New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

Eric C. Schneider, “Smack: Heroin and the American City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

When I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music bands was The Velvet Underground. They were from the mean streets of New York City (The Doors were from the soft parade of L.A….); they hung out with Andy Warhol (The Beatles hung out with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi…); they had a female drummer (The Grateful Dead had two drummers, but that still didn’t help…); and, of course, they did heroin. Or at least they wrote a famous song about it. We did not do heroin, but we thought that those who did–like Lou Reed and the rest–were hipper than hip. I imagine we would have done it if there had been any around (thank God for small favors). We thought we had discovered something new. But as Eric C. Schneider points out in his marvelous Smack: Heroin and the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), the conjunction of music, heroin, and cool was hardly an invention of my generation. The three came together in the 1940s, when smack-using bebop players (think Charlie Parker) taught the “Beat Generation” that heroin was hip. Neither was my generation the last to succumb to a heroin fad. The triad of music, heroin, and cool united again in the 1990s, when drug-addled pop-culture icons such as Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), and Calvin Klein (of “heroin chic” fame) taught “Generation X” the same lesson. History, or at least the history of heroin, repeats itself. For white, middle-class folks like me heroin chic was an episode, a rebellious moment in an otherwise “normal” American life. But as Schneider makes clear, the passage of heroin from cultural elites to the population at large was not always so benign, particularly in the declining inner-cities of the 1960s and 1970s. Here heroin had nothing to do with being cool and everything to do with earning a living and escaping reality. For millions of impoverished, hopeless, urban-dwelling hispanics and blacks, heroin was a paycheck and a checkout. The drug helped destroy the people in the inner-city, and thus the inner-city itself. In response to the “heroin epidemic” of the 1960s and 1970s, the government launched the first war on drugs, focusing its energy on “pushers.” But there were no “pushers” because–and this is the greatest insight in a book full of great insights–pushing was not the way heroin use spread, either among middle-class college kids or the down-and-out of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. No one pushed heroin on anyone. Rather, users taught their friends how to use; in turn, those friends–now users–taught their friends, and so on. Heroin stealthily spread through personal networks. The only part of the process that was visible was the result: in the case of suburban college kids, bad grades and rehab; in the case of poor urban hispanics and blacks, crime and incarceration. Not surprisingly, when the heroin “epidemic” ended, it was not due to the war on drugs. Heroin simply fell out of fashion, in this case being replaced by another fashionable drug, powder and crack cocaine. Today we are fighting cocaine just as we fought heroin, and, by all appearances, with similar success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Broadcast on:: 15 Jun 2011
Audio Format:: other

We thought we had discovered something new. But as Eric C. Schneider points out in his marvelous Smack: Heroin and the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), the conjunction of music, heroin, and cool was hardly an invention of my generation. The three came together in the 1940s, when smack-using bebop players (think Charlie Parker) taught the “Beat Generation” that heroin was hip. Neither was my generation the last to succumb to a heroin fad. The triad of music, heroin, and cool united again in the 1990s, when drug-addled pop-culture icons such as Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), and Calvin Klein (of “heroin chic” fame) taught “Generation X” the same lesson. History, or at least the history of heroin, repeats itself.

For white, middle-class folks like me heroin chic was an episode, a rebellious moment in an otherwise “normal” American life. But as Schneider makes clear, the passage of heroin from cultural elites to the population at large was not always so benign, particularly in the declining inner-cities of the 1960s and 1970s. Here heroin had nothing to do with being cool and everything to do with earning a living and escaping reality. For millions of impoverished, hopeless, urban-dwelling hispanics and blacks, heroin was a paycheck and a checkout. The drug helped destroy the people in the inner-city, and thus the inner-city itself.

In response to the “heroin epidemic” of the 1960s and 1970s, the government launched the first war on drugs, focusing its energy on “pushers.” But there were no “pushers” because–and this is the greatest insight in a book full of great insights–pushing was not the way heroin use spread, either among middle-class college kids or the down-and-out of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. No one pushed heroin on anyone. Rather, users taught their friends how to use; in turn, those friends–now users–taught their friends, and so on. Heroin stealthily spread through personal networks. The only part of the process that was visible was the result: in the case of suburban college kids, bad grades and rehab; in the case of poor urban hispanics and blacks, crime and incarceration.

