BEIRUT: “I took heroin for 10 years and no one knew,” says 24-year-old Khaled. “I was doing everything normally ... My friends, my family, no one knew anything.”

Khaled, who asked that his real name not to be used, graduated with a degree in business management last year, and has been working at his father’s store for six years.

“I was going to work every day. I wasn’t the type of person who takes heroin and stays in their room passed out ... I take heroin and I go to work, to university,” he says.

Heroin addicts often describe how they’re always trying to relive the first experience, and Khaled is no different. He used heroin for the first time with older friends when he was 14, and says he remembers the experience perfectly.

“The problem with heroin is that when you take it you start chasing after the first time you [got] high ... but you never get high like the first time.”

He says that contrary to other drugs, heroin allowed him to “go out and function properly” without others noticing. Heroin just makes “everything easier to live with.”

“To people who don’t know you’re on heroin, you’re just a happy person,” he adds.

Khaled says he could have continued this way for many years but things changed seven months ago when one of his friends was caught with a substantial amount of a different drug, which he was planning to sell. He gave Khaled’s name to the police.

“The night before [he was arrested], he came to my house. He was on a bunch of pills and heroin. He was overdosing at my house,” Khaled explains. “I didn’t want him dying in my house; I didn’t want the trouble of going through this ... for killing someone so I dropped him off at his car.”

Khaled thinks his friend might have given his name to the police because he was upset with him over the incident. Khaled was sentenced to eight days in jail after testing positive for “a bunch of stuff.”

The first day he spent in jail was the hardest. “I hadn’t been taking heroin for four days so I was feeling very, very bad physically,” he says, describing his withdrawal.

“The cops saw me and gave me half a pill of Xanax. They thought it would help, it didn’t do anything,” he laughs.”

Xanax is the brand name of a drug prescribed for anxiety.

“[Back then] my tolerance was really high ... I was taking about 5 grams a day of heroin and about 20 [different kinds of] pills,” he adds.

He wasn’t offered heroin in jail, but it was an unlikely place to get clean.

“There were a lot of drugs in jail, I took a lot of pills,” he says, adding he also smoked a lot of hashish.

Khaled says that he really decided to stop using after jail, mostly because his parents discovered his addiction.

“They went crazy. They took everything I had away from me; they took my car, my money, my computer,” he says.

After that, he used heroin “a couple of times.”

“And then this one day I started thinking [that since] you never get as high as the first time you did it, I should just give it up.”

He had to go to a detox center for 10 days and experienced group counseling. “I think it’s bullshit. Honestly I have enough problems on my own to listen to other people’s problems.”

He later started going to a rehabilitation center twice a week, once to get tested and once to see a psychiatrist, but he is doubtful of the method.

“My mom wants me to do it so I do it. But honestly, to stop heroin you don’t need to go to rehab, you don’t need a psychiatrist, you don’t need any of this. You just have to convince yourself ... and to be honest I’m not 100 percent convinced.”

But for now, he knows it’s the “right thing to do.”

“I miss it but ... I lost a lot of things this year, it was the worst year of my life,” he says, referring to the time he spent in prison as well as breaking up with his girlfriend of six years.

“The problem with it is that you don’t really pay attention to things. You might live your life and do things right most of the time, but [at some point] you’ll screw up,” he says, explaining that he preferred at the time to spend the day before his girlfriend left Lebanon getting high in the mountains.

“The next day I went down and she just wasn’t there,” he says. “And I regret that, every day I regret doing that.”