David C. Morrison is a prize-winning journalist who for years would leave the capital's offices of power, enter a men's room, take a needle from a bag and shoot up heroin.
Morrison, 41, a national security correspondent for The National Journal, a public policy magazine, has been a recovering drug addict since he walked into a hospital emergency room last June and asked for help. He was near collapse after trying to go cold turkey.Because he is a writer, and writes about what he knows, Morrison recorded his existence inside the web of drug addiction in an article last January for the City Paper, a Washington alternative weekly. He called the 20,000-word account "a personal exorcism about a very unpleasant passage in my life."
The story was published anonymously. Morrison said Saturday he didn't want his name attached because "I didn't want to be in a media flap; I wasn't at the right place emotionally."
He is anonymous no longer.
The Washington Post splashed Morrison's life on its front page Saturday, under the headline, "Journalist as Junkie; Covering National Security Beat, Reporter Struggled With Heroin."
He cooperated with the author of the article, which was accompanied by a 1993 photograph of him receiving an award from former President Gerald R. Ford.
At roughly the same time as the photo was taken, he says he routinely carried a bag containing syringes, cotton, a metal spoon, and a water-filled vial with him as he interviewed military officials, defense contractors, arms control experts, members of Congress.
He said he never carried drugs into the Pentagon but only out of fear he might get caught. The habit was costing him $500 a day. He said he spent $50,000 on drugs in just a few months.
From the City Paper article, this is Morrison's description of what he hopes is a former life:
"Scoring a brick of junk - five bundles, or 50 ten dollar bags - I'm up in Spanish Harlem, wading through the crack vials that litter 124th and Lex like pebbles on a beach in hell. I fix in the john of a greasy spoon on Third Avenue. Heading back on Amtrak to D.C. I don a suit to interview a House subcommittee chairman."
Or this description of deep depression as he drained his bank account and exceeded the limit on his credit card to buy drugs:
"Can't see living without dope. Damn. Can't see living . . . Back to basics. Screw showering. Screw shaving. Screw eating. Feed that monkey."
Why did he commit those raw nerve endings to print?
"So much that has been written about drug addiction is utter nonsense," Morrison said in an interview Saturday. "It's a compelling subject matter that I knew a lot about and, as a reporter, I have a hard time writing without publishing."
The child of an alcoholic father, Morrison said coming of age in the '60s "certainly helped" his own off-and-on immersion in the drug culture. And he said he has seen enough to become convinced that his story is not unique.
"Reasonably well-raised white people with everything to lose are still getting hooked on crack, smack, you name it," he wrote in the City Paper. "I've met scores of people just like me. Journalists. Doctors. Lawyers. Designers. Consultants. Bureaucrats. Republicans. I have sat in my dealer's kitchen and watched the evening rush hour of civil servants picking up their $50 bags of junk or chunks of rock."
Morrison said he hopes that for himself, at least, that life is over.
"No one is ever sure. As they say, it's one day at a time," he said.
And he thinks he has more to say; he's starting a book about other middle-class drug users.