Not surprisingly, when the heroin “epidemic” ended, it was not due to the war on drugs. Heroin simply fell out of fashion, in this case being replaced by another fashionable drug, powder and crack cocaine. Today we are fighting cocaine just as we fought heroin, and, by all appearances, with similar success.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Deep in the ocean an orca pod is on the hunt these aren't your average orcas These guys are organized Marketing team did you get those social media posts scheduled for the seal migration? Hi, I captain We even have an automated notification for all pod managers when they go live They use Monday calm to keep their teamwork sharp their communication clear and their goals in sight Monday calm for whatever you run even orcas go to Monday calm to dive deeper You Hello everybody and welcome back to new books in history I'm Marshall Poe your host each week We pick a new history book that we find particularly interesting and we interview the author of that book This week I'm pleased to tell you that we have Eric Schneider on the show and we'll be talking about his book smack heroin and the American City when I got to college in the early 1980s I was told by the students already there whom I much admired that drugs were cool and music was cool and drug music was cool and the coolest of the cool where I went to school was the band the velvet underground and They did heroin and wrote songs about heroin at least one that I recall I think called heroin and I listened to this song many many times and although I never did heroin I thought of these people as a kind of model for the way I wanted to live They had a kind of nonchalance and a kind of intensity as well I never really understood the association between drug bans like the velvet underground and one might also mention Janice Joplin and Jimmy Hendrickson. They're a whole host of them and heroin until I read Eric Schneider's book Interestingly, it wasn't the first time there was an association between heroin and a musical subculture The first time was bebop in the 1940s as Eric points out And he points out a lot of other things about the origins of heroin use It's transmission to the United States the way it flourished the way it ebbed and flowed the way the government fought it The way it was picked up by various cultural icons and the way it was cast away by them as well today Heroin use has fallen out of fashion people use other drugs And he also talks a lot about the cost of heroin use which has been really very significant I really enjoyed talking to Eric today, and I think that you'll enjoy the interview So without further ado, here it is. Hi, Eric. I'm Marshall. How are you today? I'm Jeff. Thanks. Glad to hear that today. We're talking with Eric Schneider about his wonderful new book smack heroin and the American city I was before we begin talking about the book I wondered if you could do us the favor of telling us a little bit about yourself. Sure. I'm a I'm a native New Yorker, which And I find myself constantly drawn back to the city of my birth in terms of my research and writing the I Went to high school and in the South Bronx the Cardinal Hayes Memorial high school for boys And I like to astound my students by telling them that despite the fact that I'd more or less Grew up in Manhattan. I didn't know any Jews until I went to graduate You New York is such a parochial place everybody I knew was either Irish Italian German Catholic or if not Catholic, you know, there were I think maybe one or two Protestants on my block But that was a bad hit. That's right. That's I'm sorry really insular. Yeah, I'm sorry in a row But it's very interesting though because I I had kind of the opposite experience I grew up in Wichita, Kansas where people think is entirely homogenous and one of my best friends growing up was Rob Cohen and I lived two blocks from Temple Emmanuel There you have it. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry to interrupt. No. No, it's so I I went all through Catholic You know grammar school high school. I went to Fordham University a Catholic College but I became Fascinated with the history of cities and so when I when I decided to Go to graduate school, I decided what I really wanted to do was study cities and I wanted to work with the Premier urbanist of his generation who was Sam Warner who Was had just moved from the University of Michigan to Boston University so I got my PhD at Boston University and my first book was a revision of my dissertation a study of juvenile delinquency and Institutions for delinquents in in Boston. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I see so Maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you came to write this book about heroin This project I would say that my my career is largely accidental in nature my my Book previous to this was a history of street gangs in New York City that was inspired by reading an obituary in the New York Times of a guy called the Cape man Salvador Agran who Was imprisoned actually initially sentenced to death at age of 15 for killing two kids in a playground gang fight and in doing the Work on that I interviewed a number of former gang members. I interviewed street club workers basically young men who were hired to go out and make contact with gangs and Steer them in more pro-social directions and What I heard again and again from people Was that yes gangs were definitely a problem and this is the the Jets and Sharks era if you the 1950s and 60s before gangs acquired all the armaments and things that they got later and They said yeah gangs were a problem people got maimed or killed But if you really want to understand what destroyed inner city neighborhoods in the 1950s and 60s you need to understand heroin and When I began to look I found that there were a lot of social science studies of Heroin that were produced in the 50s and 60s, but of course did not look at heroin over time and Historians who had looked at this Topic had focused mostly on medical and scientific Work they were themselves historians of medicine and they were they were interested in a completely different set of questions than the ones that I became interested in namely how did how did Ordinary people respond to heroin. What was the impact on city life? those kinds of questions medical historians aren't interested in and so no one had really Looked at heroin. So it was it was just kind of I became hooked on it if you will Sort of a natural progression from my last project. Mm-hmm. I see well let's begin talking about the book I have a preliminary question that The answer to which is it's not exactly in your book But I suspect that you know, but I suspect many of our readers are listeners don't know and I said what is heroin? well heroin is a I mean it drives obviously from opium poppies. That's that's the initial source and then opium poppies have to be harvested the the opium itself is Then boiled to remove remove impurities that usually happens very close to the site of agricultural production in in the Post-World War two period that would have been in Turkey or in Lebanon now obviously in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Once that happens, you've got a relatively stable substance opium base that can be Transported it's it's relatively indestructible and can be stored for long periods