Along the Heroin Borderline

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.

Long after he lost his truck, and failed repeatedly to rehabilitate, he became a fixture of Juárez’s back streets and the bridge that leads across the border to El Paso. As ugly deaths took many of his drug associates—his Mexican friends—he survived thanks to a kind of spiritual awakening. In his book he thanks “the nameless and faceless people whom I encountered daily on the streets of Juárez and El Paso. It was their unconditional grace that kept me alive during some of my darkest moments.”

Is this not a strange book for an academic press, specifically Texas’s Inter-America series?

Not really, says one of three series editors, Howard Campbell, a professor of sociology and anthropology at UTEP. He says Comar’s memoir casts light on the social ills of addiction and poverty that pervade border culture, and much else—the background to the horrific drug-related slaughters of many thousands of Mexicans in recent years, for example. “The book shows what it’s like on the streets among the people who are actually consuming the drugs,” he says. “You seldom get accounts from street-level junkies” versus those from the “highly literate, decadent elite,” he says. “It’s a frog’s-eye view of things.”

Comar began writing Border Junkies before he knew it—in the form of a journal he compulsively kept while still a daily drug user crossing back and forth over the border as he phased in and out of narcotic suspension. By the time he began to use his journal as the basis of a book, he was enrolled in a master’s program in history at UTEP, where he now is in the department’s borderlands doctoral program. Now eight years into rehab, with a wife and young son, Comar says academe represented his last opportunity for a future. He initially aspired only to become a substitute schoolteacher, but met with so much academic success that he began to aspire to more.

He agreed to flesh his journal out into a book at Campbell’s encouragement. The professor got to know about Comar at a UTEP graduation ceremony, a few years ago, when Comar repeatedly mounted a stage to receive undergraduate awards. He was, recalls Campbell, a tall, ungainly, man with soda-bottle eyeglasses, “staring out at the audience as if he wasn’t sure why he was there.”

Some time later, Campbell approached Comar at a grocery store and found him not just shy and rather skittish, but also a “goldmine of information” on the subject Campbell was himself studying—the border drug trade. Soon, over morning runs at a UTEP track, the two were conferring on Comar’s evolving memoir, whose introduction Campbell ended up writing.

Campbell also pressed for Border Junkies’ inclusion in the Inter-America series, where the book now sits alongside other contributions to the growing academic subdiscipline of border studies, which since its inception in the 1980s has always welcomed first-person accounts of borderland identity.

As an account of the ways homelessness, poverty, and addiction fuel the use of narcotics and societal decay in the Mexican urban landscape, Border Junkies is a complement to other series titles, like El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the U.S.-Mexican Border (2004) by Mark Cameron Edberg, about the rise of the narcotrafficker as larger-than-life “social bandit” and cultural icon. Other books in the series address the spate of brutal murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, sex workers in Tijuana, and changing enforcement of immigration laws along the Texas-Mexico border.

Border Junkies also complements Campbell’s own, 2009, Texas-press book (not in the Inter-America series), the highly regarded Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches From the Streets of El Paso and Juárez. Based on Campbell’s 20 years of treading the same streets as Comar, it includes oral histories of drug traffickers and law-enforcement officers to cast light on what makes that spot on the border the drug cartels’ prime conduit of cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines for U.S. consumption.

Comar says his hope was to explain some of the dynamics of that trafficking, but also to advance understanding of the obsessive nature of addiction and consumption and to promote recovery programs and keep them alive “at all costs.”

Expanding his journal into a book certainly helped him to survive, he says by phone. “Being in recovery and looking at the whole story was therapeutic,” he says. “I always thought, ‘Wow, if I could write a book about this, it would be a pretty good story.’”

He was able to write Border Junkies, he says, because “I had an awakening where I realized I’ve got one more shot at life. I benefited from the work ethic I learned as a truck driver in the moving business. I’ve been able to take that and apply it to my schoolwork. It hasn’t failed me yet.”