"Some people think that because they have been addicted to drugs, that they've somehow earned a platform to preach to drug users. They are mistaken. " There's no preaching, sugarcoating, or glamorizing in Tony O'Neill's Digging the Vein. The novel is an unrelenting and brutal retelling of his experience as a heroin addict living in LA. Gothamist sat down with the young talent who now lives in New York, to discuss addiction, recovery, and freedom.

You preface Digging The Vein by thanking, "All the junkies, thieves, whores, malcontents, fuck-ups, burnouts, psychos, and drug dealers," who you say are, "The last truly free men and women on this stinking cop and politician-ridden planet," and that, "It's time for everyone to Just Say No to the War on Drugs." What makes this group you described "truly free" and what do you think should be done with The War on Drugs?
Well, as far as the war on drugs goes, it should go on the scrap heap with all of the other wrongheaded, failed experiments of our time. We should save a place for it on the pile, right between eugenics and fascism. We could maybe replace it with a war on stupidity, because stupidity is a far bigger problem in this country than people getting high. If we took the money that we are spending chasing drug dealers, busting kids with 20 dollars of heroin in their pockets, and spraying marijuana, opium and coca crops in foreign countries, we could establish universal health care in this country. Everybody knows the war on drugs is an un-winnable one. If junkies could buy their shit legally, without inflated black market prices, have access to clean needles and have easy access to medical treatment when the time comes that they want to quit… well, for a start they wouldn’t be in your apartment rummaging through your drawers looking for money to score with.

The only way to stop people from getting high is to make society so great, so perfect, that the idea of getting high would be silly. To make life so wonderful for ordinary people that they don’t feel the need to smoke crack until their eyes bleed. But of course, instead of a noble idea that that, we’ve decided to take people who have a medical problem, criminalize them, and lock them up.

Freedom is a mental thing. When you are high enough that you aren’t hungry anymore, you are free. When you are high enough that seeing the president’s dead-rodent face on the television doesn’t make you want to smash your fist through the screen, you are free. When you are high enough that the total absurdity of our lives in this country, on this planet, is not powerful enough to drive you completely insane, then you are free. When you live completely outside of the moral constraints of acceptable society, then you are truly free. The lifestyle is hard, and sometimes it will not feel like freedom, but even a man in a prison cell can be free if he is free in his head. Being free of all of the day-to-day bullshit that grinds us down in America is the best kind of freedom there is.

Having stopped using heroin, have you abstained from other drugs as well?
No. I’m not in AA. That was half the reason I couldn’t get clean when I tried it that way. If you tell someone who has spent the last 7 years injecting heroin and cocaine daily that once they stop that that’s it, no booze, not even a joint to take the edge off, then getting clean becomes an insurmountable task. If I tried it that way I’d be dead by now. When you do things with that mentality, you are going to fail because that beer you had hanging out with your friends is considered as terrible an infraction as smoking some crack, or doing meth, or whatever your REAL problem was. So then it’s real easy to say, “Well, I already fucked up. I'd better go have some of the good stuff now”

You offer many critiques in Digging The Vein of drug treatment and rehabilitation programs. What do you think would be better ways to help people work their way out of addiction and how can treatment conditions be improved?
We need to get away from this idea of addiction as a disease, or as a spiritual sickness. It is neither. Addiction is like malaria. It is simply a matter of exposure. The cult like aspects of the 12-steps teaches either complete dependence, for the rest of your life on the 12-step lifestyle, or total failure. I am a total failure by 12-step standards, yet I am happy, productive, a good father. But the alcohol I drank last night, or whatever I do for recreation, marks me as an ‘addict’ still. Getting clean is a medical matter. Some people do not want to get clean, they are not sick of the drug, they are just sick of the lifestyle. In a way, prohibition creates the boogey man of the ‘junkie’ not drugs. If addicts had access to cheap, clean pharmaceutical heroin they would not be living in the gutter or mugging old ladies for dope money. They’d be holding down jobs, marriages, all of that apple pie bullshit. If people want to get clean, give them a bed, a medical detox; maybe turn them on to something else. Yoga. Boxing. Art. Just keep God out of it. We have plenty of churches in this country; we don’t need them in our hospital wards too.

And I want to clarify addiction. Addiction is a physical and mental dependence on a drug. Addiction is not Lindsay Lohan passing out in her car, drunk. Addiction is serious shit. I know that celebrities use going to rehab for a kind of mea culpa for getting drunk and making an ass of themselves. I mean if you’d believe the media, everybody who has ever done a drug is an addict. That is a gross oversimplification. It takes a lot of years, and a lot of drugs to make an addict. Lindsay Lohan can get back to me when she’s dug around in her femoral vein trying to shoot dope before she can talk to me about addiction. That girl is no more an addict than she is a singer.

What is the projects you're working on with Jason Peter and how'd you get involved with him?
I am currently co-writing the memoirs of NFL player Jason Peter, who had a distinguished college career at Nebraska, before signing with the Carolina Panthers. He was out of the game due to injuries very soon after, with a crippling addiction to painkillers, crack and heroin. This book is coming out on St Martins press, and rather than being a traditional sports memoir is something else altogether - I am actually writing his life in his voice, warts and all, and this is going to be something pretty special I think. It's hopefully out spring or fall 2008.