of time So it's a very stable substance that in turn has to be processed chemically to be turned into morphine and Then the morphine has to be processed again to turn it into heroin so heroin Is is like the the grandson of the opium pop. Mm-hmm. And when was heroin first discovered who invented heroin? I've invented maybe that's their own work synthesized or whatever synthesized. Yeah, it's uh, that's a really interesting question because the the anniversary for the creation of heroin was the 100th anniversary was in in 1998 and The creator was the Bayer Company. Mm-hmm. And Bayer thought that Heroin would be the miracle drug of the 20th century and it turned out that they in fact created the miracle drug of the 20th century the following year 1899 with Bayer aspirin. Yeah, which you know, I Don't know about you, but certainly was a mainstay of my oh, yeah, Houston. Oh, yeah, medical cabinet so anyway Heroin was was synthesized and and then promoted by Bayer as a response to morphine as it was it was seen as a cure for people who were Addicted to morphine, which you know, ironically if you were addicted to morphine and somebody gave you heroin you would be perfectly happy It would solve any withdrawal symptoms because it's it's a drug that is about Estimates vary, but you know six to eight to ten times more powerful than morphine and morphine itself is a fairly powerful drug medically its use was as one of the few drugs that could soothe the racking coughs of People who were in the end stages of tuberculosis So it had a very legitimate Medical use I was obviously it's it's also an anesthetic the same way that that morphine is and then in some places still used as such, but it very quickly entered the underground market in New York City and gradually took over the underground market for Opiate drugs. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that one of the things you say in the book is that There was a kind of historical gateway drug to heroin and it was it was opium And how did opium and opium smoking originate and then how did it get to New York City in this case and then other American large cities? well Opium is rightly associated with Chinese populations Chinese immigrant populations, although I should quickly add that Opium was introduced into China by the British and the Americans who were concerned about a balance of trade problem basically the British population to a lesser extent Americans were consuming large amounts of Tea buying Chinese silk and porcelain and this was creating a huge balance of trade Problem and in order to try and Sell something back to the Chinese that could counterbalance our our importation of their goods Opium became the logical answer. So there there had been some opium smoking in Coastal areas in China usually opium mixed with tobacco But opium as a kind of major drug gets introduced into the Chinese market by British and American trading companies and then there are they the two opium wars that were fought by the British in the mid-19th century basically blew open the market and Not only did opium pour in from India but also The Chinese began cultivating their own Opium poppies. So by about 1900 or so there were an estimated 40 million Chinese opium smokers and as the Chinese emigrated to other parts of the world they brought the practice of Smoking opium with them. Mm-hmm. Now what's interesting about this is is that it was Chinese merchants who would essentially hold these Chinese migrants in in thrall they they paid for their passage to in in this instance the United States and Chinese laborers would have to work off their debt The merchants would supply them not only with goods at very high costs with gambling dens with prostitutes, but also with opium and so You know opium is the opiate of the masses. It really kept people you know in debt and and working hard and That was really the origins of opium smoking in the United States among the Chinese Immigrant population. Mm-hmm. So the logical question then to ask is how does it spread from the Chinese to others? And the answer is that In the 19th century in Western towns in American cities there there was a fairly public policy of tolerating vice and red light districts, but they were frequently spatially Contained so that you would have a specific red light district say in San Francisco or the the Tenderloin area in New York City and these were Co-terminus with China towns in many instances so that the practice of opium smoking began to spread gradually from the Chinese immigrant population to the white underworld and so it was initially pickpockets and gamblers and Pimps and prostitutes where Opium smoking began to take off and then gradually it it migrates out into a white ethnic working-class population So by I would say about the 1890s or so you have White Opium smoking populations in many American cities mining towns you know places where you might not ordinarily expect Opium use except for the fact that There were originally Chinese migrant populations working in the mines or building the railroads or something like that and and so they they left the opium smoking practices behind in those in those areas How do we get from I was gonna say how do we get from opium in these populations opium to heroin? That's a slightly longer track that takes almost a half a century to accomplish and 1908 the United States prohibited the importation of smoking opium and Therefore importing opium became an you know obviously an underground activity It became much harder to get for persons outside the Chinese community simply because as is frequently the case in underground markets Ethnicity was used or race was used as a marker of trust so that Chinese would sell to other Chinese, but they were they were notoriously reluctant to sell to whites and whites therefore Moved from in most parts of the United States from moved from smoking opium to using morphine which could be You know practices were relatively loose you could you could go to a physician and get a and get a prescription for morphine There were a lot of over-the-counter Mrs. Brown's soothing serum kinds of things that women would use for menstrual cramps for example that were largely opium and alcohol those those began to disappear with the pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and better public information about the content of of those kinds of medications, but morphine was available to More middle-class populations that would go to doctors, but then eventually it becomes available on the on the underground marketplace in most parts of the United States with the exception of New York City and the reason that New York was an exception is that heroin was outlawed in 1914 that is all narcotic drugs for non medicinal purposes were outlawed in 1914, but heroin could continue to be used for medical purposes and the pharmaceutical companies that Manufactured heroin were all located in the New York City area and so it's it's one of these kind of fascinating movements of Drugs from a legal above-ground economy into an illicit underground economy that has happened again and again in our history It happened with barbiturates in the 1950s. It's happening today with OxyContin Where the pharmaceutical companies are obviously interested in their market share so they're producing large amounts of these drugs and The question is what happens