Relief as Pleasure--William Burroughs and the Sleep Cure

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William Burroughs—one of America’s great 20^th century humorists (closer to Bierce/Mencken than Thurber/Woollcott, like Twain with a rainbow coalition of nasty addictions and outré social habits)—wrote this cookbook article of drug addiction in the British Journal of Addiction in 1956.  Considering it is only twenty-two pages long, it is an Encyclopedia Brit-burroughanica for its quick contents. 

“Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” is crisp and concise, a clinical horror story of addiction and cure.  I say “and cure” because of the low trials Burroughs went through in some of the ten attempts/cures he experienced to clean himself up.  (Burroughs had already been using narcotics for twenty years by 1956.  By a mixture of good genetics and miracles Burroughs (1914-1997)  made it to his 83rd year.)  Burroughs describes one of the treatments,  the “prolonged sleep” cure, (excerpted below), in singular terms, revealing a particularly gruesome adventure into lost health:

“Prolonged Sleep.--The theory sounds good. You go to sleep and wake up cured. Industrial doses of chloral hydrate, barbiturates, thorazine, only produced a nightmare state of semi-consciousness. Withdrawal of sedation, after 5 days, occasioned a severe shock. Symptoms of acute morphine deprivation supervened. The end result was a combined syndrome of unparalleled horror. No cure I ever took was as painful as this allegedly painless method. The cycle of sleep and wakefulness is always deeply disturbed during withdrawal. To further disturb it with massive sedation seems contraindicated to say the least. Withdrawal of morphine is sufficiently traumatic without adding to it withdrawal of barbiturates. After two weeks in the hospital (five days sedation, ten days "rest") I was still so weak that I fainted when I tried to walk up a slight incline. I consider prolonged sleep the worst possible method of treating withdrawal.”

If as Burroughs says, all pleasure is nothing but relief, then this cure didn't offer any, and certainly must rank high in the Bad Ideas Department of Caustic Non-Cures.

Comments

[Rick]

How can anyone react except in disbelief when exposed to this description? I'm not saying I don't believe Burroughs, but that my own tentative construct of the universe is so walloped in reading this that my only reaction is laughter.

Weird, but that's what happened when I read this. I laughed.

Side note: the photo you included should be captioned this way: One of us is not walking away from this conversation. I'm guessing you are going to vote that it be me. I'm okay with that.

[John Ptak]

How could you not believe a 20-yr-long horse junkie? Frankly, even if half of it was made up, there's still that other half. And I have little doubt that Old Bill knew what he was talking about. Also, he got a lot of mileage out of the Unfortunate Accident with his wife--he posed a lot with handguns and rifles and shotguns, but I have a doubt that he would use them. Much. Depends on the target, I guess.