With William Burroughs

by Victor Bockris

  BURROUGHS: I categorically deny this—because, you see, in order to consume a drug orally you’ve gotta have the FDA’s approval.

  SOUTHERN: Well, how did Cosonal get through?

  BURROUGHS: What does it have to do with Cosonal?

  SOUTHERN: Cosonal was this cough syrup—this was while you were out of the country—there was a period of about six months or more when you’d walk into a room literally ankle-deep in empty Cosonal bottles. Sick junkies were drinking fifteen or twenty bottles a day. It was 85 cents a bottle—and then the price started going up, inexplicably—before there was a scandal about it and it was taken off the market. It was chock-a-block full of codeine.

  BURROUGHS: Believe me, nothing gets by the FDA. You can’t put it out if they don’t okay it.

  SOUTHERN: Yes, but can’t they okay something that will get you high without their knowing it? Something new, which they don’t yet know is sense-deranging? Or, coming from yet another direction, couldn’t the drug companies sell something which the patients would take without realizing they are getting high from it?

  BURROUGHS: No, and I’ll tell you why—in the first place, all the big companies are hand in fist with the FDA—the FDA are the company cops, that’s exactly what they are.

  SOUTHERN: I’m talking about corruption within the company …

  BURROUGHS: Yes, there’s corruption within, but it’s more likely that it has something to do with drugs that kill people, rather than get them high. Occasionally they will turn up something … something like Milanite. Something like that can sneak through. Other things can sneak through, but then they find out they cause liver damage … very little sneaks through that is going to get you high … [picking up a bottle]. Now, this is the one thing we got—it contains half a grain of codeine sulfate—hardly any, but if you drank one of these bottles you might get a little buzz.

  SOUTHERN: Down the gullet, Bill!

  BOCKRIS: What we should do is take William out to dinner.

  BURROUGHS [ignoring this]: You can get all the codeine you want right across the counter in France or Switzerland, but you can’t get it here. [He picks up a bottle and reads]: “Confused, forgetful, cranky, unkempt, suspicious personality … Transient cerebral ischemia, inimical psychological condition for the second day in a row and they deal with underlying circulatory …”

  BOCKRIS: I want to get straightened out. “Unkempt.” I’ll take one of those.

  BURROUGHS: Each to his taste, as the French say, but I advise against it. [Grumbling]: Now here’s something that goes straight in the waste-paper basket—“non-narcotic”! … I don’t want anything non-narcotic on these premises! Heh-heh-heh.

  SOUTHERN: Listen, they can say “non-narcotic,” but they may have some really weird definition of narcotic, like something out of Dracula … I mean, think of the fantastic competition that must be going on between the headache-remedy people—trying to cure headaches and make you feel good.

  BURROUGHS [reading another label and tossing the bottle aside]: Well, we don’t need any inflammatory agents for ancient arthritic conditions.

  William and Terry backstage at the Nova Convention: New York 1978. Photo by Marcia Resnick

  SOUTHERN: Wait! That’s a painkiller! “Arthritis” is the word they use now for “pain,” and that means heavy codeine, Bill!

  BOCKRIS: This potion is well known to me—it’s merely your friendly cough syrup with all the regular ingredients.

  SOUTHERN: But it might cook up into something really sensational! You cook it up until everything disappears except the essence, which would be dynamite in terms of sense derangement …

  BOCKRIS: We need an isolizer to isolize it.

  SOUTHERN: No. Trial and error, trial and error …

  BURROUGHS: We’ll not go the trial-and-error route on these premises.

  BOCKRIS: Shall we smoke another joint before we go out?

  SOUTHERN [opening a small metal can]: Now this is from the Republic of Columbia—dynamo-dynamite. I’ll just twist one up [takes out pink papers] using these clitoral pinks to give it zest.

  BOCKRIS: Why don’t you twist up another one? It looks like Bill might smoke that one up himself. [Burroughs has picked up a series of newspaper clippings about murders and is acting out the various parts on the other side of the room, Terry’s first joint in one hand.] Bill, was there a lot of cocaine in Paris during Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s time?

  BURROUGHS: Man, there was plenty of cocaine and heroin. In the late 1920s it was all over the place in Europe, if you knew how to go about getting it. It was about 1/100th the price it is now.

