A droplet on the tip of a needle

I came to Belgrade for a few days. It was 1994. I was sleeping with a smuggler who rented me a bed in a dirty room somewhere in Cetinska for a small fee. Nearby lived my friend, a lawyer at the time and the owner of a tobacconist, and Milo's ambassador today, somewhere behind the former "Iron Curtain".

Belgrade in the XNUMXs

His friend, the eternally smiling Garo, a young man from Beran, came to pick us up the other evening to take us to some "party". Beneath Belgrade, pressed by smuggling stalls that stretched from Zelenjak to Zvezdara, in basements below street level full of drunken reservists and human thrash from the late Yugoslavia, who came here to deal with various criminal "jobs", there were clubs where the eighties still lasted.

A sweaty mass of young men and women roared Johnny's songs in such a hole, as if they were the mantric medicine for the serious illness of a city and a country.

I talked to Garo as much as I could through the noise and over the edge of the plastic beer glasses. Like many young Montenegrins in Belgrade, he couldn't explain to me exactly what he was doing there, but he knew all the new wave lyrics by heart. He was likable to me, one of those characters who produce positive vibes and smile even when it's the blackest darkness around.

The next time I visited Belgrade, the madness of the war had settled into the post-war greyness. I asked my friend what happened to that club where we were. "He's gone," he shrugged. Then he looked at me with a trace of discomfort in his eyes: "Gar is gone, too. It's been two or three years, we're waiting for him in front of his entrance, and he's gone for half an hour. We're knocking. We're banging. The door is open. He on the bed. Needle in hand. He was carried away by the heroin devil”. Afterwards, he explained to me that Garo went to Russia for a year and a half, he did some slag there. There he got hooked on a needle. He returned to Belgrade as a secret junkie.

At the end of the poppy fields

He was the first man I knew personally who was killed by heroin. Later, I looked more closely at the faces of those poor people in German cities who were drunk and drunk and looking for the next "shot". In Germany, there were withdrawal and resocialization programs, including programs of controlled administration of heroin, to avoid dirty needles and the possibility of transmitting AIDS or hepatitis. However, in Frankfurt, Berlin or Cologne, I always saw a sufficient number of these shadow people, who had inconceivable addictive despair in their eyes, to understand that even the richest societies did not solve the problem.

For me, heroin was first associated with music and literature. As a high school student, I read "Mi djeca s Kolodvora Zoo", a Croatian translation of the confession of Kristijana F. As a 13-year-old girl in West Berlin, she became addicted to heroin, so she earned money for drugs through prostitution. When I lived in Berlin for a while a few decades later, at the Zoo station, where I often changed transport, I would always remember Christiana.

A mass murderer of musical people

And the music I listened to as a teenager was steeped in heroin. John Lennon and Yoko Ono weaned themselves from that drug together, Lennon left a musical record about it in 1968 Cold Turkey - in English, this expression (cold turkey) means sudden weaning "on dry". In 1970, Janis Joplin crossed that magical poppy field forever and never woke up again. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones survived, leaving an addictive trail in things like Before They Make Me Run, Monkey Man or Sister Morphine. It's even an entire Stones album Sticky Fingers devoted to experiences with drugs. The devastating effect of drugs was described in reality by the heavy metallers from the band Black Sabbath Hand of Doom. Lou Reed named one of his songs Heroin. Neither punks nor musicians of the nineties were far behind. Kurt Cobain was addicted to heroin when Nirvana released Nevermind. The most destructive combination of opiates withpidbol, which consists of heroin and cocaine, killed one of the Blues Brothers, John Belushi. Drugs did not spare Phil Lynott, the leader of the Irish band Tin Lizzy or Lane Staley, the frontman of the group Alice in Chains and others. The domestic scene was not far behind. The overall composition of the EKV can be subsumed under direct or indirect victims of drug abuse. In 1994, the drummer of Bijelo Dugmet, Ipa Ivandić, fell from the sixth floor of a building in Belgrade. It is generally considered to be a suicide. Although there are doubts about this version, it should be remembered that the suicide rate in the addicted population is as much as 14 times higher than in other people.

It didn't look any better in the music in which I found myself more and more after the thirties - in jazz. New York jazzers in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs injected heroin all too often. Charlie Parker erected a musical monument to his dealer in song Moose the Mooche, and then heroin killed him in 1955. No one can tell me which shade of nostalgia in Billie Holiday's voice was produced by her artistry and which by her addictive being. And so on.

How the monster was created

The history of human consumption of narcotics is several millennia old. From the ancient Egyptian civilization to the opium divans in China, which was conquered by the British Empire. Thousands of years ago, the Sumerians called opium poppy hul gil, "plant of joy". The most well-known component of opium is morphine, also known as morphine. It is an extract of raw opium. It was named after Morpheus, the ancient Greek god of dreams. Morpheus is the son of Hypnos, the god of sleep. According to ancient Greek mythology, poppies bloomed in front of Hypnos' palace in the underground. Thus, the mythological connection between morphine and the opium poppy is ensured.

