At seventeen, Milton Schorr sat in a Cape Town flat with a heroin needle
in his arm, facing a life-altering choice. His path to addiction had already
begun—through shoplifting, porn, alcohol, and drugs. In Addict, Milton
recounts his descent into darkness, the chaos of active addiction, and
the long, painful road to recovery. With raw honesty, he reflects on the
decisions that nearly ended his life and the ones that ultimately saved
it. Now, two decades sober, his story is a powerful testament to resilience
and hope—an essential read for anyone affected by addiction or seeking
to understand it.
I knew I wanted to be a heroin addict when I watched the film The Basketball Diaries with Leonardo DiCaprio when I was a fifteen-year-old boy. Where others saw a tragedy on the screen, I saw something more. In Leo’s haunted face as he wandered the streets of New York a drug-soaked wreck, I saw absolution. I saw peace.
Because release comes when the inside matches the outside, even if just for a moment.
How Leo looked was how I felt. His pain was mine, and his decision to use the needle was mine too. I wanted that logic. I wanted to be who I felt I was. Broken. A wreck. Unloveable.
And so, when my moment came, when I walked into my friend Brittany’s apartment in Cape Town at the age of seventeen, and Manny, a friend-to-be, offered me a syringe, I didn’t hesitate. I stuck out my arm.
This was my moment, the one I’d been dreaming of. There I was, squatting on my haunches with my left knee jammed into my left armpit. The needle was already inside my skin, and Manny was looking at me, a sly smile on his lips.
‘You sure?’
I nodded. The answer was always yes.
He pressed the plunger and the brown liquid slipped inside me.
‘Now wait.’
A moment.
‘I don’t feel anything.’
‘You will,’ he said. ‘It’s coming.’
Suddenly, I felt a strange pressure on my chest. As if a weight was crushing down on my lungs, squeezing them together, flattening them. I was afraid. What was happening to me? Was I about to die? What was this poison that I had let in?
I didn’t have time to think about it, because the pleasure came soon after, a pleasure that dispelled all doubt, a feeling that wiped every worry and every fear I had ever felt completely away.
And so I had taken the plunge, I had stepped into a movie of my own making, modelled on the one I’d seen years before. Now I was the star, the human torch, inviting others to watch me burn. And now it was my turn to discover that there is a price to pay for everything.
Today I am forty-two years old, and I have been sober for nineteen. Today, in sitting down to write this book, I have had to ask myself: Why, when watching that movie as a young boy, did I wish that fate upon myself? Why did I choose to seek out the dark, when my friends did not?
This book is my answer to that question. It is the tracing of a line through my life, a river called addiction that I have been paddling since boyhood, that has taken me through hellish places, and beautiful ones, and most importantly, has revealed myself, to me.
Extracted from Addict by Milton Schorr, out now.
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY
Extract: I Am Tshiamo by Tshaimo Modisane