Word: addicting
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THERE IS a curious ambivalence about our present-day view of the heroin addict: although we often give lip service to the notion that he is a sick or psychologically disturbed person who needs understanding and treatment rather than punishment, our more basic and emotional response of revulsion, fear and hatred is reflected in our implicit acceptance of the fact that the use of heroin and other opiates continues to be dealt with primarily through prohibition and the imposition of criminal penalties. This means that addicts--with the exception of a few like physicians and pharmacists--have little choice...
Part of it will come from a restaurant that the family has bought in downtown San Francisco. In preparation for opening day later this month, members are honing their skills in the mansion's huge kitchen and candlelit dining room, where an ex-addict maitre d'hotel conducts family members and their guests to small tables, and waitresses serve them elegantly...
Some specialists consider such tactics destructive. In an American Psychiatric Association study of Synanon and other therapeutic communities, five drug experts observed that if addiction is partly the result of low selfesteem, "one can wonder whether the most appropriate corrective experience is to persuade the person of his worthless-ness." Members of Delancey Street, however, defend their rules on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to let off steam, teach humility and prepare the way for a kind of rebirth by erasing an addict's old image of himself...
Prisons in the Bay Area regularly admit Delancey Street residents to screen recruits, and courts sometimes put addict-criminals on probation if they join the family. Says San Francisco County Sheriff Richard Hongisto: "Delancey Street doesn't cost the taxpayers money and it's not bureaucratic. It is reasonably humane-it doesn't keep people locked up. And it has had a reasonable degree of success. Few rehabilitation programs do as well...
Prince, a native of Manhattan, was a matinee addict; one of his earliest theatrical memories is of being mesmerized by Orson Welles playing in Julius Caesar at the Mercury Theater. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in English in 1948, he so impressed Director George Abbott with his enthusiasm that he was hired as a "call boy," the factotum who tells actors when they are to go onstage. Then, as now, Prince was prone to nervousness, and first night out he lost his voice. After two years off for Army service, he was rehired...