< heroin >

[rayheinrich]

ha! yes! one of the problems with poems is that they usually don't have enough footnotes. and while i can see mike doing his mad-dope-fiend-scientist as Julia-Child-chef act as he added lemon juice to his soup you can't since i didn't take the time to add that to the poem but maybe someday... but anyway, mike was a good chemist: many chemicals (including drugs like morphine/heroine/etc.) aren't very soluble in water until you react them with an acid to make a water-soluble salt. mike knew someone who could get him really cheap mexican heroin (lagarto?) but one of its defects was that a lot of the heroin in it hadn't been converted to its salt form. normally mike would add hydrochloric acid to it to convert it all to the salt form and then add sodium bicarbonate to the mixture to neutralize the left-over acid (and sometimes he'd clean it up as well by using ether and setting his car on fire). but every once in a while (too often) he'd end up needing some that he hadn't made yet and that's when he used lemon juice for acid. the trick is to use just as much as is necessary for the reaction so that there's no acid left over. if you succeed, it's smooth, if not, it stings (but it still works). pyrex beakers are much better than spoons as you can make a more dilute solution which is easier on veins, they don't spill as easily, and they look cool and scientific instead of vulgar and junkie-drug-addict. anyway, that's what mike would have said. i just borrowed his stuff to put in joints as i've always been superstitious about injecting anything that wasn't made by one of those big, legit pharmaceutical companies (not that that's sure-fire either).