I avoid needles not because of particular fear of what's inside of them, but because needles themselves are fucking scary. Call me a pussy if you want; just keep those things away from me.
I got the very rare opportunity to try the old school Vitamin Q (Luudes to the older folk) a few years back. WOW. Dangerous stuff. No wonder it doesn't exist anymore. Things like Percs cause your motor skills to fail. Qualuude causes everybody within a fifty foot radius to have failed motor skills. That shit was unreal, and therefore scary.
My mother died of liver cirrhosis about 10 years ago when I was 22. She had been telling me since I was about 16 that that was the way she was going to die and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it. I hadn't seen her completely sober since I was a child. She went to visit my sister for Christmas and my sister said she didn't look right. They took her to the emergency room the day after Christmas. Everything was shutting down and there probably wasn't much hope. She was the color of a school bus and could do nothing but lay there writhing and moaning when we signed the DNR. She died that night, New Year's Eve. The funeral home people were miracle workers. They made her look as beautiful as I remembered from my childhood. She finally wasn't tortured anymore. Heroin ate up my hometown and some of the families that I grew up with. My best guy friend's dad ODed in bed next to his non-drug doing wife. This happened in the same house where my BGF's sister's boyfriend (and father of her three kids) also ODed a few months earlier. She was doing dope too and didn't discover that he was dead until the next morning. He had been dead for most of the night. She's in jail now for robbing a 7-11 with some black guy. My BGF's baby mama died from an overdose too. They found her slumped over a toilet in a halfway house. My ex-boyfriend's (the one from the prom picture) little brother (he was my age, the boyfriend was a few years older) died from an overdose in his girlfriend's car while parked in front of his parent's house. They had gone to visit his parents and when they got there, Sam was asleep so the girlfriend went inside to watch movies with his mom and let him sleep. When he hadn't come in after a while, she went out to check on him and found him dead. There were a few other overdoses, some deadly, some not so much. I was living with BGF for a bit (he was a junkie too) and woke up one morning to some teenage girl dying in the bathtub (someone had brought her over and she ODed in the house - this wasn't like a Pulp Fiction kind of thing where she was brought there in that condition). She was going blue and thankfully the cold water somehow knocked her out of it but I though she was a goner. I moved out very hastily thereafter. I don't have too many official addictions myself. I quit smoking almost 3 years ago and while I frequently drink too much, it is not compulsive or necessary that I do so. I've tried more than my fair share of drugs (never did heroin though) but nothing ever made me so gaga that I HAD to have it all the time. I guess I'm lucky, right?