Article in Femina issue 3 1997
She takes care of her appearance
That way nobody will discover her secret
Tina was in her early 20's when she first smoked heroin. Her boyfriend was offered a trip to Thailand where he was supposed to pick up the drug and smuggle it into Denmark. As it turned out, he was paid in 'kind'.
"We thought that if you smoked it in cigarettes nothing would go wrong," says Tina who grew up in a decent, ordinary environment and who had never had anything to do with drugs until then. "It was exciting - and we thought we were a little better than others. I was curious and really naive!"
But it turned to addiction even though the amounts consumed were small. Their addiction was maintained because of the boyfriend's trips to Thailand, for which he was paid with drugs. That was why the couple could stay away from criminal environments and why they didn't have to empty their pockets to pay for their otherwise expensive habits.
Tina is a woman in her 40's who has had several office jobs since she was very young. Today she is undergoing training in the field of commerce, with an emphasis on computing, among other things. She'll soon be finished and wants to work as a temp for an agency where she can use her newly-acquired knowledge about what computers can used for. She shares a lovely apartment with Henrik who is also a former addict. Both live stable lives. Their closest friends know that they are both on methadone. Their parents know it. Their circle of acquaintances knows nothing. No one at Tina's school knows about her problem. And she has never said anything at the places she has worked, and no one has ever suspected that she's an addict. It's very important for Tina that nobody knows her secret. She takes half of her 10 methadone tablets in the evening and the rest in the afternoon when she comes home from school. Methadone makes your pupils small and she doesn't want to run the risk of being found out while she is at school.
"I've learned how to play the role. If you're conscious of it and make sure your appearance is neat, no one is going to notice anything."
Judgemental attitude
"People don't really know how they should relate to drug addicts and they usually have a very judgmental attitude. Drug addicts are maladjusted people who steal left, right and centre, and would sell their own grandmother. Even though it might move a few mountains if I came out and told my story, I don't really think it would help," opines Tina. "If you want your neighbour to say hello to you, if you want to be able to go to a meeting of the housing organisation, if you generally want to be treated decently, you shouldn't say anything. I don't think it's an ideal situation to be addicted to anything, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we are worse people than anyone else."
After a couple of years of smoking heroin - Tina has never injected - she wanted to stop. She had become sick and tired of her abuse, and she had also moved out on her boyfriend, so that was the end of the free heroin.
"I was tired of being addicted and of being sick if I didn't get any. I went 'cold turkey'. At that point I was working as a secretary and phoned in sick, saying I had the flu. I was off for 14 days, and I had my doctor - who didn't know anything about my addiction - write a certificate of illness. Then I isolated myself for the 14 days. I didn't feel that I had any choice. It was relatively painless. It takes 3-4 days to get the drug out of your system, but afterwards your nerves are completely raw for a long time. Just seeing something sad on television makes you cry!"
Methadone in the morning coffee
Tina was drug-free for 4 years. She lived alone, cultivated her job, her friends and quite a bit of sport. Until she had a crisis because of problems at her work. Going to work became a chore and Tina had a hard time dealing with it.
"I was feeling really screwed up. So, to be able to handle going to work, I phoned some people I knew and asked where I could get hold of some heroin. And that was it!" Tina went to work, but her colleagues started shunning her, one by one. She quit without having another job. "For someone like me that's about the most insecure situation you can get into."
At about the same time she had started seeing her old boyfriend again. He moved into her apartment, but things were far from good. "He'd starting fixing and had changed completely!"
The boyfriend wanted get clean using methadone, but without becoming known by the authorities. He'd heard about a doctor who only helped female addicts. If Tina could act as a stand-in for him, he could get the methadone completely anonymously!
"I refused! We carried on the discussion for three weeks, a month where I felt strange, bad. I couldn't get him out of my apartment either. One day I told him that I couldn't understand why I'd been feeling so strange for so long. He told me it was because he'd been putting methadone in my morning coffee for a month! Methadone is harder to come off than heroin. I tried but the withdrawal was terrible. The pain is indescribable, it's as if your insides are being torn. You sweat, freeze and shake!"
Doesn't want children
Tina did what her boyfriend asked. She started receiving treatment, gave some of the pills to him, but turned to the black market and bought an equal number for herself.
"That was to be able to cope at work. No way could I handle the job and coming off at the same time!"
Tina has been on methadone since then, 10 pills a day, which she gets from her doctor. That's 9 years on methadone without using anything else. Tina thinks things will stay like that for the rest of her life. "The first 7 years I lived with Henrik we fought like mad to come off it. It damaged us physically, we looked terrible. It really gets to your body!"
Tina and Henrik have made a conscious decision not to have children. "We put it off for a lot years, because if we were to have children we both wanted to be drug-free. We once saw a new-born baby in withdrawal, and we agreed that we'd never do that to a baby. And we're both so old by now. We have two cats, and they're sort of like kids!"
When Tina looks back she doesn't really understand why she became an addict. "If I hadn't met that guy that time, I don't think I would've been on methadone now. But who knows?"
A trip to watch the addicts
Jørgen of the Users Union: "In a certain Danish provincial town the addicts have to go to Falck's methadone bus down by the harbour. It's sort of turned into a tourist attraction and a place for the locals to go. They turn up in their cars to look at those addicts. I've just talked to a single mother in the town who is on methadone. She told me that her neighbour had seen her at the bus. Now, her children and the neighbour's children aren't allowed to play together anymore."
