Ah! Death..our unseen companion through life, the awareness of whom makes a man enlightened like nothing else, distills the mind and brings complete clarity. Death makes angels of us all, gives us wings where we had shoulders as smooth as raven's claws, said Jim Morrison. Given our recent shift of focus from stock tickers and sports league tables to the death count caused by the corona virus, I thought I'll take a look at various causes of death and their numbers these days, trip on death a bit myself and not be left out the buzz it is creating among the general public.
According to Wikipedia 'The crude death rate is defined as "the mortality rate from all causes of death for a population," calculated as the "[t]otal number of deaths during a given time interval" divided by the "[m]id-interval population", per 1,000 or 100,000;' The Criminal Investigation Agency (CIA) of the US places the average global rate as 7.7 per 1000 for the year 2020 though the accuracy of these figures is not certain. In some countries it is known to go up to nearly 15 per 1000. Let us go with the CIA figures for now. 7.7 deaths per 1000 makes it 61.6 million deaths projected for 2020 at the normal current average annual death rate considering a world population of 8 billion humans. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate)
I thought I'll look at the death count due to various leading causes.
Age-related causes tops the list. According to Wikipedia - Of the roughly 150,000 people who die each day across the globe, about two thirds—100,000 per day—die of age-related causes. In industrialized nations, the proportion is much higher, reaching 90%. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate). That's 36.5 million deaths a year from age-related causes.
Tobacco - Tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke. - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco
Alcohol - Worldwide, 3 million deaths every year result from harmful use of alcohol, this represent 5.3 % of all deaths - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/alcohol
Drug abuse - 585,000 people died as a result of drug use in 2017. More than half of those deaths were the result of untreated hepatitis C leading to liver cancer and cirrhosis; almost one third were attributed to drug use disorders. Most (two thirds) of the deaths attributed to drug use disorders were related to opioid use. - https://wdr.unodc.org/wdr2019/prelaunch/WDR19_Booklet_1_EXECUTIVE_SUMMARY.pdf
AIDS - HIV continues to be a major global public health issue, having claimed more than 32 million lives so far. Due to gaps in HIV services, 770 000 people died from HIV-related causes in 2018 and 1.7 million people were newly infected. - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hiv-aids
Hunger - According to Jean Ziegler (the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food for 2000 to March 2008), mortality due to malnutrition accounted for 58% of the total mortality in 2006: "In the world, approximately 62 millions people, all causes of death combined, die each year. In 2006, more than 36 million died of hunger or diseases due to deficiencies in micronutrients". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate
Respiratory diseases - Globally, it is estimated that 3.17 million deaths were caused by the disease in 2015 (that is, 5% of all deaths globally in that year). - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease-(copd), Lower Respiratory Tract Infections (LRTI) includes pneumonia, acute bronchitis and lung abcess. It killed 2.74 million people in 2015 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_obstructive_pulmonary_disease, Worldwide in 2012, lung cancer resulted in 1.6 million deaths - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lung_cancer. A total of 1.5 million people died from tubercolosis (TB) in 2018 (including 251 000 people with HIV). Worldwide, TB is one of the top 10 causes of death and the leading cause from a single infectious agent (above HIV/AIDS). - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis
Air pollution - Air pollution kills an estimated seven million people worldwide every year. - https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
Water contamination - Contaminated drinking water is estimated to cause 485000 diarrhoeal deaths each year - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drinking-water
Violence - Globally, some 470 000 homicides occur each year - https://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/en/
Cancer - Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, and is responsible for an estimated 9.6 million deaths in 2018. Globally, about 1 in 6 deaths is due to cancer. - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cancer
Diarrhea - Total deaths from diarrhea are estimated at 1.26 million in 2013—down from 2.58 million in 1990 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diarrhea
Diabetes - In 2017, diabetes resulted in approximately 3.2 to 5.0 million deaths - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes
Alzheimer's and other dementia - in 2015, dementia resulted in 1.9 million deaths - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer%27s_disease
Vector borne diseases - Vector-borne diseases account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases, causing more than 700 000 deaths annually. They can be caused by either parasites, bacteria or viruses. - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/vector-borne-diseases
For every one of the following causes of death - age-related diseases, air pollution, respiratory diseases, AIDS, dementia, diabetes, drug abuse, cancer, violence, hunger, alcohol and tobacco, cannabis can be viewed as a preventive mechanism to mitigate and reduce the death count. Yet, the legalization of cannabis for recreational use and home growing world wide is a subject that is given least importance. I am a firm believer in the benefits to the planet of working from home and social distancing. I have been doing this for years. While we wipe our faces, hands and asses to keep the coronavirus at bay, can we please also legalize cannabis for recreational use and home growing by individuals so that the small matter of a few tens of millions of annual deaths world wide from the above listed causes gets some attention?
