Second opinion
ALL flesh is grass, of course — that goes without saying — but, round here, it is also batteries, coins, razor blades, bleach, 'wraps' of cocaine and heroin, and anything else that can pass down the human gullet. Some people come to the hospital, indeed, with entrails like a small hardware store. The surgeons are forever retrieving bits and pieces from the guts of the disgruntled. In our district, getting down to the nuts and bolts is no mere metaphor.
There has been an epidemic of swallowing lately. One poor deluded soul swallowed a battery because he thought he was a robot and needed power. Another poor deluded soul thought he could elude the attentions of the police by swallowing the evidence, in this case heroin wrapped in condoms. He refused to have blood tests until his solicitor was present.
In the prison the day before, a prisoner informed me that he had swallowed a bottle of washing-up liquid. I asked him why.
'My cellmate said he'd beat me up if I didn't.'
This, of course, brings us to the interesting question as to why anyone would demand of another that he drink a bottle of washing-up liquid. I suppose it would take a Nietzsche to answer that particu lar question; but then Nietzsche had the inestimable advantage, from the point of view of explaining human behaviour, of suffering from neurosyphilis.
The things people do to themselves! I suppose by now I shouldn't be surprised at it, but having grown up in an ordered world in which I was by far the least rational person I knew, I am still shocked by the insouciance with which people destroy themselves. That doesn't prevent them from blaming others, of course.
Drug addicts are among the most enthusiastic, or at any rate most successful, of self-destroyers. You'd think that British housing estates were concentration camps to see the state in which the young men who live in them arrive for a sojourn at Her Majesty's expense. They come in hollow-chested, sallow-skinned, sunken-eyed, rottentoothed; one rubs one's eyes and wonders what century one is in. Prison is a health resort by comparison with a British housing estate.
The arms of drug addicts are so horn ble that I avert my eyes. You'd also think our housing estates were infested by vicious tsetse flies that confined themselves to biting along the line of the veins of the arm. Quite often such arms bear dark, purplish-black lumps, rather like buboes, where an abscess is forming when the addicts have missed the vein and injected into the tissue instead. And of course they're all on methadone — known round here as `meffs' — as well. Just as alternative medicine is actually additional (additional, that is, to the orthodox variety), so round here methadone does not supplant heroin; it supplements it.
Last week a prisoner told me that, 'on the out, like', he was prescribed '80 ml of meffs a day'. I pointed out to him that the numerous injection sites on his arms suggested to me (I told him that one didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce it) that he took heroin as well. And methadone, [said, was supposed to be taken as a substitute for heroin, not as a top-up.
'Yeah, but it's prescribed to stop me feeving, doctor,' he said.
'And what are you in here for?' I asked.
Teft,' he replied.
Theodore Dalrymple
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