Books available on addiction : M

	Opium A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon By Barbara Hodgson ISBN: 081182411X
With its connotations of mystery and sinister beauty, opium holds a near mythical place in the popular imagination. From swaying poppy fields to dimly lit, smoke-laden opium dens, author Barbara Hodgson traces the path of opium's creation and consumption, and describes how it has been alternately rhapsodized, demonized, and anointed. A seductive muse that fueled the visions of artists, writers, and poets including Baudelaire, Coleridge, Wilde, and Poe, opium was also used in hundreds of commonly consumed patent medicines. Today, opium remains one of the most widely trafficked drugs and its story is by turns strange, comic, and dark. Illuminated by an amazing array of archival photographs, rare engravings, movie stills, and lurid dime store book covers, Opium is an engrossing look at this illicit indulgence.

	Out of It By Stuart Walton ISBN: 0241140382
In this book, Stuart Walton takes on Nietzsche's challenge in "The Gay Science": "Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica?" From Greek and Roman antiquity, through the Middle Ages, the English Restoration, to the present, Walton guides the reader through the Western history of intoxication and examines its implications for society, culture, religion and the corporeal individual. This is an account of how and why human beings in all ages have had recourse to altered states of consciousness (whether through drugs or alcohol) as a primary requisite of daily life.

	Permanent Midnight : A Memoir By Jerry Stahl ISBN: 0446607266 (USA) ISBN: 0349111901 (UK)
It's not pretty and it's not "professional," but it's Jerry Stahl's true story of his life as a writer. Beginning his career as a pornographer for Beaver magazine, Stahl later wrote fake sex letters for Penthouse and articles for Hustler before moving on to write scripts for such TV hits as Moonlighting, Thirtysomething, and Alf, jobs that put almost $7,000 a week in his bank account. This is also the story of Stahl's addictions to smack, coke, crack, Dilaudids - you name it. Moving between $100 L.A. lunches and meetings with Cybill Shepherd to dangerous scores in the worst parts of the city, Stahl managed to lose his family, his house, his screenwriting opportunity for the second season of Twin Peaks, and nearly his life. Permanent Midnight is not for people with delicate sensibilities or any other low thresholds for truth. Stahl's autobiography provides no glitzy Hollywood confessional with raised letters on the dust jacket, and it's not a self-help book on recovery. Instead, it explores, with brutal honesty and humor, the author's struggle between the nightmares of addiction and the nightmares of sobriety. Permanent Midnight is one of the most harrowing and toughest accounts ever written in this century about what it means to be a junkie in America, making Burroughs look dated and Kerouac appear as the nose-thumbing adolescent he was. View film details

	Perv : A Love Story By Jerry Stahl ISBN: 0688177875
It was 1970. Woodstock was over, Nixon was in the White House, and the Vietnam War continued full steam ahead. This is the backdrop for Perv, Stahl's excellent first novel about adolescence, tacky sex, lots of drugs, and a horrifying cast of misfit parents and predatory adults. The early 1970s provides convenient wallpaper, but this book could be set any time in postwar America. Bobby Stark, the 16-year-old hero, finds himself back home in Pittsburgh after being thrown out of prep school. With the public schools on strike, he's stuck at home with his pill-popping mother and her creepy crowd of misfit boyfriends. A chance encounter with a grade-school acquaintance, a disenchanted Hare Krishna named Michelle, gives him a chance to go on the road and into even more perilous situations. This is black comedy at its darkest - alternately funny, poignant, and neurotically absurd. At some points, Stahl goes over the top, and his self-indulgence becomes painfully unpalatable. But overall, it's a worthwhile trip back into teenage nightmares.

	Porno By Irvine Welsh ISBN: 0393324508 (USA), 0099422468 (UK)
The Trainspotting lads are back...and in worse shape than ever. In the last gasp of youth, Simon "Sick Boy" Williamson is back in Edinburgh. He taps into one last great scam: directing and producing a porn film. To make it work, he needs bedfellows: the lovely Nikki Fuller-Smith, a student with ambition, ego, and troubles to rival his own; old pal Mark Renton; and a motley crew that includes the neighborhood's favorite ex-beverage salesman, "Juice" Terry. In the world of Porno, however, even the cons are conned. Sick Boy and Renton jockey for top dog. The out-of-jail and in-for-revenge Begbie is on the loose. But it's the hapless, drug-addled Spud who may be spreading the most trouble. Porno is a novel about the Trainspotting crew ten years further down the line: still scheming, still scamming, still fighting for the first-class seats as the train careens at high velocity with derailment looming around the next corner.

	Queer By William S Burroughs ISBN: 0140083898 (USA) ISBN: 0330300164 (UK)
Queer is the sequel to Junky, where we hear what happens to William Lee in Mexico. The story deals with Lee trying to get off drugs and on to boys, but things do not always turn out that way. However, in comparison with Junky we hear very little about drugs and a lot about homosexual acts. All in all, a good book, with Burroughs telling his stories as only he can do it. If you enjoy his later works, this book is an interesting view of how he wrote before and how many of the same themes are still explicit already here. An interesting and sensitive portrayal of Burroughs sex life at the time

	Rational Recovery The New Cure for Substance Addiction By Jack Trimpey ISBN: 0671528580
Outlining the Addictive Voice Recognition Technique, a self-recovery program for alcoholism and drug addiction, this helpful guide presents an alternative to traditional substance abuse approaches and profiles the addiction 'Beast'.

