Smack

Smack PDF Author: Eric C. Schneider
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Why do the vast majority of heroin users live in cities? In his provocative history of heroin in the United States, Eric C. Schneider explains what is distinctively urban about this undisputed king of underworld drugs. During the twentieth century, New York City was the nation's heroin capital—over half of all known addicts lived there, and underworld bosses like Vito Genovese, Nicky Barnes, and Frank Lucas used their international networks to import and distribute the drug to cities throughout the country, generating vast sums of capital in return. Schneider uncovers how New York, as the principal distribution hub, organized the global trade in heroin and sustained the subcultures that supported its use. Through interviews with former junkies and clinic workers and in-depth archival research, Schneider also chronicles the dramatically shifting demographic profile of heroin users. Originally popular among working-class whites in the 1920s, heroin became associated with jazz musicians and Beat writers in the 1940s. Musician Red Rodney called heroin the trademark of the bebop generation. "It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club," he proclaimed. Smack takes readers through the typical haunts of heroin users—52nd Street jazz clubs, Times Square cafeterias, Chicago's South Side street corners—to explain how young people were initiated into the drug culture. Smack recounts the explosion of heroin use among middle-class young people in the 1960s and 1970s. It became the drug of choice among a wide swath of youth, from hippies in Haight-Ashbury and soldiers in Vietnam to punks on the Lower East Side. Panics over the drug led to the passage of increasingly severe legislation that entrapped heroin users in the criminal justice system without addressing the issues that led to its use in the first place. The book ends with a meditation on the evolution of the war on drugs and addresses why efforts to solve the drug problem must go beyond eliminating supply.

Heroin Century

Heroin Century PDF Author: Tom Carnwath
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134469101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Heroin is a drug that myths are made of. Whether smuggled in the stomach of a camel or used as the ultimate symbol of lifestyle chic, no drug has been more argued over and legislated against, no drug has been more subject to misinformation and moral panic. Heroin Century sets the record straight. It contains a wealth of historical and medical information about this drug which made its first appearance as a miracle medicine over a hundred years ago and makes recommendations for its future in the twenty-first century. Evidence shows that heroin is dangerous principally because it is illegal. The authors argue that a more relaxed relationship between society and the drug would benefit both the economy and public health and safely. Individual chapters describe the history of heroin production; the makeup of heroin and evolving methods of use; the spread of heroin and international efforts at control; typical "career" patterns of users, ranging from occasional recreational use to destructive dependence; the subjective experience of taking heroin; the association between heroin and crime; the use of heroin in medicine and its effects on physical health; the history of the treatment of heroin dependence; and likely changes in heroin use in the future. The authors have drawn on literary and artistic sources as well as the large pool of scientific literature to compile a comprehensive and fascinating account of this world-changing drug. Heroin Century makes available a wealth of information about the history, chemistry, pharmacology and medical aspects of heroin in a form accessible to anyone who wishes to participate in the contemporary debate bout society's attitude to drugs.

Smack

Smack PDF Author: Eric C. Schneider
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why do the vast majority of heroin users live in cities? In his provocative history of heroin in the United States, Eric C. Schneider explains what is distinctively urban about this undisputed king of underworld drugs. During the twentieth century, New York City was the nation's heroin capital—over half of all known addicts lived there, and underworld bosses like Vito Genovese, Nicky Barnes, and Frank Lucas used their international networks to import and distribute the drug to cities throughout the country, generating vast sums of capital in return. Schneider uncovers how New York, as the principal distribution hub, organized the global trade in heroin and sustained the subcultures that supported its use. Through interviews with former junkies and clinic workers and in-depth archival research, Schneider also chronicles the dramatically shifting demographic profile of heroin users. Originally popular among working-class whites in the 1920s, heroin became associated with jazz musicians and Beat writers in the 1940s. Musician Red Rodney called heroin the trademark of the bebop generation. "It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club," he proclaimed. Smack takes readers through the typical haunts of heroin users—52nd Street jazz clubs, Times Square cafeterias, Chicago's South Side street corners—to explain how young people were initiated into the drug culture. Smack recounts the explosion of heroin use among middle-class young people in the 1960s and 1970s. It became the drug of choice among a wide swath of youth, from hippies in Haight-Ashbury and soldiers in Vietnam to punks on the Lower East Side. Panics over the drug led to the passage of increasingly severe legislation that entrapped heroin users in the criminal justice system without addressing the issues that led to its use in the first place. The book ends with a meditation on the evolution of the war on drugs and addresses why efforts to solve the drug problem must go beyond eliminating supply.

