The shocking nightmare story of a black heroin addict

Trapped in the festering sore of a major American ghetto, a young man and his girlfriend—both attractive, talented, and full of promise—are inexorably pulled into the living death of the hardcore junkie. It is a horrifying world where addicts will do anything to get their next fix.

For twenty-three years of his young life, Donald Goines lived in the dark, despair-ridden world of the junkie. It started while he was doing military service in Korea and ended with his murder in his late thirties. He had worked up to a hundred-dollars-a-day habit—and out of the agonizing hell came Dopefiend.