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   Heroin addicts, New York, photographed by Bill Eppridge
   VIEW GALLERY | 9 PHOTOS
   Caption from LIFE. Her arms around Johnny and his brother, Bro -- also
   an addict -- Karen lies hopelessly on a hotel bed.Bill Eppridge—The
   LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
   Heroin addicts, New York, photographed by Bill Eppridge
   Needle Park, LIFE magazine, Feb. 26, 1965
   Needle Park, LIFE magazine, Feb. 26, 1965
   Needle Park, LIFE magazine, Feb. 26, 1965
   Needle Park, LIFE magazine, Feb. 26, 1965
   Needle Park, LIFE magazine, Feb. 26, 1965
   Needle Park, LIFE magazine, Feb. 26, 1965
   Needle Park, LIFE magazine, Feb. 26, 1965
   Needle Park, LIFE magazine, Feb. 26, 1965
   Caption from LIFE. Her arms around Johnny and his brother, Bro -- also
   an addict -- Karen lies hopelessly on a hotel bed.
   ... VIEW MORE
   1 of 9
   LIFE Photo Essay

'Two Lives Lost to Heroin': A Harrowing, Early Portrait of Addicts

   Ben Cosgrove
   Updated: Mar 04, 2015 2:48 PM UTC | Originally published: Oct 03, 2013

   'We are animals in a world no one knows'

   In February 1965, LIFE magazine published an extraordinary photo essay
   on two New York City heroin addicts, John and Karen. Photographed by
   Bill Eppridge, the pictures — and the accompanying article, reported
   and written by LIFE associate editor James Mills — were part of a
   two-part series on narcotics in the United States. A sensitive,
   clear-eyed and harrowing chronicle of, as LIFE phrased it, "two lives
   lost to heroin," Eppridge's pictures shocked the magazine's readers and
   brought the sordid, grim reality of addiction into countless American
   living rooms.

   To this day, Eppridge's photo essay remains among the most admired and,
   for some, among the most controversial that LIFE ever published. His
   pictures and Mills' reporting, meanwhile, formed the basis for the 1971
   movie, Panic in Needle Park, which starred Al Pacino and Kitty Winn as
   addicts whose lives spin inexorably out of control.

   Here, on the heels of the sobering news that heroin-related deaths
   quadrupled in the U.S. in the last three years, LIFE.com presents
   Eppridge's "Needle Park" photo essay in its entirety, as it appeared in
   LIFE — a portrait of two young people who have become, as they
   themselves put it, "animals in a world no one knows."

   [See more of Bill Eppridge's work.]
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