In October 2013, a 21-year-old Norwegian logged on to Freak Forum and asked how to inject heroin.
He did not arrive as somebody asking to be talked out of it. He had read about the drug. He had already snorted and smoked it for months and had injected twice with help. He knew withdrawal existed because he had felt it after using for a week. That experience did not frighten him away. It became evidence for the defence: he had stopped once, so he believed he could keep stopping.
He wrote under the name BloodshotEyes. Behind the username was a young man whom Dagbladet later called Pål. He played guitar, loved football, Star Wars and Hans Zimmer, worked in a grocery shop, lived with his parents and could make customers believe he was doing fine. He was not ignorant of drugs, and he did not look like the ending people picture when they hear the word heroin.
That is what makes the thread so difficult to read.
You do not meet him at the end and work backwards. You meet him while every exit still looks open.
This story includes addiction, overdoses and suicide. I have deliberately left out the procedural details of injecting. If you are in immediate danger or think someone has overdosed, call local emergency services now.
October 2013: the confident question#
The original post was practical and almost cheerful. Pål wanted equipment and preparation advice. He headed off criticism before it arrived, joked that his soul was already lost, then explained why he was different: heroin was easier for him to leave alone than nicotine, he limited consecutive days, and he felt sure this was not a substance he would lose control over.
The replies split in a way internet drug discussions often do. Some users answered the question in the language of harm reduction. Others refused to treat it as a neutral technical problem. They warned him that every dependent user had once believed they would be the exception.
One commenter effectively predicted that the thread might become a diary of a future addict. Pål returned to that idea himself. It became the horrible structure of everything that followed.
Knowledge was not absent here. The missing piece was that he did not yet know what heroin would mean to him—not its chemistry, but the private bargain it would offer his particular brain.
December 2013: the rules begin to move#
Within weeks, the clean boundaries in the first post were already bending.
He described using before work and calculated that his income and low living costs made the habit affordable. The occasional experiment had become one or two days a week, then a two-week run, then another run. Each escalation came with a fresh limit and a future break. The numbers changed; the confidence survived.
This is one of the most familiar tricks in addiction. The rule is treated as proof of control even while the rule is being rewritten.
The forum kept worrying. Pål thanked them for it and gave the thread a name: a “junkie-in-the-making documentary.” By then he reported feeling physically ill after two or three days without heroin. He still said stopping would not be especially difficult. Then he supplied the sentence that mattered more: he did not want to stop.
The drug was not creating his pain from nothing. Two years earlier, after a severe reaction to cannabis, he had been left with anxiety, paranoia and depression. He had moved through psychologists, psychiatrists and medications and had stopped believing that treatment could reach him. Heroin did not make him feel as good as he had felt before becoming ill. It merely helped more than the things that had failed.
That distinction matters. Curiosity opened the door, but relief gave the drug somewhere to live.
June 2014: two versions of the same son#
At home, his parents thought he was improving. He got up, went to his placement at the grocery shop, smiled and joked with colleagues. When his father asked how he could appear cheerful at work while saying he was depressed, Pål told him that he was putting on an act.
Online, strangers saw the other version. They saw the binges, the withdrawal and the rationalisations in something close to real time. His parents saw none of it.
Then his father found a syringe in the bathroom.
Pål came home from work and his mother asked him to sit down. There was no elaborate lie. He told them he had started using the thing every parent feared most. Their planned summer holiday disappeared. The family entered years of treatment appointments, missing-person reports, ambulance calls, accidental and intentional overdoses, locked doors and nights spent sleeping in shifts.
There is a small detail in Dagbladet’s account that I cannot get out of my head. His parents arranged his shoes in a pattern before bed. In the morning, a moved lace would tell them whether he had gone out during the night to buy heroin.
That is what addiction did to an ordinary family home. It turned a shoelace into an alarm system.
September 2014: 51 days#
Pål did stop. More than once.
After 51 days, he posted a day-by-day account: the sweating and sickness, a little food, sleep slowly returning, then rehab. He left treatment and happened to meet his regular dealer in central Oslo. That was enough. After more than five weeks, the whole distance between recovery and relapse collapsed into a chance meeting.
Still, the update was not hopeless. He stopped again. He noticed how much money sobriety saved. He wondered what to do about work and how to rebuild a CV in his early twenties.
This is why the thread cannot be reduced to a straight line down. Addiction rarely gives a story that tidy. There are stretches of genuine progress, ordinary plans and lucid self-knowledge. Every one of them makes you think: perhaps this is where he gets out.
His parents thought so too.
2014–2015: a normal life, almost#
Medication-assisted treatment gave him a period in which he no longer had to spend every day finding enough money and heroin to avoid withdrawal. In December 2014 he reported living relatively normally and feeling little desire for heroin.
Two months later, his language had changed again. He missed not only the effect but the ritual. He knew that using heroin on top of his medication could produce no high at all, yet sometimes did it anyway. He understood that he needed to build a meaningful life before trying to live without the medication. That was a sharp observation. Understanding it did not make it easy to do.
