Heroin may not be my drug of choice, but if this guy can maintain appearances while earing $100,000 a year at a fancy-pants white collar job then goddamn if that isn’t something to admire. He could be hoarding feral cats in his house for all I care, as long as he’s able to do something “weird” at home and front like a totally normal dude at the office he’s still my hero. It gives me the faintest glimmer of hope that one day I’ll be able to become a full-fledged Insane Clown Posse juggalo without my friends and family realizing what a fucking freak I am. Ahhhh, those’ll be the days!
But back to Seth Porter (name changed), a 39-year-old business analyst from Australia who reportedly got hooked on heroin at just 19 after experimenting with other drugs. Remember those DARE classes you had to sit through at school? Looks like they were correct about “gateway drugs” but somehow conveniently forgot to mention that you’ll also wind up making $100K a year while shooting up. Obviously I’d never want to be addicted to heroin, but if I could do it in exchange for a $100K a year salary….yeah go ahead and pass me that needle. According to Daily Mail,
‘I [Seth Porter] didn’t think about addiction or overdose when I first used. I had taken other drugs in the past like speed, ecstasy and acid. I was always taught that they were addictive and dangerous and I found that to be a lie,’ he told Daily Mail Australia.
‘So when a friend encouraged me to try heroin I didn’t really think twice. But I obviously found out that this was the drug that was incredibly addictive.’
While Seth can’t be sure of the age, he does recall overdosing at either 19 or 20 years of age.
‘I just remember using and then the next thing I knew I had paramedics over me with a resuscitation machine.
‘The person I was with had called an ambulance. I don’t know if I would have died or not if my friend hadn’t called them.’(via)
Despite his brush with death, he reportedly took heroin again two days later.
While Seth is able to able to function normally in society while on hard drugs, Dr. Mark Daglish, the direction of addiction psychiatry at Royal Brisbane Hospital says he’s a bit of an anomaly:
‘We almost never see people like this in our clinics in the public sector. We do see the ones who try to be functioning and fail, and the ones who get caught,’ Dr Daglish said.
But Mr Porter has defied the odds.
The addict claims he has never been unemployed for long periods and he has never been sacked or made redundant.(via)
Seth goes on to claim that he is even set to receive a $13,000 Christmas bonus this year, although when it comes to whether or not he’ll spend the money on heroin his answer was “I’d like to say I won’t…but I probably will.”
As for what he believes separates him from your usual run-of-the-mill heroin addict who tries and fails to function in society while high, he says that he “genuinely enjoys working” and that it helps that he dresses like a business analyst – i.e. he doesn’t look like a dirty bum with track marks running up and down his body. Although he does admit that he lives in constant fear of being caught, he’s lucky in that the “genuinely brilliant people” who have the ability to see through his lies are generally “few and far between in the upper-middle management levels of Australian business.”
[H/T Daily Mail]