Casualties of a war at home....

So, I wondered before I started out this morning, what are junkies like?

I should have known better. I've been over at R's when somebody's come looking to exchange used needles. Although he doesn't encourage junkies to show up at his house in an upscale San Diego neighborhood, R permits a few to drop by if they're in desperate need, the ones he's gotten to know over the 12 years he's performed needle-exchange and who are now almost friends.

Someone R knows wrote the grants and got the technically-illegal program off the ground. Politicians and law-enforcement officials who stumble across it tend to look the other way, and media attention has been focused elsewhere, on a new, officially-sanctioned program which has been making tentative baby steps and takes pains to distance itself from R's group.

A shame, considering the invaluable experience they've garnered during more than 12 years ministering to hundreds (thousands?) of addicts, providing them with clean needles, alcohol swabs, antibiotic ointment and other harm-reduction materials, thereby prolonging lives and preventing the spread of a host of blood-born illnesses to non-drug users.

Formerly once-a-week, now every other week, R or another volunteer drives the 4 to 5-hour route, stopping at designated homes. People know he's coming, news of the service spreads by word-of-mouth, and many junkies help out addicted friends, collecting and exchanging full sharps-containers for empties and requesting extra clean needles and syringes to hand out.

Nothing remarkable distinguishes the people I've previously encountered at R's, so much so that I've given up trying to figure out who is a volunteer, who a junkie and who just a friend when a new face appears at the door. Until they go back to the garage and the exchange occurs, I simply don't know.

Today was different, however, we were going to their homes, and a trend quickly became apparent. These are people who have seen better times. Harshly used by life, they have been rendered as worn and threadbare as the scuffed wall-to-wall carpet that invariably covered the floors of their tiny, shuttered and darkened homes.

The houses, sometimes ramshackle on the outside, were surprisingly neat and clean inside. Cheaply turned out with battered furnishings and sometimes cluttered, they were vacuumed and dusted and I never saw a single dirty dish in a sink.

Better times were evidenced, though, by framed photographs on walls and side-tables. In one, a young man in military uniform stared seriously at the camera. In several, young adults posed proudly in caps-and-gowns--children? Or the addicts themselves? I saw the occasional wedding picture, solemn or smiling, and framed slogans celebrating Black pride. In one apartment, a collection of framed rock-band playbills decorated two walls. I saw fresh fruit and delivered bottled water in several homes--suggestions of healthier habits, perhaps formed during happier days.

The junkies defied categories. They were white, black and brown--the latter a reflection of the U.S.A.-Mexico border just miles away--male and female, mostly middle-aged to older. Although determining a junkie's age is pure guesswork: poverty and addiction ravage a person's looks.

No matter how humble their circumstances, though, or compromised their health, people were polite and gracious. They asked after R's wife and toddler. Shook my hand and made sure they ended by saying how glad they were to have met me. And always, they thanked us profusely.

"They're so used to nobody caring," R said, "they're just grateful we come by."

Truly, the encounters had the quality of social visits. People often seemed as grateful for the effort R made to seek them out and interact with them--knowing they were junkies--as for the supplies he provided.

It didn't take too many homes before I found myself wondering if I wasn't witnessing the graphic results of 30 years of economic warfare against America's working classes. Yes, I know, they're junkies, addicted to physically-disabling (and illegal) substances--sometimes to the point of not being able to hold down jobs. But what jobs are available? Do any come with a living wage and benefits?

How different would these folks' circumstances look had they money in the bank and, say, guaranteed health and dental-care? Don't tell me the face of addiction is not determined by economics. I'll come back at you with Dennis Hopper, Drew Barrymore, Matthew Perry and Robert Downey, Jr.

The people we saw today aren't even enjoying their addiction. "They don't talk about getting high anymore," R told me. "They talk about getting well." They inject drugs regularly just to keep at bay heroin's devastating withdrawal symptoms.

All made an impression, of one sort or another.

First was a bone-thin, older black woman, whose tiny, low-to-the-ground pink-stucco bungalow could barely contain all her cheap furniture and belongings. She had forgotten we were coming. Still attired in a nightgown at 11:30, she swayed on her feet, teetering to one side like her cottage, and her hands shook as she handed over used needles and accepted clean ones.

"She has congenital heart failure," R told me once we were back in the car. "That never gets better, you know, it just keeps getting worse." Turns out, she was the woman I'd heard about for years, who looked out after the neighborhood's derelicts, suffering the wrath of the cops for it, frequent visitors to her bungalow.

Then there was the short, stocky, 40-something black man, whose belly hung out from under his T-shirt and over the waistband of his camouflage fatigues. His teeth were rotted completely away, when he smiled shyly, a few yellow stumps poked up. He gave us a twenty as a voluntary donation.

Next we saw a long-haired, large-breasted and slightly chubby prostitute. White and in her 30's, she lived in a small, cluttered trailer that had seen its last vacation, in a park replete with faded, crumbling, no-longer-mobile homes.

While a male acquaintance lounged on the unmade bed and surfed the Internet for porn, she quietly rummaged for her used needles, thanked us in a soft voice for coming and followed us outside to lock the gate as we left. Gesturing toward her coddled, well-groomed chow who lounged in the shade, "She keeps her eyes glued to the gate, never missing a chance to escape," the woman flashed us a sweet smile that dropped decades from her face.

One guy was a newbie. A rangy, weather-worn white man in his late 30's, he was working on an orange BMW in his driveway with a bare-chested, gray-bearded tattooed man when we drove up. He led us into the house, down a pitch dark hallway where he flipped on a light and opened a combination lock that secured a bedroom door. Tossing out the cat who tried to sneak in behind us, he closed the door and stood shyly in his T-shirt and Levis, fingers hooked into a belt with a large, Western buckle.

R asked how many clean needles he and his girlfriend would need. "Ahhh....fourteen?" he replied, shuffling his feet on the carpet. Then his eyes widened like a schoolboy at a comic-book convention as R scooped out a couple brimming handfuls of needles and syringes, placing the pile of sterilely sealed packages on the neatly-made bed.

"There are two of you, right?" R asked. "And it'll be two weeks 'til we're back. So take enough and only use each one once."

Toward the end, we saw a bubbling Latina, who rushed out and exchanged with us out of the trunk of her car in the parking lot of Marie Callender's, attired in her waitress' uniform. Then a slightly older woman who lives in a nice track home with her sister and aged mother. She delighted in her pet Chihuahua, excited by our arrival. "He doesn't usually like men," she said. She'd rescued the dog as a stray, battered and spitting up blood, and nursed him back to health.

The last guy we visited for the day was a Mexican-American man of indeterminate age, thin and lanky, with large, expressive hands. He almost seemed starved for contact, more interested in engaging us in conversation than in getting supplies. We made the exchange beside the car, parked in a dirt alleyway next to his house, under the constant watch of a loud group of neighbors across the street.

The man drew out the encounter, slowly transferring used needles into the proffered sharps-container, bent over the ground in front of the car and concealing his actions by placing everything within a large brown paper bag. He exchanged that bag for a new bag, containing clean needles and an empty sharps-container. All the while, he talked to R. How was the baby? What was new? Was this our last call for the day? He didn't seem to want to let us go.

As we drove toward home, I asked R about the scabs covering the man's hands. "He's collapsed all his veins," R said. "So he only skin-pops now." A particularly risky practice, R added, as infections are easy to catch and spread that way. Yet the man persistently refuses R's offers of antibiotic ointment.

"Junkies just don't take care of themselves," R said, sighing. "They've been told for so long that they don't deserve it, they've come to believe it."