to the excess? You know what happens to the goods that are not absorbed by the medical market and the answer is in New York in the 19 teens and 20s those drugs began to appear in the underground economy and so in New York and the New York metropolitan area people moved from opium smoking to heroin using and they More or less skipped the morphine stage whereas in other parts of the country as as opium disappeared people began to use morphine or if somebody was initiating Opiate use and in New York they would initiate it with heroin whereas let's say in Chicago they might initiate it with morphine and gradually between about the 1920s and the post-war immediate post-war period Heroin began then to gradually take over the market. Mm-hmm. Now I can explain why heroin does that because And it has to do with with the economics of smuggling as I as I mentioned earlier Heroin is itself a derivative of morphine and so heroin is kind of the ideal smugglers product because Opium base itself while it's relatively sturdy is fairly large in volume and so by converting opium base to morphine you reduce the volume fairly dramatically at the same time since heroin is So much more powerful than morphine. You are again producing a item which can be smuggled in very small you know a kilo or two kilo quantities it can be hidden in steamer trunk or in the panels of automobiles as happened in the 1930s and 40s and Once it crosses the bottleneck created by customs Controls it can be Expanded in volume dramatically because it can be cut and still retain a very powerful impact on on the body so Heroin that comes directly out of the lab might be 90% pure by the time it hits the streets and Let's say the early 1950s you were talking about a drug that might have been 10 to 15% pure so it gets cut Frequently on its way to the consumer and that's obviously where where the profit lies. So it was it was much more feasible for a smuggler to import heroin then to import either morphine or opium and so Heroin became the drug of choice if you were if you were You know an underground entrepreneur. Mm-hmm. Let me ask this at what point Does heroin begin its long association with music and gain a kind of? Cultural patina a kind of mmm. I don't know exactly how to call it But it becomes part of a sort of a sort of solid subculture. Yeah the The answer is is with the rise of bebop in the 1940s When let me let me answer that question in a kind of long-winded way Is my want the There was a heroin shortage in the United States in the 1930s and 40s because as soon as Japan invaded China that Completely disrupted the world Trading system in opiates and so in just to give you a sense of how rare Heroin use was in the United States in the 1940s the federal government which had opened a Narcotics hospital in Lexington, Kentucky in 1937 was actually in discussion about closing it down in 1943 because there weren't enough heroin users to to fill it up so it came as a complete shock to people that young people and specifically young african-americans began Using heroin in the immediate post-war period and the reason that heroin was cool was because of its association with jazz musicians with bebop players with hustlers with people in in nightlife and what I show in my book is that in the so-called swing alley of Midtown Manhattan 54th Street between 5th and 6th avenues There were a large number of jazz clubs located in this in this in this one area. It was also these jazz clubs had During prohibition been speakeasies. So you have an initial association with the underworld and of course as prohibition comes to an end in the United States in the night, you know after 1933 These guys are looking around to supplement their product line and heroin is the obvious substitute for alcohol for illegal illegal alcohol, but it's stymied by the rise of World War two so immediately after the war you have larger quantities of In this case, it was Italian made heroin a major scandal an Italian pharmaceutical company in association with Italian organized crime figures in New York began smuggling heroin into the port of New York and that heroin was being sold in the jazz clubs around swing alley and it became associated with bebop jazz musicians Very famous musician red Rodney said that heroin was the badge of their generation You know if you wanted to play bebop if you wanted to be like a cool cat on the cutting edge heroin was the drug and You know if you think about bebop as a as a musical form. It's it's kind of jarring It's it's the you know is a radical rejection of the big band swing era the kind of easy Listening kind of music it was associated with a cultural style that Embodied a kind of rejection of white mainstream America so if you were going to be hip whether you were white or black, but this was obviously more of an issue for after American adolescents If you were going to be hip if you were going to be cool if you wanted to be like these famous jazz musicians heroin was was the way to go about it and in the after hours clubs in the Places frequented by musicians There you would find a mixing of both young people and hustlers and organized crime figures and musicians And that was really the origin of the kind of post-war jazz cool association with heroin probably the most famous Bebop musician is Charlie Parker. Mm-hmm, and You know if if you can you can sort of figure out the logic somebody says well gee Here's Charlie Parker. He's the best saxophonist if his generation I want to play the saxophone like Charlie Parker Charlie Parker's a heroin user If I want to play the sax like Charlie Parker, I need to to use heroin Parker himself was always very careful about trying to dissuade people from Following his example, but I think it's a you know, it's a good example of Do what I say and I do what I do and people saw what he did and they followed his his direction Was this the moment? I mean immediately after the second World War was this the moment that? the demographics of heroin users became primarily African-American that's right in the in the first part of the 20th century heroin users were primarily white they were ethnic Jews Italians Germans Irish In New York City and Chicago eventually and in other cities But that was an aging demographic group there was as as African-Americans moved to American cities after World War one there was a slight expansion of heroin use but but nothing particularly notable until right after the war and That's when you have this major Demographic transition where heroin users became much younger They became much more African-American in New York City There were larger numbers of Puerto Ricans in the Southwest larger numbers of Mexican Americans but it was a definite Identifiable demographic population that was associated with drug young male and Either either African-American or Latino. Mm-hmm. I see so at what point does the Attention of the nation if I can put it that way become focused on heroin use is it after it's immediately after World War two or a little bit later It's a little bit later, but not not that much later. It was in the early 1950s between basically 1915 about 1952 there is a heroin panic in the United States as suddenly people become concerned that heroin which nobody as I said would have predicted would have been a major problem in the US seem to be making a comeback and There is this