Good Practices
Heroin Finds New Life As Club Drug
Jon Henley in Paris
Tuesday, July 24, 2001
The Guardian
After years of decline in France, heroin is back, not this time as the drug of despair for white-faced junkies shooting up in darkened corners but as just another of the myriad mind-altering alternatives open to cool young clubbers.
A government report yesterday on new trends in France's drugs scene warned that while street heroin consumption was more or less stable, the drug's use in clubs and rave parties had soared in the past 12 months.
"We're witnessing the arrival of a new kind of heroin use", said Nicole Maestrecci, head of the government's inter-ministerial group on drug abuse. "It's fashionable now not as a primary but as a secondary drug, mainly to give people a soft landing from highs produced by other substances". Ms. Maestrecci added that France's new generation of heroin users would not dream of injecting the drug, which they considered "dirty, downmarket and dangerous", but sniffed lines of it in the same way as cocaine.
The report, compiled by 150 sociologists and other researchers who aim to identify changing patterns of drug abuse rather than to quantify consumption, says that a wave of bad publicity about ecstasy has led to a recent stabilisation in its use. Stimulants such as speed and cocaine have gained significantly in popularity, however, while older hallucinogens such as LSD, which had been in more or less constant decline since the 1970s, was making a strong comeback.
The researchers believe that along with a switch in strategy by heroin dealers aimed at making the drug more socially acceptable, the unexpected return of substances such as speed and LSD to the French party scene is one of the main reasons for the recent surge in heroin consumption.
"Coming down from a speed- or LSD-induced high can be a very violent experience compared with ecstasy", said Michel Perrin, one of the researchers. "The new breed of heroin users see it very much as a relaxant, a way to control and manage the after effects of something else".
Arthur, a 23-year-old Parisian who works for a film production company and has now kicked the habit, told the newspaper Lib?ration that sniffing heroin was "pretty much the ultimate high - your head opens up amazingly, you can work like a madman for 15 hours at a stretch, you're not angry or hungry or thirsty. You're cool".
The police say demand is also being fed by astute drug barons who have long realised that France's estimated 70,000 heroin addicts represented a dwindling market for the drug in traditional, intravenously injected form. "Heroin was basically taboo for everyone except junkies," a Paris police spokesman said. By launching "brown" or powdered heroin, sold in France under the name rabla at ?35-?60 a gramme, dealers had "opened up a whole new market of first-time users who do not associate it with any of its traditional drawbacks".
The report's researchers say the new heroin users were mainly young, comfortably off clubbers, including a large number of DJs who had found that "sniffing a few lines of heroin made the music sound an awful lot better, just like in the good old days of rock". They warned that heroin taken in any form remained an exceptionally dangerous and highly addictive drug which changed the user's psychic functioning.