POPPIES
Odyssey of an Opium Eater
Eric Detzer
San Francisco: Mercury House, 1988
170 pp., $8.95
THE ADDICTIVE PERSONALITY
Rituals and Recovery
Craig Nakken
Center City, Minnesota: Hazelden Foundation, 1988
Dist. by Harper & Row
128 pp., $7.95
Poppies is a wrenching personal account of author Eric Detzer's addiction to the euphoric effects of the opium poppy. Detzer sees himself as "the other kind of junkie," the kind who has an education, a good job, a wife, kids, and a lovely home. Detzer doesn't shoot heroin or rob people in the inner city at gunpoint. He swipes opium poppy plants from gardens in the Washington State countryside. He is convinced that no one is being hurt when he nods out in his living room from the effects of a homemade narcotic tea.
Detzer's story is built around his attempts to kick his opium habit. The reader is given a graphic view of the horrors of narcotic dependency. Fifty pages into the book, one feels safe in assuming that Detzer is just another self-centered ex-hippie caught in the downward spiral of addiction. But then, in the midst of his indulgent ramblings, the author stumbles onto a basic underlying truth about his own condition. The redeeming pearl of wisdom earned by grueling personal experience is his understanding that opium poppies are not his problem, but rather, it is the spiritual void—his lack of values and spiritual principles—that is slowly killing him.
At the point at which Detzer believes he will perish either by narcotic poisoning or by his own hand, he writes in a letter to his son, "you will have had many lectures in school about the dangers of drugs. You will be told how they harm your body and cause you to act erratically. These lectures never had much of a deterrent on me and you will probably be the same. The truth is, it's possible to stay reasonably healthy and functional while using large quantities of dope. I am living proof of that. No, the negative effects of drug are not physical and not social. They are spiritual."
Unlike most junkies, Detzer's narcotic dependency does not cost him sums of money. He requires only the few dollars necessary for gas to cruise the countryside looking for poppy plants during the "pod" season. But precisely like every other junkie, Detzer is empty. "Narcotic drugs poison the spirit and my spirit has been so battered and anesthetized that most of the time I don't feel human. Without that spirit I am a cardboard piece of background scenery. …" He has lost that sense of belonging to a family, to a group of coworkers, to a community, and to a fellowship of humanity. Detzer's addiction has cost him the values that make us more than flesh and bone—the spiritual values of trust, caring for others, accountability, and trying hard. In a poignant and pathetic request, Detzer's young son says to his father, "Why don't you take some of the stuff and let's play ball."
Early in his addiction, Detzer is warned by a
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