Word: addictions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...present flow of narcotics to the West is capable of supporting a savage rise in consumption?and with it, savage rises in crime, in crippled lives and in deaths. Hard statistics are hard to come by, but the best Government estimates put the U.S. heroin-addict population at 560,000?ten times the level of 1960 and almost double what it was only two years ago. On the average, a U.S. addict spends $8,000 a year to support his habit; in New York City, with an addict population of more than 300,000, as much...
...other countries are discovering to their horror, it is an expanding market. In Canada, recent estimates place the addict population at 14,000 and rising. Turkey now has a small heroin-addict population?a development that defies Moslem strictures against drugs and the powerful conviction among Turks that narcotics reduce sexual potency. Heroin is spreading among young South Vietnamese, who have picked up a taste for hard drugs from the departing American soldiers. All over Western Europe, which once idly dismissed hard drugs as "an American problem," officials now reckon that they have a growing addict population of about...
Even so, the U.S. antidrug effort has not been notably successful. Shortly before President Nixon announced his all-out war on drugs a year ago, an estimated 315,000 Americans were addicted to heroin, which is the most profitable item in the international narcotics trade. Recent estimates have put the addict population at around 560,000 persons, though the jump in the figures reflects some zags in statistics taking as well as real growth in addiction...
...most remarkable revelation of the study is the ease with which addicts deceived their employers. They usually injected their heroin in the men's room, where they could experience the initial rush of euphoria undisturbed. This might last up to 20 minutes. They were careful to shoot only enough heroin to prevent withdrawal symptoms, not enough to get conspicuously high. If one began to nod, he moved around quickly to hide his drowsiness. If he was questioned about odd behavior, the favorite excuse was fatigue from lack of sleep caused by family problems. Older addicts also used the excuse...
Theoretically, gambling ought to be an interesting obsession. In this engaging first novel James Guetti is not always certain just what the obsession is: an untrammeled subculture with openings to the metaphysical or merely a shabby compulsion that can absorb the addict to the point of rendering every thing else in his life irrelevant. Yet it is precisely that ambivalence that makes his book interesting...