It’s true, I was never a proper punk: I had too much sense of historical bohemia and too little love of spitting and snarling at hippies. So I went straight to postpunk, and was soon slipping down the sidestreets of North London, apparelled like an Oliver Twist urchin, haunting the night like a wraith as cold winter thawed out into the tense, riot-breeding summers of the early 1980s. Islington and Camden were not the respectable quarters then that they are now; there were squats on almost every street, and drugs in almost every squat. In one of these squats—it was actually just off the Gray’s Inn Road, near the old Sunday Times building—I was offered my first smoke of heroin. On a bare staircase lit by a guttering candle, a figure reached toward me out of the gloom, a piece of foil in his outstretched hand, upon which snaked a long, lazy S of the golden brown drug.

I had smoked pot for some years. But there was something about the 1980s that demanded a stronger poison, something to insulate the alienated youth, of which I was an extravagantly coiffed example, from the bitter winds of Margaret Thatcher’s revolution. In those days, people were encouraged to believe that the poor deserved to be poor, that greed was good because inequality was in the nature of things. Unfortunately, as history has shown us only too often, many people don’t need much in the way of encouragement to kick those who are down, and to feel virtuous about it while they’re doing the kicking. Looking back now, there are some strange resonances between that time and the present, most importantly a new Conservative government intent on the laceration of public services and with a proud contempt for education, other than when narrowly defined as vocational training.

Anyway, I decided to take up the offer of that first smoke of heroin. It was an unforgettable experience, which I repeated occasionally, then more often, until after a year or so it became an everyday thing which I could not do without. This is not a piece of writing about the morality or dangers of heroin: everybody has heard the countless warnings already and can make up their own mind. I spent some years taking the drug; I had some times in Hell and some in Heaven. My life did eventually descend into a terrible mess, and it took a lot of time and suffering and hard work to steer myself back toward some kind of inhabitable social identity. But it can be done and I was one of those who did it.

The heroin culture that existed then was different from today’s. There were, to generalise a little, two main heroin cultures in London in the early 1980s. One was made up of the so-called ‘Skag Kids’: these were a new phenomenon, mushrooming up suddenly from the unforgiving concrete of council wastelands like the North Peckham Estate. They were tough kids from hard backgrounds, and there was not much mixing between them and the heroin subculture to which I belonged. This was made up largely of ex-students, punks and indie kids—the bohemians of the 1980s, who inherited their tradition of alienated style from previous youth cultures, and for whom drugs were partly a gesture of defiance toward straight society, partly a method of keeping the spirit warm amidst Thatcher’s Britain, which lay all around like ice on the soul.

In times of drought—which were short and did not come often—we would sometimes go to score from the skag kids. At East Street in Peckham, which was then a sort of white boys’ front line, little groups of sick boho addicts would arrive, sniffing in the freezing twilight; there seemed to be no-one around. But you just had to whistle, and a dozen or so dealers (all of them white and none looking a day over 16) would instantly appear, materializing out of the courtyards and walkways, advertising their cockle bags and ching bags (£10 and £5 respectively). They would compete with one another for your cash, squaring up and swaggering. When the transaction was made, we’d go back to Camberwell to get straightened up, finding that the deals were good considering the circumstances, and the gear quite strong.

Within a year or two of the appearance of the skag kids, their older brothers were in on the act. I knew someone who was dealing in Camberwell who was robbed at knifepoint by a bunch of them, and beaten up for serving up on their turf. Things got nasty very quickly. Prior to this, the retail heroin scene was very different to today’s; all the people who supplied were themselves users, and were part of the circles from which their customers came. This kind of supply maintained the dealer’s habit, and maybe gave him or her a bit of cash to spend; but it also provided a sort of public service, restricting supply to those who were serious users, giving credit when someone was sick, and their homes functioned as meeting places for the boho junkie community. Now the retail scene is very different: most of those involved do not use themselves but are in it purely to make money; they know little and care less about the quality of what they sell, and will casually bulk up the material with potentially dangerous additives. Many of them are teenagers, using the drug trade to provide them with the consumer goods on which they depend for their social status. They often hold their customers in contempt.

It occurs to me that this change in the structure and style of the market can be linked to what some sociologists have called ‘normalization’ of drugs; in general terms, this refers to the movement of drug use beyond the subcultures with which they were previously associated and into ordinary or mainstream youth culture. This process is disputed by some researchers, but there is no doubt that some drugs, such as cannabis, are widely used by people who don’t regard themselves as belonging to exclusive drug or youth subcultures. A similar process has occurred on the supply side, with the result that those supplying heroin no longer care about the product or the customer. It seems the drug culture too has been infested by the ideology of the market, with most dealers being motivated by pure profit and having no concern with the public service ethic that was a part, at least, of the drug culture—even at the supply level—in the 1960s and 70s.