[This article contains images of injection wounds.]
When you have been injecting drugs for a long time, it tends to show on your body. After more than a decade, I’ve experienced many things that you wouldn’t know just by looking at me, like overdoses and hepatitis C, but I’ve also had some serious injection-related infections. And I definitely have some serious track marks.
Track marks are the darkened puncture marks that often develop on areas of the skin where drugs have been injected repeatedly. Some people have veins right at the surface that don’t roll and provide lots of different injection sites to choose from. Some people might have just one spot that works for them. But often the vein starts to leak from repeated use and eventually collapses.
I’ve never had “good veins” for injecting. My legs worked for a while, until they didn’t. And now I honestly have some of the worst track marks I’ve ever seen. My friend John Keating, the person who first taught me how to properly inject a transdermal fentanyl patch, once joked that it looks “like I have the map of Nova Scotia on my legs.” Bobby Morrison, one of my best friends in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said he thought I got “slashed or cut up by someone.”
When I first started injecting, I was with someone who could hit me better than any professional phlebotomist. Our whole relationship revolved around drugs. When the relationship ended, I changed my mode of consumption to smoking for a while, and actually went to detox and a sober living house. No surprise given the success rates of those places, I soon started using again. I met a different girl who showed me how to inject in my legs, and since then I haven’t stopped.
The fentanyl-cocaine speedballs I love so much can be tricky to inject. Cocaine constricts the vein, making it smaller, and it also numbs the area—so it’s easy to miss. It was a while before I realized part of the reason my legs are getting destroyed is half-missed shots. Or full misses.
Since fentanyl and especially cocaine wear off pretty quickly, that can mean injecting a lot and not necessarily having a fresh, sharp needle every time. Cocaine doesn’t need to be “cooked”—it’s dangerous to inject heated stimulants—but people might still cook the opioid part of their speedball before mixing it with the coke, and most needles used for drug injection are so fine that they’ll get dull just from touching a cotton that’s still hot.
Another thing that makes injection-site bruising a lot worse is if you’re on the move when you do it. And that’s one of the big differences between having a private place inside where you can take your time, and having to do things in public. For folks who live outside, wearing two or three pairs or pants at a time just ups the odds of getting injection infections and worse scarring.
For the first time in my life, I am homeless. And I’m learning so much about how to properly inject drugs. I thought I knew a lot, but doing drugs in a nice tidy home is a whole other ball game than doing them on the fly.
I commend Morrison for his kindness and generosity in sharing his knowledge about safer injection. He has taught me so much in such a short period of time. We both like the good, strong East Coast cocaine, which in Halifax in particular has been getting better and better.
But Morrison is such a smooth shooter—no gnarly scars like mine, or at least that’s what I thought. I asked him if he had any track marks, and he said “a couple,” kind of sarcastically. But then he said “my arms look like they’ve been slaughtered,” and I could hear the internalized stigma in his voice.
He talked about the embarrassment he felt. “What do people think, all of that?” he said.
At times the stigma and judgment made him regret ever starting to use drugs. I told him he wasn’t doing anything wrong, and the words seemed to help a little. But it’s hard to take away that shame.
I’ve felt so much of that myself. During summertime I wouldn’t ever wear shorts because of the scars on my legs. Then one day in detox I met the love of my life. We were flirting, and I had to be real with her and show her my leg. She laughed and said, “What, do you think I never saw a track mark before?”
She didn’t care about the scars. Or about the severe substance use disorder or criminal record. I felt like my true self with her. Her name was Grace Lynn Davidson, and she died way too soon on August 10, 2025. I’ve been broken since she passed, but I’ve had the support of my street family—including Morrison, Wala, Boo, Wendell, Mitch, Scotty and Art—knowing how much she brought us all together. I don’t feel ashamed of my legs anymore. Now I take pride in them, and all I feel is love.
That’s why I love being a drug user. We are humans, we make mistakes, we may not always treat each other properly. But we also have each other’s backs. And we never forget the ones we loved the most.
In memory of Grace Lynn Davidson.
Top image via Madison County, New York. Inset images via Matthew Bonn.
