Guilt, responsibility and friendship.
Where do the above three intersect, diverge, and become mutually exclusive?
Case in point:
Today I was collecting cash from two of my using friends who I had lent a fair chunk of my pay last Friday.
The loans, whilst some may consider a loan to a junkie high risk, were actually the safest bet I could think of. Junkies who've used over a decade hold few illusions about their chances of cleanliness, but also they know the suffering inflicted by not getting gabo.
And not getting gabo on a day when you expect to get gabo, e.g. a payday, is one of the more exquisite forms of junkie suffering.
Like Pavlov's mutts, I am very finely conditioned to expecting shots on certain days:
Not that I want to perpetuate a cynical worldview, but more often than not it seems than if I know my pay will be credited in thirty minutes, and a dealer tells me that they'll arrive in twenty, and I assume this is fine as the dealer will really take forty to fifty, then this will be the instance that the dealer arrives on time, and I have to ask them to come back in ten.
And of course that ten will be "just after I drop off a packet around the corner". And that'll be the drop-off that gets them busted. And you'll go home spun out from your second-degree interaction with the pigs, and semi-sick from lack of gabo...
Anyway, all this craziness just means that we’ve no way of knowing when her pay will come in. It used to turn up on Tuesday evenings, so there was the few weeks of stress when that stopped happening and she started getting the cash on a Wednesday.
And then there was the long weekend where her pay didn’t turn up until Thursday evening – an event that made no sense to me from my understanding of Direct Entries – as the Tuesday was a working day, so why was the pay not sent until Wednesday?
Anyway, I digress. My point is - is it okay to do what I do - lend cash to a frriend to help them to score today, and then when they pay you back in a few days that helps you score then. Or should you take the straights' approachs and tell them to suffer, to learn to support themselves - if they haven't the funds to score then they cannot score.
One of those things that sounds noble until you are on the receiving end. Until you are unable to score because of a firend enforcing their morality...
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One thing a friend said today was interesting – “I feel that when I was on the dole in the 90s, my standard of living was higher than it is now when I work”.
I proffered that maybe rent had something to do with that – rent as a proportion of income I meant. When you are young you can sharehouse , and $50 per week was the standard mid nineties rent. Now in the first decade of the new century, we’re all a little older and subsequently a little more desirous of our own space. My erstwhile friend, S, who as we all know, moved out of my flat a couple of years back not because she was over me, but, as she finally said two years later, because she needed more space, now pays $255 per week – roughly 45% of her income. On the dole, rent of $50 a week out of $250 weekly dole was only 20% of income.
But in M’s case, he is still doing a share-type arrangement, and his rent is only $80 a week, instead of $50. So as a percentage this expense has only increased from around 20 to 26 per cent. So in M’s case, there must be a different explanation. His is that the thing we all “like to spend out money on” is actually costing us more. Whilst it may have cost a lot more per gram in the mid 90s (I remember $2000 a weight being the going price from a guy who’d just motor biked back from Sydney with an ounce in his pockets), it all really comes down to purity in the end. Figures like “$500 a gram”, or “100 buck quarter weights” are all meaningless.
There’s another guy I know who shall we say, likes to generate his own input. And that stuff, coming fresh outta the tap, is close to 80% pure. Therefore, asking for $150 for a tenth of a gram is acceptable, as although this works out at $1500 a weight whereas you can get a weight for only $450 if you go to the street, dollar for dollar it's better. That’s why I always spin out at customers who flipped out that they bought a half-weight and took it home to see it only weighed 0.42 grams or similar. I’d always say “Take it and then see if you still want to complain.” I could easily have added 0.08 grams of glucose to make it on weight, but all that would have done would have been a cynical marketing exercise - one I leave for the multinationals. I shiver when I think of the day to come when h is legalised and marketing agencies get their paws on the wrapping and packaging angles...How long will it take them to learn that gabo is one of those "almost perfect" products that sell themselves. If people will prostitute themselves and risk death just for the privilege of paying inflated prices, then what marketing would be needed when it's legal and the price is commensurate with its production cost?