What shooting heroin actually feels like: divine euphoria and a relentless grip

What shooting heroin actually feels like: divine euphoria and a fall into hell

«During the high you feel like a ing god; when it wears off, you feel like scum». This raw, unfiltered description sums up the experience of those who have tried heroin: a peak of absolute pleasure trinc by an emptiness that only another dose can fill. Those who have lived it describe a feeling of omnipotence and connection with the world, but the price is a dependency that devours everything.

Literature already portrayed it. In 1931, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle published The Fire Within (El fuego fatuo), a novel based on the life of surrealist poet Jacques Rigaut, who took his own life in 1929 at the age of 30. The text describes addiction with chilling precision: «Mandatory regularity, continuous cadence, increasing doses. He began to be afraid». Heroin, like an agent that ends up possessing the person.

But not everyone falls. Some claim to have known users who managed not to get hooked. «He tried it and didn't get hooked», one account says, though they admit it is not the norm. Smoked heroin, as an alternative to injecting, is presented as a mode some consider «controlled», but the accounts of those who have lived in drug dens describe it as «the devil».

The paradox is served: maximum ecstasy, within reach of a syringe, and personal ruin as the most likely fate. 115 years after its first recreational use, heroin remains the drug that divides the waters between pleasure and self-destruction.