As your habit takes hold, you find that the daytime is upsetting. You wake up afraid and feeling sick - and if you’re resourceful and have enough game and hustle to make sure you have a wake up shot, even when you get well the morning light is still anxiety provoking. You can’t hide in the daylight. The daytime brings all kinds of activity and scrutiny. Daytime belongs to law abiding citizens - to healthy people, to people who (correctly) shun the darkness and the madness and sickness that calls it home. Your biorhythms will become rapidly nocturnal as the poison alters your blood - and then your being.

Food tastes different - foods that were once your favorite things to eat come to taste as ashes in your mouth. Bland foods that you never had a taste, let alone a craving for become your survival staples. That is, IF you can eat at all. Even when a heroin addict is well and not in the throes of withdrawal, food is a dubious proposition. Often, consuming even a modest meal will quite literally hurt - nausea is a constant too, but I speak of actual pain. Food sits in your stomach like shards of sharp granite. And the vampire-addict must time his meals around when he can get well. To attempt to eat when in Heroin withdrawal will cause violent stomach upsets and - to be frank - bowel control issues.

As you become pale, and your eyes sunken, and your bodyweight plummets, you will also come to smell differently. I’m not speaking of body odor - the new vampire-addict will smell even after a scalding hot and soapy shower. Its a subtly musky scent, but comingled with that semi-familiar, musky ‘‘human’’ odor is a kind of chemical perfume. Its almost ‘‘fragrant’’ - owing, in part, to the fact that Heroin, even when distilled and chemically manipulated, retains characteristic of plant matter - but its not a pleasant smell. It smells, literally, like death.