“I had a car, a girlfriend and everything.” These were the most poignant words I heard last December as I carried out some research into poverty in Ireland. The words were said by a young man in his early twenties, to describe what he had lost, to an all-consuming heroin addiction.
I met Mark by accident, sitting in the canteen of a men’s homeless shelter in the city centre. We began to chat. It was as if he felt the need to open up, to tell his story. He was clean, young and friendly. He was shy and had innocence about him. As a father, I recognised in him a goodness that wasn’t contrived. On first impression he came across as a genuine and likeable person who was concerned about my comfort, did I take milk and sugar and would I like a biscuit.
As I spoke to Mark I thought of myself at that age and of my own two sons who would be contemporaries of Mark but living totally polar lifestyles. Every young man needs to achieve certain goals or steps in life as they climb the ladder to full maturity. The car is the opportunity to be self-sufficient, to spread your wings, to have freedom. The steady girlfriend is the symbol of manhood, of being in some way proof that you are the provider and the protector. To Mark, as with all young men these were part of his “everything”, everything that he had lost.
The first time you get a high from heroin is the most beautiful feeling in the world, it is the most powerful sensation that you can experience, it is the best and the most all-consuming delight that the body can handle. All your pains and your worries and your problems disappear in that instant. You are literally floating on the clouds, and your life is at the best that it can ever be. The problem is that you can never relive that experience, try as you might you continue to chase that dragon, but you will never ever see him again. This is a lesson Mark learnt the hard way.
Most of us don’t have sympathy for drug addicts, we look at things differently. We see the effects, the crimes committed to feed habits, the diseases spread by dirty needles, the squalor of squats and underground passage ways where drug users congregate. We look at the junkies and wonder why they don’t just get their act together, get a job and stop shooting poison into their arms. Just for a moment sit back close your eyes and think what life would have been like if you grew up as Mark did.
Mark has brothers, sisters and parents, but as he put it, “the family never got on”. I read this as code for something he didn’t want to talk about and left it there. As his family became more and more dysfunctional, Mark ended up in foster care. He was sexually abused for the first time at 16. Mark didn’t have the support which he needed to cope with the abuse, or the family problems, he was on his own, barely in his teens and forced to deal with traumas way outside of his ability to comprehend. Ask yourself what it would have been like if you as a teenager had suffered as Mark did.
Mark progressed from cigarettes to smoking dope, getting in minor trouble, or as he put it “going a bit wild”. This period in his life was short-lived. He settled, got a job, found a girlfriend, bought a car and was getting his life together. He told me that for the first time in his life he felt good about himself.
Mark was 20when he “fell in with the wrong crowd”. His car and his willingness to drive his new friends around while they searched for heroin made him popular, made him one of the lads and gave him the family unit he never truly had.
It wasn’t long before he tried heroin and experienced that rush and became hooked as he tried to relive the first tremendous high. It never happened. He couldn’t catch the dragon no matter how hard and often he tried. He lost his job, his car and his girlfriend left him and once more he was on his own. Mark began to rob to get more and more money to feed his habit.
His life was a mess, his parents and the family of which he was meant to be a part of, grew tired of sitting by bedsides in intensive care after he was once more dragged from the river, rescued from a second failed attempt at ending his life. His family no longer trusted him and what little care they had for him was long gone.
Mark was homeless when I met him and living in a men’s shelter, he was clean and off heroin trying to put the pieces of his life back together. Mark told me of his fears of not being able to live life on his own out in the world. He spoke of not being able to resist the need to feel that dragon just one more time, of not having a family to help him. He is afraid to contact or meet his former friends as they might lead him once more back to drugs. Mark admits to being weak and to being frightened.
Mark gave me his mobile number, I tried to call him but can’t reach him, I know he has left the hostel and is out on his own. Mark is a nice guy and deserves a chance and I hope he is ok, and I hope he will make it. But I just don’t know.
