Second opinion

THERE has been a terrible outbreak of supposed helplessness lately, especially round here. The number of drug addicts appears to be increasing daily and, as everyone knows, drug addicts are helpless, though no one is quite sure whether the helplessness starts before or after the drug addiction. What is clear, however, is that, by the time they swim into my ken, they claim not to know what they do.

There were three drug addicts in my ward at the same time last week. One was a Standard British Moron, vacant of face and malevolent of eye, who had injected himself with a huge dose of heroin to celebrate his release from prison, and had choked on his own vomit.

'Why did you inject yourself with so much heroin?' I asked.

'For something to do,' he replied.

Ah, what we need are more youthrecreation centres: more Ping-Pong, less heroin.

I learnt that his scholastic career had not been a triumphant success: he walked out of school at the age of 12 and never returned.

'Why not?' I asked.

'I didn't see the point.'

Neither did 1: schools round here leave the tabula of the human mind strictly rasa.

The patient in the next bed was an aging hippie with smelly feet. He also had a blood clot in his lungs, a complication of his habit of injecting himself in the groin. He will be injecting himself in the neck, if not the eye, before he dies. He wanted me to prescribe him drugs.

'To me, doctor, withdrawal from heroin is the evillest thing in the world.'

'What a sheltered life you've led!' I exclaimed.

He laughed, revealing the blackened stumps that drug addicts, ever given to exaggeration, call teeth.

The third of the drug addicts was what is known as a body-packer: 63 condoms full of cocaine had been removed from his intestines at operation. There were complications afterwards, and he needed a nasogastric tube. He looked at the inoffensive little tube with disgust and said, 'You don't expect me to swallow that thing!'

'But you swallowed all those condoms full of cocaine,' said one of our nurses. 'I never!' he protested, deeply offended.

He denied that he had any knowledge of how the condoms full of cocaine happened to be in his intestines: presumably it was the Cocaine Fairy who inserted them by magic during the night.

The three addicts soon struck up a friendship, and were laughing and joking together.

The body-packer uttered words of encouragement to the Standard British Moron.

'What you need when you get out of here is some really good gear,' he said. 'You'd be crazy not to. I can tell you where to get it.'

I should perhaps mention that the body-packer was under arrest at the time, and there were two policemen present while he said this. He obviously enjoyed taunting them with their impotence.

'I'm going to discharge myself if you don't give me nothing, doctor,' said the man with a blood clot. 'I know it's dangerous for me, but it won't be me doing it; it'll be the heroin that makes the decision.'

Forgive them, Father, for they know exactly what they do.

Theodore Dalrymple