At the first hit of morphine the pre-adolescent Stephen was overawed by wonder as his brain flooded with opiates his own circuits could never produce. “What did that feel like?” I ask. “Like a warm, wet blanket,” he replies, “a place of safety—the safety that came before pain and danger, before the enormity of being born, pushed and dragged, kicking and screaming into this world.” The sex trade worker who told me that her first hit of heroin was like a warm, soft hug was fantasizing a state of infant joy. Stephen’s “warm, wet blanket” harkens back even further, to the womb—perhaps the last
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