vicemag:

We all know that pumping heroin into your veins turns you into a phenomenal artist. Basquiat? Cobain? Burroughs? Have you seen the shit they were putting out before they started using? Of course you have, because it was put on your high school syllabus to teach you that you’ll never be able to create real art without a smack habit. But one group of artists your school books might not have mentioned are the dealers who use their own graphics to beautify their heroin baggies. Kind of like acid tab art, I guess, only more sinister and likely to kill you.

Dequincey Jynxie is a female heroin user who runs a blog of the same name. It’s basically a photo archive of all the various heroin stamps floating around the Brooklyn and Manhattan areas, with reviews of the product itself so that other users have a real-time directory of what’s going to make them nod off into a state of blissful, introspective somnolence, and what’s going to leave them puking water and bile for hours. By the way, I’m pretty certain Dequincey Jynxie is an allusion to Thomas de Quincey, and not her real name. That’d be too heavy a self-fulfilling prophecy to heap on a kid.

VICE: Hey Jynxie. What’s the story behind your heroin stamp archive blog?
Dequincey Jynxie: Well, I was cleaning out my room, disposing of various trash and paraphernalia, when I found a variety of old stamps I’d tossed aside and decided I wanted to document them somehow. At first it was just images, but I added the reviews as it grew, almost as a notation to myself in case I came across something in the future. I started to save bags en masse, but eventually it got to be too much, as I was looking at a $30,000 pile of glassines to keep them all in, which probably could have paid for grad school or a sailboat. Fuck.

What is it about the art on heroin bags that you love so much?
My background is in fine art, and I worked as a mass market designer for a while, so I was always amused and excited by the branding. I also wanted to keep tabs on the quality of the product, especially if something was particularly good, bad, or just dangerous, so the site could work as a form of harm reduction.

Continue reading: The Art of Heroin Bags

A Little Afternoon Read.