Replies

I hope you're not saying that serious alcoholism is a "whimsical pastime."

I doubt that every heroin addict always has enough heroin or methadone readily available to keep him/her calm and on an even keel.

A poster on another forum described his/her work with heroin addicts in some clinic/hospital ward. The poster said that sometimes they wanted to "check in" in order to clear out their system. This would then enable them, after their discharge from treatment, to get their "fix" from a lesser amount of heroin than it would have required b/f they went in for treatment. This was b/c their tolerance would have been higher b/f they got clean, and the amount necessary for the fix would have been escalating and thus costing more and more. They didn't have the money for that, so they'd want to get "clean" in order to be able to buy less and still get the fix.

This poster also said that those heroin addicts who had some sort of coverage, be it government or private, would call and ask "how long has it been since I was in?" They knew the exact timing of how long they had to wait btw cleansing hospital stays, in order to have each hospital stay paid for by their provider.

The poster also said that while on the ward, the addicts would beg to have one of those intravenous tubes inserted--the kind that stay in your skin, like the little thing that is used for an IV. (Those tubes are kept in on patients who need very frequent injections of some sort of medicine, as in chemotherapy, at least how chemo used to be.) The reason they wanted the little tube to stay in their skin was so they could have a friend come by to visit--and the friend could shoot them up through the little tube, and there'd be no needle mark.

I am not trying to say that being on a heroin high (or low) would make a person likely to run out and break in and kidnap a girl. As I said to Freedox, it's hard to see how a using heroin addict would be motivated to do anything that energetic. All I'm saying is that it was a documented fact that Ricci was a heroin addict, that a person once addicted must deal with it for life, and that the prognosis is poor for the person going for a very long time w/o falling off the wagon. Ricci's track record (no pun intended) looks to have been pretty bad, as far as falling back into using again and again.

Do you agree that a heroin addict who is NOT currently high, but who is beginning to need a fix, can get pretty desperate?