Voices From The Depths

The Addict in the Street
edited and with an introduction by Jeremy Larner from tape recordings collected by Ralph Tefferteller
Grove Press, 288 pp., $5.50

Reading this book is a highly disturbing experience—for it compels us to confront (through the immediacy of specific human beings) an appalling complex of hopelessness, cruelty and degradation in our much-celebrated American way of life. One must be awfully hard-hearted or else extremely blase and pseudo-hip to come away from this book without feeling strong compassion for the individuals involved and great shame and contempt for the inexcusable stupidity and inhumanity of our attempts to “deal with” them and their problems—let alone, serious doubts about a social structure and culture in which such problems thrive in the first place.

The book is a collection of firsthand accounts by drug addicts in New York — edited fro...