Gately named as addict first, burglar second
Don Gately was a twenty-seven-year-old oral narcotics addict [...] a more or less professional burglar; and he was, himself, unclean and violated.
Context
The introduction puts the disease ahead of the trade in the very grammar of the sentence — oral narcotics addict first, professional burglar second — and closes by turning the burglary's residue back onto him: he is himself the unclean and violated thing his work leaves behind. The Demerol-and-Talwin appetite is the engine; the burglary is only its drive train.