Knew a guy years ago named Bill that at one point in his drinking career hung out in the Denver version of skid row. He and his drinking buddies lived in a piss-in-the-sink residential hotel and used to drink Sterno after squeezing it through a t-shirt. One day his best friend got his disability check from the military (a fairly large sum from what I can gather) and Bill sees him walking through the hotel lobby carry several cases of Sterno. Dude was dead the next day.
You can polish a junkie, but he's still a junkie.