In 1873, the English chemist Charles RA Wright tried to extract a concentrate from morphine. He stopped his experiments. But today's German chemical-pharmaceutical giant Bayer has taken everything into its own hands. He hired Felix Hoffmann, a man with a double doctorate in pharmacology and chemistry, and tasked him with picking up where Wright had left off. The gifted scientist very quickly created diacetylmorphine from morphine. Since its chemical formula S21N23NO5 was not sexy, Bayer applied for a patent on June 27, 1898 under the name heroin.

"Pain reliever and cough reliever”

Heroin is an artificial word derived from the Greek word heros, meaning a close relative of the word hero. It was marketed as a pain reliever and cough reliever. The advertisement was immediately made in 12 languages. Bayer listed another 40 beneficial effects, including high blood pressure, lung and heart diseases. From today's point of view, Bajer's claim at the time that it is a "non-addictive drug" for the treatment of withdrawal symptoms from morphine or opium is particularly intriguing.

The new miracle drug supposedly had all the benefits of older opiates, but without the severe side effects. Among the side effects, only mild constipation and a slight decrease in sexual desire were mentioned. And indeed, heroin proved to be up to three times more effective as a pain reliever than all previous agents, including morphine.

Decades will pass until the evil brother of morphine is read and banned in most countries. In the United States, Chinese immigrants, opium smokers, switched en masse to cheaper heroin. Then "fashion" took hold of all social strata. The American ban followed in 1924. Under pressure, Bayer stopped production only in 1931, and in West Germany heroin was sold in pharmacies until 1958.

As soon as heroin was banned in the USA, illegal laboratories were created, the most famous of them in the French port of Marseille. Raw materials from Indochina and Turkey were smuggled to France, and refined heroin was then illegally exported to the USA. It was the infamous "French connection". And the Kingdom of Yugoslavia stood out as a dealer of raw opium. Especially in the Kumanovo area, poppies were grown and opium was produced. Prizad (Privileged Export Company) had a legal monopoly on opium trade, and in 1939, slightly less than a thousand producers reported old stocks of almost 57 tons of opium at that address.

A euphoric beast

Wars were a natural reservoir of new addicts - the bigger the war, the more drugs. It was the same during World War II and during the Vietnam War. It's just that the "French connection" was replaced by the "pizza connection" - the Italian-American mafia dominated the smuggling channels. At the beginning of the 70s, the number of addicts in the US was so great that the then US President Nixon declared drug use to be the number one national problem. But American doctors have also contributed to the drug addiction of the nation since the end of the 90s. Four out of five heroin addicts had previously obtained other prescription opiates.

If heroin is taken every day, addiction develops in ten to twenty days. After years of abuse and financial ruin of addicts, for many, the relationship with heroin ends fatally - with a direct "golden shot" due to a poor assessment of the quality of the substance or indirectly, from AIDS, embolism and other accompanying non-heroic diseases. The initial euphoria after the injection turns into a definite nightmare.

The German poet Jerg Fauzer was addicted to heroin in the seventies and lived for some time as a junkie in Frankfurt, Berlin and Istanbul. He recorded his experiences in poems from the collection "The Story of Harry Gelb".

A droplet on the tip of a needle

Art does a better job of conjuring the hell of drug addicts than indifferent statistics. Jerg Fauzer wrote from pure experience. In the poem All you need is Istanbul describes his roommate and brother in law in the city on the Bosphorus: “When the Wasps inject enough O, they can go days and days without touching a human being. He does not avoid contacts, he simply does not need them. When a junkie has a junkie, it is completely autonomous. But if Osi doesn't have an O, you better not look at him... He crawls whining, balls dripping down his chin onto the pink blanket, he'll drop to his knees in front of you and lick your bum..."

And in the song Sometimes with Lily Marlene from December 1972, Jerg Fauzer accurately conveys the images that torment the former addict:

"...when Kerouac died I was in Istanbul a year later my mother said on the way: "He's been dead for a long time." And others who hanged themselves in rehab prisons hanged themselves in bathrooms or simply somewhere in the park the same faces the same nonsense cold starving flesh at night sometimes I dream of a needle I saw how they inject themselves into the penis in a vein in the neck my friends in the morphine shack I myself have scars on the outside and on the inside scars that never heal images that nothing erases what is life after all but a drop on the tip of a needle and death is nothing but a refusal to say anything more..."

Jerg Fauzer, at least as far as heroin is concerned, was luckier than Gar, a guy from Beran who was killed by a heroin "golden shot" in Belgrade in the 90s. On July 17, 1987, after midnight, Fauser left the party he organized in Munich for his 43rd birthday. On the Munich highway A94 around four in the morning, he allegedly crossed the road drunk. Then he was hit by a truck and killed instantly. But that death is from the story of alcohol.