Oh, by the way, what do you think the death count due to cannabis is?
According to Wikipedia 'The crude death rate is defined as "the mortality rate from all causes of death for a population," calculated as the "[t]otal number of deaths during a given time interval" divided by the "[m]id-interval population", per 1,000 or 100,000;' The Criminal Investigation Agency (CIA) of the US places the average global rate as 7.7 per 1000 for the year 2020 though the accuracy of these figures is not certain. In some countries it is known to go up to nearly 15 per 1000. Let us go with the CIA figures for now. 7.7 deaths per 1000 makes it 61.6 million deaths projected for 2020 at the normal current average annual death rate considering a world population of 8 billion humans. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate)
I thought I'll look at the death count due to various leading causes.
Age-related causes tops the list. According to Wikipedia - Of the roughly 150,000 people who die each day across the globe, about two thirds—100,000 per day—die of age-related causes. In industrialized nations, the proportion is much higher, reaching 90%. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate). That's 36.5 million deaths a year from age-related causes.
Tobacco - Tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke. - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco
Alcohol - Worldwide, 3 million deaths every year result from harmful use of alcohol, this represent 5.3 % of all deaths - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/alcohol
Drug abuse - 585,000 people died as a result of drug use in 2017. More than half of those deaths were the result of untreated hepatitis C leading to liver cancer and cirrhosis; almost one third were attributed to drug use disorders. Most (two thirds) of the deaths attributed to drug use disorders were related to opioid use. - https://wdr.unodc.org/wdr2019/prelaunch/WDR19_Booklet_1_EXECUTIVE_SUMMARY.pdf
AIDS - HIV continues to be a major global public health issue, having claimed more than 32 million lives so far. Due to gaps in HIV services, 770 000 people died from HIV-related causes in 2018 and 1.7 million people were newly infected. - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hiv-aids
Hunger - According to Jean Ziegler (the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food for 2000 to March 2008), mortality due to malnutrition accounted for 58% of the total mortality in 2006: "In the world, approximately 62 millions people, all causes of death combined, die each year. In 2006, more than 36 million died of hunger or diseases due to deficiencies in micronutrients". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate
Respiratory diseases - Globally, it is estimated that 3.17 million deaths were caused by the disease in 2015 (that is, 5% of all deaths globally in that year). - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease-(copd), Lower Respiratory Tract Infections (LRTI) includes pneumonia, acute bronchitis and lung abcess. It killed 2.74 million people in 2015 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_obstructive_pulmonary_disease, Worldwide in 2012, lung cancer resulted in 1.6 million deaths - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lung_cancer. A total of 1.5 million people died from tubercolosis (TB) in 2018 (including 251 000 people with HIV). Worldwide, TB is one of the top 10 causes of death and the leading cause from a single infectious agent (above HIV/AIDS). - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis
Air pollution - Air pollution kills an estimated seven million people worldwide every year. - https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
Water contamination - Contaminated drinking water is estimated to cause 485000 diarrhoeal deaths each year - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drinking-water
Violence - Globally, some 470 000 homicides occur each year - https://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/en/
Cancer - Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, and is responsible for an estimated 9.6 million deaths in 2018. Globally, about 1 in 6 deaths is due to cancer. - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cancer
Diarrhea - Total deaths from diarrhea are estimated at 1.26 million in 2013—down from 2.58 million in 1990 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diarrhea
Diabetes - In 2017, diabetes resulted in approximately 3.2 to 5.0 million deaths - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes
Alzheimer's and other dementia - in 2015, dementia resulted in 1.9 million deaths - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer%27s_disease
Vector borne diseases - Vector-borne diseases account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases, causing more than 700 000 deaths annually. They can be caused by either parasites, bacteria or viruses. - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/vector-borne-diseases
For every one of the following causes of death - age-related diseases, air pollution, respiratory diseases, AIDS, dementia, diabetes, drug abuse, cancer, violence, hunger, alcohol and tobacco, cannabis can be viewed as a preventive mechanism to mitigate and reduce the death count. Yet, the legalization of cannabis for recreational use and home growing world wide is a subject that is given least importance. I am a firm believer in the benefits to the planet of working from home and social distancing. I have been doing this for years. While we wipe our faces, hands and asses to keep the coronavirus at bay, can we please also legalize cannabis for recreational use and home growing by individuals so that the small matter of a few tens of millions of annual deaths world wide from the above listed causes gets some attention?