Heroin Addiction Care and Control

Heroin Addiction Care and Control PDF Author: Henry Bryan Spear
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781904319047
Category : Drug abuse
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description


Heroin Century

Heroin Century PDF Author: Tom Carnwath
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113446911X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This fascinating account of the development and use of this twentieth-century drug provides a wealth of factual information alongside some informed insights into the future for heroin in the twenty-first century.

Creating the American Junkie

Creating the American Junkie PDF Author: Caroline Jean Acker
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801883835
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Heroin was only one drug among many that worried Progressive Era anti-vice reformers, but by the mid-twentieth century, heroin addiction came to symbolize irredeemable deviance. Creating the American Junkie examines how psychiatrists and psychologists produced a construction of opiate addicts as deviants with inherently flawed personalities caught in the grip of a dependency from which few would ever escape. Their portrayal of the tough urban addict helped bolster the federal government's policy of drug prohibition and created a social context that made the life of the American heroin addict, or junkie, more, not less, precarious in the wake of Progressive Era reforms. Weaving together the accounts of addicts and researchers, Acker examines how the construction of addiction in the early twentieth century was strongly influenced by the professional concerns of psychiatrists seeking to increase their medical authority; by the disciplinary ambitions of pharmacologists to build a drug development infrastructure; and by the American Medical Association's campaign to reduce prescriptions of opiates and to absolve physicians in private practice from the necessity of treating difficult addicts as patients. In contrast, early sociological studies of heroin addicts formed a basis for criticizing the criminalization of addiction. By 1940, Acker concludes, a particular configuration of ideas about opiate addiction was firmly in place and remained essentially stable until the enormous demographic changes in drug use of the 1960s and 1970s prompted changes in the understanding of addiction—and in public policy.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater PDF Author: Thomas de Quincey
Publisher: Gottfried & Fritz
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
A book about opium usage and the effects of addiction on the authors life.

White Out

White Out PDF Author: Michael W. Clune
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1946022616
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
A classic of addiction and recovery. How do you describe an addiction in which your drug of choice creates a hole in your memory, a “white out,” so that every time you use it is the first time—new, fascinating, vivid? Michael W. Clune’s story takes us straight inside such an addiction—what he calls “the memory disease.” With dark humor, and in crystalline prose, Clune’s account of life inside the heroin underground reads like no other. Whisking us between the halves of his precarious double life—between the streets of Baltimore and the college classroom, where Clune is a graduate student teaching literature—we spiral along with him as he approaches rock bottom: from nodding off in a row house with a one-armed junkie and a murderous religious freak to having his life threatened in a Chicago jail while facing a felony possession charge. After his descent into addiction, we follow Clune through detox, treatment, and finally into recovery as he returns to his childhood home, where the memory disease and his heroin-induced white out begin to fade. White Out is more than a memoir. It is a rigorous investigation that offers clarity, hope, and even beauty to anyone who wants to understand the disease or its cure. This tenth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author.

