Piece in last weekend's Observer featuring my old drug guru and friend William Burroughs, on the cure pioneered by a doctor Dent using apomorphine, a non-narcotic morphine derivative. Burroughs swore by Dr Dent and apomorphine which got him off junk after several years in thrall to the stuff.
Oddly though, the longish feature never mentioned the most noticeable thing about apomorphine: that it's a powerful and violent emetic. Heroin and morphine will cause the uninitiated user to throw up as often as not, but no one can take apomorphine without being violently sick pretty well immediately. Burroughs kept pretty quiet about it too. I suppose he didn't want to put people off 'the sanity drug' as he sometimes called it.
|
Was used for erectile dysfunction a few years ago, just after Viagra came out.
Seemed pretty crap at that.
I think there's little proof it works better than placebo in opiate dependency but I may well be wrong.
|
>> I think there's little proof it works better than placebo in opiate dependency but I may well be wrong.
You may have a point actually Lygonos. Burroughs believed Dr Dent had cured him with apomorphine, but the cure wasn't permanent or anything like it. He backslid into addiction at least twice in later life. He was a complex figure of course, deviant in other ways too (his passive homosexuality for example, and a distasteful if highly individual interest in the so-called 'occult').
His literary style caused many to see Burroughs as a cold-hearted, sinister man, ruthless and morally depraved. In reality he was kind-hearted and tender, although a lifelong gun freak, highly intelligent and not always willing to suffer fools gladly; when I knew him was becoming deeply worried that youngsters excited by his writings would emulate him by getting junk habits, as one or two had already done. He wrote a piece in (I think) Transatlantic Review intended to set them straight, but its style would have had many of them foxed.
I leave it to others to judge whether Burroughs was a 'great' writer. He was certainly a brilliant one sometimes, and a basically playful individual I feel privileged to have known. As so often, public image and private persona were poles apart.
|
Footnotes: Dent only tried apomorphine on junkies after using it successfully, he thought, on alcohol-dependent patients.
Burroughs like many artists had a child-like side that made him easy to influence, not always for the better. I am thinking of the English writer and arts hustler Brion Gysin, who was as queer as a coot and infected Burroughs with his rather gross and thuggish mysoginist theorizing. Certain women adored Burroughs, not always to his approval (he liked them young, pretty and cool), but respectable ladies like Herself always tended to disapprove of him.
|
I read some stuff a few years ago about a drug that induced hallucinations and after which some heroin addicts found themselves without their desire to take heroin any more.
Not sure if it actually worked as I don't think I've seen anything about it recently.
But as mentioned previously, the treatment of addiction is unfortunately ruined by the tinkering of our political masters in their "war on drugs".
(Funded in part by their readiness to take £££ from alcohol and tobacco)
*edit* - this is the one: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine#Treatment_for_various_addictions
Last edited by: Lygonos on Sun 2 Nov 14 at 17:13
|
Dunno if it was Ibogaine, but at one stage in my ongoing, occasional war on tobacco I took some pill that was psychoactive and I think made from a plant. It was supposed to stop you wanting to smoke. It did too, up to a point, but I didn't like it, thought I could detect unpleasant side effects (not amusing hallucinations or anything entertaining, more like depression). So I soon stopped taking it.
As for our political masters, world drug policy dictated from (if not exactly by) the Unites States is a lot worse than tinkering or monkeying stupidly around. It's systematically evil and imposed willy-nilly on a lot of countries that know better. Of course more politicos are 'useful idiots' than actually in the loop.
|
>> I took some pill that was psychoactive and I think made from a plant. It was supposed to stop you wanting to smoke. It did too, up to a point, but I didn't like it, thought I could detect unpleasant side effects (not amusing hallucinations or anything entertaining, more like depression). So I soon stopped taking it.
Herself thinks it was called Zyban, and that does ring a bell. It isn't a plant derivative but entirely synthetic. It worked, but as I said it made me feel a bit ill. Nothing exciting like the promised seizures though.
Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Sun 2 Nov 14 at 22:43
|
|
Most won't be, but those interested in Burroughs could try googling, if only for balance, the reactionary, philistine, ignorant piece on Miles's latest Burroughs doorstep that appeared in the LRB a year or so back, and a more recent very similar piece in Private Eye. Very likely scribbled by the same sanctimonious twit, or anyway by one just the same, a clone.
|
|
I used Champix (Varenicline) twice to stop smoking, it worked both times (after a fashion, both times I found it easy to give up but slipped back into it after about 6 months). That could have hallucinogenic effects.
|
>> I used Champix (Varenicline) twice to stop smoking, it worked both times
Clearly it didn't!
|
|
Best cure for opiate addiction is not to take opiates :-)
|
You can't cure something that doesn't exist Rastaman.
:o}
|
>> mysoginist
misogynist I mean.
I thought I had corrected that. Damn! It's an easy one to make when your brain's going.
|
Cure for opiate addiction - Lygonos
