by Martin Booth
It was only a matter of time before action was taken. In 1875 the San Francisco municipal authority, under the pressure of offended public opinion, passed an ordinance forbidding the smoking of opium, the possession of opium or the paraphernalia needed to smoke it and the organising of a smoking house. Virginia City, with a substantial Chinese population, followed suit in 1876. Enforcement was patchy. Those dens to which whites went were closed down, on racial grounds, but smaller establishments catering primarily for Chinese were ignored.
The result of the ordinance in most places was simply to transfer non-Chinese smokers to boarding houses owned by Caucasians on the fringes of Chinese residential areas, where they continued their habit, whilst wealthy users frequently set up their own dens for well-heeled clients and friends. Supplies were obtained through Chinese opium merchants.
Despite local ordinances being passed in twenty-seven states by 1915, opium smoking steadily increased until federal legislation was enacted which made the vice so risky and expensive smokers turned to other opiate use. In this lay part of the root of the problem as it exists now: smoking, whilst harmful, was far less dangerous than injecting morphine or, in due course, injecting or smoking heroin.
Imported smoking opium or domestically produced supplies made from raw opium imports were heavily taxed, the levy of 75 cents an ounce sufficiently exorbitant as to encourage vast smuggling operations run almost exclusively by the tongs. In addition, large numbers of Chinese set up in business as ‘cooks’ running ‘opium kitchens’ in which, in direct contravention of the 1890 law prohibiting non-native Americans from engaging in opium manufacture, they processed raw opium into the smoking product.
By the end of the century, demand for smoking opium reached a plateau then began to fall, mainly because the Chinese population similarly began to drop due to immigration controls and voluntary repatriation in the face of racial abuse. Nevertheless, it was realised the only way to combat opium was not in individual state legislatures but federally.
Hamilton Wright, preparing for the 1909 conference in Shanghai, lobbied Congress for federal legislation. If the USA was to lead the world against opium, he argued, it had to put its own house in order, too. Yet there was more to it. With some states prohibiting opium and others not, there was a brisk inter-state smuggling traffic which had to be addressed.
Just before the Shanghai conference, the Senate passed the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act which illegalised all imports of opium save those brought in by registered pharmaceutical firms. Severe fines and terms of imprisonment were put in place and possession was sufficient cause for arrest. Suddenly, opium was regarded as a criminal substance to which was attributed the romantic thrill of the danger of illegality. It also suggested opium was an alien substance, contrary to the American way of life – a filthy Oriental habit – which set the tone for drug enforcement. As might have been expected, smuggling increased sharply, the street price of opium rose and criminal gangs started to make substantial profits.
Wealthy smokers, especially those connected to show business, high-class call-girls and rich criminals, maintained their smoking habit, protected by their riches or position from arrest or shortage. By the 1920s, most of the major American cities had opium-smoking locations: those with gangster residents, such as Miami, New York and Chicago, were particularly well catered for as was Los Angeles with its movie industry. In Errol Flynn’s autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, he describes in detail his smoking of opium in a den, being introduced to the place by a Chinese girl called Ting Ling. Inevitably, Flynn insists opium improved his sexual capabilities, rather than suppressing them.
Opium smoking was fashionable. Smokers, colloquially known as ‘pipies’, considered themselves a drug élite and superior to heroin users. Newspaper stories circulated about parties held for smoking, the guests arriving in their pyjamas as if ready for bed: sex and drugs were already inseparable. For the vast majority of smokers, who were not protected by fame or fortune, there was only one alternative: they turned to morphine and heroin which were cheaper to buy, easier to hide and less conspicuous to use. In time, the smoking élite also turned to other drugs, as smoking opium became more and more rare and less was smuggled because of its bulk.
The crackdown also affected the Chinese. The Californian police mounted a concerted, 18 month drive starting in 1913, resulting in 1200 convictions and a public bonfire of opium and pipes. Many of these were not merely drug equipment but valuable antiques centuries old. Reluctant at first to give up smoking, the Chinese were also eventually forced to change to morphine and heroin, the last smokers disappearing in the New York area during the Second World War.
