I Was A Drug Addict. By Leroy Street. (Rider. 15s.)
THIS book is less sensational than its scream- ing dust-jacket might at first suggest. It, is a sober and careful (sometimes, perhaps, too careful) account of the author's thirteen years of slavery to heroin and morphine, experimenting on the side with cocaine, marijuana and opium,' 'Mr. Street'—justi- fiably, a pseudonym—tells of a tormented journey from a comfortable and otherwise happy lower-middle-class New York home through countless reformatories, hospitals, prisons and doss-houses to an eventual cure; he can give no final answer after it all about the real starting-point of the drug habit, for it seems to strike and cling at random, and apparently has little to do with poverty or depression, attracting rich and poor alike. What makes addiction so horrible, and what makes the book so frustrating, is the power of these drugs to atrophy completely first the will and then self-respect: after the fourth or fifth resolution to ' give it up,' followed by a craving which is satisfied almost immedi- ately, one begins to despair of having any sympathy at all with the victim. But Mr. Street (aided by a not-too-apparent ghost writer) at least convinces one that the evil is, with effort, curable: 'the sincere desire to quit is basic."
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