Essam Youssef’s - "A 1/4 Gram"

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Egypt's Gilded Teens Get Hooked on Heroin, Self-Destruct: Books
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Interview by Daniel Williams

Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Fast cars, loose women and drug highs are things most people don't associate with Egypt, land of Pharaohs, crowded mosques and worshipers who pray in the streets.

Yet these vices lie at the core of Essam Youssef's "A 1/4 Gram," a fictionalized account of the real-life disintegration of middle-class kids hooked on heroin.

This is a readable saga of degradation told mostly in dialogue and slangy banter, even if it's too long at 568 pages. The 2008 Arabic-language edition is in its 22nd printing -- almost unheard of in the Mideast's most populous country. An English translation is now available for the first time.

"I think people, especially the young, like it because it's written in an authentic voice," Youssef says in an interview at Montana Studios, his film production company in Cairo's upscale Heliopolis district. "The characters enjoy drugs even as people die around them. I don't try to hide that. It's the first novel that looks at the problem from the addict's side."

As we spoke, Youssef jotted down my criticisms with a ballpoint pen. A nearby wall held a poster of "Scarface," the 1983 Al Pacino movie about another drug-scarred life.

Set in the 1980s and '90s, "A 1/4 Gram" tells the story of six school chums hooked on hashish, pills and heroin as they approach adulthood. Egypt had just opened up to Western consumer imports, ushering in a revolution that brought cars, appliances, clothing -- and drugs -- to an eager middle and upper class. For anyone unfamiliar with Egypt, the book opens a window on hedonism and irresponsibility among the comfortable classes.

Indulgent Parents

As teenagers, the boys in "A 1/4 Gram" are indulged. If they do their schoolwork, their parents reward them with a car. Allowances are plentiful. Girls hold their hands and sympathize even as their boyfriends self-destruct. Police let them off because they come from well-to-do families.

Before sitting down with Youssef, I mentioned his novel to three Cairo friends who came of age at around the time "A 1/4 Gram" takes place. They all said that they knew someone who had overdosed and that heroin had become an epidemic in some upscale neighborhoods.

In the novel, the addicts steal, lie and cajole parents and friends into keeping up a flow of cash for heroin. They seem oblivious to their surroundings, to the uneasy blend of wealth and destitution that is Egypt.

Death and Overdoses

As the youths get older, an occasional death or harrowing O.D. doesn't deter them. In one memorable scene, a friend rifles the pocket of a comrade who has overdosed in order to grab packs of heroin before doctors arrive to save him. Only one character eventually goes straight.

Youssef, 44, says the book is timely because the scourge goes on, except that cocaine has replaced heroin as today's fashionable drug.

"In the West, people may think we're riding camels in the streets and praying all the time, but Egypt has the vices of anywhere else," he says.

About 8 percent of Egypt's population of about 80 million and 12 percent of school kids, mostly boys, use drugs ranging from marijuana and hash to amphetamines, ecstasy and heroin, according to Egypt's National Council for Fighting and Treating Addiction. Hashish is smoked at all levels of society -- in nightclubs along Pyramids Road, on sailboats and motorboats cruising the Nile River, at weddings and even in movie theaters.

"It's as cheap as cigarettes," Youssef says.

Does his book just make drugs overly attractive, I ask, by linking them to prosperity, consumerism and sex?

"I don't believe in preaching," he says. "For the party to crash at the end, there has to be a party."

"A 1/4 Gram" is from Montana Studios in Cairo (568 pages, 100 Egyptian pounds, US$18.50).

(Daniel Williams writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the reporter on the story: Daniel Williams in Cairo at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... XbsURMtXIg