Smack: Heroin and the American City

Politics and Culture in Modern America

by Eric C. Schneider

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.

Genres: History, Drugs, Nonfiction, Geography, Urban, Crime, Sociology

280 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 2008

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a worthwhile history of the heroin trade in the 20th century that is unfortunately combined with excessive and strained explanations for heroin use and some contradictory stories about the relative importance of supply and demand in creating the heroin "epidemic."

The real story here is about New York City, which as late as the mid-1960s had almost half the countries heroin users. The reason is that the city was an entrepot for the Turkish heroin travelling through Marseilles (the "French Connection") which was then shipped throughout the country by the New York Mafia families, but of course a lot of it trickled down into the black and Puerto Rican communities. This convergence of supply and use would seem to argue for the importance of "supply" in creating a local market for the drug, but Schneider spends much of the book arguing that supply was irrelevant and only poverty (which created "demand") mattered in explaining drug use (the "I'm poor so I will shoot heroin" explanation). If poverty alone was the problem, why was New York, which wasn't as impoverished as so many other cities, the indisputable center? It was its importance as a distribution point.

Still, much of the book is level-headed and intriguing, with surprisingly clear descriptions of the history of federal and local drug policy (from the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 to the birth of Methadone clinics in New York in 1969 and onwards). If you're interested in drug history and policy, this is actually one of the better books out there.

[Michaela Kollin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing style could be a bit dry at times but I like that this book actually covered pre-Prohibition efforts to regulate and criminalize narcotics. I feel like most narratives about drug epidemics have focused on either our current opioid epidemic or the crack epidemic, so it was informative and refreshing to go back a little bit further. I especially liked the later chapters that looked at the evolution of the war on drugs and the varying effectiveness of different forms of drug treatment, from methadone maintenance to Narcotics Anonymous to residential religious facilities and early forms of harm reduction.

[Evgeni Klauber · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the twentieth century historians displayed a general scholarly disinterest in the social settings of drugs in general and heroin in particular. The study of drugs used to focus on historical and psychological rather than social and political conditions. Schneider (2008) proves that social and political settings for drug usage can help us with the objective understandings of the phenomenon. Schneider (2008) draws precise social and political mechanisms linking drug cultures with the observable social and political behavior. Reducing opium into heroin was a product of smuggling, i.e. political restrictions on its usage and not simply arbitrary set of “scientifically possible” laboratory occurrences. Quitting with heroin among post-Vietnam war soldiers was, also, a product of change within their social setting. Social and political setting is the determinant for drug culture, not brain disease or internal psychological factors. This trend away from psychological explanations of drug cultures is closely linked to the decline of the psychological paradigm that dominated the field of history of drugs so far. According to the psychological paradigm, the presence or absence of mental disorder was a key factor in explaining drug cultures as a whole. Specifically, brain disorders of specific communities where the explanatory force, while social and political settings were treated as secondary factors. Such assumptions inspired a generation of social scientists to study history of drugs as a product of particular psychological conditions. In order to prove this argument, Schneider (2008: xii) employs "geographic concepts of concentration, centralization, and marginality," as "social and economic marginalization linked the less developed with the developed world, and those who grew opium poppies with those who consumed them in the form of heroin." Political endeavors of restraining the growing of crops of opium poppies in one part of the world "led to the rapid emergence of new suppliers in other, equally marginal, areas ready to satisfy the demand in the United States" (ibid.: xii). Drug cultures, in short, are about politics. In the end, Schneider’s brilliant and elegant book still leaves both historians and political scientists with numerous unanswered questions concerning the precise causal significance of elite ideology, the ways in which ideologies can generate powerful drug cultures, and the effects of both ideologies and drug cultures on city crime, heroin music. While Schneider stresses the importance of social settings in explaining drug cultures in the modern cities like New York, Philadelphia, LA, Chicago, and Detroit, seems well placed, he does not go far enough in refining his conceptual framework to develop more precise hypotheses regarding the empirical effects of specific political decisions in particular social context. The case of post-Vietnam soldiers, however, is an exception within this flaw.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. The importance of peer influence in heroin proliferation is interesting and I think correct. We see the power of peer influence in other areas as well. But it is interesting that social elites - musicians, in this case - were the fuse for the problem; it is interesting that people want to be like the rich, the cool, the talented, the famous and we will grab onto anything to be like them...in this case, to take their drug of choice. Once that takes hold in some individuals, then they spread the "coolness" to their peers.

A lot of talk of the "marginalized" - yeah, ok, heroin addiction is caused by Anglo-white males - pile on. Great, but too easy. Suburban teenagers who listened to the Ramones and the Beasty Boys were drug users too...and they probably drove their parents' Cadillacs to pick up the drugs. As long as we continue to take away individual responsibility for drug use from the individual and blame someone else, will it ever be fixed? Do "marginalized" people ever take drugs because they are lazy, stupid, wicked, irresponsible, bored, and don't want to do what 90% of the population does everyday: get up, go to a boring job, pay bills, raise kids, etc. "Non-marginalized" people can be lazy, stupid, wicked, irresponsible, and bored (which seems to be the reasons they take drugs), why can't marginalized people be like this? Are the poor immune from being the source of their own vice? Is this part of the definition of being marginalized? 90% of life is just mundane...maybe these people just don't want to be mundane, so they see the jazz and punk musicians and want to be like them because they are not mundane, and then they become trapped in a world worse than the mundane: the world of momentary thrills that fade and need to be fueled again and again through drugs.

We live in a sinful world and sinful people do sinful things. But that's tough to admit and for many they don't even think this is true. So they identify victims and the oppressors and perpetuate a blame game that ultimately solves nothing.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting narrative on the decline of the American urban landscape through the lense of heroin use. It addresses socioeconomic, racial, and cultural reasons for the balloon in drug use in the urban setting. I thought his use of individual stories was intersting but he could have used more to back up his points, especially those related to knowledge and opportunity as being motivating forces in the youth trying heroin. Well written and interesting, I really enjoyed it.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not too dry for an academic history, this book's subject is fascinating. It turns out the history of heroin is also the history of globalized trade, of American race politics, and of urban restructuring post-WW2.

[Denali · Rating 4 out of 5]

schneider looks at heroin as an urban/spatial phenomenon. makes for good reading so far.

[Dave Cutler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very solid history of heroin's progress through the thicket of US drug morality and regulation.

[L.M. Elm · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to know why heroin is at its heart a drug of the city with its capital in New York City, read this book.