It is an insight into the life and the mind of a pickpocketing, hustling, petty dealing, little thieving, addict of the middle of the twentieth century. Junky is full of bogus science, of heavy opinions stated as fact, but this is why it works.

He is not the master of himself he feels both strengthened and weakened by the opiates he consumes.

Thompson**: Burroughs needs his highs and his drugs but doesn’t want to need them. His drug use is more in keeping with that of the thrill-seeking-but-never-finding-it Jack Kerouac than the criminally over-rated Hunter S. It is open and writes about self-destruction in the way that I like – Burroughs is pretty disgusting: his blood is splattered across the pages, as are the complaints of constipation, the booze-induced blackouts, the violently peaking and troughing libido and his casual attitude to guns.* Over the course of 120 pages or so, he consumes pretty much every inebriating substance I’ve ever heard of (other than the ones that hadn’t been invented yet), he spends time in jail, he experiments with various “cures”, he has a lot of casual sex with men, tortures cats, briefly mentions the fact that he has a wife and child in the most unexpected of moments, is sick, is arrogant, is unsociable, deals drugs, steals drugs, eats drugs, smokes drugs, injects drugs… But he isn’t happy, which is how I managed to get through to the end. It opens with him receiving his first taste of heroin, and ends with him alone in Mexico City considering travelling south in the pursuit of yage, a drug he believes may be the cure from his addiction that he occasionally desperately wants. Burroughs’ first novel, and it is the frank, autobiographical anecdotalising of a few years of his life as an itinerant (though trust fund-funded) smack addict meandering around the US and Mexico. After the horrors I went through when I gave up my serious ibuprofen addiction last week (surprisingly messy), I thought a nice book about heroin would be a good way to relax once my own withdrawal symptoms were over.

Junky by william s burroughs