Driving that train/high on cocaine/Casey Jones you better watch your speed/trouble ahead/trouble behind/And you know that notion just crossed my mind. (Grateful Dead, 1969)

Photography by the amazing Richard Tommy Campion

We met at schoolies, a massive party on the Gold Coast.  He was a boy with a lot of money and a taste for drugs. I was bored wandering around the government endorsed piss up where thousands of teenagers get together and get hammered, or off their face, or nailed.  Or all three.   It’s six days of booze, fast foods, and blasting heat; a raucous and out of control mess.  Then government came along, as it always does, and left behind organised activities, ID bracelets, free condoms and STD warnings.

This story is from the freewheeling, out of control days.  We partied. Hard. He was paying and life was easy. Dope, booze, non-stop clubbing. When George Bush was launching his war on terror, I was taking my first steps in a decade-long dance with the devil. Stretching back in the recesses of blurred memories I can see his face but can’t hear his name. Not that it matters.  This is the story of the journey not the person.

We caught up weeks later in a dilapidated old Queenslander with its overgrown yards, cracked windows and all the traces of an uncared for share house, just two doors down from the local train station.  Everyone, there was doing speed.  “Wanna taste?”  There’s urging but no one needs much of a shove. In this nondescript suburban lounge room, the devil and I meet again.

“He rolled up a $10 note with the skill of an expert and puts out a line of speed. I’m in the big time now and I   shove that rolled note up my left nostril and snort.  Hard.  I take the line. It smacks me back – hard.  There’s nothing that can describe the gag-reflex-inducing bitterness that burns my nostril and the back of my throat.  Where’s the magic? Then it’s there, flooding in, up and through my body,   warm and fuzzy.  Everything is peachy, everyone is a friend. No judgements. No pain, No loneliness. The world just starts to seem awesome. I want this feeling to last forever. “

But that’s the fake seduction of amphetamines. An incredible high for the first four or five hours then you crash back. This is the start of the cycle, the pursuit of THAT high – that initial euphoria –which you try and try and try to get back but never do. It’s gone, forever, but you just don’t know it yet. The seduction, brief as it was, is complete.  You adore your new friend, speed. You are happy to pay the price, to devote yourself and every waking moment to the pursuit of drugs, taking drugs, thinking about drugs, scheming to get drugs and eventually doing anything for drugs. But that’s years away. We are still at the fun stage; still at the “I can walk away from this tomorrow” illusion.

“The pleasure and joy and connection you feel with these people – your drug buddies – is profound.  And you use and use and use.  You burn through thousands of dollars in the next few years, if not your money then someone else’s.

“That’s what addicts do; they stretch relationships; they trash friendships; they trample them; belittle them; lie about them and finally, destroy them. Night after night, week after week – other aspects of life merely interfere with your main interest. So the intervening years don’t really matter; they were all repeats of the same day, same night, same week over and over and over again.  What matters is speed, heroin, meth, because the taste in the suburban lounge, that dance with the devil had woken the monster.”

Using the needle, crossing the line to that of an undeclared junkie wasn’t planned. 

These things rarely are. Back in that suburban house, two doors down from the train station, needles were being prepared.

Needles are the line in the sand, only junkies use needles. It takes you to the next level, opens the doors to a new world. That was the tipping point, although you don’t know it. Welcome to HIV, hepatitis C, drug dependence, vein degradation and overdosing.

“I wasn’t watching the others preparing the needles. Everyone said needles were better, and fast. They get me to lie down on their blue couch and hold out my left arm, clenching my fist like squeezing a stress ball.

Someone is holding my bicep. I didn’t feel the needle go in but I remember someone saying ‘Oh fuck, I missed’ and I was thinking ‘what the fuck does that mean? Next minute, an exasperated voice says ‘fucking  hell I’ll do it” and I’m lying there sweating cause I’m so scared.

“Next minute this amazing, orgasmic heat rushes straight through my body up to my brain and I sit straight up. Oh My fucking God!!! Have I just died and gone to heaven? Wow, I mean, WOW!!! I have no words to describe this feeling. It’s like a million orgasms travelling through you at a million miles an hour. I can hardly breathe I’m so euphoric. “

There he is, the devil, smiling at me, it’s the smile of the addict understanding that first rush. Seven seconds from injection to the brain. The devil is full of shit