So instead of letting our grades slip for a good night's rest, we get three shots of espresso instead of two the next morning and are dragged to class, addicted to our coffee cups.
Dr. Edwin A. Salsitz of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, who has been treating addiction for decades, said that in the pre-Suboxone universe, he encountered all too many middle-class addicts who refused to set foot in a clinic.
And she singled out "Mouth to Mouth," a drama written for her by her friend Kevin Elyot, and "That Face," a play by Polly Stenham in which she played an upper-class addict (background that is coming in handy for her portrayal of Claire) as stage highlights.
And some argue that drug-takers are also a special class: once addicted, they can no longer make rational choices about whether to continue to harm themselves.
Drug Abuse Sciences is hoping to try it on human volunteers in clinical trials later this month.Similarly, experts are hoping for a technical fix to one of the most offputting aspects of methadone treatment for middle-class heroin addicts, namely the nuisance and humiliation of queuing up at a down-at-heel clinic in the inner city.
Tony, a 32-year-old class A addict from Birmingham, told me that the 8210 has also become a good bargaining chip.
And she fell in love with an upper-class heroin addict four years her senior, an acknowledged wastrel and bad lot she still fondly remembers as "great".
When Benny persuades the middle-class drug addict Tiago to buy him some designer clothes and returns to Lil Zé and his gang dressed in jeans and brightly coloured shirt with dyed blonde hair, he looks just as ridiculous to us as to them.
Ray's movies, which deal with everything from dancing Gypsies to a middle-class cortisone addict, teem with solitude; one staggers out of them with the dizzying suspicion that men and women are like planets and moons, each following a predestined curve, repeatedly tugged or slung away by the gravity of other bodies.
Eldridge believes – and most critics would agree – that he fulfilled that ambition last year, with The Knot of the Heart, in which Lisa Dillon played a middle-class heroin addict whose mother, desperate not to lose her, pays for and sources the drug.
None were classed as addicted.
