Smack: Heroin and the American City (review)

Sensible drug policy has proved an elusive goal in the United States. As this book demonstrates in the vivid detail that the best social history provides, drug policy and policing has done more to propel the availability of heroin in U.S. cities than to control its consumption. Law enforcement has pressured innovation in the illicit drug economy. Market dynamics—the relative degree of centralization in vertical markets versus decentralization in lateral markets—are amply illustrated throughout Smack, which is as much a meditation upon the limitations of U.S. drug policy as it is a social historian’s exploration of how heroin became the quintessential “urban” commodity. Schneider’s account relentlessly places heroin within the landscape of inequality where the drug came to stand for the concentration of poverty and marginality in the nation’s inner cities. Casting urban heroin markets as products of disinvestment in urban communities, Schneider relies on the conceptual tools of cultural geography—concentration, centralization, and marginality—in order to analyze the primary material he has gathered through interviews, photographs, and documents.

All but forgotten, the post-World War II heroin epidemic and the “juvenile delinquency” panic in the early 1950s illustrates the valuable lesson that drug “panics” often occur when actual use is declining. The dominance of cultural scripts—especially those of antidrug crusaders—overrides commitment to accurate data. A compelling example of this tendency is the over-emphasis on adult pushers giving out free shots or sniffs in attempts to get youths “hooked” on gratis samples. As Schneider shows, such implausible scenarios were the stuff of cultural fiction, and peers were far more often the route to experimentation than adults. This book debunks several similar myths, among them the notion that heroin is a disaggregating force. For the postwar youth of certain urban environs, heroin became an organizing force around which whole lives were centered. Schneider builds on the classic ethnographic study of heroin use in late 1950s New York City, Ed Preble and John Casey’s “Taking Care of Business,” in which the heroin addict is presented as a “very busy man,” for whom “the life” was not about apathy, lack of motivation, or laziness, but instead provided an identity and a motivation for the pursuit of a meaningful existence. Preble and Casey argued that drug use was meaningful as they described the relationships and activities of people engaged in “hustling” or “taking care of business” as not only tantamount to full-time jobs, but even challenging careers in places where there are no others. As Schneider points out in the well-reasoned polemic with which he concludes, until the intimate relationship between work and “social discipline” is understood as the antidote to “deviance,” drug policy is unlikely to become effective at changing the social setting in which the urban poor turn to drugs and drug economies.

Of particular value as a novel contribution is Smack’s fifth chapter, “Ethnicity and the Market” on the role of Mexican heroin not only in expected places like New York City and Chicago, but in the Mexican American barrios of southern California. This refreshing look breaks the stranglehold exerted by the Northeast in U.S. drug policy history. Another important contribution central to the heart of Smack stems from an insight generated by Schneider’s previous book on gangs, Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (Princeton University Press, 1999), which revealed that when gangs were in their heyday and thus at their most cohesive, members shared bonds, philosophies, and activities that mitigated against ongoing involvement with heroin, despite enabling experimentation with drugs and alcohol. As this kind of “peer-organized resistance” (Schneider 2009, 101) declined—and as anti-gang initiatives disrupted social networks on which gang members collectively relied—individuals turned to “hustling” in an illicit economy that was expanding rapidly enough to absorb them. Indeed, Schneider maintains that the doubling of New York City’s known heroin users across the decades of the 1960s far exceeded the...