Being hooked is less dangerous when our society winks

January 26, 2007

Warning: This story contains graphic details about the Robert William Pickton trial.

When Robert William Pickton was filmed being shown the mug shots of dozens of Vancouver women who had gone missing, he would sometimes comment on their attractiveness or lack of it and then move on to the next one, without any visible flashes of recognition. This does seem odd given that the evidence found on his pig farm — bloodstains, an asthma inhaler, clothing, a crucifix, even heads cut vertically in half — means that some of the women had arrived on his property at some point and apparently never left.

Just as a meat cutter makes no distinction between the carcasses that arrive before him on the speeded-up line at the plant, the women's faces, so fascinating to horrified Canadian viewers, are all a bit same-y to Pickton.

We, too, regard the women as much of a muchness. Almost all appear to be prostitutes. They were all desperate, and desperation brings a certain uniformity to humans, whether they're addicts or refugees. They only want one thing, whether it's drugs or freedom, and when they die pursuing their want, they are defined by their failure to get it.

Prostitution doesn't intrigue me; it is a side effect of drug addiction. I don't know why reporters are so dismissive when reports of murdered prostitutes come into a newsroom. Alcoholism remains a problem in the media. The only difference between a reporter shaking for some rye and a skeletal young woman on the street on a rainy night is that the reporter can get their fix cheaply at a liquor store.

I can never decide what's worse, to be addicted to something that's readily available and will kill you slowly like booze or cigarettes, or to be hooked on a substance that is hard to find, unreliable and expensive. Alcohol, heroin, crack, they all have a stranglehold on the frail forked human body but with liquor you can cling to your middle-classness for decades. In most provinces, the government sells you your fix in attractive little shops. How sweet.

By coincidence, I have been reading a great trilogy by Edward St. Aubyn, a British writer whose brilliant first novel upset me so badly when I reviewed books for a living that I was unable to read the next two as they were published. Some Hope, also known as the Patrick Melrose Trilogy, tells the story of a little boy who is the son of a "pedophile, an alcoholic, a liar, a rapist, a sadist, and a thoroughly nasty piece of work." The boy grows up to become a junkie and then a recovered junkie bereft of the brief hollow comforts of heroin. This very much resembles St. Aubyn's early life, which may be why the second novel, Bad News, is the most horrifying rendition of drug hunger I have ever read (and I'm a connoisseur of literary misery).

The Desperates (and this includes alcoholic journalists as well as smack-hungry prostitutes), as we shall call them, get their start with a miserable childhood. I had one of those. So did you. Have some sympathy.

Terribly unhappy, frightened, insecure people need brain holidays. They want a break from their misery.

Patrick Melrose, in Bad News, is so unhappy that he cannot take off his wool overcoat on a hot day. "Do you ask a lobster to disrobe?" When he injects his drug and sees the emblem of beauty, a "poppy of blood" unfolding in the syringe, he feels the drug's "cold geometric flower break out everywhere and carpet the surface of his inner vision. Nothing could ever be as pleasurable as this."

But when he had injected all the heroin and coke he had? Nothing could be as painful. "As usual, his liver ached as if he'd had a rugby ball kicked under his rib cage. His desire for drugs, like the fox hidden under the Spartan's tunic, gnawed at his entrails.… These complaints and the general feeling that his body was held together with paper clips and safety pins and would tear apart at the slightest strain, filled him with remorse and terror. It was always now, on the dawn of the third day, that he was filled with a disgusted desire to stop taking drugs, but he knew that the first hints of lucidity and withdrawal would bring an ever greater horror of their absence."

"He had run out of gear… Soon enough, his synapses would be screaming like staring children, and every cell in his body tugging pathetically at his sleeve."

If you felt this way, wouldn't you get in a car for a party just about anywhere, to earn the money to get back that feeling of ultimate maximum extreme pleasure, even if it's only brief?

I would. I suspect you would too, especially if you had no money, no family, no shelter, no routine, no structure to guide you in another direction.

To think that women died because they didn't have the drug their body and soul demanded, and they were unfortunate enough that the drug wasn't liquor, which they could buy at the corner store.

Why the hell aren't we making all drugs available to all adults? Yes, we'd have another mess on our hands, but it would be a better mess than women's heads sliced in half and left in buckets. It would instantly drain the power of violent criminals. Yes, prostitutes need protection. But perhaps we could make it unnecessary for them to climb into a car and ride into the fetid, bloody pit of death that we will peer into during this trial.

All this for a little heroin, a little cocaine, a willingness to admit that people's bodies and brains need what they need. All these things these women, The Desperates, didn't get from us because they were lumped into an undesirable group of people who need something so desperately they would go anywhere to get it.