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  • Published: 29 February 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448118342
  • Imprint: Ebury Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
Categories:

Leaving Dirty Jersey

A Crystal Meth Memoir




The extraordinary true story of a young man's descent into crystal meth addiction and his struggle to get clean

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. This resulted in a spell in rehab where he met a bunch of ex-convicts, and he soon fell into the thuggish, drifting lifestyle of meth addiction. It was to take a near-psychotic event to finally get him to clean up.

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. His voice is so open and authentic, it is hard to believe he is still so young.

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.

  • Published: 29 February 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448118342
  • Imprint: Ebury Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
Categories:

About the author

James Salant

James Salant has been clean for over two-and-a-half years. Since his release from a court-mandated stay at a rehabilitation program in Secaucus, New Jersey, he has lived in East Windsor, New Jersey, and worked as the Office Manager of Comprehensive Educational Resources, an educational consulting firm which manages the Thomas J. Rubino Academy. He is also a Floor Trainer at Momentum Fitness, a health club in Princeton.

Praise for Leaving Dirty Jersey

If prose were a mind-altering substance, James Salant would be your neighbourhood pusher. Lord knows, the man will make an addict of you

Koren Zailckas, author of SMASHED: GROWING UP A DRUNK GIRL

Leaving Dirty Jersey is a harrowing, pitiful account of one guy's demise into full scale addiction and insanity ... Up there with Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries for drug rites of passage books

Blowback Magazine

Salant's gritty portrayal of his descent from all-American college boy to rehab-skiving hood rat hits an untapped vein, and he delivers a very readable hit

thelondonpaper

Like watching a car crash, the gruesome details - drug deals gone wrong, violence and seedy motels - make the book compulsive reading

Big Issue

Completely addictive ... brilliant

Word Magazine

Normally I hate to tell anyone what to do, or what to think, or read. But I honestly believe every parent should read this book. And every teenager on the verge of a drug trip should read it. And everyone else, too. It's that good, that important

Dava Sobel, author of LONGITUDE