I also have a serious problem with the school of thought: “trading one addiction for another” – When speaking of Methadone treatment/maintenance.
I’m a professional artist & for much of my life have been an opiate addict. A Junky. My real addiction was opiates, but I used all drugs, all the time. I was able to use drugs & continue my passion for many years, but became such a hopeless addict that for nearly a decade, I did not produce any art. Being a Junky is a full-time job.
After going to a Methadone Clinic, getting on a stable dose, I live a real life.
That was a little over 6 years ago.
I have a beautiful daughter. A great woman. A family. I’m a contributing member of society.
Almost all my old ‘drug buddies’ are dead, or in prison. And I had a bigger habit than all of them. I always had to do the biggest shot. Take the most pills, etc.
I’m lucky.
When a person is addicted to drugs for a long enough period of time, the brain is changed in such a way that cannot be undone (not yet anyway) Leaving the user forever in torment, even after NO trace of the drug is in the system. You’re need for drugs is greater than your most basic human requirements: Food, Shelter, Sex, Safety, Family, etc.
It’s true that Methadone is highly addictive. In-fact the with-drawls can often last over a month & are considered “The Worst With-drawls Imaginable” -even by many in the medical profession.
Methadone is abused. It can be dangerous.
However many Medications for a million other medical problems, are Narcotic,highly addictive, abused & can be dangerous.
Methadone is a treatment. And further more, one can detox from it slowly, & even switch to another drug Suboxone, which is much less addictive, & has less severe with-drawls.
Methadone has been shown to cause the body virtually NO long-term damage. I can’t think of many drugs that cause No long-term damage. Not even Tylenol!

-To: Shane Flipside:
Concerning your question about a mixture of Dilaudid & Oxycontin..
As you may know now, Numorphan was available in the 70′s (That’s what Bobby Hughes is talking about when they’re shooting ‘Blues’ in the film: “Drugstore Cowboy”-which of course featured Mr. Burroughs playing Tom “The Priest”) I think it was taken off the market because of how easily one could inject it (although many others are too). Numorphan has returned as Opana. Both are Oxymorphone, which when you think about it, is basically that mixture. Dilaudid, is Hydromorphone & OxyContin is Oxycodone.)
Opana has essentially replaced Oxycontin.

-
Thank you again for the fun read.
-Seamo

One thing I found interesting in Junkie was how it described the existence of Mexico City white that was actually the pharmaceutical, Pantopon. That particular molecule has never been available in my lifetime as a junkie – but if I’m not mistaken it was a mixture of the active ingredients of Dilaudid, Oxycontin, etc (In other words, all the opoids compounded in one prep!)

AS far as the various other “theories” this essay present – well – hmmm – made good reading.

Thanks and later,]

Shane

Your essay focuses on Burroughs, but contrasting the experiences of WSB with Huncke would be a fruitful tangent. Herbert was born a year after William, his drug use began in the late 1920s and lasted until his death in 1996. Both men were on methadone in their last decades. (It’s doubtful that such programs ever anticipated the needs of octogenarians).

Huncke spent almost the entirety of the 1950s incarcerated for drugs and burglary. As Ann Douglas observed, Herbert was one of Genet’s “torturable” masses. WSB, as has been pointed out, had and utilized resources that Herbert lacked.

Thanks for your comments and your criticisms. I appreciate your close reading. Of course my own ignorances, stereotypes, and mis-readings are in this piece, they are in every piece of writing. The generalization you point out is a great one; and no doubt stereotype. Another that people have mentioned to me is the idea that once and addict always an addict. So this piece might reveal me but I think it also reveals Burroughs. Maybe just my Burroughs.

As for the white junk paragraph, Burroughs plays a role (reads a script) that fits into an image of rightness (straight white guy, educated as well as being right, having the right opinions from the Paris Review interview) and he feeds the square’s addiction to rightness, thus he is a pusher in a way. The so what is that he plays both ends of the game: he want to shed his class for example through drug use yet relies on that class to get drugs and get out of the drug related trouble he finds himself in.

There are both conservative and transgressive elements to Burroughs’ drug use. Most people hightlight the outlaw elements, I am suggesting the opposite exists as well.

Again thanks for your comments

However, while I can see the point is necessary to your argument, I must take exception to the following over-generalization:

“Most drug addicts graduate from the school of hard knocks, but Burroughs backed up his street smarts with university degrees.”

Opiate addiction crosses all class and ethnic lines. In claiming Burroughs capitalized on the image of priveliged white Harvard graduate, you, yourself, advance a “stereotype” about junkies.

And you completely lose me in the paragraph wherein you claim, “When Burroughs enters a drugstore to fill a script, he reads off his own, dealing ‘white junk’ to squares. Burroughs is both addict and pusher.” I find this unintelligible. What exactly is he “pushing”? His image as a straight white guy, I suppose. But so what? WSB was not unique in this. He had front. “You gotta play the cards you’re dealt.”

Furthermore, to claim “[t]here is racial stereotyping here tying miscegenation, incest, and tainted bloodlines to Mexican heroin and Mexicans. This fascination with racial mixing and its link to drug use is clear from Burroughs’ yage vision of the Composite City . . .” is to conform Burroughs’s ideas about Yage to your OWN preconceptions about class and sex. To argue that “[t]here is a suggestion of race and class in his choice of heroin,” is just more tiresome “Gender Studies” twaddle and, in my mind, ruins what might have been a simpler, informative discussion linking the history of junk in the U.S. to Burroughs’s addiction.

On the whole, this argument is yet another attempt to shoehorn sex and class, the Party Line adhered to in universities, into an analysis of Junk as a Burroughs theme.