Addiction

Though the connection between narcotics and deviance is often taken for granted, the arrival of these substances on the sociocultural margins is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the turn of the 20th century, the use of drugs that are now illicit was socially acceptable and actually quite common. Morphine became a painkiller of choice thanks to the increased availability of the hypodermic syringe after the Civil War, while opiates were used widely in popular cures for gastrointestinal illness and hangovers and were even used in sleeping agents for infants. Cocaine was a main ingredient in hay fever medicines and popular tonics and beverages (including Cocacola), while cannabis was an ingredient in ordinary pharmaceutical preparations. Yet as use of these substances became prevalent in the late 19th century, doctors began to notice that many of their patients, especially those who used morphine, developed both a tolerance to and a physical dependence on these drugs—in short, they became addicted. Increasingly aware of the potential dangers of addiction, doctors became reluctant to prescribe narcotics, and the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act led pharmaceutical manufacturers to decrease the narcotic levels in their products.

As the medical use of narcotics declined, the demographic of the typical user shifted dramatically: The once common type of addict—a middleaged, middle- or upper-class female who became addicted because of a doctor's careless prescription habits—became increasingly rare as medical professionals and consumers became more careful with narcotics. In place of the well-to-do victims of medically induced addiction emerged a new kind of addict—a person who began using narcotics recreationally and was likely to be a working-class and nonwhite young male. Consequently, stereotypes linking heroin with inner city immigrants and radicals, opium with Chinese laborers in the West, marijuana with Mexicans, and cocaine with Southern blacks worked to create powerful discursive links between drug use and foreignness, social disorder, and decay. This shift in popular perceptions of both drug use and drug users helped lay the ideological and political groundwork for the stringent legal controls over these substances that would emerge in the 1910s and 1920s.

While some states had passed laws against morphine and cocaine in the late 19th century, the federal government became involved in narcotics control by prohibiting the importation of smoking opium into the United States, and the 1914 Harrison Act required anyone who imported, sold, or prescribed opiates or coca leaves to register with the federal government and pay a special tax. The Harrison Act was buffered by a series of Supreme Court decisions, highlighted by Webb et al. v. United States (1919), which established that doctors could not prescribe controlled substances to addicts so addicts could maintain their drugtaking habits. Shortly thereafter, narcotic clinics, which had opened in about a dozen major cities to help addicts gradually reduce their drug intake, were shut down. Thus by the mid-1920s, addicts were left with little choice but to either enter treatment or turn to what had become a growing black market in the narcotics trade.

In the 1920s, law enforcement became the major weapon in the struggle against addiction, operating under the assumption that stiff penalties and severe [Page 5]enforcement measures were the best way to ensure public compliance with the federal drug control regime. By 1928, almost one third of the inmates in federal prisons were incarcerated for violating narcotics laws, more than the total of the next two categories of lawbreakers (violators of liquor prohibition and car thieves) combined. To alleviate the strain on the prison system in the 1930s, the federal government created separate facilities for drug addicts, which came to be known as “narcotic farms.” The two farms—one in Lexington, Kentucky, the other in Fort Worth, Texas—were ostensibly treatment facilities designed to give addicts a retreat from the rigors of modern life in the city, which were held to have been a key factor in causing addiction. However, the farms ultimately proved to be more like prisons or labor camps than treatment facilities, as medical practitioners played a relatively minor role in what came to be a rather harsh program of rehabilitation that was imposed on addicts.

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