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Harry Wynn: Stories from heroin misusers

Niall McElwee

To enhance the ability of youth to help peers and themselves, the author proposes specific training in mature social decision making to help youth overcome immature moral development and egocentric thinking.

Dave is Dead
London, 1985. I am sitting in Seven Sisters with an Irish character known as “Dave the Axe”. He’s been living in London for nearly a decade. Dave is well known in the locality as a man from whom one can obtain anything “legal or illegal. I am sitting my university examinations and am referred to as “Shakespeare” by all my co-workers as I always seem to have my head in a book or a report. I have never seen heroin up close.

Dave calls me over and asks if “Shakespeare wants a real education"? I am curious and answer, “sure". Dave takes out a needle from his rucksack and injects a brownish liquid substance into the back of his eye. “You have to be really careful Niall. We have to roll up our sleeves and show that there are no track marks on our arms or else we get fired". As Dave slumps over the chair, I realise that I really didn’t know a lot despite the countless hours I spent reading.

It's three weeks later and I am returning home to the flat I was sub-letting from Dave. I notice a van parked outside. Three men are loading our fridge into the back of it. I peer into the back and note that it is full. I ask the lads what’s going on. “Your mate inside owes a lot of money for Skag and hasn’t come up with the goods. This time it’s just the furniture, but next time it'll be his legs. You better tell him to cop on". I walk into the flat and find Dave lying on the kitchen floor with his arms wrapped around the toaster. He is high. His son is sitting on the couch crying.

It’s 2004 and Dave is dead. His lifestyle was too fraught with risk and he succumbed to all that is associated with heroin addiction, continually trying to “duck and dive" to survive. He owed too much money to too many people. A lost Irish statistic. His son is in the care of relatives.

Larry too: Heroin Again
New Jersey, 1986. It is coming up to lunch time and I am taking a break from my summer job in Wildwood, New Jersey. Like many Irish University students I have come to the States to sample American living. We are a very disparate group of people with students from several countries comprising the labour force. I get on well with some of the lads who are known to be “crazy”. Two of them are Vietnam veterans but they are very different from each other. They have one thing in common now “they are both addicted to heroin. I have seen in London what heroin can do to an individual. The lads, let’s call them “Brian” and “Larry”, are high. They have not eaten in two days and have already spent their pay on heroin and rum. They invite me to partake. I decline the offer of heroin but share a cool glass of rum and a watermelon slice. We talk about their use of drugs. Both of them picked up the habit whilst out in the American army fighting in Vietnam.

Larry is scarred by the war and blames the American public for his addiction stating that he “wasn’t respected in the war and wasn’t respected when he came home" so drugs were a refuge. Brian blames his ex-wife. On his return from the war, he lay for three days in the trees on the brow of a hill waiting for her boyfriend to ride his motorcycle past. Between “shooting up” and chasing pills, his intention was to kill the man. Brian eventually fell asleep and missed his target. By the time I left for Atlanta some two months later, Larry was very ill. I heard subsequently that he died from some “bad gear". What a shame.

Both these people deserve to be remembered as more than just lost statistics. They had many dreams. I am not sure of much any more, but I am sure that Dave and Larry did not think when they were children in the US and in Northern Ireland that they would die later from their drug misuse. Why this happened in both cases is incredibly complex but there was at least one commonality between them.

They felt no one cared. Let us give the message that we care.