By April 2015 he could finally describe the opening months without the old bravado. At first, he said, the entire process had felt like a game: arranging the purchase, riding the bus with the drug in his pocket, anticipating the evening. Then the bill arrived.
His girlfriend, called Ida by Dagbladet, had known him as funny and magnetic. They listened to metal, watched Titanic, ate frozen pizza and drank Red Bull. She tried to put boundaries around his heroin use. Eventually she spent her workdays wondering whether he was dead. She had to remove the addiction from her life even though she could not stop caring about the person inside it.
2015–2016: he knows#
Pål managed roughly two months without illicit drugs, returned to school subjects, picked up hobbies and saw friends he had withdrawn from. Then a health scare gave him a reason to use. The tests came back clear, but the relapse had already happened.
In June 2016, he wrote with none of the romance of the first post. Heroin made him too sedated to do what he wanted. Friends, women, family and hobbies had lost their meaning. Even after sober weeks, he would remember the beginning and imagine one more injection might feel like it used to. It did not. He called each return a disappointment.
This is the point that destroys the comforting idea that addiction continues because the person does not understand the consequences. Pål understood them with awful precision. He had both the information he began with and the experience he lacked. Now he knew the feeling too—the relief, the ritual, the withdrawal, the narrowing of life, and the way memory could preserve the promise after the reward had gone.
He went back anyway.
2017: no clever ending#
By 2017 his parents were exhausted. They had driven around looking for him, negotiated tapers, found treatment, watched him leave treatment and sometimes driven him to a dealer because a controlled amount seemed less dangerous than what might happen otherwise. Every boundary had become negotiable under pressure.
Pål continued to move between heroin, withdrawal, sobriety and institutions. He agreed to a treatment place, then refused it the day before admission. Later he did well for several weeks at a drug-free residence, relapsed and was expelled. At an emergency shelter, his phone and bank card were stolen while he slept. After his reaction got him thrown out, his mother stood beside him at the intercom and tried to help him get back inside.
His last forum updates were not written by a man who thought he had outsmarted heroin. He described repeated overdoses, the thought of a fatal one becoming tempting, and the misery of returning even though the rush itself disappointed him. He had reached the bleak punchline: drugs are bad. There was nothing clever left to add.
In another update dated 30 October 2017, he was three days sober. He wrote that if he made it through again and lived sober in the way people recommended, perhaps his next update would be more positive.
It was his last one.
The answer his family had to give#
After a final quiet conversation with his mother, Pål went to bed. The next morning, his father found him unresponsive. Resuscitation failed.
There is an important correction to the version of this story that is often repeated online: Pål did not die from a heroin overdose. According to the autopsy account reported by Dagbladet, he was sober when he died by suicide. Heroin still runs through the story of his death, but accuracy matters—especially when the real ending is even more complicated than the summary.
His parents later sat with printouts from Freak Forum and read their son’s private chronology for the first time. While they had been looking for signs in his face, his work and eventually his shoes, hundreds of strangers had been watching the words change on a screen.
They described reading it as frightening: their son had documented his own route toward destruction. They spoke publicly because they wanted his experience to warn young people that even a small flirtation could be deadly, to urge parents to pay close attention, and to help families living through the same thing.
It is the final reply to the confidence in his opening post. Not a scolding from an anonymous user. Not an argument about pharmacology. His mother and father, years later, reading the record he left behind and trying to make it useful to somebody else.
Why I keep thinking about it#
I have my own addiction story. That may be why this one lands differently for me than a newspaper statistic or a before-and-after photograph.
People often speak about drug education as if catastrophe only happens when somebody is missing a fact. Tell them about dependence, tolerance, withdrawal, contaminated supply and overdose, and surely the informed person will make the informed choice.
Pål knew a great deal. So do many people who become addicted. Facts can reduce harm and puncture myths; they matter enormously. But facts do not let you rehearse relief. They cannot show you, in advance, what it will feel like when one chemical seems to quiet the exact pain you have been carrying, or how persuasive your own mind becomes when it wants that relief again.
The thread is not powerful because nobody warned him. It is powerful because they did.
They warned him when he was confident. They worried when his limits moved. They encouraged him when he stopped. They watched him recognise the trap in his own language. None of them could reach through the screen and make the next choice for him.
At the beginning, Pål believed knowing the map meant he could not get lost.
Four years later, he knew exactly where he was.
That was not the same as knowing how to get home.
Sources#
- The original Freak Forum thread: “Hvordan skyte heroin” (Norwegian)
- Dagbladet’s account, based on the thread and interviews with Pål’s parents and former girlfriend (Norwegian, published 10 May 2019)
If you are thinking about suicide or may act on those thoughts, contact emergency services or a crisis line where you live. Find A Helpline can help you find a local service by country.
