THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610070186
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL ANFT
LENGTH: 86 lines
HEP-CATS, NARCS, AND PIPE DREAMS
A History of America's Romance With Illegal Drugs
JILL JONNES
Scribner. 510 pp. $30.
Human history, some anthropologists and psychologists have claimed, has shown that achieving altered mental states - ``getting high'' - is as normal a human drive as having sex, eating and getting out of the cold. How else to explain, such scientists might offer, ancient religious rites aided by hallucinogenic herbs and the steadily high numbers of modern addicts?
Jill Jonnes is having none of it. The Baltimore-based social historian and author (We're Still Here) believes that illegal drugs, ``recreational'' or otherwise, do not need to be part of the human landscape. She has little use for the Baby Boomers' longtime notion of drugs as a force for personal liberation, or of the underclass' acceptance of illicit narcotics abuse as a worthwhile statement of anti-authoritarian rage or hipness. She urges an end to the cynicism surrounding the nation's drug problem - which she says destroys families, drains public coffers, threatens democracy and quashes initiative - and a push toward solving it.
Her conservatism on the topic may be fashionable, but it offers little that is new. Nonetheless, the value of Hep-Cats, Narcs and Pipe Dreams, her weighty review of this country's past not-so-sober 110 years, lies not in its argument but in its elucidation. Jonnes, who recently received a Ph.D. in social history from Johns Hopkins, offers an exhaustively researched, jaundiced-eyed investigation of Americans' damaging affair with substances beginning in the 1880s, when doctors unintentionally hooked patients on morphine and cocaine, and opium dens became an item from San Francisco to New York.
Although much of the territory Jonnes covers after that - CIA complicity in drug trafficking, the Colombian cocaine cartels, the proliferation of crack - has been explored with more depth elsewhere, she deftly intersperses such examples into her involved, multifaceted rendering of history. Hep-Cats' major virtue is that Jonnes puts all of this country's narcotics travails in one volume.
Since we've been bombarded by the modern media on the details of heroin addiction, crack houses and the now-passe middle-class fixation on cocaine (which make up much of this tome), Jonnes' dissertation on the drug epidemic of a century ago is the more fascinating aspect of her book. It is doubtful that most readers would know that 19th century physicians were as in the dark about the addictive effects of certain ``medicines'' they prescribed as were their uneducated patients.
Furthermore, patent medicine makers were lacing their over-the-counter remedies with opiates and cocaine that turned unwitting young kids into addicts. While opium dens run by the Chinese and by prostitutes offended the morals of the age, much addiction was achieved through these much more invisible means.
Even revered members of the medical establishment were frequently in the dark regarding drugs and their pernicious effects. For example, cocaine's cause as a non-addicting anesthetic, mood elevator and cure for opium addicts was furthered by a young Viennese neurologist named Sigmund Freud. A drug company with an apparently sincere motive, the German firm Bayer, invented heroin in 1898 as a non-additive opiate that aided respiratory patients. It was marketed in tandem with Bayer's other pain reliever, aspirin. Within 14 years, thousands of street kids and down-and-outers were hooked.
Jonnes takes pains to point out that the Food and Drug Act of 1906, which finally regulated the tonics industry, and the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 went a long way toward wiping out the availability of narcotics in most areas and, hence, a large chunk of this country's first drug epidemic.
It is a point she returns to when discussing those who would consider making heroin and cocaine available on demand through decriminalization - including Kurt L. Schmoke, the mayor of Jonnes' hometown - in return for treatment. The author instead proves her mettle as a student of history, citing areas that have given supply on demand (such as London) with few favorable results.
But one wonders how NIMBYism and the current tax-cutting fever would affect her plans to arrest and treat addicts in prisons or through probation. Prisons and parole officers - not to mention a massive expansion of treatment facilities - take big money. Also, there's little talk of the hopelessness behind inner-city addiction - the lack of decent-paying jobs outside the drug trade. In order to eliminate the huge lower-class drug culture, policymakers must help these folks find something to do.
Still, Hep-Cats is as complete an examination of this sad subject as one is likely to find. MEMO: Michael Anft is a Baltimore-based writer and critic. by CNB