Collect Smack: Heroin And The American City Produced By Eric C. Schneider Issued As Textbook

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, Very solid history of heroin's progress through the thicket of US drug morality and regulation, 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.
schneider looks at heroin as an urban/spatial phenomenon, makes for good reading so far, Not too dry for an academic history, this Smack'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 postWW.

This is a worthwhile history of the heroin trade in theth 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.
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The real story here is about New York City,

which as late as the mids 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 levelheaded and intriguing, with surprisingly clear descriptions of the history of federal and local drug policy from the Harrison Narcotics Act ofto the birth of Methadone clinics in New York inand onwards.
If you're interested in drug history and policy, this is actually one of the better books out there,


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 capitalover 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 indepth archival research, Schneider also chronicles the dramatically shifting demographic profile of heroin users.
Originally popular among workingclass whites in thes, heroin became associated with jazz musicians and Beat writers in thes, 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 usersnd Street jazz clubs, Times Square cafeterias, Chicago's South Side street cornersto explain how young people were initiated into the drug culture.


Smack recounts the explosion of heroin use among middleclass young people in thes ands, It became the drug of choice among a wide swath of youth, from hippies in HaightAshbury 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.
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