd go out... then come running in, like,
skipping and this (gestures)... and she'd know. She'd
say, "Thar's a lot happier this morning."
Interesting
those these words might be, when I read them, I want
to see and hear Cheryl and her mother, and look
around the neighbourhood where they live. It's not
Pearson's fault, of course, that he lacks the
resources of a television producer, but he only
rescues the important things he has to say in the
book through his own commentary which introduces the
unseen, unheard talking heads.
Pearson
has learnt a few lessons from other media, however,
and dramatically reminds us that there are some
working-class neighbourhoods where, unaffected by
government information campaigns, the heroin crisis
"is so bad that the headline writers of Fleet
Street simply would not have the literary command to
describe how bad it is".
I
think he underestimates some journalists' ability. A
couple of years back I had the good fortune to work
my way around the same Liverpool council estate as a
BBC correspondent who subsequently reported that half
the teenagers on Merseyside were taking heroin. It
was a ridiculous invention, but was so potent a story
that it became very widely believed.
For
his investigations, Pearson has not sought out
unproveable statistics about the horror of heroin,
and he doubts whether that is what is needed most.
"It is better approached as something which
seeps into people's lives, friendships and
families," he believes. "And rather than
talking over the heads of the people who this problem
affects, as we often do in policy debates, it seems
better to allow the new heroin users to speak for
themselves."
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Brian Deer. All rights reserved. No portion of this
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