Volume 39, Number 13 · July 16, 1992
The Possessed
By Luc Sante
Crackhouse: Notes from the End of the Line
by Terry Williams
Addison-Wesley, 156 pp., $17.95
Clockers
by Richard Price
Houghton Mifflin, 599 pp., $22.95
The drugs that people take for non-medicinal reasons do more than numb pain or enhance pleasure or induce entertaining perceptual distortions. They are a weapon against the void. In his book on opium, Jean Cocteau wrote that every human activity 'takes place in an express train hurtling toward death.' To take drugs, he proposed, is to get off that train. The potent illusion that drugs provide is called upon when the more commonplace illusions fail, and especially when life appears as nothing more than the conduit between birth and death. Drugs populate the empty landscape, supply the missing heaven, extend the movie into the third dimension. Drugs impose their own structure—customs and language, goals and priorities, rewards and punishments—on lives in which all belief has collapsed, and with it conventional structures.
Review, 3963 words
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