Jonathan Kirkpatrick

4 weeks ago | filtermag.org | Jonathan Kirkpatrick |Kastalia Medrano

When I was young, I was living on the streets of Los Angeles at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early ‘90s. I injected meth a lot. Needles were expensive and hard to come by, so people often reused and shared them. The recommendation to avoid AIDS, as we called it then, was to bleach your rig before using with other people. A great recommendation, but it was hard. It took a long time, sometimes ruined your plunger and required me to carry a bunch of other stuff to do it.