Any Lengths: the fear becomes the Substance, not the jail

The conversion's thesis, measured by an inversion of fear. Gately, who has done hard time and isn't afraid of a 90-day jail bit, is now afraid of exactly one thing — using — and specifically of a jail where "Demerol and Talwin and good old weed are almost easier to get" than outside. The old hierarchy of terror is flipped: the Sergeant at Arms (relapse, the Disease's patient enforcer) has replaced every other threat, and the man who once feared cages now fears only the chemical cage. "Any Lengths" is the recovery ideal cashed out as a reordered soul: he will accept jail, poverty, humiliation, anything, sooner than the one thing he used to organize his whole life around getting.