I thought cocaine was a fantastic drug. A wonder drug, like everybody else. It gave you [an] energy burst. You could stay awake for days on end, and it was just marvelous and I didn't think it was evil at all.

Life passes most people by while they're making grand plans for it.

Sometimes you're flush and sometimes you're bust, and when you're up, it's never as good as it seems, and when you're down, you never think you'll be up again, but life goes on.

Strange thing, when they arrested me for the pot, the federal agents, they said, "We're sorry, we really don't want to bust pot people but this is tied into a heroin operation and we have to arrest you."

After a while, the cocaine - I didn't have any friends. I was just alone and I didn't even like myself.

I thought heroin was evil and morally, myself, I thought that pot was okay. That it wasn't a bad thing and so therefore thought I wasn't doing a bad thing. I knew I was breaking the law but I thought that the law was wrong also. So I morally justified what I was doing.

That's a terrible price to pay because you loved life so much, with the intensity of a thousand suns, and the women and all of it - and then it's all taken away from you. You end up walking the hallways of always to a place called tedium and apathy, day after day after day. Years go by.