Friday, May 29

Meth Lifestyle

I had two meth runs in a row one day recently, for those that don’t know meth is short for methadone which is a liquid heroin substitute doled out by the pharmacist and has to be drank whilst in the chemist’s shop.  This is a daily thing for these people and part of their normal routine, but don't go thinking that it’s all shady young chavs in hoodies, it’s both males and females and with a wide range of ages from twenties up to fifties.   
  Some say that these people have a drug problem but no to a lot of them it isn’t a problem at all.  With most of the long term users it’s simply a way of life and they know nothing else. Think of it this way, what wouldn’t you give to be free of all responsibility and to just treat life as one big game. Usually no fixed address so no bills to pay and no kids to look after, just like most of the users they are brought up by relatives or end up in a care home. Cash isn’t a problem easily earned by small time dealing, supplying other users. 
They tend to give the wrong destination when ordering the cab and it then turns into a run-around and a drop off on a vague street corner after going from one side of town to the other and back. Now sometimes if I stay real quiet with more than one fare in the taxi folk seem to forget I am there and talk about all sorts of strange stuff, today was just one of those occasions. This kind of opened a window onto the wild crazy lifestyles that some of these users take for granted. And it does sometimes seem that they can experience crazier stuff in a week than most of us see in a whole lifetime.  Three people in the taxi and they were all pretty silent until the meth had been taken and then they started to relax and talk between themselves.
One story was the tale of a fellow user who had not been able to go to his brothers’ funeral that week from his prison cell. “Naw the screws wunt let him go cos he’s an high escape risk he got out of the cop van in Lancaster and was on the run for a week, then when they got him he squeezed out of the skylight of the sweatbox (prison van).”  The lass then responded with “they double cuffed me when I went to me nanas, why didn’t they do that and put him on a lead” (a long chain from the cuffs to the prison officers) just then the actual guy they were talking about rang them using a smuggled mobile phone direct from his prison cell. They seemed to treat this as nothing out of the ordinary apparently mobiles are quite easy to get hold of in jail. 
They spent the rest of the cab ride laughing and telling each other stories about how they got caught for dealing and what cars the police were “sneaking around in”.  They didn’t think it fair that the police were now using cars with blacked out windows to watch them from and even using rough old cars to follow them with.  
Wow how some folk live eh!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I can't even fathom this scenario. Barrow has changed so much since I was a teenager there fifty years ago -- but my nephews and nieces tell me how it is now. It makes me sad, it was a great town to grow up in.
Marion in Panama