How can I make use of LOCAL VARIABLES within a heroku postgres query?

I have looked around in many MANY threads, and through various documentation however for what seems like such an incredibly SIMPLE task, this is driving me insane.

I have a node.js webapp which generates a userId upon login, and is stored within a session object.

req.user.id <== my local variable for the user id.

The code I have so far is along these lines:

var query = client.query("SELECT * FROM programs WHERE authorid = req.user.id", function (err, result) {

    if (err){
      //Do erranous things
    } else { 
      // Do good things
    }
});

What am I doing wrong? How can I do this simple task of comparing a database entry to a value stored in a local variable?

Any / all help appreciated - I've been trying to do this for 6 hours.