Oh, by the way, what do you think the death count due to cannabis is?
The following list of articles taken from various media speak about the above subject. Words in italics are the thoughts of yours truly at the time of reading the article.
'In each of these situations one turns away to ponder the question: Who
has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings,
this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a
pebble is dropped into a still pond? Who has placed in one pan of the
scales the leaves that might have been eaten by the beetles and in the
other the pitiful heaps of many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of
the birds that fell before the unselective bludgeon of insecticidal
poisons? Who has decided - who has the right to decide - for the
countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme
value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world
ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight? The decision is that
of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it
during a period of inattention by millions to whom beauty and the
ordered world of nature still have a meaning that is deep and
imperative.' - Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, 1962
'Even as Bruce was being buried in Seattle, more headlines about him were appearing in the Hong Kong press. First lab tests from the autopsy, not done until thirty-six hours after death, were just coming in, and the big sensation was again "cannabis." Eventually the fact that there were traces of cannabis, or marijuana in Lee's stomach was completely discredited as a reason for his death. A doctor later said that it had as much meaning as telling him Lee had drunk a cup of tea the day he died.' - The Legend of Bruce Lee by Alex Ben Block, 1974
'There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can only do so when it is in full possesion of the facts. In the words of Jean Rostand, 'The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.' - Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, 1962
'These insecticides are not selective poisons; they do not single out the one species of which we desire to be rid. Each of them is used for the simple reason that it is a deadly poison. It therefore poisons all life with which it comes in contact: the cat beloved of some family, the farmer's cattle, the rabbit in the field, and the horned lark out of the sky. These creatures are innocent of any harm to man. Indeed by their very existence they and their fellows make his life more pleasant. Yet he rewards them with a death that is not only sudden but horrible.' - Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, 1962
'Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, the the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I quite never saw it. I felt nauseous. I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie. A huge, neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in a clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'There was a raw ache in my lungs. People vary in the way junk sickness affects them. Some suffer mostly from vomitting and diarrhea. The asthmatic type, with narrow and deep chest, is liable to violent fits of sneezing, watering at eyes and nose, in some cases spasms of the bronchial tubes that shut off the breathing. In my case, the worst thing is lowering of blood pressure with consequent loss of body fluid, and extreme weakness, as in shock. It is a feeling as if the life energy has been shut off so that all the cells in the body are suffocating. As I lay there on the bench, I felt like as if I was subsiding into a pile of bones.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'The doctor asked a few questions and looked at my arms. Another doctor with a long nose and hairy arms walked up to put in his two cents.
"After all, doctor," he said to his colleague, "there is the moral question. This man should have thought of all this before he started using narcotics."
"Yes, there is the moral question, but there is also a physical question. This man is sick." He turned to a nurse and ordered half a grain of morphine.
As the wagon jolted along on the way back to the precinct, I felt the morphine spread through all my cells. My stomach moved and rumbled. A shot when you are very sick always starts the stomach moving. Normal strength came back to all my muscles. I was hungry and sleepy.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'I was too weak to get out of bed. I could not lie still. In junk sickness, any conceivable line of action or inaction seems intolerable. A man might simply die because he could not stand to stay in his body.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'C[ocaine] is hard to find in Mexico. I had never used any good coke before. Coke is pure kick. It lifts you straight up, a mechanical lift that starts leaving you as soon as you feel it. I don't know anything like C for a lift, but the lift lasts only ten minutes or so. Then you want another shot. You can't stop shooting C - as long as it is there you shoot it. When you are shooting C, you shoot more M[orphine] to level the C kick and smooth out the rough edges. Without M, C makes you too nervous, and M is an antidote for an overdose. There is no tolerance with C, and not much margin between a regular and a toxic dose. Several times I got too much and everything went black and my heart began turning over. Luckily I always had plenty of M on hand, and a shot of M fixed me right up.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'An eating habit is the worst habit you can contract. It takes longer to break than a needle habit, and the withdrawal symptoms are considerably more severe. In fact, it is not uncommon for a junkie with an eating habit to die if he is cut off cold turkey in jail. A junkie with an eating habit suffers from excruciating stomach cramps when he is cut off. And the symptoms last up to three weeks as compared to eight days on a needle habit.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'Rollins listened to my account of the previous evening. "You're going to get your head blown off carrying that gun," he said. "What do you carry it for? You wouldn't know what you were shooting at. You bumped into trees twice there on Insurgentes. You walked right in front of a car. I pulled you back and you threatened me. I left you there to find your own way home, and I don't know how you ever made it. Everyone is fed up with the way you've been acting lately. If there's one thing I don't want to be around, and I think no one else particularly wants to be around, it's a drunk with a gun."' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'I got drunk on the fifty pesos. About nine that night, I ran out of money and went back to my apartment. I lay down and tried to sleep. When I closed my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and nose eaten away by disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it.