wonderful irony in that all of the cultural productions of the period the heroin comic books the popular Novels that were that were being promoted with that kind of really garish covers showing young women plunging needles into their arms with you know leering older guys peering over their shoulders They were all focused on white teenagers and so when Estes Kefaw for the senator from Tennessee who wanted to promote his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the presidency began televised hearings into organized crime he also had hearings into the the use of heroin and he would Bring before the committee's television lights heroin users who were white mmm-hmm and get them to talk about or try to get them to talk about the the pushers who would give out free samples and try to get kids hooked on heroin and then following Kefaw for example, there were a number of both state and local mitigations into heroin use where again, they would try and find kids to come and talk about how they Begin using heroin and what was wonderful is it from a historian's perspective about these? hearings is of course in a everybody knows that these sorts of hearings are like public dramas right and and it's it's all scripted you never ask a question For which you don't already know what the answer is going to be you carefully prepare all of your witnesses and so these kids would would come on and they would they would Adhere to the script so that somebody would say well, how did you know who gave you your first heroin? And they would say oh, I was at a teen dance and some guy came up to me and said this kid you want to try something cool I was wanted that to happen, but it never did any of me ever or in the local playground Somebody would come up to you, you know in a black trench coat and and of course teenagers being the utterly obedient beings that they are They would immediately charge off to the men's room Where somebody would hand them a capsule and and they would be told to snort it They would then snort it and then from there of course They would be immediately addicted to the drug Mm-hmm, and it was only if you believed that using heroin once would immediately addict you That any of this made any sense at all because you know, obviously, why is it a good business plan to give away? Stuff for free. How do you know that the kid that you're gonna give some heroin to? Isn't gonna tell some adult or other? How do you know that they will? Come back and and purchase some more eventually People's initial response to heroin is usually that they get quite violently sick to their stomach And so they have to be taught that this is a pleasurable experience Mm-hmm so none of this cultural script made any sense whatsoever, but that was the cultural script that was being promoted at the time and I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, but the the Investigators who worked with keef offer and who worked with a lot of these investigations into The use of heroin were supplied by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and As a result of the heroin scare of the 1950s Congress passed increasingly draconian legislation the first federal examples of kind of three strikes and you're out mandatory imprisonment for people who were caught selling Small amounts of heroin and eventually in 1956 even if you were possessing Small amounts of heroin you could be sentenced for up to 20 years to life for a third-time conviction. So But these bills also included dramatic increases in the power of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics Where narcotics agents began to be authorized to carry weapons, which they had never been authorized to do before They could conduct wiretaps, which they had not been able to do before and the Commissioner of Narcotics Harry Anslanger was deeply jealous of the publicity given the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the you know the famous G-men who would go out and capture bank robbers and get all of the all of the press and so he wanted to construct the Federal Bureau of Narcotics as an equally powerful Agency to the FBI one that was protecting American families from the evil scourge of heroin and the way that Harry Anslanger did this was by saying look Heroin is being exported by the communist Chinese. This is a communist plot to subvert American liberty by addicting our youth and so he would show up at the UN or before Congress with packets with you know Chinese characters on them and saying you're proof that it's the communist Chinese who are behind this conspiracy to import Heroin into the United States and if you only give us More power, etc, etc. Then we will be able to fight off this fiendish red conspiracy to destroy America's youth I'm sorry to laugh. That's just very rich though, isn't it? Yeah, especially the institutional angle where really it's institutional jealousy and competition That's driving this well, I people don't really realize this I think here is is that That the heroin that was on the world market that did in fact have Chinese lettering on it was not being produced by mouth say tongs communist China right now was busy ruthlessly trying to Destroy opium production China and and arrest Chinese opium smokers and throw them in prison It was the Chinese Nationalists the common dang who were you know Cold warriors hiding in Burma that Used Trafficking and heroin as a way to support their raids Into communist China. So it was actually our allies the nationalist Chinese who were Introducing heroin into the world market rather than the communists. Mm-hmm. So in the 1950s the These government agencies cook up this scenario in which there's a guy in a black trench coat Usually a black guy, I suppose who comes to know. No, these are the this is the mafia. Oh the mafia Okay, the other the other side of this is because you know, how how would Chinese heroin? Get to a drug pusher in a playground near you I suppose they could have focused on the local Chinese ham laundry, but much more Insidious They had a kind of general motors not not the bankrupt general motors Yes, but the old-fashioned general motors made cars. Yeah, that's right that one a kind of GM model of the mafia where you had a board of directors and you had you know local affiliates in every single town throughout the United States well if you that's the version of the mafia that that ang slinger promoted and of course To get to the institutional rivalry point Hoover was downplaying the existence of the mafia while Anselinger was playing it up and so Anselinger saying well, you know these these Italian pushers headed by lucky Luciano in Italy were the people who were responsible for taking communist heroin and You know supplying the American market with it. Yeah, the question I was trying to get at here was Really, how does a Culturation into the world of hard drug use and heroin use actually happen one of the things you point out in the book And I think you're quite correct is that this stuff really does sell itself Yeah all of the evidence show then I'm glad you asked that question because Since we've been talking about the pusher narrative. Yeah, that's what I mean the contrast It's actually can be found in the same hearings where where once you get beyond the script They would they would talk to these pushers who would say well, you know, I Really didn't want