There’s a moment where life happens. It’s the moment just before making a good decision, or a bad one. For Milton Schorr, just such a moment took place at the age of seventeen, when he found himself squatting on his haunches in a Cape Town flat with a heroin needle in his arm.

 

A friend sat with him, his thumb on the plunger, and a decision was to be made. Let the heroin slip inside, and take the road the drug offered, or turn away, and find a new life not defined by the endless quest for oblivion.

 

For Milton, the path was already set, as it had been at his first taste of shoplifting, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, Mandrax, LSD, Ecstasy and crack. In this memoir he details the life that led him to addiction, the wild and dark years of his drug use, his struggles to return to normality, and the reckoning with the self that ultimately led to his recovery.

 

Addict is a courageously honest account of Milton's life in active addiction and recovery. Today, two decades sober, he relates the pivotal points in his journey toward death, and back to life. This book is essential reading for anyone touched by addiction.