Opium (32 page)

Gradually, heroin usage spread first from New York to other eastern seaboard cities, then westwards. By 1930, heroin was to be found nation-wide. Furthermore, from about 1925, the pattern of addiction began to alter with large numbers of negro workers migrating north. To counter their misery and poverty in the cold, northern cities, they played jazz, sang the blues and used heroin.

By the 1920s, heroin was being injected. At first, it was injected subcutaneously or intramuscularly but it was not long before mainlining became the mode. There are several reasons suggested for the popularity of the hypodermic but the primary one is the lowering standard of heroin purity caused by the success of legislation on production and by the selling methods employed by Italians who took over distribution from Jewish gangs, leading to an increase in price and higher levels of adulteration. The heroin was cut with finely ground sugar, milk powder or talc to give it bulk but this reduced its effect so any method which could release a dose into the system quickly and thoroughly was eagerly followed. By 1939, street heroin was only 27.5 per cent pure.

Addict statistics may have been inflated but the problem was serious. The Italians were ruthlessly efficient. Some peddlers, eager to extend their customer base, were reported to resort to giving free initial samples which acted as loss-leaders: once an addict was hooked the demand was established. This creation of a market was not as widespread as common myth would have it although crime rates started to build where there were addict-rich communities.

Scandals in Hollywood did nothing to allay public apprehension concerning drugs: if the popular heroes of the silver screen were susceptible, then no one was safe.

Surviving as much on calumny as celluloid, Hollywood was a quidnunc's dream and several high-profile drug scandals provided good copy. Olive Thomas, one of Ziegfeld's most beautiful showgirls and a rising actress, was found poisoned in Paris in September 1920. It came as a shock when it was found she had been obtaining drugs from a US Army captain, called Spaulding, who was a heroin and cocaine dealer. Her death prompted an outcry, culminating in Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago issuing a pamphlet entitled
The Danger of Hollywood: A Warning to Young Girls.
Two years later, Wallace Reid, Paramount's main star, was committed to a sanatorium. Addicted to morphine, first taken at the instigation of a fellow actor to counteract exhaustion whilst filming
Forever
in 1920, he died in the sanatorium in January 1923, his addiction and his health broken. The next film his wife Florence made was called
Human Wreckage:
it was an exposé of the drug trade and prohibited in Britain because of its vivid scenes of drug taking.

The same actor who hooked Wallace Reid, who worked on the Sennett lot, was pusher to the stars. Known as The Count, he also addicted Mabel Normand, Barbara La Marr, Alma Rubens and Juanita Hansen. Barbara La Marr died in 1926, aged thirty, of an overdose of opiates and cocaine: the studio put it about she died of anorexia. Alma Rubens tried to break her habit but she was physically too degenerated to survive: she died in 1931, aged thirty-three. Juanita Hansen was comparatively fortunate. She kicked her heroin habit but lost her career, later founding the Juanita Hansen Foundation which crusaded for doctors to wage war against addiction.

The US government made a number of attempts to counteract the growing problem. A Committee on Drug Addiction was set up in 1921: the Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act of 1922 increased penalties and established the Federal Narcotics Control Board. Congress effectively outlawed all domestic use and production of heroin in 1924 and, three years later, formed the Bureau of Prohibition, the commissioner being made responsible for enforcing the Harrison Act, previously the responsibility of the Internal Revenue Service. In another three years, responsibility was passed to the Justice Department which inaugurated the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), not only to enforce the Harrison Act but to provide international liaison and co-operation and delegates to conferences.

All these changes had little effect. Heroin addiction did not substantially fall and smuggling continued as before.

Such was the problem that, by 1930, 35 per cent of all convicts in America were indicted under the Harrison Act. The Public Health Service instituted federal hospitalisation of addicts in narcotic ‘farms' at Fort Worth, Texas, and Lexington, Kentucky. Many in the medical world considered addiction was the result of personality disorders akin to a form of insanity, requiring compensatory institutionalisation. Accordingly, these ‘farms' were austere premises built like prisons, staffed by warder-like nurses and with régimes to match.

