My browser froze up while I was writing out my response, so you get the first part of this in image format:
This is a butterfly clip, to save explaining (great for larger injections):
Anyway I worked as fast as I could while sweaty and shaky to get the shot prepped, the air out of the barrel and long tube and the massive needle at the end into a vein (I've always had shitty veins at the best of times, let alone after a few days of constant redosing, and I wasn't very hydrated, which makes it much trickier). I finally got a bit of blood to flow up the tube, press the plunger down about 20%, and nothing. Don't feel a fucking thing. But it might just be shit H (for the record, at the time about 60mg of the H I usually got would get me as high as 100mg of oxy/morphine), so I kept pressing slowly, in case it was buprenorphine (or almost as bad on top of withdrawals, meth or some other stimulant). So I kept going, eventually getting the whole 50mg in, and nothing. I figured at worst it was a complete dud, but the white looked suspiciously pharmaceutical, which made me suspect some kind of pill had been crushed in with fuck knows what, so I tried another 50mg. Then 100mg. Then another 100mg, then another, each time using a fresh butterfly clip/barrel and slowly pressing it in over 2 minutes or so in case something drastic happened.
Somewhere along the way I felt some edging of relief. By the time I'd hit 350mg of whatever the fuck I was injecting, I was no longer shaking or getting cold sweats, my pupils had shrunk down to slightly smaller than normal and I was just over the edge of the line into feeling comfortable. Comfortable enough to be pissed the fuck off, so I called my friend, yelled at him for 10 minutes, went into my room, ate a sleeping pill or two and passed out. 8 hours later I woke up with that feeling like all my joints had shattered and were poking into my muscles, and I remember a day of alternating between lying in bed watching the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and lying in a hot bath hating my life.
That was actually the second last time I shot up opiates - the last time was about 6 months after that, also with J - he got ripped off again buying from a woman who sold out of a needle exchange (hey, it's efficient) but this time I didn't let him pass the losses onto me. It was a pretty crazy two days and by the end I shot my last 130mg and barely felt anything, pretty much figured it was time to bite the bullet and call it there while I was ahead, or keep going down the rabbit hole and wake up one day 35 or 40, still living for nothing but the next shot. I haven't been squeaky clean since (went through a lot of benzos that year, although that was mostly self medicating, also went through a second round of ketamine binging, which is some intense, mind-twisting stuff when you're injecting it every half hour, and a while back I had a bit of a backslide into some GHB and meth for a night. But for the most part, I don't live that lifestyle anymore.
At the time I just put it down to J being hopeless and figured he'd gotten himself ripped off, but he ripped another friend of mine off about a year later (he sold a bottle of valium as clonazepam, which is worth twice as much, then left town, guess he figured it didn't matter at that stage... except his new start lasted about two weeks and suddenly he was back calling around for people to hook him up, swearing he hadn't done any such thing), as well as dodging me for months on some money he owed me and not delivering on a repayment in the form of a bottle of valium, so I started to look back on events in a new light, along with the time I gave him money to buy me some morphine capsules and he came back with 1/4 of the beads missing from each of the capsules, and a few of the other rumors I'd heard. Last I heard he's still running around, and he's probably gonna still be running around 10 years from now, if he lives that long. A shame cause he was a really good friend (one of the few of my drug using friends I invited over to my house) and came through for me when I was in some bad situations (did a two hour trip to drop off some valium for free when I was coming off a fucked up binge, shouted me loads of drugs, although I reciprocated, stuff like that). I think it all just got the better of him, some people just can't handle life too well.
Have you ever had to suck a shitcock to get money to get high?
Lol. Nope. Worst thing I did to obtain drug money was hock a nice watch a family member had bought me for my 18th BDay, although I sold a lot of other stuff with sentimental value and skimped on a lot of birthdays and Christmas presents. But I never stole, was never a dealer and never did anything sexual (I had an offer from one of the gay dealers I used to buy from in my early days - protip: gay dealers are the best, they had a much higher standard for their product because their customers are much more demanding - but at the time I wasn't an addict and turned it down). Though I met a few girls who worked while I was getting high and they were pretty much either a) nice, at least somewhat intelligent women who'd had severely fucked up childhoods and needed prolonged psychiatric care which they almost certainly would never receive, or b) the same, but manipulative scamming bitches who I wouldn't trust to hang onto a 5c coin for me. There didn't seem to be much middle ground, some of them had what it took to hang onto their humanity while living such a fucked up lifestyle, most didn't. Most of the overt hookers were older and not very attractive - the ones who'd been worn down after a decade + of heavy drug use. A younger woman with even moderate looks could attach herself to a dealer and pretty much get high for free, the more attractive, the higher up the ladder the dealer was and the more drugs she had access to. Whether you call that prostitution or not seems like splitting hairs to me.
My own appearance actually degraded pretty badly on opiates (though as a straight guy it's nowhere near as much of a factor, except it kept me single - which was lonely, but also meant I didn't have a GF I was obliged to share drugs with, so you take the good with the bad). People think of most junkies as being skinny, but I put on 20 kilos within 6 months when my use really ramped up - probably a combination of the fact that I'd started spending all my money on opiates and had none for weekend meth use (even a single night on the pipe burns off a few kilos, especially if you're at a gig or in town), the fact that opiates gave me the munchies really badly for some reason and the metabolic and hormonal changes heavy opiate use cause. I also started smoking somewhat regularly (nothing like a smoke after a shot) for the first time, instead of just being a weekend smoker, and my arms were generally covered in ugly, swollen bruises once I started with the needles (mostly healed up now, though I can see some faint scarring inside my elbows if I look). So yeah, I wasn't looking my best, and I was never Johnny Depp to begin with.
No idea why that image is appearing at the bottom as well, how do I delete the double?