Read What Allie, A Heroin Addict Has To Say

She spends her days getting high but also buying the drug and selling it to others for a profit. “It’s so easy to get,” she says. “I get a gram for $60 and sell it for $110.” Her regulars include waiters and waitresses, engineers, an anesthesiologist and a pilot: “Normal people,” she says, “functioning addicts, which is more dangerous because nobody has any idea.” They come by most mornings and often on their way home to their spouses and children.

Her eyes well up when she thinks about how young she was when she entered this hell, and the tears fall when she talks about the young people she sells to, whom she’d rather scare off. People like the “girl with everything going for her”: a penthouse apartment, a new car, access to schools and supportive parents. She hates that she even knows her. “Believe it or not, I tell them, ‘Honey, this is not what you want to do,’ ” she says. “It’s the end of the line. This is skid row. … This shit will kill you.” She warns girls and young women that the power of heroin will drive them to sleep with men they never would have imagined even talking to. And guys, even those who openly “gay bash,” she says, will give men oral sex for fixes — because that’s how this world works.

Allie had kids of her own but walked away for this life. The last time she saw them, they were 13 and 11. That was half their lifetimes ago. Parents need to wake up, especially if their children are behaving differently or blowing through money, she says. They need to look into their children’s eyes. If the pupils are constricted and exceedingly small, “unless they’re looking right into a … spotlight, your kid is on heroin or some type of opioid.”

Once upon a time, she glorified this lifestyle. She capitalized on being cute and felt powerful with her pockets full of cash. Today, she’s no better than most junkies who wake up covered in their own vomit or not knowing what — or whom — they’ve done.

“This is not a road you want to go down,” she says, as she continues to cry. “It’s evil. Nothing good can come of this.”

But then she pushes the needle into a vein in the back of her hand. As the heroin takes hold, she scratches her head and neck. She begins to slur her words as she explains how her body tingles and her heart beats out of her chest.

“I may have done a little too much,” she mumbles as her eyes grow heavy, her head nods forward and her limbs go temporarily limp.