I watched curiously. "I got the horrors," I thought matter of factly.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'Ike came back from the bathroom with the works and began cooking up a shot. He kept talking. "You're drinking and you're getting crazy. I hate to see you get off this stuff and on something worse. I know so many that quit the junk. A lot of them can't make it with Lupita. Fifteen pesos for a paper and it takes three to fix you. Right away they start in drinking and they don't last more than two or three years." - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'I lay there trying to control the fear. I did not know much about uremic poisoning. A woman I knew slightly in Texas died of it after drinking a bottle of beer every hour, night and day, for two weeks. Rollins had told me about it. "She swelled up and turned sorta black and went into convulsions and died. The whole house smelled like piss!"' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'What about Roy?" I asked.
"Didn't you hear about him? He went wrong and hanged himself in the Tombs." It seemed the law had Roy on three counts, two larceny, one narcotics. They promised to drop all charges if Roy would set up Eddie Crump, an old-time pusher. Eddie only served people he knew well, and he knew Roy. The law double-crossed Roy after they got Eddie. They dropped the narcotics charge, but not the two larceny charges. So Roy was slated to follow Eddie up to Riker's Island, where Eddie was doing pen indefinite, which is maximum in City Prison. Three years, five months, and six days. Roy hanged himself in the Tombs, where he was awaiting transfer to Riker's.
Roy had always taken an intolerant and puritanical view of pigeons. "I don't see how a pigeon can live with himself," he said to me once.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junkie quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before. Like a man who has been away a long time, you see things different when you return from junk.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'Withdrawal symptoms are allergic symptoms: sneezing, coughing, running at the eyes and nose, vomiting, diarrhea, hive-like conditions of the skin. Severe withdrawal symptoms are shock symptoms: lowered blood pressure, loss of body fluid and shrinking of the organism as in the death process, weakness, involuntary orgasms, death through collapse of the circulatory system. If an addict dies from junk withdrawal, he dies of allergic shock.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'All the symptoms of shock can be produced by an overdose of histamine. Histamine is produced by body tissue wherever injury occurs. Histamine enlarges blood vessels so that extra blood comes to the place of injury. When a blood vessel is enlarged, its walls are stretched thin and porous and so fluid escapes. Loss of blood leads to lowered blood pressure. Excess histamine leads to lowering of blood pressure and shock, as occurs in serious injury. Adrenaline is the body's defense against excess histamine, and before the specific antihistamine drugs, was the only chemical antidote for histamine poisoning.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'It would seem that junk is the only habit-forming drug. Cats cannot be addicted to morphine, as they react to an injection of morphine with acute delirium. Cats have a relatively small quantity of histamine in the blood stream. It would seem that histamine is the defense against morphine, and that cats, lacking this defense, cannot tolerate morphine. Perhaps the mechanism of withdrawal is this: Histamine is produced by the body as a defense against morphine during the period of addiction. When the drug is withdrawn, the body continues to produce histamine.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'Opium is formed in the unripe seed pods of the poppy plant. Its function is to protect the seeds from drying out until the plant is ready to die and the seeds are mature. Junk continues to function in the human organism as it did in the seed pod of the poppy. It protects and cushions the body like a warm blanket while death grows to maturity inside. When a junkie is really loaded with junk he looks dead. Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.
Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can only do so when it is in full possesion of the facts. In the words of Jean Rostand, 'The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.' - Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, 1962
'These insecticides are not selective poisons; they do not single out the one species of which we desire to be rid. Each of them is used for the simple reason that it is a deadly poison. It therefore poisons all life with which it comes in contact: the cat beloved of some family, the farmer's cattle, the rabbit in the field, and the horned lark out of the sky. These creatures are innocent of any harm to man. Indeed by their very existence they and their fellows make his life more pleasant. Yet he rewards them with a death that is not only sudden but horrible.' - Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, 1962
'Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, the the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I quite never saw it. I felt nauseous. I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie. A huge, neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in a clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'There was a raw ache in my lungs. People vary in the way junk sickness affects them. Some suffer mostly from vomitting and diarrhea. The asthmatic type, with narrow and deep chest, is liable to violent fits of sneezing, watering at eyes and nose, in some cases spasms of the bronchial tubes that shut off the breathing. In my case, the worst thing is lowering of blood pressure with consequent loss of body fluid, and extreme weakness, as in shock. It is a feeling as if the life energy has been shut off so that all the cells in the body are suffocating. As I lay there on the bench, I felt like as if I was subsiding into a pile of bones.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'The doctor asked a few questions and looked at my arms. Another doctor with a long nose and hairy arms walked up to put in his two cents.
"After all, doctor," he said to his colleague, "there is the moral question. This man should have thought of all this before he started using narcotics."
"Yes, there is the moral question, but there is also a physical question. This man is sick." He turned to a nurse and ordered half a grain of morphine.
As the wagon jolted along on the way back to the precinct, I felt the morphine spread through all my cells. My stomach moved and rumbled. A shot when you are very sick always starts the stomach moving. Normal strength came back to all my muscles. I was hungry and sleepy.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'I was too weak to get out of bed. I could not lie still. In junk sickness, any conceivable line of action or inaction seems intolerable. A man might simply die because he could not stand to stay in his body.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'C[ocaine] is hard to find in Mexico. I had never used any good coke before. Coke is pure kick. It lifts you straight up, a mechanical lift that starts leaving you as soon as you feel it. I don't know anything like C for a lift, but the lift lasts only ten minutes or so. Then you want another shot. You can't stop shooting C - as long as it is there you shoot it. When you are shooting C, you shoot more M[orphine] to level the C kick and smooth out the rough edges. Without M, C makes you too nervous, and M is an antidote for an overdose. There is no tolerance with C, and not much margin between a regular and a toxic dose. Several times I got too much and everything went black and my heart began turning over. Luckily I always had plenty of M on hand, and a shot of M fixed me right up.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'An eating habit is the worst habit you can contract. It takes longer to break than a needle habit, and the withdrawal symptoms are considerably more severe. In fact, it is not uncommon for a junkie with an eating habit to die if he is cut off cold turkey in jail. A junkie with an eating habit suffers from excruciating stomach cramps when he is cut off. And the symptoms last up to three weeks as compared to eight days on a needle habit.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'Rollins listened to my account of the previous evening. "You're going to get your head blown off carrying that gun," he said. "What do you carry it for? You wouldn't know what you were shooting at. You bumped into trees twice there on Insurgentes. You walked right in front of a car. I pulled you back and you threatened me. I left you there to find your own way home, and I don't know how you ever made it. Everyone is fed up with the way you've been acting lately. If there's one thing I don't want to be around, and I think no one else particularly wants to be around, it's a drunk with a gun."' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'I got drunk on the fifty pesos. About nine that night, I ran out of money and went back to my apartment. I lay down and tried to sleep. When I closed my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and nose eaten away by disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it.
I watched curiously. "I got the horrors," I thought matter of factly.' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'Ike came back from the bathroom with the works and began cooking up a shot. He kept talking. "You're drinking and you're getting crazy. I hate to see you get off this stuff and on something worse. I know so many that quit the junk. A lot of them can't make it with Lupita. Fifteen pesos for a paper and it takes three to fix you. Right away they start in drinking and they don't last more than two or three years." - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'I lay there trying to control the fear. I did not know much about uremic poisoning. A woman I knew slightly in Texas died of it after drinking a bottle of beer every hour, night and day, for two weeks. Rollins had told me about it. "She swelled up and turned sorta black and went into convulsions and died. The whole house smelled like piss!"' - Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'What about Roy?" I asked.