to encounter new people. That's you know, that's the way you get arrested Uh, and then you talk to adolescents and you realize that Heroin the the analogy I make in the book is is it was like discovering this hot new record that Nobody else in the neighborhood had heard yet and you wanted to go and play it for all your friends You wanted to invite everybody over to your house to sample it and to see what it was like and to share in the in this cool experience that that only the hip elite knew about and so heroin spread Within pure groups and certainly spread within schools. I mean, uh, the investigators were not wrong in looking at schools They were only wrong in thinking that it was grown-ups hanging out in the playground uh because it was it was you know the kids themselves um Basically tried to get heroin from their older brothers or from the older guys in the neighborhood the hustlers who were using heroin and in the in the interviews that I found with heroin addicts from the 40s and early 50s Frequently these older users really tried to discourage the younger kids from getting on the drug and the kids were you know, insistent on trying it uh, so I to give a specific example here um uh one Kid kept trying to get his his older friend to let him try the drug and and the older friend kept saying no no no Until one day the kids sees his friend and he's drug sick. He's he's heroin sick and so Uh, he wants to borrow some money and the kid says to him I'll give you the money, but you have to give me a taste of the drug And so that's finally how he begins to use the drug. So it was definitely a drug that that uh circulated through pure groups uh, and and from from you know one generation to the other and in in that kind of uh a way and obviously once One kid became obituated to using the drug uh the easiest way to support Your drug habit was to sell it and so uh, there would then be A moment where somebody might would would you know begin selling to to fellow um, analysts. Mm-hmm. I this is totally consistent with my experience not as a drug user or a dealer But I've worked with people that have substance abuse problems and it's very frequently the case that they're Uh, what they call their drug dealers are some of their best friends. Yeah, so they're just their buddies, you know And they hang out all the time and uh, you know, they get brought into the business basically because they can't support their habit And it goes through these lines of affinity in families and in peer groups Uh, yeah, and you know, it's funny because that and these guys that I've worked with, you know that you go to the drugs The drugs don't come to you. Right. So yeah The other thing is that that um I use the the phrase in the book drug knowledge That you had to have drug knowledge in order to become a drug user. So uh You know, no offense to Iowa, but if you were a sax player in Iowa and you wanted to be like charlie parker Good luck and finding heroin. Yeah, no, it'd be tough. But but if you were a uh, an adolescent in in brooklyn Uh, the opportunity to acquire drug knowledge and eventually to acquire the drug itself uh, was much more available to you and basically you needed a peer to be an intermediary because uh, the world of drug use was encoded in ritual and secrecy not just for its own sake, but also uh as a way of uh protecting oneself, you know from penetration by agents and so uh Some kid, you know walking up. I mean This change is over time by by the 1970s. There were open-air drug markets in New York city But at least initially in the 1950s and 60s that was not the case And so you had to have an intermediary who knew the language who knew the codes who knew what to look for who could convey a sense of being somebody who could be trusted And who could therefore make a buy and again That's what shows how ridiculous those narratives about pushers then being promoted at the time were Yeah, no, I think that's right. Actually you just mentioned um the the 70s New York in the 70s and I I wondered how heroin and heroin trafficking contributed to Increase in crime and then an additional another moral panic on the part of the american political elite in the 1970s yes, the the increase in crime And it's association with heroin is is quite tangled because uh, for example in New York between 1960 and 1970 Homicides increased by about 400 percent But there's absolutely no evidence That shows any link between homicide and heroin use It just you know, it's a murder is not a drug users crime It it it became Associated with the sort of wild crack cocaine market of the 1980s But not the heroin market of the 1950s and 60s, which was much more carefully controlled now um the the Other crimes however that are associated with uh, heroin use would be robbery the the the street mugging is kind of the quintessential uh 1970s crime And it is also the drug users crime because again it doesn't require a lot of skill It just requires uh, some kahone's as as the Puerto Rican kids would say and have some balls in order to be able to do this um Or burglary or larceny from stores, you know shoplifting particularly women would would go on shoplifting expeditions uh in order to support uh Their their drug habits. So there was clearly an association between drug use and crime But crime such as as murder, which was going up At the same time not in the same rate as these other kinds of crimes show that there's a there's something else going on besides drug use So there's a connection, but it's not always a clear cop one And what is it what is that something else that's going on? This is one of the sort of fundamental points of the book that we shouldn't just point at heroin, but a lot of other things You talk about i'm talking about these uh, these social settings that you talk about They're created by you know, so inadvertently in some ways by different people pursuing different agendas But they all add up to a place that makes it really attractive and easy to do hard drugs, right? the the perfect setting for both uh drug selling and drug using would be an abandoned building uh A place where you could have a stash stored someplace not on your person where user could come and uh Could be signaled to go and leave some cash someplace and then pick up the drug from a runner and then perhaps go to a shooting gallery where He or she could uh rent a set of works for a dollar and uh, then shoot up um in the shooting gallery and then leave without having to carry any drug paraphernalia, which would be a source of of arrest and the question is, you know, where did these kinds of um abandoned structures flourish? Well, the answer had to do with, you know, kind of a kind of a post-war history of the city uh, um, you have white flight occurring in the 1940s and 50s that you know, this subsidized uh creation of all white suburbs that meant that mill and modestly uh working-class people could buy homes out in the suburbs and leave the old town behind at the same time that uh african-american migrants were pouring into the city and uh Into neighborhoods that were bursting at the seams because they were surrounded by hostile white communities that eventually Those boundaries broke down as as whites began to leave um and So you have a kind of an initial Process of densification that happens in the early 1950s because because it takes a while obviously for