Voices From The Depths

...The inclusion in the book of two quite poignant accounts by mothers of addicts is especially useful, for the very idea that drug addicts might have relatives who may care about them and about whom they care has been screened out in the conventionally narrow conceptions of addiction...

...in fact they couldn't get enough...

...Having read these accounts one may well agree that the addict lives "in the most advanced stage of alienation —alienated even from himself...

...What kind of a society is it, in short, that can only outlaw, degrade and brutalize troubled individuals whose initial difficulties reflect nothing more than that same society's shortcomings...

...I felt that the longer ones (Dom Abruzzi, Carmen Sanchez, Tommy Blake) were by far the most effective, and that an even better book might have been built around three or four addicts (instead of the ten included here) had sufficient material been available...

...As writer Jeremy Larner notes in his introduction, the book provides a wealth of descriptive material about the daily routine of heroin addicts—how they get and take their drugs, what they do to get money, their experiences in prison and hospital...

...this was a bargain, they were getting meat at half price...

...Once hooked, the user rapidly becomes enmeshed in the illicit traffic and must commit some sort of crime to support his habit...

...They wanted more...

...Although there seem to be some satisfactions from the drugs ("that boss feeling, man, like you're your own boss"), most of the addicts report their main aim is simply to keep from getting sick...

...Modes of financing mentioned in these accounts include breaking into automobiles, stealing and selling one's parents' clothing, prostitution, stealing meat from a supermarket and selling it around the neighborhood...

...What kind of a society is it that lets its police strip and "search" female suspects in darkened hallways...

...Under these circumstances, one may take up drugs not because of a disordered personality but mainly because it's the thing to do, to be one of the group...

...The addicts are casualties of the diseased environments we have allowed to persist in our urban slum neighborhoods...

...On the contrary, as these accounts make clear (and as Lamer himself emphasizes) the addict's rouitne is a long and monotonous round of miseries...

...The technique of letting the addicts speak for themselves is highly effective, although Larner exaggerates when he claims the book is "something different and original in the literature of drug taking...

...This is no small accomplishment, because in much of our thinking about the drug problem—not only in the official efforts to "crack down," but even in the relatively enlightened schemes for "crash programs" of treatment and expansion of medical facilities— we simply lose sight of the addict as a person with feelings, family problems, and the entire range of human needs and dilemmas...

...At the same time, when the editor suggests that the addict tends toward "absolute escapism" he should not be misconstrued...

...All this and much more comes across powerfully and painfully in these accounts...

...But above all the book in large measure accomplishes Lamer's main purpose, which was simply "to permit the drug addicts to give portraits of themselves as human beings...

...Hounded by the police, fearful of "cold turkey" in jail, in constant peril of receiving an overdose (almost all these addicts report friends having died in this way), it is small wonder if these people become ever more alienated from "respectable" society...

...Similarly, while some of these miseries may seem attributable to the addict's own weakness or insecurities, there is much in the drug situation for which particular addicts can be neither blamed nor "treated...

...Also based on tape recordings was The Fantastic Lodge, edited by Helen M. Hughes [Houghton Mifflin, 1961], a powerful and moving full-length autobiography of a girl drug addict...

...Reading this book is a highly disturbing experience—for it compels us to confront (through the immediacy of specific human beings) an appalling complex of hopelessness, cruelty and degradation in our much-celebrated American way of life...

...But this is a minor criticism of a book which does ring true, does continuously hold one's interest, and which strongly urges one to cry out: What kind of a society is it that lets sick people writhe in agony on prison floors tended only by brutal and unthinking guards...

...One must be awfully hard-hearted or else extremely blase and pseudo-hip to come away from this book without feeling strong compassion for the individuals involved and great shame and contempt for the inexcusable stupidity and inhumanity of our attempts to "deal with" them and their problems—let alone, serious doubts about a social structure and culture in which such problems thrive in the first place...

...Indeed, one possible basis for criticism of the present book is the somewhat fragmented nature of a few accounts...

...On top of the socio-economic pressures promoting alienation and withdrawal, there is the sheer availability of the drugs themselves—already noted by Larner in his DISSENT article on the New York schools ["The New York School Crisis," Spring 1964...

...The addict does escape from some life problems and obliga tions—but hardly into a state of happy oblivion...

...THE ADDICT IN THE STREET, edited and with an introduction by Jeremy Larner from tape recordings collected by Ralph Tefferteller...

...The addicts do speak kindly of their relatives and of particular doctors they've encountered (and they have an evident regard for co-author Tefferteller), but their usual lot is unmitigated hostility, persecution, brutal incarceration...

...The book is a collection of firsthand accounts by drug addicts in New York — edited from tape-recordings made by a long-time social worker at the Henry Street Settlement...

...One addict reports that in his group only a boy who was mentally retarded did not take drugs—"The smartest retarded person that I know...