Blowing Up a Joint

Amy Burton, as Author David Hulburd calls her in H Is for Heroin (Doubleday; $1.75), was a long-legged, golden-haired girl of 15 who was spending the summer in harmless idleness on the beach at "Coast City" (on the outskirts of Los Angeles) when she met Jocelyn. From Jocelyn, a 19-year-old senior, Amy learned to play hooky when high school opened; she also learned that "blowing up a joint" means smoking marijuana.

"One day," says Amy, "Jocelyn. and I rode around in Jocelyn's car and she started telling me all over again what kicks I would get out of blowing up a joint . . . We parked way down the other side of the abalone pier. She gave me the joint and I lit it. Yeah . . . I liked it. I had a ball real soon . . . It made me feel just good, I guess. Kind of silly-like . . . Then we had another and then we just rode around and goofed."

"You Know How It Is." Soon, Amy was a marijuana regular. Usually, boys bought the smokes for her, but every now & then she conned her accountant father or telephone-operator mother out of $10, and bought a few dozen of her own. "I guess I lied all the time," she say's. "I played it cool at home; I was real quiet and cagey. I didn't act odd, and they never thought anything was up; they never got hip . . . [I] used to be proud of lying."

After a while, Amy had something more to lie about. "I blew up joints for more'n a year before I ever fixed. Fixed is jolting, you know--taking a shot of H in the main line. H is heroin."

It was summer again, Jocelyn had been sent off to Women's Prison, and Amy had a new girl friend, Hortense. The two girls dropped in on friends who were having a heroin party. "We said we didn't want to jolt, but . . . you know how it is when a lot of kids are around; they all started to laugh ... I didn't have the money to buy a cap [shot] with. Danny said he'd give me one; he said it real quick. That's what they always do, any hype that wants to get you hooked so you'll score [buy] from him." Amy was hooked.

Amy was still only 16 when, by threats and cajolery, she won her parents' reluctant permission to marry Eddie Neale, who was all of 21 and a confirmed narcotics addict. Their routine was to spend $25 for a half-spoon of heroin, enough to make ten or twelve individual shots. They sold the shots for $5 apiece. But, confesses Amy, "even that didn't pay for all the jolting we did after we got married. Eddie was spending around $40 a day sometimes just for the junk for us to jolt with."

"I Haven't Any Lesson . . ." Amy does not remember just when they began to borrow money from her parents, but soon they were hopelessly in debt, and hopelessly enmeshed in the narcotics racket. Then they were arrested. Amy went to

Los Angeles' Juvenile Hall, where she was straightened out with mercifully few withdrawal symptoms. Eddie got 90 days. At 17, divorced, and with a court record of drug addiction, Amy says: "I haven't any 'lesson' to give other kids. If they read this story ... if that isn't a lesson enough, I don't know what is."

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