The book is currently a joy to write. His agent, and then Jason himself read “Digging The Vein” and we decided to collaborate on the book. Jason wanted to tell his story in a different way, far removed from your typical crash and burn redemption story, or bullshit tell all sports expose. Jason is a fascinating guy, a very cool person, and after we met face to face I walked away itching to write the book. I have pretty much a free reign on the voice. I am working from taped transcripts and email conversations with Jason. He reads what I have written and he gives me notes. But the marvelous and rare thing about this is that Jason trusts me, and his job is to really fact check and make sure that I didn’t screw up the order of events.

Writing in Jason’s voice is interesting, because he has a very distinct way of telling a story and I wanted to capture that. So the story is quite novelistic, in how it reads. There’s no “Jason Peter was born in blah, blah, blah…” stuff in there. Its all real shit: the thrill and the physical impact of playing in the NFL, the bloodcurdling surgeries, the money, the adoration, and the drugs. I mean look: Jason was a professional footballer. I was someone who played in Indie bands and bummed around the world. But we have a deep connection in our shared addictions. I don’t have to get into character to write about Jason really. I instinctively know his character because I share a lot of personality traits with him.

Is "Down and Out On Murder Mile" a continuation of the story of the unnamed protagonist in Digging the Vein?
Yes. And I think it will be he last time I write about that period of my life. It starts in LA, and them moves to London and is a description of a period of my life marked by extreme poverty, a tanked musical career, methadone treatment, the mental unraveling of my second wife, and then, you know, a happy ending. And a talking dog who solves crimes with me. (Well, not really). It really is a love story. Meeting my current wife, and the birth of our daughter. It’s probably the most intense thing I have ever written. There is also “Songs From The Shooting Gallery” which is the most personal thing I have written. A lot of those poems were written as it was all going on. I found a lot of them in old notebooks with bloodstains on them; I mean I’d literally be cracked out in the bathroom taking notes at time. That one comes out on Burning Shore Press , on June 11.

Please share your strangest "only in New York" story.
Hm, there’s so many. There’s a guy who stands in my neighborhood, in Astoria, 365 days out of the year on the same street corner. He just stands there, looking up at the sky. I pass him pretty much every day. I have become convinced he is some kind of mystic. A yogi. In the sun, the rain, the snow he just stands there and waits. For what, I don’t know. And then around 9pm he is gone. He puts in at least 8 hours a day doing this.

He never says a word. He doesn’t ask for change. I once saw a guy offer him change, and he refused, by silently shaking his head. The guy looked so confused, and he shoved the coins back in his pocket and scurried off.

One day last summer, when it must have been 90 degrees outside I was walking past and a woman was coming out of the bodega across the road and she walked over to him as I approached. She had an ice-cold can of 7-Up in her hand. It was glistening with condensation. It was making ME thirsty. She said: “I bought this for you,” and handed it to him.

He didn’t take it. I slowed up to listen. Then I heard him speak for the first time. He said, “No, thank you.”

She stood there looking confused, and then he added, apologetically, “I don’t like 7-Up”

Which New Yorker do you most admire?
There are so many great New Yorkers. I mean, most of the arts world has passed through here at some point. I want to say Joey Ramone, or Johnny Thunders, or Christopher Walken, or… well every person I choose I’m gonna feel bad about the ones I didn’t choose. So I’ll say Lou Reed, because not only is he a New Yorker, but he is also someone who actively shaped my perception of New York through his songs. I mean, you hear Lou Reed, you think of New York. Even though my favorite album of his was the decidedly un-New York “Berlin”.

Given the opportunity, how would you change New York?
I would lower the rents and property prices so that people other than rich kids can move into the cool neighborhoods. I would tax the fuck out of the extremely rich and stop the poor from paying taxes. I would open up free health care clinics. I would replace the NYPD with the cast of the police academy movies. I would put William s Burroughs, Dennis Cooper and Dan Fante on the required reading list for schools. I would lower the legal drinking age to something civilized like 18. I would tear down all of those ugly NYU buildings. I would make Coney Island a historic landmark. I would ban ironic mullets and Shania Twain songs. I would improve the quality of our radio stations. Amsterdam style coffee houses replacing Starbucks. Replace the MTA’s staff with friendly people. Stop anybody whose ambition it is to be a politician from entering into politics. Lou Reed for mayor of New York. All art galleries and museums subsidized by government and free admission for all.

Under what circumstance have you thought about leaving New York?
When my neighbors drive me crazy. When I see Rudy Giuliani on the TV trying to be president. When I see the contents of the New York Post and the Daily News. When politicians try to ban words. When there are mice in the walls and my landlord doesn’t have to do anything about it. I mean sure that stuff makes me think about leaving, but then I think, “Where would I go?” Unless I could find an island completely uninhabited by other living people, somebody will always be driving me crazy. That’s life, I guess.

What's your idea of a perfect day of recreation in New York?
I start of the day with lunch and a Texas sized cherry bomb with a float at Dallas BBQ. Then myself, my wife and my daughter, who is mysteriously behaving like a little saint all day go to Coney Island where we take in the sideshows, and ride Dante’s Inferno, and the Cyclone, the Hell Hole, The Break Dancer, and then we walk on the beach as the fireworks go off. Later, off for some drinks at the Holiday on St Marks (without the little one, of course).