"Didn't you hear about him? He went wrong and hanged himself in the Tombs." It seemed the law had Roy on three counts, two larceny, one narcotics. They promised to drop all charges if Roy would set up Eddie Crump, an old-time pusher. Eddie only served people he knew well, and he knew Roy. The law double-crossed Roy after they got Eddie. They dropped the narcotics charge, but not the two larceny charges. So Roy was slated to follow Eddie up to Riker's Island, where Eddie was doing pen indefinite, which is maximum in City Prison. Three years, five months, and six days. Roy hanged himself in the Tombs, where he was awaiting transfer to Riker's.
Roy had always taken an intolerant and puritanical view of pigeons. "I don't see how a pigeon can live with himself," he said to me once.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junkie quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before. Like a man who has been away a long time, you see things different when you return from junk.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'Withdrawal symptoms are allergic symptoms: sneezing, coughing, running at the eyes and nose, vomiting, diarrhea, hive-like conditions of the skin. Severe withdrawal symptoms are shock symptoms: lowered blood pressure, loss of body fluid and shrinking of the organism as in the death process, weakness, involuntary orgasms, death through collapse of the circulatory system. If an addict dies from junk withdrawal, he dies of allergic shock.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'All the symptoms of shock can be produced by an overdose of histamine. Histamine is produced by body tissue wherever injury occurs. Histamine enlarges blood vessels so that extra blood comes to the place of injury. When a blood vessel is enlarged, its walls are stretched thin and porous and so fluid escapes. Loss of blood leads to lowered blood pressure. Excess histamine leads to lowering of blood pressure and shock, as occurs in serious injury. Adrenaline is the body's defense against excess histamine, and before the specific antihistamine drugs, was the only chemical antidote for histamine poisoning.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'It would seem that junk is the only habit-forming drug. Cats cannot be addicted to morphine, as they react to an injection of morphine with acute delirium. Cats have a relatively small quantity of histamine in the blood stream. It would seem that histamine is the defense against morphine, and that cats, lacking this defense, cannot tolerate morphine. Perhaps the mechanism of withdrawal is this: Histamine is produced by the body as a defense against morphine during the period of addiction. When the drug is withdrawn, the body continues to produce histamine.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
'Opium is formed in the unripe seed pods of the poppy plant. Its function is to protect the seeds from drying out until the plant is ready to die and the seeds are mature. Junk continues to function in the human organism as it did in the seed pod of the poppy. It protects and cushions the body like a warm blanket while death grows to maturity inside. When a junkie is really loaded with junk he looks dead. Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.
Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.'
- Junky, William S Burroughs, 1977, originally published in 1953
Related links
Cannabis and the Liver
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-liver.html
Cannabis and the Lungs
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-lungs.html
Cannabis and Renal Disease
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-renal-disease.html
Cannabis as Universal Medicine
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-as-universal-medicine.html
Cannabis and Cancer
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-cancer.html
Cannabis and Diabetes
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-diabetes.html
Cannabis and Dementia
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-dementia.html
Cannabis and the Environment
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2018/10/cannabis-and-environment.html
Cannabis as an Agricultural Crop
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2018/10/cannabis-as-agricultural-crop.html
Cannabis as Medicine
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2018/10/cannabis-as-medicine.html
No medicinal value?
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/02/no-medicinal-value.html
Cannabis and Pain
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-pain.html
Cannabis for Animals
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-for-animals.html
Cannabis as an Antibiotic
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-as-antibiotic.html
Cannabis and the Elderly
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-elderly.html
Cannabis and Alcohol
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-alcohol.html
Cannabis and Tobacco
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-tobacco.html
Cannabis and Opioids
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-opioids.html
Cannabis and Harm Reduction
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-harm-reduction.html
Cannabis and HIV
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/05/cannabis-and-hiv.html
Cannabis and Crime
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-crime.html
Cannabis usage in 19th century treatment of infectious diseases
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2020/03/cannabis-usage-in-19th-century.html
19th Century usage of cannabis as medicine by Indian physicians
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2020/03/19th-century-usage-of-cannabis-as.html
References to medicinal cannabis in ancient texts
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2020/03/references-to-medicinal-cannabis-in.html
Cannabis and the Digestive System
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2020/03/cannabis-and-digestive-system.html
Cannabis and Cooking
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-cooking.html
Cannabis and the Food Industry
https://ravingkoshy.blogspot.com/2019/04/cannabis-and-food-industry.html
No comments:
Post a Comment