The lore has been out there practically since first I learned to read: It’s the legend of the totally out-of-control, self-and-everyone-else-destructive junkie. First, I think, came Frankie Machine, counterhero of Nelson Algren‘s classic, 1949 The Man With the Golden Arm. Then there was William S. Burroughs’ then-pseudonymous paperback, Junky, in 1953, and Jack Gelber‘s beatnik-era, off-Broadway smash, The Connection, in 1959. And their many contemporaries.All of them were fictions about heroin addiction, and all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, presented drug addiction as both a sophisticated response to postwar straight, consumer culture and a dire, parodistic affliction of that same commodity-driven society. The addict, the lore agreed, was typically a totally destructive individual, first toward himself (during this period, most junkies were imagined as male) and then toward everyone he trusted, everyone he touched — wife, children, friends, parents. Most accounts held out only the barest hope of redemption, let alone of cure.