Junkie Merry-Go-Round

This is Wandsworth Pirison. The author claims that if you step inside this circle then the prison officers get very angry. Photo from AP
 

If you have an addictive personality and you start dabbling with Class A drugs as a way of dealing with your day-to-day problems then the reality is that you stand a good chance of ending up in prison. I should know. I’ve been in 16 of the fuckers.

To all you aspiring Class A users (especially those of you who are messing about with crack and heroin) I would advise you to be very careful because prison becomes an occupational hazard if you choose to persevere in getting high on that evil, insidious rubbish.

When I first started using brown and white, it was pretty glamorous, lots of fun and “rock n roll,” but it wasn’t very long before it deteriorated into a shit heap of ruined lives, criminality and involved roasting to death in a variety of little cells alongside the worst people in the world. Here’s what happened to me:

PORTLAND OREGON, USA

I was living here playing music and hanging out with people like Jerry A from Poison Idea. This is where I really started using Class As to the extent where I couldn’t control my binges any longer. So I ended up doing bad things to feed the beast and then BINGO! I was behind bars. It was totally un-awesome.

I was getting screws telling me things like: “Harry, dude, you’ve just started doing life on the instalment plan”. I didn’t understand what he meant, but now I do. Just after I heard this sweet little message, I remember hearing one of the black prisoners who was due to be released the next day singing out: “I’ll be out the gate by eight / In the spoon by noon / Fixed by six / and back in the pen by ten!” That little number really stuck in my mind and that’s what inspired the “Junkie Merry-Go-Round” title of this article. The reality is that once you go to prison it’s so much easier to score than outside that criminals (a huge amount of which are addicted to drugs) are constantly dizzily stumbling from one dizzy prison stumble to the next dizzy release date straight back into another dizzy prison stumble quite soon after. Honestly, it’s enough to make you dizzy.

HMP LEWES

After I got deported from the States in 1988, I ended up doing my first British sentence in HMP Lewes, just up on the Sussex Downs above Brighton. I’d tried running a bent cheque past a bank teller at a NatWest in Brighton but I got caught. When it started going Pete Tong, I decided, using the amazing “nothing is wrong” feeling that makes junkies not realise they are a fucking mess, to snatch a thousand pound bundle from the other side of the glass. I thought I’d get away with it, seeing how my wrists were skinny as a skeleton in a skin graft. Whoops! I was arrested but bailed and after a protracted period in France, evading prosecution, I found myself doing the same old withdrawal, up-the-bed-down-the bed trip in HMP Lewes. People talk about using being really exciting, but for me it was just predictable bullshit. It was day in and day out, sentence after sentence. You start eating and sleeping, and the hormones kick in as the narcotic leaves your body. I would end up having a crafty wank to get through the pain, while my cellmate snored away in the bunk below. Not a very feel-good-vibe. And unless you were independently wealthy, there’s no way you could maintain any kind of Class A action so at that time it was a case of smoking as much wacky tabaccy as was humanly possible just to go to sleep for an hour.

HMP BRIXTON

I think the worse time I ever had in a British prison was here. It was the early 90s and it was during the time when IRA prisoners were still held in “prison within a prison cages”. I remember when an IRA prisoner pulled a .22 out of his trainer, and made his way over the wall during Catholic Mass. That was exciting, but being on F-Wing wasn’t. F-Wing was otherwise known to the old-school addicts of London as “Fraggle Rock” and had the dubious notoriety of housing prisoners with mental health issues as well as your garden-variety dope fiends like me. It was really sad, because you had schizophrenia spectrum disorder patients and addicts trying to co-exist with each other in an environment where copious amounts of liquid cosh (injections of heavy downers by force) were used to manage individuals who didn’t conform. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and you could hear them screaming in the strip cells of an evening, or see them shuffling to the hot plate in the day. The screaming at night was blood curdling. Thank God they shut that wing down. After I finished my detox on F-Wing, I went onto B-Wing, where a lively renowned boxer was housed just down from me on the fours. He was in for allegations of busting a cap in a famous boxing promoter’s ass. The boxer used to cover himself in baby oil, and run around the landings, winding the screws up who could never get a hold on him due to the baby oil. When he got bored he’d just saunter back to his cell and kick the door shut. All great entertainment value, but it did very little to help me address my massive drugs problem.

The next time I went into Brixton for theft of vodka was ten years later. I had been clean for long enough to get a Joint Honours Degree in psychology and sociology, but had relapsed after the breakdown of my relationship with my son’s mother. I’d been around the 12 Step Programme for multiple years of recovery, and I can tell you that a head full of NA and veins full of speedballs are not a good combination, not to mention a belly full of booze. It was soul-destroying for me to end up back there again, having built a life and gone on to do my degree. The bottom line, however, was that when I put a drug or drink in my body, my behaviour deteriorated faster than I could lower my standards. I ended up in dialogue with a “progressive governor” about the still high incidence of suicide in that jail and the easy availability of drugs in jail and how they were linked and we came to the conclusion that the whole system was rotten to the core and totally fucked.

HMP WORMWOOD SCRUBS

This was my last bit of bird, before I threw the towel in and hung up my spoons, collected a white key ring from NA, and gave up the high cost of low living.

The Scrubs is actually a half-decent nick but I spent fourteen days on Conibeere Unit, a wing dedicated to clucking (heroin withdrawal) one’s bollocks off. You can either come off using Methadone or Subutex, and a Benzo for the booze. After fourteen days of that horrific withdrawal, in tandem with the 23-hour lock up period, I was ready to crack up at the sheer inhumanity of it. I had murderous visions.

Anyway, the solution to curing this homicidal junkie was to release me straight back into the general population of the prison! When I walked through the gate in reception they enquired, “Are you suicidal?”. Well I don’t know about suicidal, but after fourteen days withdrawing from copious amounts of opiates and lots of other stuff, I was certainly homicidal. The theme tune from the Twilight Zone springs to mind.

As I walked over to my new wing, the accompanying screw said to me: “You’re down for the NA meeting.”

And I’d go straight there with good-ish intentions because there’d be tailor-made fags and Hob Nob biscuits. If you were lucky, there’d be a bit of banter. It was that jailhouse esprit de corps and gallows humour that’s the currency of keeping sane in prison but never really works when you’re on the outside. Cracking anal rape jokes at dinner parties never seems to have the same effect as when you’re eating instant mashed potato next to a guy who strangled his wife to death because she’d put too many sugars in his tea.

Anyway, as soon as the meeting finished I waltzed straight back to my cell with an NA pamphlet titled “Who Is An Addict?” and I tore it up to make a tube to hoover up the lines of heroin my brand new cellmate was so helpfully preparing for me. The powder hit the back of my throat and in a couple of seconds I had a new best mate.

We were like long lost soul brothers, all high-fiving each other and that shit. He was in for importation of cocaine and he was trying to recruit me to fly to Bogotá, where all I had to do was run a chemical analysis on some product, and phone back with the results! Yeah, right on!

I should mention here that I left the Scrubs with a bigger habit than when I first went in there. Thanks jail!

What can I say except that addiction is pandemic in prison and until the Government wakes up and smells the coffee, nothing will change. We are dealing with a disease, not a moral dilemma. Until we recognise this as a society, nothing is going to change for a lot of people.

Tony Blair’s famous soundbite was: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” But if addiction is the main cause of crime, don’t you think it makes sense to treat it rather than punish it, or is there an agenda in maintaining such a myopic view that, once a junkie, always a junkie?

FAST HARRY