Leaving Dirty Jersey

'When I was eighteen years old and a drug addict, I left my home and upper-middle-class, educated family in Princeton, NJ, having been sent to Riverside, California, ostensibly for rehabilitation.

Instead, I ended up spending almost exactly one year shooting crystal meth and living as a petty criminal...' "Leaving Dirty Jersey" is the compellingly crafted tale of James Salant's descent into crystal meth addiction.

Written at the age of only twenty-two, this memoir chronicles his year-long addiction with complete honesty and heartbreaking candour.

Brought up in a stable, middle-class family, the second son of two therapists, he was introduced to heroin at seventeen by his brother Joe.

A spell in rehab introduced him to a bunch of ex-convicts, and he soon fell into the thuggish, drifting lifestyle of meth addiction. He details the specific behaviour induced by using crystal meth - 'sketching' is meth-induced paranoia, 'tweaking' is becoming compulsively enthralled in an activity that can be as simple as tying a shoe or finding a vein, and 'rooting' is a form of tweaking that involves looking for something that doesn't exist - and skilfully weaves the scams and the psychoses into the narrative in a voice that is so open and authentic it's hard to believe he is still so young.

With graphic descriptions of life on crystal meth - the insatiable sex drive, the paranoia, the desperate need for more drugs to sustain the high - James' writing mimics the emotional detachment of the drug and the wired yet aimless life it induces.

It was to take a near-psychotic event to finally get him to clean up.

Given the nickname "Dirty Jersey", while living as a tough guy-junkie in California, James had it tattooed on the inside of his left arm.

There, it remains as a graphic and permanent reminder of his past life as a junkie.