Heroin

Heroin PDF Author: Alex Mold
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Heroin, often viewed as the "hardest drug," looms large in the popular consciousness. Heroin addiction in Britain first began to cause concern during the 1920s, yet while one group of doctors regarded the addiction as a disease which required treatment, other physicians viewed it as a vice which demanded strict control. The medical community and the government have debated both the definition of addiction--medical condition, moral failing or social problem--and the method of dealing with addiction--medical treatment vs. legal controls. In Heroin, Alex Mold examines the interaction of the different approaches to heroin addiction and argues that the treatment of the addiction as a disease and the control of heroin as a social problem could, in practice, rarely be separated. Treatment became a way of controlling the addiction and the addicts themselves, but debates about the nature of addiction treatment and the methods used resulted in politicisation of the topic. During the late 1960s Drug Dependence Units (DDUs) were established as a means to combine both medical treatment and social control. The "British System" essentially treated addiction as a disease and offered maintenance--the administering of heroin or an opioid substitute on a long-term basis--as treatment. Maintenance proved to be a source of tension between psychiatrists specialising in addiction treatment and private and general practitioners who operated outside the DDUs. This conflict manifested itself in heated disputes on the pages of medical journals, in government committees and in disciplinary hearings before the General Medical Council. The same debates, conflicts and tensions which have beset drug addiction treatment since the beginning of the twentieth century persist today. Despite international laws and codes concerning addiction and treatment, there is much that is peculiar and significant about the British case. Drawing on government papers, private archival collections, medical journals, oral history sources and official reports, Mold presents the first detailed historical analysis on the subject. Historians, sociologists, addiction specialists and contemporary policy-makers can look to this groundbreaking study to learn from the past and shape the future response to heroin addiction.

The Least of Us

The Least of Us PDF Author: Sam Quinones
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635574374
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Apple Best Books of 2021 Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal * Shortlisted for the Zocalo Book Prize From the New York Times bestselling author of Dreamland, a searing follow-up that explores the terrifying next stages of the opioid epidemic and the quiet yet ardent stories of community repair. Sam Quinones traveled from Mexico to main streets across the U.S. to create Dreamland, a groundbreaking portrait of the opioid epidemic that awakened the nation. As the nation struggled to put back the pieces, Quinones was among the first to see the dangers that lay ahead: synthetic drugs and a new generation of kingpins whose product could be made in Magic Bullet blenders. In fentanyl, traffickers landed a painkiller a hundred times more powerful than morphine. They laced it into cocaine, meth, and counterfeit pills to cause tens of thousands of deaths-at the same time as Mexican traffickers made methamphetamine cheaper and more potent than ever, creating, Sam argues, swaths of mental illness and a surge in homelessness across the United States. Quinones hit the road to investigate these new threats, discovering how addiction is exacerbated by consumer-product corporations. “In a time when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like traffickers,” he writes, “our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.” Amid a landscape of despair, Quinones found hope in those embracing the forgotten and ignored, illuminating the striking truth that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable. Weaving analysis of the drug trade into stories of humble communities, The Least of Us delivers an unexpected and awe-inspiring response to the call that shocked the nation in Sam Quinones's award-winning Dreamland.

White Market Drugs

White Market Drugs PDF Author: David Herzberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022673191X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
The contemporary opioid crisis is widely seen as new and unprecedented. Not so. It is merely the latest in a long series of drug crises stretching back over a century. In White Market Drugs, David Herzberg explores these crises and the drugs that fueled them, from Bayer’s Heroin to Purdue’s OxyContin and all the drugs in between: barbiturate “goof balls,” amphetamine “thrill pills,” the “love drug” Quaalude, and more. As Herzberg argues, the vast majority of American experiences with drugs and addiction have taken place within what he calls “white markets,” where legal drugs called medicines are sold to a largely white clientele. These markets are widely acknowledged but no one has explained how they became so central to the medical system in a nation famous for its “drug wars”—until now. Drawing from federal, state, industry, and medical archives alongside a wealth of published sources, Herzberg re-connects America’s divided drug history, telling the whole story for the first time. He reveals that the driving question for policymakers has never been how to prohibit the use of addictive drugs, but how to ensure their availability in medical contexts, where profitability often outweighs public safety. Access to white markets was thus a double-edged sword for socially privileged consumers, even as communities of color faced exclusion and punitive drug prohibition. To counter this no-win setup, Herzberg advocates for a consumer protection approach that robustly regulates all drug markets to minimize risks while maintaining safe, reliable access (and treatment) for people with addiction. Accomplishing this requires rethinking a drug/medicine divide born a century ago that, unlike most policies of that racially segregated era, has somehow survived relatively unscathed into the twenty-first century. By showing how the twenty-first-century opioid crisis is only the most recent in a long history of similar crises of addiction to pharmaceuticals, Herzberg forces us to rethink our most basic ideas about drug policy and addiction itself—ideas that have been failing us catastrophically for over a century.