With hindsight, it can be argued the Harrison Act was positively harmful. It forced addicts across the legal divide, criminalising them and causing them to seek underworld drug supplies. It also consolidated the connection between the addict and the criminal which had always been there but was weak in the face of a legitimate or semi-legitimate drugs trade. In the eyes of the public, the act tarred all addicts with the same brush, be they down-and-out petty criminals or members of the establishment. It can further be argued, at the time of the Act, drug use had reached a peak and was beginning to fall naturally, affected by the problems of prescribing morphine and the development of alternative medicines. The Act exacerbated, even exaggerated, the situation by giving drugs the status of illegality, suggesting the problem to be greater than it was and providing criminals with a new commodity.

Not only the US government aimed to eradicate addiction: so did others who, in the 1920s, sought their goal through fear and near public hysteria. One of these was Richard P. Hobson, a pious, Prohibitionist zealot who, once liquor was banned, redirected his attention to dope. Described as a person of virtually unlimited moral indignation, he was not interested in preventative measures. He wanted a crusade. To this end, Hobson promoted the idea that heroin propelled addicts into the most heinous acts. Broadcasting nation-wide in 1928, he referred to addicts as criminal zombies, the Living Dead. Addiction, he declared, was like leprosy but not as remediable and far more readily contracted, addicts being carriers of this disease which, he went on, threatened the whole of mankind with violence and crime. The threat he perceived was genuine enough and Hobson's rabid zeal only further alienated addicts. It was no wonder attitudes hardened and, by the outbreak of the Second World War, where there had previously been a variety of addicts from the southern lady to the Chinese coolie, the saloon gambler to the street gang member, there was now only one – the despised; depraved and villainous junkie.

The Second World War greatly disrupted international trafficking and many thousands of addicts were forced to undergo cold turkey. The FBN found its workload shrinking for the addict population dropped from around 200,000 to 20,000 by 1945.

As the war took hold in Europe and the Far East, heroin supplies came mostly from south of the border in Mexico. It is said enterprising Chinese from San Francisco, realising poppies would probably grow well in Mexico, took seeds to farmers in the hills of Sinaloa province, inland from the cities of Culiacán and Mazatlán on the Gulf of California, who cultivated them. Mexican heroin was rough stuff, never over 50 per cent pure (and sometimes as impure as 30 per cent) and a dirty brown in colour. To make it go a long way, the dealers adulterated it by as much as 97 per cent with sugar or milk powder. Morphine was cut by 35 per cent with novocaine, baking soda, powdered boric acid and talc. Some dealers sold counterfeit heroin which had no result in the addict whatsoever and a good many, faced with virtually non-existent supplies of opiates, turned to such drugs as marijuana.

Between 1945 and 1970, the penalties for drug dealing in the USA underwent a series of sea changes. At first, capital punishments were levelled: the federal penalty for the sale of heroin by someone over eighteen to a buyer under eighteen was death at the jury's discretion. Drug dealers were sent to the electric chair or the gas chamber but this penalty and others created a strong reaction in society and the onus of responsibility for the control of drugs was passed to doctors and psychotherapists. The threat of Death Row had not had the desired effect. Addiction rates steadily rose, fuelling crime against property. With a new faith in medical and psychological treatment, penalties under federal laws were reduced to mandatory minimum gaol sentences, obligatory participation in detoxification programmes, flexible sentences and even the maintenance of addiction under medical supervision.

The demographic nature of addiction altered, too. In the immediate post-war years to 1950, there was a sharp increase in heroin abuse in the black and Latino ghettos of northern cities to which southern blacks had migrated over the previous two decades and to which Latin Americans had flocked during the war. This development so worried the FBN that, in 1951, a mandatory minimum sentence of two years was instituted for a first conviction of narcotics possession.

This minimum sentence entered the statute books just as the dread of Communism and Soviet aggression was growing to the mania of McCarthyism. It was a natural progression of Senator McCarthy's rabid zeal that narcotics be linked to the Communist conspiracy.

