I am in Amsterdam.

Picturesque 17^th Century canals and canal houses.

Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

Red Light District with prostitutes in windows.

Sprawling immigrant neighborhoods.

Smoking cafés offering up Lebanese Blonde, Skunk, Thai, Kashmiri, Purple Sens and dozens of boutique strains.

I am walking down Utretchsestraat, a commercial street lined by cafés, restaurants and shops, toward the Red Light District. Normally, I’d be in a great mood—just arrived in Amsterdam and ready to hit town at full stride. I’d stop in a brown café for a beer or hit a smoking café for pre-rolled joints or high-grade hashish to roll with tobacco into a Euro-style joint or, even, for a midday space cake. Space cakes are brownies containing THC that taste like dirt and wrap you in a one-of-a-kind mellow buzz. They rock.

I am neither upbeat nor relaxed, however.

I’ve hit Amsterdam with a case of moderate dope withdrawal, and the city is in the middle of a serious heat wave. I am sweating like a big furry dog and shivering at the same time.

I am not dressed appropriately for the heat because shooting dope—an art form that I am learning—has left me with a purple and green bruise the diameter of a tangerine on my upper arm. (Note to self: Never, ever, try to hit one of the bulging little veins in your upper arm. It won’t work.) This hideous dope bruise looks especially bad in the context of the bright and angry red track marks that extended for several inches on both arms and that are concentrated in pre-abscess red masses near the crooks of both elbows.

And so, even though the temperature is in the upper eighties, I am wearing long sleeves—the year round fashion of choice for junkies everywhere.

I am on a mission to score dope, having been on a weeklong run in New York City that centered around a brand called Murder One, stamped in red on yellow bags.

The Murder One was happening in East Harlem, and I acquired a bundle of ten bags on my last buying excursion. I did my last shot of it before leaving for Kennedy Airport.

While I did not become totally strung out, I am registering six point five stars out of ten on the Strung Out Misery Index, just shy of seven stars, which is the tipping point between unhappy discomfort and significant wretchedness.

The Strung Out Misery Index goes like this:

× = What’s the problem?

×× = A conviction that you control the drugs; they don’t control you.

××× = Unhappiness about stopping, but grudging acknowledgement that one more day of doing dope would have meant getting strung out (again).

×××× = Resignation about having gone too far, and a conviction that the aftermath will pass in 48-72 hours.

××××× = Depression that the party is over, mixed with gratitude that it’s bad, but not as awful as it could be.

×××××× = A significant level of existential angst, dope obsession and physical discomfort.

××××××× = Deep hostility towards existence and significant bodily distress including sneezing, sniffling, sweating, aches and pronounced lack of energy.

×××××××× = Major physical issues, including an unshakable feeling of being cold, cold sweats and puking and/or diarrhea, and a psychological fixation on doing more heroin.

××××××××× = An increase in the crime rate because you want to get back to feeling four or less, but a lack of financial resources stands between you and the dope.

×××××××××× = A conviction that death is preferable to the sleepless-vomiting-explosive diarrhea misery of full-blown withdrawal and a willingness to do anything for dope including crossing the line between petty crime and violence.

The general junkie rule of thumb is that three days is the longest one can use dope and not suffer consequences greater than three on the scale of ten. My New York City run was five days. So, the world will be an ugly place until I can get dope into my system.

The only thing I can think about—and the only thing that creates any feeling of joy—is scoring more dope and being wrapped in the warm blanket of opiate bliss.

Unfortunately, I’ve never had luck scoring dope in Amsterdam, other than having been ripped off several times.

Call me an idiot, or call me cursed, but I’m a heroin novice in Amsterdam.

I dispatch my girlfriend to the Van Gogh Museum so I can hit the Red Light District in search of opiates.

I tell her I’ll be back at the hotel, a comfortable place near the Rijksmuseum, around four.

My drug buying smarts—which serve me well in New York City and Washington—go out the window in Amsterdam. Generally, I avoid people brazenly hawking drugs, the only exception being in the days when the dealers on First Avenue near 125^th Street in Harlem shouted brand names of the dope they were selling when you walked past.

Generally, however, people selling drugs don’t advertise. You approach them; they don’t come to you.

I don’t know Amsterdam’s hard drug scene. I know the low-key “soft drug” scene that revolves around all the retail establishments where you buy marijuana and hashish from long and exquisitely detailed menus.

I haven’t the slightest idea where to buy heroin except for the one obvious spot where dealers—both real ones and scam artists—are concentrated: the Red Light District.

Amsterdam’s real heroin trade is centered in a lot of outlying and immigrant neighborhoods about which I know nothing.

It is annoying and frustrating, but also a backhanded endorsement of the Dutch policy of separating “soft drugs” like weed and hash from “hard drugs” like coke and heroin by allowing commerce of the former in smoking cafés while trying to keep the latter off the streets.

