—WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) first shot morphine in 1944. As he wrote in Junky, “Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then 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 never quite saw it. I felt nauseous.” While an addiction to needle drugs like morphine carries a greater stigma than, say, alcoholism, the Harvard-educated Burroughs knew that it was all just a different shade of the same color. “The needle is not important. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction,” he wrote. In 1944, Burroughs moved into an apartment with his girlfriend, Joan Vollmer, and her daughter.