  SOUTHERN: Hemingway and Fitzgerald never mentioned it—no reference to dope … in their “entire collective oeuvre,” so to speak. They were both heavily into the juice.

  BOCKRIS: What I’m asking is, were Picasso and Gertrude Stein and Hemingway snorting coke?

  SOUTHERN: No, but in Paris, where you have a large Arab population, you can turn on with hash quite openly—in the Arab cafés near the Hôtel de Ville. They have the strongest hash you can get, so they had that thing in the Gide, Baudelaire tradition …

  BURROUGHS: You are confounding your times in this message. You got Gide and Baudelaire at the same fucking table sniffing cocaine. Why don’t you throw in Villon, for Christsake!?! They all had a sniff of cocaine together! I think you’re sniffing time-travel, baby!

  SOUTHERN [with a show of indignation]: Doctor! I am referring to the sustained tradition of sense-derangement among decadent frogs of the so-called Quality-Lit crowd! Baudelaire! Rimbaud! Verlaine! And the late great Andy Gide!

  BURROUGHS [adamant]: Time-travel!

  SOUTHERN: Bill’s threshold of tolerance is about the width of a thai stick.

  BOCKRIS: I hate Quaaludes.

  BURROUGHS: You really feel logy in the morning. It’s terrible stuff. I don’t like them at all.

  BOCKRIS: I hate that stuff—and Mandrex.

  SOUTHERN: The great Mandrex! Is that the same as quay?

  BOCKRIS: Stronger than quay. The English equivalent, but stronger. They use it a lot for seduction.

  SOUTHERN: That’s the thing about Quaaludes—chicks love Quaaludes—makes them less self-conscious, I suppose, about fucking. The druggist says it’s a great favorite with hookers. With students and hookers. They must have something in common.

  BURROUGHS: Intense pain.

  SOUTHERN: They call them “floaters”—I guess they float above the pain.

  BURROUGHS: On it, more likely—floating on a sea of pain!

  SOUTHERN: Right again, Doctor! A. J. himself would agree!

  BURROUGHS [muttering as he examines a label]: Sometimes I wonder about A. J.… remonstrated with him time and again … advised him to place himself exclusively in my care … all to no avail …

  SOUTHERN: It’s said that he has little or no regard for human life …

  BURROUGHS: That is correct … except for his own, of course.

  We go over to Mickey Ruskin’s restaurant at One University Place for dinner.

  BURROUGHS: I’ve reached the age where I can get a drink in Chicago without showing my ID. God man, listen to this, we walk into this bar and they demand IDs. The waitress looked at me coldly and said, “I guess you’re all right.” Were you along on that? Did you get a drink, Terry? Were you “all right”? If anyone asks for my ID I should be deeply flattered.

  The cab arrives outside the restaurant. As we walk toward the door Burroughs growls, gangster style, “I’ll get you boys in, I swear.” Inside, Roy Orbison is beginning to sing “Pretty Woman.” The music washes over us as we take a table …

  BOCKRIS: Terry, what do you think is the most interesting development we could have in drugs right now?

  SOUTHERN: I think the first thing is price and quality control … the establishment of a standardization system. There would be a Dr. Benway type who would designate the criteria for the evaluation process and it would be priced according to quality. And the criteria should probably
be technical—like the number of units of THC present, rather than, you know, on the basis of how much of a rave-up it causes any particular person … in other words, as nonsubjective as possible. Within that framework you will have your critics, of course. Charlatans will move in with their various hybrids. One can see it: “All right, why don’t you try a little of Brand X—half the price of your usual brand.” Well, that sort of thing should be against the law.

  BURROUGHS: It’s known as the Croakings of Experts.

  BOCKRIS: We ought to call this interview the Croakings of Experts. But while you’re fixing these prices, what about agricultural-support schools? We gotta have some agricultural price-support schools.

  SOUTHERN: As rice is to China, so the coca bush will be to Mr. and Mrs. Undernourished U.S. of A. as a painkiller from their hunger because of the overflow—hunger will be caused by the necessity of efficient production.

  BURROUGHS: Yes, it sure can ease off the pangs of hunger.

  BOCKRIS: Everybody could raise his own coca bush.

  BURROUGHS: It isn’t all that easy; they only grow in certain climates.

