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Smack : Heroin and the American City / Eric C. Schneider.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Politics and Culture in Modern AmericaPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2013]Copyright date: ©2009Description: 1 online resource (280 p.) : 14 illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812221800
  • 9780812203486
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 362.29/320973 23
LOC classification:
  • HV5822.H4
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- INTRODUCTION: REQUIEM FOR THE CITY -- CHAPTER ONE. New York and the Global Market -- CHAPTER TWO. Jazz Joints and Junk -- CHAPTER THREE. The Plague -- CHAPTER FOUR. The Panic over Adolescent Heroin Use -- CHAPTER FIVE. Ethnicity and the Market -- CHAPTER SIX. The Rising Tide -- CHAPTER SEVEN. Dealing with Dope -- CHAPTER EIGHT. Heroin Suburbanizes -- CHAPTER NINE. The War and the War at Home -- CHAPTER TEN. From the Golden Spike to the Glass Pipe -- CONCLUSION. Heroin Markets Redux -- NOTES -- INDEX -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Summary: 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.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780812203486

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- INTRODUCTION: REQUIEM FOR THE CITY -- CHAPTER ONE. New York and the Global Market -- CHAPTER TWO. Jazz Joints and Junk -- CHAPTER THREE. The Plague -- CHAPTER FOUR. The Panic over Adolescent Heroin Use -- CHAPTER FIVE. Ethnicity and the Market -- CHAPTER SIX. The Rising Tide -- CHAPTER SEVEN. Dealing with Dope -- CHAPTER EIGHT. Heroin Suburbanizes -- CHAPTER NINE. The War and the War at Home -- CHAPTER TEN. From the Golden Spike to the Glass Pipe -- CONCLUSION. Heroin Markets Redux -- NOTES -- INDEX -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

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.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2022)