El Paso Times :: Border Junkies

Border Junkies

By Scott Comar
Buy It Now

Brave memoir recounts hell of heroin addict on the border

By Kathleen "Kathy" Staudt \ Special to the Times

Scott Comar came to the border in 1998 after growing up in New York and Connecticut, where he worked as a cross-country truck driver and furniture mover.
Soon after he arrived in the Juárez-El Paso metropolitan border region, he became addicted to heroin.

With attention to gritty detail, Comar tells the grim story of his chronic heroin-use cycles over a five-year period in "Border Junkies: Addiction and Survival on the Streets of Juárez and El Paso" (Austin: University of Texas Press).

He began by getting a fix on weekends, then once daily, and after that, increasing fixes to two or three times daily as he built up tolerance for heroin, finally surrendering to a daily regimen of a heroin-controlled life. Periodically, he would decide to stop, undergoing detoxification and the misery of withdrawal, but would then re-start the cycle. Finally, in 2003, he was able to stop with assistance from a caring counselor at Aliviane in El Paso.

UT Series editor Howard Campbell calls this book one of many "opiate narratives," examples of which date to the 19th century by writers including William S. Burroughs.

Comar's first-person writing style is direct and refreshing. He fills the narrative with keen observations and musings: riding buses in Juárez, panhandling pitches to Americans and Mexicans, homeless-shelter atmospheres, room-renting etiquette.

Read the full review at elpasotimes.com »

The Chronicle of Higher Education :: Border Junkies

Border Junkies

By Scott Comar
Buy It Now

The addict’s narrative has a centuries-long tradition—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, William S. Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi. But accounts rich with ethnographic detail rather than literary reach or lurid indulgence have been few.

In Border Junkies: Addiction and Survival on the Streets of Juárez and El Paso, out this month from the University of Texas Press, Scott Comar tells the story of his life on the down-and-out streets of United States-Mexico border cities.

While a furniture mover and long-haul trucker, steering his rig all around the country, he became more and more deeply entangled in the temptations, compulsions, short-term satisfactions, decline, and desperation of heroin. That brought him, for several years, into the day-to-day worlds of other junkies and also the dealers, prostitutes, “coyote” people smugglers, thieves, and casual killers who were his neighbors and sometime friends, hosts, and suppliers.

Comar, now a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Texas at El Paso, describes not only those colorful characters, but also the patient social workers, missionaries, shelter workers, and physicians who tried to help him escape, often necessarily letting him trudge his own path towards perdition or salvation.

The scenes Comar paints are hallucinogenic, themselves. Ciudad Juárez, as it began to become the most blood-drenched killing field of narcotrafficking, was a dusty maze of taco-stand- and bar-lined tracks where heroin was inexpensive and obtaining it was easy. Holding onto it was not always such a snap; it required that junkies have their wits about them when it came time to pay off the police. Riding about in pick-up trucks, armed with machine guns, cops often not only oversaw drug laws, but also controlled drug channels.

Chiva—Mexican brown-tar heroin—and its kin became Comar’s abiding companions, at first to his exultation, but soon to his anguish. His life flattened out, as a junkie’s will, into the tedium of obtaining the fix that would tide him over to the next one while he sank lower and lower into panhandling and disarray. Comar states at the outset of his narrative: “In no way do I wish to glamorize or minimize the pains, fears, and uncertainties associated with the lifestyle of a drug addict.” And he does not.

Read more at chronicle.com »

Publisher's Weekly :: Border Junkies

Border Junkies

By Scott Comar
Buy It Now

Review:

In this eye-opening account, former heroin addict and current doctoral student Comar chronicles his five years as a junkie, during which he panhandled to support his drug habit and repeatedly completed rehabilitation only to quickly fall back into drug use. Readers will continue waiting for the announcement of the low point of his life: is it the withdrawal pain, going to jail, learning a friend has died from overdose, or lying to his family to get money for drugs? While following Comar's trail between Juárez, Mexico, where he lived for most of these years, and El Paso, Tex., where he was often able to find employment or panhandle, readers will learn about the facilities available for detoxification and where Comar finds them lacking; life on the streets; and survival with, and without, the bare necessities. As Comar writes, "The food was good, and the showers had hot water. I had a small pocket radio and a bottom bunk. What more could someone want out of life?" Clean since 2003, Comar uses these pages to reflect on the processes of addiction, detoxification, and recovery, while questioning how drug treatment centers could better assist recovering addicts. (Oct.)

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