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5. Scoring
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5. Scoring Once addicted, classic-era users had to obtain narcotics on a regular basis or endure thepains ofwithdrawal. There were no ambulatory detoxificationfacilities and no maintenance clinics; they either scored or they became ill. This duality was the dominantfact oftheir lives and shaped every aspect oftheir behavior. There were two principal sources ofnarcotics: doctors, who could sometimes be persuaded to write prescriptions for a fee, and street dealers, who were the retailers for the illicit market. Morphine and synthetic opiates could be obtained through theformer, adulterated heroinfrom the latter. One interestingpoint that surfaced in the interviews was that the addicts tended to specialize. Some confined themselves to makingdoctors, others to purchasingheroinfrom dealers. Once they had the knack and the connections for scoringfrom one source or the other, they stuck with it, at least until an unforeseen event disrupted their routine. One such event was the shortage occasioned by World War II. As Arthur and Jack mentioned in the previous chapter, and as John describes in this chapter, illicit narcotics became increasingly scarce and expensive during the early 1940s. Axis occupations in Europe and Asia eliminated several traditional sources of heroin and opium, whilesubmarines andstrict wartime customs inspections made smuggling difficult. Anslinger had also been busy buying up most ofthe Near Eastern opium crop, both to insure a military stockpilefor theAllies and to keep such invaluable medication out ofenemy hands (whereupon German researchers developed methadone, the synthetic opiate that would boomerang on the Bureau ofNarcotics twentyyears later). The combination ofdisrupted smuggling and preemptive purchases created a massive "panic" among addicts; by 1942 street heroin was about 2 percentpure, ifit could befound at all. J# spoke to afew people, like Teddy, who saidthat they were able to purchase heroin regularly during the war, but this was exceptional. Most addicts accustomed to black market heroin had to switch to other drugs 132 ADDICTS WHO SURVIVED or quit altogether. Those who lacked the skill or patience to make doctors often resorted to robbery and burglary--"everybody with a white coat, everybody even remotely associated with medicine" was liable to be held up during a panic.) Anotherexpedient was to boildown andinjectparegoric, the camphoratedtincture ofopium still widely available without a prescription in the early 1940s. Once druggists caught on, they began profiteering. One midwestern pharmacist upped thepriceofagallon ofparegoric to $165, orabout thirty-three times the wholesale cost.2 He did not wantfor customers. J 0 H N John was born into a blackfomily in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1915. His parents moved to Baltimore briefly, then to New l0rk City in 1926. I started using drugs in the thirties. This was more or less an experimental thing. I had been smoking marijuana when I was a youngster, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. In Harlem you can buy anything-you just have to know where to buy it. When I was a kid, we used to go to a reefer pad and buy it and smoke in the pad. We'd sit there listening to a jukebox or a phonograph. We'd listen all day. We'd spend maybe six, seven hours in there smoking. This was, I suppose you'd say, being "cool" or "cooling it." Most of the people that were considered to be in the life smoked marijuana-the night people, people that were considered "down," such as gamblers, numbers people, prostitutes. At that particular time marijuana was the only drug you found in the reefer pads. There was a separation between marijuana and the heroin. The coke was separate too. You'd go to another place, and you'd sit down, and coke would be put on a plate. Coke, and whiskey. This was a different type thing. I went to these pads, but not too often though. There were mostly pimps and prostitutes there, and gamblers. I was about twenty-three when I first used heroin. In the block I carne out of, 143rd Street, there was a group ofolder fellows, and most ofthem, I suppose, had habits. We used to wonder about them, why they were so much higher than we were. We were smoking the best reefer around, because we were smoking meserole, and during that time, anybody that 1. Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Macmillan, 1965),353. 2. "What's Cooking?" Newsweek 25 (April 9, 1945), 99-100. See also Gerard Piel, "Narcotics: War Has Brought Illicit Traffic to All-time Low but U.S. Treasury Fears Rising Postwar Addiction," Life 15 Ouly 19, 1943), 82-94...