Opiate: Synthesis of Need
Opium diminishes the significance of all else. If you’ve got heroin nothing else really matters. Everything comes in second.
I’ve often thought opiate addiction is the materialization of the abstract idea of need. Most of us have an idea that we’re missing something from out lives; for some of us it is God, for others it’s a new pair of shoes, or the success of a football team that we follow, or the craving for the embrace of an absent lover. But with heroin, once you’re addicted to it, those needs, that hole that I feel is in all of us doesn’t feel nameless, some unknowable entity, but the clearly material, definable, accessible drug that it heroin.
- Russell Brand, on "Fresh Air," NPR, April 6, 2009