"A very impressive book, all the more so because of its remarkable calm and restraint after such a terrifying experience."
-- Penelope Fitzgerald

"Ann Marlowe is a meticulous encyclopedist of the pharmacopeia, a stone-cold dissector of youth's follies, a relentless moral essayist and a secret poet. Her book burns as it goes down one's craw, and it keeps burning in memory."
-- Luc Sante

"There are people bound to misread this book and see it as dangerous because of its cool authority, its lack of hysteria, because it's not a victim's book or a story of 'survival' or destruction. It's simply a memoir and a guide--unlike any I've ever read. Pro-drug it is not, but very moral it is."
-- Bret Easton Ellis

"This is an austere memoir, a passionate analysis, and, in a time when we are told that to cleanse our souls we must confess our sins and apologize, no apology at all."
-- Greil Marcus

"With fierce clarity and an unflinching grasp of paradox, Ann Marloe sets a new standard for bullshit detection. This keen, elegant and haunting book will become a classic."
-- Jonathan Lethem

"Ann Marlowe doesn't cradle her readers. Refreshing, blunt, unsparing, this powerful memoir about a life enslaved by addiction takes us into spaces where the media dare not go."
-- Ishmael Reed

"A startling, stylish and intellectually incendiary book that constitutes the most profound--and mordantly entertaining--understanding of dope's menace and allure since William Burroughs."
-- Peter Trachtenberg