Between Two Drugs

Crack & Heroin

Citation: ?. "Between Two Drugs: An Experience with Crack & Heroin (exp31490)". Erowid.org . Mar 30, 2006. erowid.org/exp/31490

DOSE:

200 mg IV Heroin 150 mg IV Cocaine

BODY WEIGHT: 140 lb

i have recently returned to drug addiction after a 5 year period of abstinence and have become completely caught up in the mix of heroin and crack. My life exists somewhere between these two substances, precariously balanced and only occasionally touching the perfect mix of the two. But when it comes, it comes big and beautiful. And then there's the down side of getting the balance completely wrong: and the fear that comes with this hit is like no other fear in the world. Total panic: felt in core of the body like ice and fire with spikes on. Terrifying.As I sit here, at this moment, I have just injected roughly .2 grams of heroin and .15 grams of crack cocaine, mixed together. Whereas the old favourite used to be a speedball (smack and powdered coke), the new baby is a snowball. Cook up a hit of smack, with citric acid to break it down (I'm in England and, unlike the States which seems to get a lot of tar heroin from Mexico, we always have brown powdered skag: it needs the acid to get it into a liquid form); let it cool just ever so slightly; add your crack and crush it up and mix it until all the little lumps have gone. Anyway, that's the recipe but, if you haven't done it before, I wouldn't do it now. It'll probably take ten years of your life before you even consider letting it go. And even then it will be with an impossible reluctance.I guess I hit up the snowball about three minutes ago and at the moment I feel totally wired but - the role of the smack - supported and I know and can feel that there isn't that far to fall. The smack gives me a bed which I can feel underneath the crazy speed of the crack and the slight numbness of my legs, and arms, and (strangely) my lips, and which means that when the crack wears off and I'm coming down, the floor rises up to meet me. It's a lot more gentle than doing crack on its own. But the three minutes to get here was a world of its own and started, like all good universes, with a bang.I pushed the plunger on the works home making sure I got the vein by checking a few times for blood because if I miss the vein with crack it numbs me so much I can't feel the pain of the miss. Miss the vein with a snowball and its a wasted hit as the coke only acts local and doesn't get to where it needs to go. Often, as it was the case on this occasion, I shake when I'm about to do a snowball and this makes getting the hit harder. The shaking is anticipation and excitement. As the last of the mix went into my arm, I started to feel the coke. It's is so hard to describe the feeling as it is almost a bodily feeling that I first experience as a taste in the mouth (cold metalic coke taste which becomes sensation as energy and thrill fill my veins and mind). And dizzy, in an electric way, almost suspended above my own body, looking down. I looked into the mirror after I did the hit and as ever my pupils have hijacked my entire iris. Nothing but black bug-eyed alien-boy looking back and not really liking what I see but fucked by the hit and don't really care that I don't really care about myself.Then I become aware of the heroin. Loyal and strong in the background: purging my body of any residual shivers and shakes, making me solid again. Strong and ready (for what? nothing ever happens apart from it ending). It would be wrong if I gave the impression that the experience of snowballs is entirely two separate bodies of feeling from two separate drugs. There is an area of experience which doesn't come with either if taken on their own. Its a mystery to me: greater than the sum of its parts. There's an inbetween to the snowball hit which is completely sublime, unrepresentable and only within the moment of the hit. Warm. Alive. Expectant. Excited and totally, totally awake.And now I just felt the first wave of sadness. Its so pure and comes across me like a silk sheet of loss. The comedown from crack on its own is horrendous and I don't know how anyone can put themselves through it without heroin. Crack comedown without the support of opiates gives me the feeling that everything in the world that was any good has left me and that the world will never, never be the same again. My life becomes an empty space where possibility ends and there is only the negative. No, I need the heroin to keep me from that deep void. I'll take the expense and risk and the life of obsession that comes with the snowball habit (neither crack nor smack is OK on its own anymore: I have to have both). And as my head starts to get foggy as the crack leaves my body I feel my eyelids get heavy and the smack takes over where the other left off. And sleep feels like a definite possibility. But still I feel sadness under it all. Perhaps that's what drives my in the end. Perhaps the sadness of comedown isn't a fall but a return. Perhaps its me. (Better have another one now, this is getting not only heavy but deeply pretentious). Laters.