WHY do heroin addicts shoot up? Why do they choose such hideously difficult lives? The kind of boys and girls in Dublin who become addicts know what will become of them.
They know as surely as office workers would if in every office, slumped forward on to their computer terminals, or half falling out of their chairs, were dying people.
If there was a dying person everywhere - one in the corner of every restaurant, one resting on the stairs in every shopping centre one gasping for breath on every corner - that's what being one of Dublin's drug addicts would be like.
I walk past Trinity Court, the addicts' treatment centre, some mornings. A lot of the young addicts clustering here and there on the pavement about their agitated business look sturdy enough. But there are always the thin ones, with grey skin. And one couple who I will never be able not to remember as long as I live.
They tottered towards me. They must have been beautiful once - tall and fair. Now they held each other up. The girl was so stick thin that she had men's socks on inside the high heeled shoes she was wearing with her jeans. The man was just bones. They were barely living wraiths, staring ahead, with filmy eyes. Ruins.
Yet at the play, Trainspotting, at the Olympia, a very young, working class audience - an audience such as I have never seen in a formal theatre before in my life - applauded and laughed their heads off at the graphic details of addiction.
The life the play - also a book and a film - dramatises is utterly, grotesquely, squalid. It is full of excrement and vomit and awful bodily pain. It is shot through with vicious violence. A pregnant women is kicked in the belly. A baby dies and goes stiff and is only found when her mother, after shooting up, fills into the bedroom with a man to have sex. A man continually punches his woman in the face in a pub, and no one cares.
The addicts gather around the flame of the candle over which they heat the drug in a spoon. Bent over the flame in the surrounding dangerous dark, they inhabit a primeval world, just like the first fire makers in their caves millennia ago, as if the intervening civilisations had never been.
The whole lives of the addicts are about scoring. Virtue is dead. There is nothing they wouldn't do and no one they wouldn't betray for a fix. The hero introduces his friend to the drug, and the friend, in the second act, becomes HIV positive from the dirty needle. (So I'm told. I'd left, gladly, at the interval.)
YET the audience obviously felt, "This one is ours". They chuckled and cheered. This foul mouthed, witty, energetic, nihilistic drama is of their culture.
The oldies and the straights don't understand.
Being knowing about addiction must be a youth thing, a style thing. Perhaps this throws some light on why certain 14 and 15 year olds in Dublin and Cork try their first needles when their brothers and sisters and friends, belonging to exactly the same underprivileged world, don't go that route.
Addicts are presented either as total monsters or as pure victims. But that's to look at them from the point of view of the wider society. What's it like looking from the addict? What, for them, are the rewards of their way of life?
I ask this because it takes users as well as suppliers to make a drugs problem, and the users are the more mysteriously motivated people in the relationship. About the suppliers we know, at least, why they are there. But the very beginning of addiction remains elusive.
I saw myself, very recently, at an anti drugs meeting and "pushers out" march, the huge effort the wider communities of the addicts are putting into pushing the tide of addiction back. I see an increasing number of earnest initiatives on the part of individual politicians and of State and voluntary agencies.
But that doesn't seem to affect the entry into drug addiction. More kids are doing it all the time. Drug taking is perfectly obviously correlated with every form of underprivilege. But the age at which kids start using drugs is younger and younger: they are too young, often, to have been driven to social despair.
Trainspotters shows you, anyway, if you needed to be shown, that jobs and education have no particular appeal for many young people. They begin using drugs as a statement about being different, not being conventional. They use drugs as a part of peer group behaviour, and the peer group is more influential than loving parents. Perhaps even more than a caring society, if we ever had a caring society.
WE all did it growing up - we smoked cigarettes, or we got drunk. We made our protest. But the odds weren't so great. We didn't see young people not much older than us tottering towards death because of smoking or drinking. And therefore the whole thing wasn't so buzzy, so macho, so dramatic. And smoking and drinking weren't so gorgeously rewarding.
If there was one aspect of Trainspotting more repulsive than the next, it was the constant ecstatic praise for the effects of a hit of heroin.
There is nothing in the world so exciting, it seems. For a while, anyway. We see addicts after that stage. We see them when they have become victims, and they're in Mountjoy or going to a treatment centre or disappearing down an alley with a handbag. We don't see that first phase, when they think they're heroes, and live on a high from which they look down at the rest of us.
We who have a stake in this society think of the drug problem in terms of law and order. We want the addicts, pushers and barons jailed, at the least. But that would be just tidying. What the communities who have risen up in Dublin are asking for, above all, is treatment - rehabilitation clinics, sited in the drug localities, clinics run by local people, and clinics in such profusion that the instant an addict says "I want to come off it" there and then they can be offered help. No waiting. No going it alone, like the boy in Trainspotting with his mother's valium and three buckets for his body's wastes.
I have hope that something like that will be put in place. But there will still be a heroin problem. That's what you realise, contemplating Trainspotting. Heroin addiction has some kind of stylish presence in the culture of modern young people.
For decades, now, the young have been becoming more separate from the rest of us. Using hard drugs may be part of that separatism. Then, since the only way to afford them is to steal or deal, the separateness is compounded by a criminal lifestyle.
It is maybe better not to think about it, because there has to be hope, or we would do nothing. But the heroin problem may be even more difficult to struggle with than our stereotyped way of looking at it has allowed us to realise.