americans american suburbs to kind of percolate away but by the 1960 Census you see in virtually all american cities a decline in uh, the white population particularly white population of families with with children um and At the same time. This is of course the period where american industry begins to migrate from uh cities to suburban locations where uh, there's more space there's less congestion there fewer taxes You might not have labor unions to to deal with and eventually to the south and and and overseas The process we call de-industrialization uh those kinds of processes culminate in the late 1960s and early 1970s and uh the south bronts in new york, uh parts of uh north philadelphia here in in philadelphia where i am now Uh parts of baltimore that were featured in the wire for those who might have seen that series um These are our neighborhoods that have been completely denuded of capital where uh, you have aging buildings and frequently the kind of the last resort of the Building owner is to hire a junky to set the building on fire so that they can uh get an insurance settlement and extract the last bit of capital uh out of um that location and the net result of this is a landscape of low density abandoned buildings or abandoned factories uh that then provide a uh, cityscape in which uh, heroin selling and using can flourish at the same time um the the loss of uh blue collar jobs uh means that the drug industry is uh kind of the free market's answer to the collapse of the legitimate marketplace in inner city communities And so it it's it's the drug market Uh, and this is where you have the the gradual appearance of open air markets. It's the the drug market that begins to supply uh needed jobs um in these communities meanwhile the passage of increasingly severe um anti-drug laws means that uh people who are involved in the drug trade need to find um adolescents to Man the stations, you know to to actually take the risk of standing out on a street corner And being a tout as it was called somebody would call to somebody and say hey, you know you want to buy some drugs or who be a lookout or something along those lines because Kids would be brought into juvenile court and uh may be sentenced to probation or something like that but would not suffer the very severe consequences that an adult drug seller might suffer so it became a way of recruiting kids into the drug selling networks and then ultimately uh those kids even though they had firsthand knowledge of what um uh drug use meant They became logical consumers as well. Mm-hmm. I see In the midst of all of this in the late 60s and early 70s something happens which I want to talk about and just to set the scene and these are my words not yours uh the inner city is a flame it has become Predominantly and even overwhelmingly poor and black and there is um a kind of epidemic If that's not too strong word of hard drug use and it has caused a tremendous or it is related to a tremendous increase in crime so it seems like all of the Phenomena they're associated with hair and use circa 1970 are negative. You know, it's almost right at this time that heroin use becomes very chic among Uh a certain class of white kids Um, and this is something I that I actually touched my own life I'm I'm I'm a little bit younger than that, but I kind of remember And I'm thinking particularly of of of of the velvet underground again and these other bands It becomes associated with white rock and roller what we would later call indy rock and and this is the second time this has happened It happened first with jazz around, you know, 1945 and now it's happened again with another kind of music and another cohort Can you talk a little bit about that? Yes, um I There is something to the cultural explanation, but I want to backtrack a moment from that and and say that my um explanation for it is largely spatial that is to say that uh, if you look at the Heroin use epicenters on the east and the west coast that would have been the east village in new york city and it would have been haydash berry in san francisco and um These were areas I the I have a statistic in the book that the new york city police estimated that there were a thousand runaways a month coming into new york moving into the east village and They were ripe for recruitment into a drug subculture That initially was focused largely on on marijuana but um again, if you if you look back at the 1950s and at the um The marijuana scares of the 1950s the sort of reefer madness, you know, if you start smoking marijuana, you're going to wind up grabbing an axe and murdering your parents in the middle of the night sort of thing uh Well, of course nobody believed that because their first-hand experience showed that it simply wasn't true and so if the government is lying about the um Uh the ill effects of marijuana use why should they believe be believed about anything else? And so you have a kind of a adolescent drug culture that valorizes drug use that valorizes the use of marijuana the use of lsd and um You have adolescents moving into communities where that kind of drug use speed for example in the in the in the late 60s as well um is is being promoted by one's peers and These communities are spatially located near Old-fashioned heroin using communities as well. And so you have a kind of mingling Of of drug cultures in these spatial locations. Now the fact that um, you know Uh, you could get a sort of a poor man's speedball by mixing speed and heroin uh the the the You know rich person's way of doing that would be to mix cocaine and heroin and injected but um uh, the fact that that speed became a very popular drug in 1968 69 70 um Heroin was a way of coming down from the multi-day very jagged experience of using Speeds of people and speed frequently was injected so people overcame the initial um, you know barrier of of using an IV needle so all of that allows a um spread of of heroin into White communities now and the fact that that you know, Janice Joplin is a heroin user that various other people in the jazz see in the sorry the rock and roll scene or are using heroin um doesn't doesn't Help the matter but again, I I focus on space as I did with the um, you know the charlie parker example because Drug use has to happen at a specific location that mixes Navises and experienced users. It doesn't it doesn't happen in your head. Mm-hmm. I see I see So we've taken up a lot of your time, but I you know, I want to go on for just another moment I want to ask another question Heroin you just to kind of complete the narrative heroin use falls out of fashion. Um, how does that happen? It does, but I I need to bring up. Okay, you go ahead. We go there. Yeah, uh, because I think one of the most important Points that I make in the book has to do with heroin use and the Vietnam veterans um One of the reasons why Richard Nixon declared the first war on drugs in 1971 Was because he was terrified that all of these uh Vietnam vets were going to come home and fuel the drug and crime uh uh Epidemic that we've been that we've been talking about and therefore he declares war on drugs, but that war includes significant expansion Of methadone for the first time in the united states as a way of maintaining somebody on a drug That does not require illegal activity in order to um get access to it and the idea was that um There would