“(you see one dangerous convenience of using junk over a period of years is that you eventually lose any paranoia over the possibility of getting bad dope, like you don’t go through all that bull crap of taste on the tongue or ‘better not shoot it all at once’ etc. crap like when you were first starting. After a while you become such a drooling fiend it’s just dump it all in, cook, main, and bingo! And if an abscess pops up like an oozing golf ball or if you o.d. or if it turns out it was “Drano” you were banging into your arm, just send the flowers of your own choice . . . blue to match the skin color).”

—Jim Carroll, from The Basketball Diaries, winter 1966, published in 1978.