Fuck it, he's deid
For a number of years, I worked on a public health project monitoring levels of HIV among injecting drug users in Glasgow. To be eligible to take part, the drug user must have injected at least once in the previous six months. If they had, we then filled in a long and detailed questionnaire about all aspects of their drug use, sexual behaviour, general health and so on. Out of the hundred or so that I interviewed over the years, one man’s story stood out. I asked him the opening question, ‘Have you injected in the last six months?’. He replied, ‘Oh yes.’ This is the story of his last injection.

He claimed that he normally injected heroin three times a day. On the day in question, he had had his usual morning hit and was sitting in his flat when the doorbell rang. It was an old acquaintance who now lived in the far north of Scotland. She was in town to score a few bags to take back up the road with her. Could he help her out? The deal was he would buy five £20 bags, she would take four up north and they would share the fifth bag between them. So out he went and, very quickly, the deal was done. Back at the flat, he set about splitting the fifth bag and they decided to have a hit ‘for the road’. As he told it, ‘Greedy bastard that I was, I went into the kitchen and gave myself the bigger share.’ He also forgot that he had already had his morning hit. At this point, Lou Reed starts singing ‘Perfect Day’ and our protagonist disappears through the floor.

An ambulance is called and the paramedics arrive. He is given naloxone but, as he’s being stretchered out to the waiting ambulance, he goes into cardiac arrest. The stretcher is set down on the pavement (two or three people stand and watch including, apparently, his brother). Out comes the defibrillator. He’s zapped once. Nothing. Twice. Nothing. Three times. Nothing. One of the ambulance crew says, ‘Fuck it, he’s deid.’ And this is the thing, your man HEARS all this. It’s said that your hearing is the last sense to go when you go. So, lying there, in a smack-induced, near-total coma, he gets to hear someone pronounce him dead, and he’s utterly unable to tell them otherwise. One of the ambulance crew then says, ‘One more, and we’ll call it a day’. Fourth time lucky - his heart starts. And that, he said, was the last time he had injected heroin.

The cynic in me was tempted to write it off as another junkie urban myth. However, later in the year I was working on another project examining the medical records of patients who had been through detox. Going through the files one day, there were the records of a man who had arrested on the pavement. It listed the time and place and number of defib attempts. It’s possible that he had just imagined what the ambulance crew had said. Either way, it seemed to have kept him off the needle for a while.
( ThisCaledonianClown has left it far too late, Tue 21 Sep 2010, 11:05, 5 replies)

Gave me the chills.

(viciousal, Tue 21 Sep 2010, 12:22, closed)

^ this

(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Tue 21 Sep 2010, 14:09, closed)

Also
^ this

You win.
( ogwen69 has returned from Reddit, Tue 21 Sep 2010, 22:44, closed)

trainspotting?
(weaselinajetengine, Thu 23 Sep 2010, 3:02, closed)

Art imitates life
This was five years before Renton and friends appeared on the big screen. But, funnily enough, this study was based in Ruchill, which is where the outdoor scenes for the overdose sequence in Trainspotting were filmed.
( ThisCaledonianClown has left it far too late, Thu 23 Sep 2010, 11:21, closed)