The FBN associated China's need for foreign currency with her determination to destroy Western society and the trafficking of heroin into the USA. Claiming most heroin in North America was of Chinese origin, the US government frequently complained in the UN. Harry Anslinger, Director of the FBN, declared in 1954 that the Chinese had a twenty-year plan to finance political activities and spread addiction in the USA. Although he continued to voice this opinion into the 1960s, he was wrong. FBN reports in the 1960s showed China was neither exporting any opium or opiates nor producing them, except for her exact pharmaceutical requirement.

By 1965, the heroin epidemic had spread into suburban middle-class neighbourhoods. The post war ‘baby boomers' had come of age, the population in the 15–24 age group increasing by 50 per cent over five years. It was these white middle-class youngsters who began experimenting with heroin on the campuses and street corners of America. The culture of permissiveness, free love, pot and rock ‘n' roll promoted experimentation: the catchphrase was ‘be cool'. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of heroin users rose from approximately 50,000 to 500,000.

Many of the new youth sought heroes: most found them in sports personalities, political activists and pop stars but for a significant number, particularly those with a modicum of education, the hero was a writer – Jack Kerouac.

An American of French-Canadian and Mohawk-Caughnawaga Indian extraction, Kerouac was the archetypal addict writer who described himself as a strange, solitary, crazy, Catholic mystic. A university drop-out with a good education and a sharp intellect, he was a rebellious drifter who wandered America like a hobo, rejecting, commenting upon and criticising the safe foundations of the American dream. He started his drug career with benzedrine then moved to marijuana. When he fell under the influence of another American writer, William Burroughs, he was introduced not only to the underworld characters of his stories and poetry but also to morphine and heroin. It was Burroughs who called his apartment a ‘shooting gallery' – his friends could shoot up there: the phrase entered every addict's dictionary. Later, in Mexico, Kerouac experimented with mescaline, peyote, and goof-balls (barbiturates): he was also an alcoholic.

Most of Kerouac's innovative writing was done under the influence of drugs. He abandoned accepted literary techniques, turning to hallucinatory and stream-of-consciousness styles, using words as jazz musicians used musical phrases. His novel,
On the Road,
was published in 1957 and it is arguably the most influential American novel of the twentieth century. The hero is a young man, Dean Moriarty, a foot-loose traveller who became the archetypal American hero, a spiritual extension of the pioneers of old who lived free. Criticised for its hedonism, degeneracy and disregard for established social mores, young people saw it as an adventure. It started a whole new youth culture of which drugs were an accepted part: it might be said to have caused the birth of the modern drug ‘culture.'

The drastic rise in addiction in the 1960s was met with a massive programme for the building of mental health centres throughout America which heralded new attitudes. The mental health establishment had a different view of addiction from the one held by the FBN: addiction was a physical or psychological disease requiring treatment and, as law enforcement had failed, it was perhaps time to try a new approach. Gradually, it was accepted that crime and drug abuse were widespread throughout society, cutting across class and ethnic boundaries and that the real criminals were the pushers, dealers and organised crime bosses, not the addicts.

Outpatient clinics offering methadone maintenance created a favourable response to the medical treatment of heroin addiction and led to the 1963 Presidential Commission on Narcotic and Drug Abuse which supported relaxing mandatory minimum sentences and increasing funding for research into all aspects of narcotic and drug abuse. Three years later, the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control of the Food and Drug Administration was set up under the umbrella of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Then, in 1968, both it and the FBN were abolished and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) established with international responsibilities and contacts. Funding was increased, agents were trained and a long-term programme of enforcement and regulation begun. New legislation, such as the Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and the Controlled Substances Act, strengthened the resolve of the authorities.

In June 1971, President Nixon launched a war on drugs campaign, the USA leading a large scale offensive against opium producers and traffickers. In a long, televised speech, Nixon said, ‘America has the largest number of heroin addicts of any nation in the world … The problem has assumed the dimension of a national emergency … If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us.' Drugs rose to the top of the political agenda. Famous public figures joined the crusade, including Elvis Presley who, by now, was probably America's best-known (yet – at the time – least realised) junkie.