Alcohol

Grog, Booze, Piss

Dgraskne Fuckpig, Fat Kitty and other characters by Shane Kneippe during the 80's

What can I say except I wish I could write as well as he paints and draws and cuts lino and does stuff to eggs and beeswax etc......

Tales from the Underworld

I had thought Burroughs the first to chronicle addiction and the eternal chase in modern society. But Hans Fallada was doing it all decades earlier.  His depiction of two mates out on a hunt for prescription pads, croakers or easy chemists - it's all fresh and very realistic.  Sure, it's morphine (monacetyl not diacetyl) that they chase, but that's probably all there was back then.  I am always amazed at the connection between the paltry lives of junkies a century ago, and their lives today - in some ways worse, as the sources HF had back then are long dried/wised up.

Life Keith Richards

So the front cover of the edition I read goes while the spine has 'Keith Richards Life', since mine comes from the library a catalogue sticker covers the word 'Life' on the spine. All that is neither here nor there but the fact that the book was written with James Fox (no not the co-star of 'Performance' with Mick and Anita) is worthy of note and he gets due mention on the title page and on the inside/back of the dust jacket. The book reads pretty much as a monologue with Keith as first person and is interspersed with various characters contributing their version of events.

Pusher

At last, a movie that deals with the low level heroin business in a non-glamourised, fairly realistic fashion. I'm amazed that when I watched this film I realised it hadn't been done successfully before.  IMDB says "A drug pusher grows increasingly desperate after a botched deal leaves him with a large debt to a ruthless drug lord."

felix's picture

Artist Adam Cullen dies

Archibald prize winner, for his portrait of David Wenham in 2000. Not killed directly by an overdose, as far as we know, but it seems he had multiple organ failure over the last year or so.

Dead Ringers

From Wiki; "Dead Ringers is a 1988 psychological drama film starring Jeremy Irons in a dual role as identical twin gynecologists. Director David Cronenberg co-wrote the screenplay with Norman Snider; their script was based on the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. The film is very loosely based on the lives of Stewart and Cyril Marcus."

Love and Addiction

Stanton Peele
with Archie Brodsky

©1975, 1991 by Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky
Reprinted with permission from Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc.
ISBN # 0-8008-5041-6

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