Needle work

I’ve been lucky. Having used most of the substances that can divorce you from reality, I am only left with a reliance on alcohol and cigarettes. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for my fellow hostel residents. To say I was shocked at the level of drug taking when I got here would be a gargantuan understatement.

I rather gauchely and uncynically refused to believe all the clichés and stereotypes about homeless people and drug or alcohol abuse. Now that my eyes have been opened I can see that the two are as closely linked as Members of Parliament and creative accounting.

It’s a shame when the views of the gutter press seem to have some faint grounding in reality. I feel disappointment, alarm and sadness at so many lives held under the cosh of illicit drugs. I don’t know why I should feel so alarmed – it’s not as if I have skipped through life without being aware that a lot of people choose to lessen their grip on the world at almost every opportunity.

Like most people my age, that was something I regularly did in the past. Take a stroll through any provincial town or city centre on a weekend and you’ll see the abandon with which people readily abdicate responsibility.

So why should it matter that people on the lower rungs of society follow suit – everyone is doing it, so why can’t we? The government has proposed stopping or reducing the benefits of alcoholics. Should they also curb the salaries of publicly owned bank employees who shove a proportion of those wages up their nose? At least alcoholics are putting something back into the system by paying the tax on alcohol.

There seems to be some unspoken rule that when you are at the bottom of the barrel you’re meant to climb out of it. But is it surprising that the desire to escape the fragility and bleakness of a homeless life exists? It would be a struggle to find a person in this hostel whose life has not directly been touched, altered, shaped or defined by a reliance on drink or drugs.

There is a sharp difference between the young and the old. The majority of older residents are facing the slow corrosive death of the alcoholic. Younger residents are using a whole gamut of prohibited chemicals, herbs and plants. The residents trade war stories and show scars – bruises from the epilepsy brought on by alcohol withdrawal or black limbs covered in ulcers from a lack of circulation caused by a heroin habit.

There are those who don’t like to be pigeonholed and do anything to render themselves stupefied to the realities of life. This matters, of course, because the reliance on drugs takes away any objectivity and becomes the sole reason for existing, filling all your waking moments. Getting drugs becomes your goal in life. Then once you’ve got them, you can find oblivion – until the cycle begins again.

It matters because it is sad to see lives unfulfilled and dependent on drugs. There is a gentleman here, a real character, always laughing and joking and helping everyone, who has not had a drink for a long time, doesn’t have an intention of drinking, but is realistic enough to know that one day he maybe will.

Here in the shelter he won’t, because he is happy and surrounded by people. The problems arise when he is out of the bubble. Then he gets lonely and his demons return. He always goes back to alcohol, then gets dry. He has repeated this pattern for most of his adult life. He will most likely continue this spindryer life because it’s all he knows.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Did my fellow residents arrive here because of a reliance on drugs or did their reduced circumstances lead them to it? Did a proximity to users and peer pressure provide the tipping point? All experimentation starts with the possibility of pleasure. Alcohol and drugs give the illusory promise of sociability, fun and shared experience.

Unfortunately, here experimentation ends with a shortened and unfulfilled life. Some arrive at the hostel as a result of alcoholism and the attendant life crisis that it entails. Others seem to accept that their journey into the heart of darkness would be incomplete without a little flirtation with narcotics. I would imagine it’s difficult not to succumb in a locale where the smell of skunk permeates the building like the smell of bread in supermarkets.

The staff provide programmes to help with the problem and seem unduly positive about trying to stick their fingers into dykes. They know exactly what goes on and chip away every day with vigour and patience and some success.

I’ve seen a grown man, aggressive and under the influence, lurch through the dining hall and start a fight over a blancmange and then seen him halted and made humble by a few words from a grey-haired old lady from the Salvation Army. That was hilarious and a thing of beauty.

For me, it is exciting if I have more than three pints of Guinness in a week. So cheers.

Paul O’Hanlon is a hostel dweller and former civil servant.