Amore Tossico on AllMovie

The inhumanity of heroin in this 1983 film is not completely different from the soon-to-break AIDS epidemic, in that seduction disguises death within its pleasures, and death rarely comes immediately or painlessly. Drawn by boredom or pushed by the crush of an uncaring environment, a few teens become hooked on heroin in this story that is set in Ostia, a bleak Roman seaport, a wasteland of the industrial age. The teens have battered, black-and-blue arms that reflect their surroundings and their similarly mangled lives of prostitution and/or armed robbery. One teen convulses from a bad mix of cocaine (with the monument to the dead filmmaker Pasolini in the background -- he was killed in Ostia in 1975). While the dying teen is sped off to the hospital, her lover's fate is not much different than her own and only slightly more violent.