In the first pages of the Naked Lunch, William Burroughs draws a powerful description of the logic involved in the drug trade. He uses junk as a “generic term for opium and/or derivatives including all synthetics from demerol to palfium” (Burroughs 1959) and defines it as “the ultimate merchandise.” Indeed, the scheme he describes (see below) seems to be an exacerbated illustration of the logic involved in capitalism and the trade of commodities in general. The fact that he uses this term, junk, which also means any kind of object with no particular specificity, expresses his will of blurring the limits between this extreme products, and more banal ones.
I have seen the exact manner in which the junk virus operates through fifteen years of addiction. The pyramid of junk, one level eating the level below (it is no accident that junk higher-ups are always fat and the addict in the street is always thin) right up to the top or tops since there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world and all built on basic principles of monopoly:
1 Never give anything for nothing
2 Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait)
3 Always take everything back if you possibly can.The Pusher always get it all back. The addict needs more and more junk to maintain a human form…buy off the Monkey.
[…]
Junk is the ideal product…the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy… The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk.William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch (1959)