	Requiem for a Dream : A Novel By Hubert, Jr. Selby ISBN: 1560252480 (USA) ISBN: 0714530107 (UK)
Aronofsky made a lot of industry noise in 1998 with Pi, his critically praised low-budget indie hit and debut feature. For his second film, he collaborated with one of his literary gurus, Hubert Selby Jr., to adapt Selby's 1978 cult classic Last Exit to Brooklyn. Set on the scarred and bleak streets of Coney Island, Brooklyn, the story follows heroin addict and twentysomething Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto), his smack-snack gorgeous girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly), and running buddy Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) as they conceive a way to score pure heroin. An illuminating interview with Aronofsky prefaces the script, which in the Faber & Faber vein, unlike the Newmarket "Shooting Script," has less detailed camera shots and reads more like a play. View film details

	Rough Ride By Paul Kimmage ISBN: 0224051458 (USA) ISBN: 0224061704 (UK)
Kimmage's determination to gain cycling glory began in boyhood. But when he went professional in 1986, reality hit and he soon discovered it was really about gruelling defeats, complete exhaustion, and the drugs to keep you going. His book breaks the silence surrounding the issue of drugs in sport.

	Sleazoid Express A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square By Bill Landis & Michelle Clifford ISBN: 0743215834
Synopsis In a bygone era, when Times Square was crammed with adult bookstores, gun shops and drug pushers, disenfranchised moviegoers flocked to the grindhouses along 42nd Street. Those theatres were gone by the mid-1980s, but the films survived. Now SLEAZOID EXPRESS reproduces for the reader what no home video can - the experience of watching a movie inn the grindhouse setting. Each chapter focuses on a unique exploitation genre - blood horror, Eurosleaze, celebrity crime, etc. - and paints a close, intimate portrait of its directors, stars and showcases. Also included are detailed reviews of landmark films such as Blood Feast and Let Me Die a Woman, plus an appendix of exploitation video companies, making this an indispensable overview of the canon of sleaze. Autographed copies of this book can be obtained by contacting Bill Landis at: bill@sleazoidexpress.com Bill Landis has also written another book called: 'Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger' ************************************************************************ More of Bill Landis and his collaborator Michelle Clifford at www.sleazoidexpress.com www.geocities.com/metasex Exploitation and 1970s classic adult movies and the Times Square vice world documented, and much more.

	Smack By Melvin Burgess ISBN: 080505801X
Like so many teenagers, Tar and Gemma are fed up with their parents. Tar's family is alcoholic and abusive, and Gemma feels her home life is cramped by too many restrictions. The young, British couple runs away to Bristol in search of freedom, and finds it in the form of a "squat." This vacant building is also occupied by two slightly older teens who share everything with Tar and Gemma (including their heroin habits). For a while, everything is parties and adventures, but slowly Tar and Gemma find themselves growing more and more dependent on the drug - whose strict mandates are even less forgiving than those of the parents they fled. As Gemma says, "You take more and more, and more often. Then you get sick of it and give up for a few days. And that's the really nasty thing because then, when you're clean, that's when it works so well." With Smack, winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize for Fiction, Melvin Burgess brilliantly sketches a gradual descent into drug addiction. There is no preaching here, just the artful revelation of cold, hard facts. Burgess's use of the first-person voice - for not only the main characters but those in the background as well - brings you into the mind of every character in this homeless, hooked culture, offering a (sometimes terrible) glimpse of the motivations and transitions of each person. (Tar's personality changes dramatically over the course of the book, from sweet-natured, lonely boy to hard-edged, hit-seeking addict.) More subtle and less graphic than Beauty Queen, Linda Glovach's tale of a girl's downward spiral into heroin addiction, Smack will linger in the your mind long after its haunting conclusion has been reached. As far as I can see from reading the information on these books, Junk has also been published as 'Smack', so be careful.

	Snow Bodies: One Women's Life on the Streets By Elizabeth Hudson ISBN: 189630074X
Synopsis Snow Bodies is a memoir of a young woman's life on the streets of Calgary and Vancouver in the early 1970s, in the vein of Evelyn Lau's Runaway. Diary of a Street Kid. From her own harrowing experience Elizabeth Hudson graphically renders the deadly underbelly of society and her decent into the abyss of drug addiction and prostitution. In unembellished prose, without fear, shame or explanation, and without imposing hindsight or societal values onto her narrative, Hudson takes the reader with her on a terrifying journey to the bottom. Snow Bodies is a heart-breaking reminder of the horrors occurring daily on Canada's city streets. Reviews the book has had Most Courageous Read Your Have All Year - Edmonton Journal Disturbing plus painfully honest - Prairie Dog Press Candid and compelling - Star Phoenix Haunting, disturbing and fascinating - Entertainment Weekly Fastforward Gripping throughout - Saturday Night Magazine

	Street Drugs By Andrew Tyler ISBN: 0340609753
A sane, balanced and impartial source of advice and information on what is known about various drugs, their history and how they are used. The legal and medical status of each drug is covered and facts are sifted from hysteria. Drugs covered include alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy and steroids.