The Cross and the Switchblade

THE TREMENDOUS HOLD that drugs have on the human body cannot be explained in physical terms alone. My grandfather would say that the devil had these boys in his grip, and I think my grandfather is right. The boys themselves say this, but in a different way:

“Davie,” I was told over and again, “there are two habits you’ve got to kick if you’re hooked. The body habit, and the mind habit. The body habit’s not too much of a problem: you just stay in sheer hell for three days, put up with a little less torture for another month, and you’re free.

“But that mind habit, Davie ... that’s something terrible! There’s a thing inside you that makes you come back. Something spooky, whispering to you. We got names for this guy: either he’s a monkey on our back, or a vulture on our veins.

“We can’t get rid of him, Davie. But you’re a preacher. Maybe this Holy Spirit you talk about, maybe He can help.”

I don’t know why it took so long for me to realize that this was, indeed, the direction we should take. The realization came about as an evolution, starting with a failure and ending with a magnificent discovery.

The failure was a boy named Joe. I’ll never forget the four traumatic days I spent with him, trying to bring him through the pain of withdrawing from an addiction to heroin.

Joe was such a nice guy. Tall, blond, at one time a good athlete in high school, he had not come into his addiction by the usual route.

“I suppose those pain-killers were necessary,” Joe told me in my office at the Center. “I know that when I needed them I was glad for the relief they brought. But look what happened to me afterwards. I never broke away.”

Joe told me the story. He had been working for a coal company. One day he slipped and fell down a chute. The accident put him in the hospital for several months, and for most of that time Joe was in severe pain. To help relieve his agony, the doctor prescribed a narcotic. By the time Joe was released from the hospital he was addicted.

“I couldn’t get any more of the drug,” he told me. “But I discovered that there was a kind of cough syrup that had narcotics in it and I started walking all over the city buying it. I’d have to go to a different drugstore each time and use a fake name, but I didn’t have any trouble getting all I wanted. I used to step into the nearest bathroom and down a whole eight-ounce bottle at once.”

After a while even this didn’t satisfy Joe’s growing need for drugs. He knew that some of his old high school buddies were using heroin, and he got in touch with them. From then on the pattern was typical. First sniffing, then skin popping, then mainline injections. When Joe came to us, he had been on heroin for more than eight months. He was deeply addicted.

Cold turkey—instantaneous withdrawal—is the method usually used in jails to take a boy off narcotics. We used it partly because we had no choice: we could not administer the withdrawal drugs they use in hospitals. But we prefer cold turkey on its own merits, too. The withdrawal is considerably faster: three days as against three weeks. The pain is more intense, but it is over sooner.

So we brought Joe to the Center and gave him a room upstairs with the men workers. How glad I was that we had a registered nurse living at the home. Barbara Culver’s room was just under Joe’s. She’d keep an eye on him all the time he was with us. We also put a doctor on the alert in case we should need him.

“Joe,” I said, as soon as we had him settled in, “as of this moment the withdrawal has started. I can promise you that you won’t be alone for one second. When we aren’t with you in person, we will be with you in prayer.”

We weren’t just going to take the boy off drugs and leave him alone to suffer. The entire four days would be coupled with an intensive, supportive prayer campaign. Prayer would be said for him around the clock. Day and night boys and girls would be in the chapel interceding for him. Others would be with him in person upstairs reading Scripture to him.

One of the first things we had to do with Joe was break the expectation of pain. Instantaneous withdrawal is bad enough by itself, without the added handicap of expecting it to be hell. I asked Joe where he got the idea the withdrawal was going to be so rough.

“That’s just it. Everyone says it’s rough, so you’re sitting here sweating just at the thought of what’s ahead. As a matter of fact, that need not be the case at all.” And I told Joe about a boy I knew who had been on marijuana and on heroin and who had been released instantaneously, without any of the withdrawal symptoms. That was rare, I admitted, and Joe had to be prepared for a rough time. But why make it any worse than it had to be? We worked hard to help Joe separate the real symptoms from the psychological symptoms that came from apprehension.

This is a wonderful Psalm. We call it the Song of the Drug Addict. There are certain verses in particular that are just made for their condition:

Pull me out of the net that they have laid privily for me: for Thou art my strength.

Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am in trouble; mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly.

For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing: my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed.

I was a reproach among all mine enemies, but especially among my neighbors, and a fear to mine acquaintance; they that did see me without fled from me.

I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel.

Once the real withdrawal pains began, Joe stayed up there in his room while he sweated through the symptoms. Barbara checked his condition regularly. I hated to go into that room. Joe lay on the bed gripping his stomach as the cramps hit him again and again. His body was a high flushed pink. Sweat poured off him in little riven that left the bed soaked through to the mattress. He cried out in his pain and pounded his head with his hands. He wanted water, then threw it up. He pleaded with me to help him, and all I could do was hold his hand and promise him that we cared.

At night we set up a tape recorder by Joe’s bed and played Scripture readings to him. I stayed at the Center during this trial. Often during the dead of night I would slip into the chapel to be sure someone was always there, then up the stairs to see how Joe was doing. The recorder was softly repeating portions of the Bible to the boy as he tossed in fitful sleep. Never once during those three days and nights did the torment let up. It was a terror to watch.

He walked around the Center smiling wanly and saying that he thought maybe the worst was over. All of us were happy with him. When Joe said he wanted to go home to see his parents, I was a little dubious, but there was nothing we could do to detain the boy if he wanted to leave.

That was our failure. “What went wrong?” I asked at a staff meeting. “The boy went through the rough part. He got all the way through the worst three days he would ever have to spend. He had a tremendous investment to protect. And he threw it all over.”

“Why don’t you talk to the boys who have come off successfully?” said Howard Culver. “Maybe you’ll find the key.”

There were several such boys I wanted to talk to. One by one I called them in and listened to their stories of deliverance. And they all spoke of a common experience.

I spoke to Nicky, who had been taking goof balls and smoking marijuana. I asked him when it was that he felt he had victory over his old way of life. Something tremendous had happened to him, he said, at the time of his conversion on the street corner. He had been introduced at that time to the love of God. But it wasn’t until later that he knew he had complete victory.

I called in David and asked him the same thing. When did he feel that he had power over himself? “Oh, I can answer that,” said David. “When I was baptized in the Holy Spirit.”

Again and again I got the same report. I cannot describe how excited I was. A pattern seemed to be emerging. I felt that I was on the verge of something tremendous.