Hamilton Wright continued his campaigning but, for all his philanthropic intention, he was also a scaremonger playing upon xenophobic and racial unease, stressing the dangers drugs posed to white people: in 1910, he published a report, playing upon racial fear, in which he wrote negroes in the South were taking cocaine which put white women at risk, presumably from fornication. This was clearly bunkum but it set a trend, an attitude towards drugs which has survived. What was more, statistics released to the public grossly exaggerated addict numbers so the drug problem seemed far greater than it was: from 1910 to 1940, attitudes towards opiate addiction which, at times, verged on the hysterical, were profoundly influenced by erroneous and occasionally deliberately manipulated figures, though obtaining accurate statistics about addicts has always been difficult because they do not volunteer to be counted.
After agreement made at the Hague Conference of 1911 and due to Wright’s work, the Harrison Narcotic Act – called after its instigator, Congressman Francis Burton Harrison – was passed in 1914. It did not actually prohibit narcotics as force doctors, chemists and other legalised dealers to register, pay a nominal tax and maintain records of drug transactions. There was, however, a loophole depending upon medical opinion and legal interpretation. If addiction was considered a disease, a doctor was obligated to cure it: if it was seen to be a vice, his prescription might maintain (or feed) addiction, thus making him commit a criminal offence. In 1919, the Supreme Court came down in favour of the latter interpretation and, over the next quarter of a century, 25,000 doctors were prosecuted for prescribing narcotics to addicts. The ruling gave rise to ‘dope doctors’, corrupt general practitioners who prescribed opiates for cash, the addict’s alternative being the criminal underworld. This further reduced addiction amongst middle-class white women who were loathe or afraid to associate with criminals.
Illicit heroin was readily obtainable throughout metropolitan areas in America. It was cheaper than morphine and gave a bigger, quicker kick. Those who could not inject it, snorted it. Addiction being what it was, criminals charged increasing sums for supplies, driving their clients to petty crime to pay for their habit. Simultaneously, cocaine was legislated against, leading many users to move over to heroin.
Heroin had for some time been used by young men in the underworld but rarely outside it. From 1910, however, heroin usage spread like wildfire across America. By the time alcohol was prohibited in 1920, heroin was well established and, with the added repression on liquor, the stage was set for the arrival of the junkie.
The term ‘junkie’, so common today, is thought to have been coined in the early 1920s, although opium was referred to as ‘junk’ at the turn of the century. Originally, it meant a junk-man, a rag-and-bone man or totter who travelled the streets buying scrap metal, wood and cloth. Aware of the fact garbage could have a value, New York City addicts earned money by picking through the city dumps for discarded metal to sell.
Other American colloquialisms existed from time to time: an addict was variously known as a ‘schmecker’ (from the Yiddish shmek, meaning a smell or sniff), a ‘hype’ (from hypodermic) and a ‘hophead’. The latter has a fascinating derivation. In the late nineteenth century, when the Chinese were the main suppliers of opium, the drug was known as ‘hop’. This was an Anglicised, shortened version of the colloquial
Cantonese name for opium, nga pin, pronounced ha peen, and meaning bird or crow shit. In white American society, this was melded with hops, as used in beer, to imply a substance of intoxication.
Most heroin addicts were addicted in their late teens or early twenties, although a substantial number were older, having transferred from opium or morphine. The vast majority were male and, until the 1940s, Caucasians outnumbered blacks. New York street gangs were especial breeding grounds for addicts. Heroin use was a part of gang initiation, an aspect of the destructive and dangerous pastimes in which gang members traditionally indulged. Indeed, New York was as now the heroin centre of America, the base for almost every heroin dealer in the nation: 90 per cent of America’s heroin addicts lived within 180 miles of Manhattan. Downtown precincts were the addicts’ territory, the tenements and low-cost housing blocks containing poor families in which addiction was frequently rife. Addicts roamed the streets, looking like bums. Those addicts who were not reduced to sorting junk typically held low-paid, semi- or unskilled jobs whilst the small number of female addicts were virtually all prostitutes.
For several years from 1919, addicts in cities across America were catered for by a chain of forty-four clinics which sought to gather statistics on addiction, register addicts, supply them with drugs and examine their problem. One, set up along strict disciplined lines by the New York City Health Department, was a visitor attraction like a working theme park and featured on city tours. The clinics were a failure because widespread street peddling supplied addicts without their having to submit to a clinical regime, attendance at them was not compulsory and the 1919 Supreme Court judgment in effect made them illegal because they were seen as maintaining a vice. By 1921 all but one – in Shreveport, Louisiana, which remained open until 1923 – were closed by the federal authorities.
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, b
y 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.
