Tradition says that each generation reinvents their stories and their drugs. With the epidemic of opiates as a real background and a changing world and in constant crisis as a scenario, authors and publishers give new impetus to the literary subgenre of drug addiction and its effects. Intimate fictions, recovered classics, odyssey, memories and trials with hard drugs return to the shelves. The junkie has returned to literature.
“Nobody intends to become a drug addict. Nobody wakes up one morning and I decide to be. Opioids are not like alcohol or grass, a means to increase the enjoyment of life. They do not provide any welfare. It's a way of life, ”reflected William S. Burroughs in the prologue of his classic Yonqui (1953), one of the foundational works of this subgenre, which has now been reissued by Anagrama in his Compact 50 collection. Burroughs - which later affected on the subject in a much more crude and hallucinated way in The Naked Lunch (1959) - he had to elaborate that well-intentioned preface in which he told his origins of a good family to make the novel acceptable to publishers, as advised by his Beatnik agent, friend and poet Allen Ginsberg. They were other times and Yonqui opened the gap.
In the following decades Go Ask Alice (Anonymous, 1971) or Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh, 1993) showed, without shame and without apologizing, the devastating effects of drugs on young people. Now in the 21st century the rules of reality have changed. “The drug is part of our society. Rich and poor, executives and riders , judges and criminals, journalists and housewives are drugged ... It is logical that this also enters the literature, ”says Nuria Barrios, author of the recently published Todo arde (Alfaguara) . This account of the descent into hell of a 16-year-old boy who tries to rescue his sister from the addiction baby of the classics and also a reality that is just around the corner. “I combined the reading of Hades of the Odyssey , the story of Orpheus and Eurydice or the book of Hell of the Divine Comedy with visits to the Cañada Real. I met a family that sells drugs there and opened the doors of his smoking room. For months I went, sat down, looked and listened. ” This social nuance also unfolds with subtlety in Malaherba , by Manuel Jabois (Alfaguara), where the gaze of a child takes the reader from the effects of heroin in his family to the underworld of traffic in the Rias Bajas.
Contemporary literature leaves no focus on the road. On the individualistic and thoughtful side militates Mateo García Elizondo, who in his debut An appointment with the Lady (Angrama) narrates the adventures of a junkie in a Mexican town to which he has gone with drugs to consume and kill himself. “I think that lately it has stopped demonizing drugs to try to give them their proper place; Now it is known (or remembered) that according to their dose and use they can be medicines, and perhaps the exploration of drugs and drug addiction in the literature is one of the ways we have to understand what their place is. My way of building heroin addiction was based on creating a strong opposition and contrast between the extreme pleasure it produces, and the fact that it is a lethal drug, ”he explains to EL PAÍS.
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Spanish fiction about narco takes off
Nonfiction has also turned to heroin. Editor of Granta and one of the great fortunes of Europe as a descendant of the founders of Tetra Pak, Sigrid Rausing recounts in Maelstrom (Random House Literature) the addiction of his brother and sister-in-law, and the trace of illness, depression and death they left behind in the environment. And it does so with an approach that throws essential questions while admitting its inability to answer them.
García Elizondo recognizes that in An appointment with the Lady , as in so many others of the subgenre of addicts, there is the influence of the beatniks . The wandering of those cursed poets through the United States was also the definitive incentive for publisher Peter Kaldheim to abandon his destructive spiral in New York and begin the escape he narrates in The Idiot Wind (Today's Topics), the memories of a man who takes in finding redemption, another vision of the American dream, of the search for the meaning of life.
"If we don't feel the pain, is the pain still there?" Sigrid Rausing asks. “The children of the most privileged group in the richest country in the history of the world got hooked and died in scratch numbers in the epidemic because of substances designed to precisely placate the pain,” says Sam Quinones in the Land of Dreams (Captain Swing ) a total x-ray of how American society has fallen into the hands of opium derivatives. Quinones traces a history of physical pain, how this concept changed in the United States and that opened the door to a powerful opioid in the form of medication, OxyContin, which gave way to Mexican heroin of cheap, powerful black tar, and its extension for every corner of the country to quadruple in five years the deaths from this cause. In Spain, deaths from opioid overdoses have risen 50% in seven years. The literature on addiction still has a vast field to explore.
The Happy Meal of Heroin
At the beginning of the 21st century, the United States concentrated 83% and 99% of world consumption of oxycodine and hydrocodone, two powerful opioids sold in pharmacies. A parallel movement was carrying powerful and cheap heroin away from traditional distribution centers. They were groups of Mexicans as far away as possible from the image of a narco. In small cells, very difficult to pursue, these traffickers worked as small businesses, distributed the drug at home in dilapidated cars, had Mexican employees who continuously rotated in exchange for a good salary and competed with others lowering prices, not shots. Sam Quinones details the operation of this system, which became known as The Happy Meal of the horse, in Tierra de Sueños (Captain Swing). The service included offers, special packages, recruitment of new clients near rehabilitation clinics or doctors who prescribed opiates or calls to addicts to see if they were happy with the service provided. The connection with legal drugs was lethal. This is summarized by a camel: "They would not sell these amounts of heroin in the street right now if those decisions had not been made in the boardroom."