  BOCKRIS: If the Chinese can make steel in their backyards, I can grow coca.

  SOUTHERN: Now wait a minute, you should be able to do it, Bill—you can get away with making your own booze. In fact, they have a legal …

  BURROUGHS [impatiently]: We tried making our own booze once, and it was all so horrible everybody was sick.

  BOCKRIS: Doesn’t it seem obvious that the most salable drug of all would turn out to be the drug that would make sex better? Imagine if you could advertise and say this drug makes sex better. That’s the drug that’s going to sell the most, right?

  BURROUGHS [emphatically]: No, I don’t think so at all … Because the drug that’s always sold the most on any market, and which will eventually replace any drug that makes sex more possible, is the drug that makes sex unnecessary, namely heroin. On an open market heroin would push marijuana right off the market, which is a fairly good sex drug. See, most people don’t like sex—they want to be rid of sex. Their sex life is terrifically unsatisfactory. They have a wife who they were attracted to forty years ago, it’s terrible, what do they want their sex life stimulated for? Their sex life is horrible. So heroin enables them to get rid of that drive, and that’s what they really want.

  SOUTHERN: Which drugs are sexually stimulating?

  BURROUGHS: Marijuana.

  BOCKRIS: A good mixture of coke and marijuana can sometimes work, depending on the catalyst, I guess.

  BURROUGHS: I don’t like coke.

  BOCKRIS: No, but a small amount of it can help.

  BURROUGHS: Get high on marijuana and then a couple of poppers.

  BOCKRIS: Do you keep poppers next to the bed?

  BURROUGHS: Well naturally, you see, all the young people do. They say the stink of amyl nitrate fills the halls of the hotels up at Bellows Falls.

  BOCKRIS: Terry, which drug would you most like to have for yourself?

  SOUTHERN: Cocaine is the most enjoyable drug for me—in moderation, natch, due to its price.

  BOCKRIS: What would you most like to see developed?

  SOUTHERN: It would depend on the good Doctor’s recommendations—Dr. Benway’s. It’s a question of metabolism, you see.

  BURROUGHS: If I were going to be a scapegoat, I would say just leave your body and go away somewhere, perhaps not even come back. It would save me a lot of trouble …

  SOUTHERN: Hurry up, Doctor. I think a citizen’s arrest should be made. I suppose you are Satan, substituting for the mad Benway. I suppose … [suddenly turning to the waitress] How would you like to be in the movies, my dear, with the mad Dr. Benway?

  BOCKRIS: I don’t see any reason to believe there’s going to be a change in the way drugs are distributed to people.

  BURROUGHS: What are you talking about?

  SOUTHERN: Once the acceptance changes, then the laws will change to accommodate that fact.

  BURROUGHS: Are you referring to what comes out of the drugstore? What are you talking about?

  BOCKRIS: I’m talking about how the drugs are going to get distributed to the people who want them. How are things going to become available more easily?

  BURROUGHS: My dear, that’s been changing for most of my memory. It’s unbelievable the degree of change.

  BOCKRIS: It’s still not that easy to get the drugs you want to get.

  SOUTHERN: The regulation of it will happen when it suits the convenience of certain people, the same people who have the cost of a color TV set at $400 while a black and white is $55. It’s an incredible discrepancy, obviously due to a conspiracy within the industry. They said, “Let’s get rid of our total inventory of black and white sets before we convert exclusively to color—like the movies—let’s bleed them to within an inch of their lives.” And this sort of thing can be anticipated in the dope market as well. But eventually there will be some sort of regulatory body—a bureau of standards. And legalization is highly commendable on other levels as well—not the least of which is its source of revenue to the government, through taxation, to support things like public transportation systems, low-income housing, medical facilities, and so on—the same as with taxation on alcohol, tobacco, lotteries, and gambling … a tremendous source of revenue. The bottom line is simply that the two things—legalization and standardization of quality—should occur simultaneously. Otherwise, everyone will end up smoking catnip.

  DINNER WITH PETER BEARD AND RAYMOND FOYE: NEW YORK 1978

  BOCKRIS: In the future will they really be able to make drugs that do almost anything?