I am moving very slowly by the time I hit Oude Zijds Achterburgwal, one of two main canals that run through the Red Light District. The O.Z. Achterburgwal has the seedy air of a strip of sex shops, porn stores, peep shows, live sex shows, nude bars, smoking cafés, souvenir shops, t-shirt places and head shops that despises daylight. Many of the windows where prostitutes sit under red and pink lights are vacant in the midday sun.

“Life show,” says a guy, thrusting a leaflet into my hands for a live sex show. “Life fucking.”

“No thanks,” I mumble.

“Real life fucking.”

After several minutes, I make eye contact with a young, Mediterranean-looking male.

He knows he has my attention and walks alongside me.

“You look something?” he says, in thickly accented English.

“Sugar,” I say, using the phrase they use in Zurich for heroin. “Heroin.”

“Sugar, yes,” he says. “I haf from Tourkey.”

“I want to try it before I buy any,” I say.

“Is good Tourkey sugar. Very good. You are wanting how much?”

“Not too much.”

“Eez good.”

“Okay, but I try,” I say, trying to approximate the speed and diction of the broken English he is speaking.

“If you want good druck, where you go?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Tourkey shugar where from eat eez?”

“Turkey?”

“Yiz!” he says. “Me from Tourkey! Shugar from Tourkey!”

He smiles, revealing a mouth full of tobacco-stained, crooked teeth.

Junkie orthodontia.

“Uh huh,” I say.

“You want good shugar, you come Tourkey man.”

“Right.”

“Shugar from Tourkey. Me Tourkey. Tourkey man haf good shugar!”

As this conversation takes place, we are walking down the Oude Zijds Achterburgwal toward Amsterdam’s Central Station. The Turk motions to a place where we can sit by the water across from the station.

He pulls a tiny plastic packet filled with tan power—a pellet that has been melted shut—from his pocket. I have encountered this packaging method before among European street dealers. He snips open the bee-bee sized packet with a nail clipper and hands it to me.

“You try, my friend,” he says. “You like, you buy.”

I pour the tan powder on my hand. It looks like the real thing. I sniff it and instantly feel a familiar sting in my nose.

“Good?” he says.

“I think,” I say.

It tastes like the real thing, but it will be another five or ten minutes before I can be certain. Of course, my desperation for dope is so strong I convince myself it is actual heroin.

“I’ll take that and one more,” I say.

The dope costs the equivalent of $20 U.S. dollars per packet. I pay the Turk for two—one that I have just consumed and another wrapped packet that I put in my pocket.

We get up. He accompanies me back up the street, extolling the virtues of Amsterdam, Turkish heroin and Turkish drug dealers.

He says that if I want more I can look for him later. He’s always somewhere in the vicinity of the O.Z. Achterburgwal.

I continue walking along the canal, past all the sex shops and prostitute windows, out of the Red Light District.

Ten minutes later, I am standing on a bridge staring at the dark green water in one of Amsterdam’s picturesque canals. I am still sweating.

Possibly, I have progressed from a six point five to a six or a five point five on the strung out scale, but I do not feel any of the giddy relief that comes with getting opiates back into your system after you have been without them.

Try as I might to convince myself, my dopamine receptors are telling me otherwise.

How can this be? I am certain I felt something.

The reality, however, is that I do not feel a bloody thing—none of the energy or serenity that accompanies doing heroin.

Fuck.

I kick at the paving stones and curse everyone from Attila the Hun and Shish Kabobs to Amsterdam and the thieving bastard Turk who sold me the bogus dope.

The Turk sold me powder with something—snuff, perhaps?—that approximates the kick of heroin when it makes contact with your nasal membranes but that is clearly not heroin or, at least, not strong enough to make an impression on anything larger than a sparrow.

Fuck it all straight to hell.

Fuck the Dutch and their laid back city. Fuck the canals, canal boats, canal houses, funky shops, broodjie sandwiches, herring stands, prostitutes, dog turds on the sidewalks, bicycles, Indonesian restaurants, smoking cafés and brown cafés.

Screw Van Gogh and Rembrandt.

Bollocks to the Rijksmuseum.

The hell with Queen Beatrix.

Death to everything Dutch and especially to Tourks selling dummy bags of dope.

Why can’t I buy heroin in Amsterdam?

Damn. Damn. Damn.

When I catch up with the girlfriend back at the hotel, she asks me how the afternoon went.

I spin a line of bullshit about having great Amsterdam fun.

She says that I seem bummed out. I say that I’m jet lagged from the flight across the Atlantic. I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow.

I will make due with the Lebanese Blond and tobacco joints I rolled in a café on the way back.

I go into the bathroom, close the door, walk to the window and look out over the lush green neighborhood around the hotel.

I fire up a joint and blow the smoke outside.

Tomorrow’s another day.

Robert Guskind has been writing for a long time. An award-winning Washington-based journalist and contributor to major national magazines and newspapers, he now lives very close to Manhattan, where he continues to write, shoot photographs and work on a book based on his travels and experiences as a reporter and formerly disreputable dope fiend. He is all better now and is a regular contributor to Cherrybleeds.