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On the Road Drugs and Alcohol Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #13

It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere. I didn’t know what was happening to me, and I suddenly realized it was only the tea that we were smoking; Dean had bought some in New York. It made me think that everything was about to arrive - the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever. (II.4.18)

Although Sal recognizes in Dean a constant and consistent madness, he chalks up his own momentary madness to drugs or alcohol.

Quote #14

That was the way we greeted each other after four years; Jane used to live with my wife and me in New York. "And is Galatea Dunkel here?" I asked. Jane was still looking for her fire; in those days she ate three tubes of Benzedrine paper a day. Her face, once plump and Germanic and pretty, had become stony and red and gaunt. She had caught polio in New Orleans and limped a little. (II.6.30)

Sal does recognize the detrimental effects of drugs on his friends.

Quote #15

Poor Bull came home in his Texas Chevy and found his house invaded by maniacs; but he greeted me with a nice warmth I hadn’t seen in him for a long time. He had bought this house in New Orleans with some money he had made growing black-eyed peas in Texas with an old college schoolmate whose father, a mad-paretic, had died and left a fortune. Bull himself only got fifty dollars a week from his own family, which wasn’t too bad except that he spent almost that much per week on his drug habit - and his wife was also expensive, gobbling up about ten dollars’ worth of benny tubes a week. Their food bill was the lowest in the country; they hardly ever ate; nor did the children - they didn’t seem to care. (II.6.32)

Drug use isn’t related to money problems for Sal alone, but for Jane and Bull Lee as well.