Voices of Drug Users

A Million Little Pieces

James Frey

Jim Frey was one addict who appeared on John Stossel’s April 21, 2002 ABC TV special, “Help Me, I Can't Help Myself” – which relied on Jeff Schaler and me as expert commentators. He was the fuzzy-haired former addict who quit on his own, and said: “I have a 12-step program. The first 11 steps don’t mean sh--. The last step is, just quit.”

Frey is the author of a book about his own drug and alcohol degradation. It reads an awful lot like the books of people who accept the disease theory, AA, and the Betty Ford Center. Only Frey dislikes these things, and for good reasons. His stories about his futile trips to treatment make one hope to get through life without entering any of these places. At them, he listens to the phony stories of other addicts, and shows his contempt by joking when required to participate himself (he states his goal is to be a “Laker Girl”).

I don’t enjoy addict bios per se (and I’ve been reading them since I’ve been a small child, like Diana Barrymore’s 1957 Too Much Too Soon and Lillian Roth’s 1954 I’ll Cry Tomorrow) – degradation rubs me the wrong way. But I am strangely drawn to them. After all, I am in the business of addiction.

The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs

Marcus Boon

Marcus Boon's is one book in the great tradition discussing the relationship between writers and their substances of abuse. Donald Goodwin, original proponent of the modern view that alcoholism is genetic, wrote a book, Alcohol and the Writer, describing virtually all of America's leading twentieth century writers as being alcoholics. The conclusion? Somehow alcoholism and a writer's creativity are on the same gene.

The immediate predecessor to Boon's book was Sadie Plant's Writing on Drugs, a one-sided account (like the laughable The Secret History of Alcoholism) which finds the source of all historical events in drugs and alcohol. Rather, Boon tries to tease out where the writer's creativity and the drug compete, co-exist, or reinforce. One solution he proposes is that some substances are so in keeping with the mood of their times that they allow the writer to find the key to his culture's zeitgeist.

Also critical is the question, as put by Aldous Huxley, of whether the writer seek simply chemical diversion or stimulation, or "a chemical vacation from intolerable selfhood." Seminal literary critic Lionel Trilling, in his "Art and neurosis," (in The Liberal Imagination) and psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie, in Neurotic Distortions of the Creative Process, believed that emotional disorders block creative impulse; they do not fulfill it.

In the case of drugs, however, there are examples of writers for whom drugs seem liberating (a recent book, Breaking Open The Head by Daniel Pinchbeck, makes this case for his and others' use of psychedelics) while for others they seem to block the creative urge. And, for many, they haven't made a damn bit of difference.

You Cannot Be Serious

John McEnroe with James Kaplan

The subtext of McEnroe's You Cannot be Serious is drug use, both McEnroe's and that of his former wife, Tatum O'Neal, a self-confessed heroin and cocaine addict. In fact, McEnroe tells less about his drug use in this book than he has on TV — where he admits he took marijuana and that it hastened his departure from the top of the tennis ranks (although he says he was already past his peak at the time). Needless to say, McEnroe is not good at imagining his wife's view of things — why she sacrificed any custodial claims in order to avoid the weekly drug testing McEnroe had imposed on her. His absence of empathy occurs despite his having dealt with Tatum's driven father, Ryan O'Neal. In interviews since McEnroe's book appeared, Tatum has discussed her upbringing — how her father moved her and her brother out of his house as teenagers in order to devote himself to Farrah Fawcett, and how he knocked Tatum out when she showed up late for a racquetball game. Even those who claim genetics are at the base of drug abuse might find grounds for Tatum's self-defeating behavior in her treatment by her father. But McEnroe is too wound up in himself to try to understand the destruction of his own family by drug use. Indeed, Tatum claims McEnroe continued the abuse that tore at her self-esteem and contributed to her addiction. Trace in this book how a self-absorbed star like McEnroe can push out in the cold someone he loved, married and had children with.

Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker

James Gavin

This book in an entry in the "great addicts" hall of fame. Note, this is not a story of a great musician who was a heroin addict (like Charlie Parker). Baker, although widely and inaccurately hailed early in his career as a jazz trumpeter on par with Miles Davis or Clifford Brown (who died even younger than Baker in a tragic automobile accident), Baker emerges in this hard-hitting biography as a poseur and pretty boy. Certainly, his musical talents were limited, although his reedy singing voice (recording My Funny Valentine) embodied a singing style that had far more impact than his imitative trumpet playing. Baker's life as depicted in this book supports the idea that bad people become drug addicts, rather than that drugs make people bad. Baker abused others as he did himself, and the quote about Baker from Gerry Mulligan (at one point a heroin addict himself but a superior musician to Baker) could apply to the fascination of many who have traveled Baker's path to early death in the gutters of Amsterdam — "It was a case of worshipping the self-destructive artist."