  BURROUGHS: They’re well on their way. Very soon they’re going to achieve the synthesis of endorphin. It’s an opiate created by the body, thirty times stronger than morphine, which they have now extracted from the brains of animals, particularly camels, who have a very high pain threshold: and they’ve found that it does stop acute pain and relieves the symptoms of opiate withdrawal, but it’s still terribly expensive—$3,000 a dose. It’s about in the state that cortisone was in when it first came out. Very expensive. But it’s a question of additional research and synthesis, although it’s going to take them five years to get endorphin on the market, because the fucking FDA is really crippling any kind of research. It may well solve the whole problem of addiction, because being a natural body substance it’s presumably not addicting itself.

  BOCKRIS: Can we expect to have much longer life spans quite soon?

  BURROUGHS: There’s a very interesting book on this, The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Taylor. He says that the ability to prolong life to as much as 200 years is not 100 years in the future, it’s ten or fifteen years. Then there comes a question: Suppose everybody’s going to live that long? Where are we gonna put ’em all? We got too many people now.

  Any sort of selective distribution of a medication to prolong life would run into, uh, social difficulties. What he points out, essentially, is that our creaky social system cannot absorb the biologic discoveries that are on the way. We will also be able to increase intelligence by the use of certain drugs. But then who is going to receive these drugs, who is to decide?

  BOCKRIS: It points toward a much more controlled society.

  BURROUGHS: I don’t think it does at all. A point that Leary made, which I think is quite valid, is that Washington is no longer a center of power, it’s no longer a center of anything, it’s a joke. It’s having less and less influence on what is actually going on. There’s no necessity for somebody to control all this because the indications are that they wouldn’t be called on to do so.

  Suppose I’m a wealthy man and I hire a bunch of scientists and they discover a longevity pill. Well, I decide then what to do with it. I can give it out to all my friends, or to the scientists who made it. That’s what Taylor points out, that our government could not make these decisions, so they won’t be called on to make them. They won’t be in charge. There’s no way that the government can completely monopolize al
l scientific discovery. So I think we are not going to get a more controlled society. Science by its nature is very difficult to monopolize, because once something is known it becomes common knowledge in scientific quarters and anybody can do it.

  BOCKRIS: What’s actually causing the growing acceptance of drugs?

  BURROUGHS: Less ill-informed media exposure is making the biggest difference. They’re going to legalize marijuana, and sooner or later they’re going to come around to some form of heroin maintenance. Many people connected with drug enforcement actually think that there’s no use going on trying to enforce an unenforceable law and that it’s been as much of a failure as Prohibition. That would make a terrific change. It would destroy the whole black market in heroin and eliminate the necessity for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

  RAYMOND FOYE: You said at a recent press conference that there were some drugs you thought they should stop manufacturing altogether—such as speed.

  BURROUGHS: Sure. There’s no use for it.

  FOYE: No medical use.

  BURROUGHS: Almost none. I’ve talked to doctors about this; they say there are very few cases where there’s a medical indication.

  Ginsberg tells Burroughs that he will smoke a joint at The Gramercy Arts Club while Burroughs, who can smell them a mile away, looks askance across the room at CIA agents. Meanwhile Mailer tells Orlovsky, our quiet American, a joke. Photo by Marcia Resnick

  BOCKRIS: Is heroin a drug that should be developed and used more?

  BURROUGHS: Basically there’s no difference between heroin and morphine. Heroin is by volume stronger, which means that it is also qualitatively stronger. Pain that no amount of codeine will alleviate can be alleviated by morphine. There probably are conditions, like leprosy of the eye and fish poisoning, where they could pump in any amount of morphine and it wouldn’t do any good. Heroin might get it. Of course heroin should be used more medically. They’re thinking of legalizing the manufacture of heroin here because it’s a better painkiller than morphine and it’s less nauseating. There are situations where nausea can be fatal after certain operations. In those cases heroin is a much more useful drug than morphine. It’s also much more useful in terminal cancer. I’ve had a lifelong interest in drugs and medicine and illness. Pharmacology was a lifelong hobby. In fact, I took a year of medicine in Vienna. I decided not to go on with it because it was too long a period of study. And then I wasn’t at all sure I’d like the actual practice of medicine. But I was always interested in diseases and their symptoms, poisons and drugs. Since I was thirteen years old I was reading books on pharmacology and medicine. However, sick people get on my nerves.