be treatment for these Vietnam vets who were coming home Um addicted to the drug the congressional investigations at the time showed that Maybe as many as 20 to 25 percent of american soldiers in vietnam We're using heroin regularly and at 1970 and 71 This is the big heroin epidemic that doesn't happen Because what happens when these vets leave vietnam is that they stop using heroin You take them out of the social setting the stress of combat the boredom of you know waiting around the the Incredibly pure drug that they used along with uh Their mates if you will in the in the platoon and you get them back in the united states and they're out of the war and you know Uh, many of them suffering from ptsd and they have problems with alcohol and other things, but they don't use And so it's an important point to make because our current narrative of drugs Is so driven by biology by the idea that that addiction is a brain disease that once you have it you you're you're not going to get off it and the vietnam vets Are a powerful contrary example showing the importance of social setting that if you change the social setting in which people live You can you can reduce drug use No, it's a very good point. Let's let's move on into this question. I ask about heroin falling out of fashion. How does that transpire? the um What happens in the in the 1980s is that New York Loses its place as the kind of principal um Import center for heroin um and You have the development of new Sources of supply in southeast asia in mexico Um, and with those new sources of supply you have new entrepreneurs who are are frequently um in the east coast they're cuban um on the west coast they're african-american as well as Mexican-american in uh, chicago they're largely mexican And they're bringing in new sources of heroin which you know drops the price They're bringing in cocaine for the first time in large amounts which dramatically drops the price of cocaine until somebody has this brilliant idea of uh taking cocaine Cleaning out the impurities and turning it into this new drug crack which can be sold in very small uh Doses and and you make your money on volume rather than on uh price and so um the the Heroin epidemic of the 1970s is kind of superseded by crack cocaine in the 1980s it's not that heroin disappears uh, you know the the heroin heroin use moves in waves and you have a cohort that becomes Addicted to the drug. You have a larger number of users who don't become addicted to the drug You may use it once in a while Experiment with it and then decide okay. This is enough. I'm I'm not going to do this anymore But you have this this cohort of people who do become addicted who move through time and age And then the question is Are they going to attract new users or are is is use going to dry up? And what happens in the 1980s is that the the people who um You know the adolescents who were narrowly might have been attracted to Using heroin become attracted to using cocaine instead and so it's it's uh, it's a it's a switch in drugs Uh, but the marketing the location of inner city drug markets uh as a kind of principal economic engine of of uh Some inner city communities that remains the same. It's just that the product line begins to shift I see so my final question about heroin is, uh, where do we stand with heroin today? Who uses it and what are the penalties for using it? And is there more or less of it coming in? And where does it come from and That sort of thing right? Um, well one of the reasons why I think a war on drugs that's focused on supply is utterly futile Is because if you look at the sources of supply they shift incredibly dramatically over time from uh, you know from turkey to uh, southeast asia to central and south america Uh, now we're back at the golden crescent in in afghanistan Wherever you have political instability, you're going to have uh drug trading because it's such a ready source of You know monetary supply for for rebel armies, whatever, you know, be they of the left or the right Uh, so, you know right now Uh, the principal producer of of heroin in the world is afghanistan uh, uh and large Uh supplies of that are are making their way into western euro Um, and heroin I think remains a drug of the young the alienated Uh, people who are marginalized socially, economically, politically Uh, that's why you find it's you soaring in the states of the former soviet union Uh, as as well as in other parts of of of europe um and If anything suggests the futility of the war on drugs Uh In north philadelphia today, I know a drug Uh, shooting spot where you can buy a ten dollar packet of heroin That's anywhere from 40 to 70 percent heroin Uh, if you had bought a ten dollar packet of heroin on the streets of north philadelphia in 1965 You'd be buying a drug that was maybe five to ten percent heroin So it is purer and more readily available Um, than uh, it has been in the past Uh, the drug here is largely from, uh, south america I don't think we're seeing large amounts of afghani heroin Although that that certainly could change Uh, it's a very real question of you know, what will the impact of of having us troops in that part of the world be given that in the 1960s american troops coming home from vietnam began a supply pipeline into the united states, so it seems logical that uh, uh, uh, uh We might be facing a very similar kind of of thread in the future um Because the drug is so pure Uh, lots of, uh More middle class people are are using the drug Uh, it's smokeable, uh, so you don't have to, uh, inject it Uh, a lot of people don't like needles, me included Uh, you can snort the drug, although eventually your nasal cartilage will fall out Uh, that's not a pleasant thing Uh, so you know, there the heroin is one of those drugs that i think uh, probably will Always retain its dark allure as as something who want to, you know, that people who want to, uh, flirt with the dark side can do And some percentage of those people will will become the adept the addicts of the of the next generation I see Well, eric is a terrific book and thank you very much for talking with us today I want to close the interview if i may with a our traditional final question on new books in history And that is what are you working on now? Um My my kids, uh, were, um Great star wars fans When I told my younger son, uh, the kinds of projects i've done, you know, juvenile delinquency street gangs, heroin use Um, he said to me in his best, uh, darth vader imitation voice, you know, dad You're a historian of the dark side So i've come to embrace my destiny and, uh, i'm now doing a project on the history of homicide in philadelphia from the 1940s Uh to the 1990s trying to figure out why philadelphia has such a persistently high homicide rate over that time Well, that's it sounds like a terrific project and, um, I hope that when you're done with it, you'll come on the show Well, I hope you invite me back. I absolutely will we've been talking with uh eric snider today about his book smack heroin in the american city eric i want to say thank you again for being on the show my pleasure. All right. Bye. Bye You've been listening to an interview with eric snider about his new book smack heroin in the american city I'm marshal poth the host of new books in history. I hope you have a great week [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]