Franklin: The Essential Founding Father

James Srodes

When we review great lives in the past, we are often struck by their different attitudes towards and styles of drinking. The colonial period in the United States was one era when constant imbibing was the standard. Benjamin Franklin is most notable in this time because of his relative sobriety (his self-control was much less evident in the area of sexual relations) — his great success at a young age is attributed in this book to the fact that he did not join in as everyone else drank from morning until night. Of course, then, we need to come to grips with the success of the other inebriated founding fathers who drank from dawn 'til dusk while writing the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, et al. In other words, reading about Franklin and the colonial past, we might reflect on how constant alcohol consumption seemed to be such a normal and successful part of so many lives, until we discovered such drinking had to be harmful and bad! It is like the experience of traveling in Southern Europe in the warm weather (that is, from April to October), and noting that, around the Mediterranean, beer is considered a breakfast food. If only the Spanish, French, and Italians could learn to see how stupid this was and to live right like us!

Churchill: A Biography

Roy Jenkins

Winston Churchill is a man of remarkable strengths and weaknesses, a man who might have gone down as a talented but failed British cabinet minister, responsible for the carnage of Galipoli in World War I, following which he left the cabinet. But among his other strengths was longevity (he lived to be ninety, and remained active politically most of that time), which enabled him to embody and fortify Britain as the Nazis drove to conquer Europe in World War II. He pulled off his superhuman defense of his island kingdom at the age of sixty, when, for the first time, he became prime minister. He then worked tirelessly and fearlessly in his role as savior of a nation. Yet, he is now often pointed out as an example of a working alcoholic (not to mention the cigars he ceaselessly smoked). This underlines the futility of claiming alcoholism is a medical disease, such that drinking x drinks daily —> alcoholic symptoms. We cannot judge the people and events in other epochs and cultures by our views of what alcoholism is. To do so reminds us, rather than having discovered the secrets of alcoholism, we are the barbarian George Bernard Shaw identified as the person "who thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."

Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic

Jim DeRogatis

This book raises seriously the issue, "Is it sometimes okay to be self-destructive?" Lester Bangs was a seminal Rock critic — opinionated, creative, primal. He also died of an overdose of prescription painkillers. Before then, he spent his life thinking, working, relating, defining the culture — and carousing. According to Bangs, "I just like people with some Looney Tune in their souls." (Bangs fell for Cynthia Heimel, author of Sex Tips for Girls, when she approached him at a club and announced, "I just had half a quaalude and three scotches and I'm not responsible for anything I do.") Are there some people who are never going to sober up, but their lives are justified anyhow?

The Art of Moderation: An Alternative to Alcoholism

John Michael

Some people claim there has never been an alcoholic who moderated his drinking.  In fact, such individuals do not find a ready audience in the U.S. — but here is one who persisted in getting his story out. John Michael was unquestionably alcoholic; he devised his own behavioral, cognitive, life style, and identity transformation, which he relates in a commonsensical but intimate way.

How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe had a long-term involvement with heroin — yet she refuses to see it as an uncontrollable disease. Rather, she understands her reliance on the drug as an expression of her outlook, experience, social situation, and personal needs, as something which she could give up when she was psychologically and situationally prepared to do so. She tells her story through the novel approach of creating a lexicon of drug-related words and experiences. According to Marlowe:

Not for a minute can I subscribe to the popular view, encouraged by William Burroughs, of addiction as uncontrollable need. Still less can I take addiction as the excuse for bad behavior. No one would condone a person who stole or neglected her children because he or she was feeling bad from the flu, and all but the severest dopesickness is no more rigorous than a nasty flu. Unpleasant? Yes. Sufficient explanation for amoral selfishness? Scarcely.

Coming Clean: Overcoming Addiction Without Treatment

Robert Granfield and William Cloud, foreword by Stanton Peele

This book is based on interviews with addicts and alcoholics who recovered without treatment. The authors draw important conclusions from, first, the phenomenon of self-cure, and second, from the methods used by addicts to "come clean."

Cocaine Changes: The Experience of Using and Quitting

Dan Waldorf, Craig Reinarman, Sheigla Murphy

A field study of the careers of cocaine users, with an emphasis on how people overcome drug addictions through reliance on the ballast of their surrounding lives.  One of the seminal works on natural remission on addiction, the book picks up where Waldorf had left off in his study of naturally recovering heroin addicts, as well as Norman Zinberg's work on the way in which alternate roles support drug users in controlling their drug use in the first place, as well as their emergence from addiction.

In an arena of puclic policy where misinformation and disinformation reigns — often encouraged and fostered by the government — facts are desperately needed, and Cocaine Changes gives us a bucketful of them. Anyone who values rationality and is concerned about the harmful efforts of our misbegotten drug policy should read this book.
—Ira Glasser, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union

I know of no other book that offers so much information on the subject so clearly and calmly presented. For anyone interested in the natural history of cocaine use in America now, Cocaine Changes provides the best, most comprehensive available resource.
—Lester Grinspoon, M.D., Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

This book puts the cocaine scare of the 1980s to the test and places cocaine in a more realistic perspective. By examening the lives of hundreds of heavy users, it discovers that even among this group, coaine use is not always cocaine abuse.
—Kevin B. Zeese, Vice-President and Counsel, Drug Policy Foundation