Andy wrote:
>I don't recall Burroughs ever finding a good thing to say about opiates/
This is from a 1978 interview:
>I was around people who were using it. Then I
>started, you know, taking an occasional shot. It
>is, for most people, I think, a very pleasurable experience.....
>In Junkie’s preface, Burroughs writes, "I have
>never regretted my experience with drugs."
>Twenty-five years later, does he still hold the same view?
>
>"Yes, I’ll go along with that because it gave
>me... you see, a writer can profit from things
>that may be just unpleasant or boring to someone
>else because he uses those things subsequently
>as material for writing. And I would say that
>the experience I had with heroin as described in
>Junkie later led to my subsequent books like
>Naked Lunch, so I don’t regret it.
>
>"Incidentally, the damage to health from heroin
>addiction is minimalno matter what the American
>Narcotics Department may say. If you read one of
>the early authorities like DeQuinceyfor one
>thing, he would never have lived to be 72 unless
>he had taken opium because he had tuberculosis.
>And I think he would say the same as I say: that
>he wouldn’t regret his experience with drugs."
>What about the effects of heroin on the user’s
>ability to cope with the normal day to day stress of living?
>
>"Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. I’ve been in
>England where addicts obtained their heroin
>quite legally through doctors. Many of the
>addicts were lawyers, doctors, bank tellers, et
>cetera. So far as creative work goes, I say very
>definitively it can’t be indicatedand I would
>never’ve been able to write Naked Lunch, for
>example, unless I’d been off heroin. But, so far
>as any kind of routine work goes, you can do it
>as well as someone who is not addicted.
>
>"The context I was talking about when I wrote
>Junkie was in the 1940s when heroin was
>extremely illegal and under very heavy pressure
>from the American narcotics department. So you
>never knew from one day to the next whether or
>not you were able to get your necessary dose of
>drugs or not. And that, of course, creates a
>tremendous feeling of insecurity and fear.
http://www.creemmagazine.com/_site/BeatGoesOn/WilliamSBurroughs/CreemInterviews001.html