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9. Working
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9. Working The hustler-addict was an American phenomenon, by no means generalizable to all cultures and legal systems. In other times and places working people made up the bulk ofregular users. Thomas DeQuincey's celebrated 1821 Confessions described opium eating amongManchester textile operatives as soprevalent "that on a Saturday afternoon the counters ofdruggists were strewed with pills ofone, two, or threegrains, in preparationfor the known demand ofthe evening. "Rural chemists and shopkeepers likewise piled high their counters, selling prodigious quantities ofopium to agricultural laborers, especially to those in the unhealthful English Fens. Their customers dosed both themselves and their children; babies were routinely stupefied into silence so that their parents could go on working. Narcotics were a cheap form of day care for the nineteenth-century laboring poor.l Chinese coolies, who toiled as indentured immigrant workers in Southeast Asia and the United States, were notorious as opium smokers. How much they consumedwill neverbeexactly known, butopium smokingwas widespreadamong them and there were a large number ofaddicts. Some historians have gone sofar as to argue that opium was the key to the coolie labor system. A coolie was not much better offthan a chattel slave as long as he was in debt to whomever paid his ocean crossing. Although his wages were meager, it was theoretically possible for him to set aside money and eventually buy his freedom. Possible, that is, if his savings did not go up in smoke. Both imperial administrators and Chinese merchant-creditors were happy to keep the coolies supplied with opium; not only 1. Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth -Century England (London and New York: Allen Lane and St. Martin's Press, 1981), 21-48,97-109; Terry M. Parssinen, Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society, 1820-1930 (philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983),22-58. 208 ADDICTS WHO SURVIVED was it a lucrative source ofrevenue, it made the workers quiescent and extended indefinitely their terms ofservitude. Opium was the opiate ofthe masses.2 Duringthe classicera, proletarian narcoticaddiction largely disappearedfrom the United States. This was partly due to the fact that a growing number of addicts were recruited from the urban underclass, and hence were under- or unemployed. YtJu cannot be a worker-addict ifyou cannot find work. Even if steady work were available, it was barely adequate to cover the cost ofheroin, to say nothing ofordinary living expenses. Addicts, however tightly controlled their habits, were constantly tempted to hustle to make ends meet. There were, however, an exceptionalfew who stuck it out, working at legitimatejobs and supporting their habits foryears at a stretch. It is interesting that three ofthe five narrators in this chapter were immigrants, newcomers to the city who were used to long hours and hard work. It is also significant thatfour ofthefive had access to the New YtJrk City drug market. "I've never known a place whereyou score as well as in New YtJrk City" is the way one addictput it. "This is the master. "As bad and as expensive as New YtJrk drugs would one day become, they were usually better than what was available elsewhere. That was of some help to addicts trying to lead conventional lives. JAN E T Janet was born in Virginia on Mulberry Island (now Fort Eustis) in 1916. Her fluher, a black oysterman who squandered his earnings on other women, died when Janet was six. "They almost had to hang me to get me to go to the funeral, that's how much I hated him."Janet learned to do domestic workfrom her mother, a housecleaner, and she eventually found work as a live-in maid for a wealthy family in Jersey City. She liked the arrangement but, when the family moved to California in the mid-1930s, she decided to stay on the East Coast, closer to her mother, who was still in Virginia. So she crossed the river to Manhattan, lookingfor work. I was an expert at pressing shirts. I had never worked in no laundry, but I knew that because the man I worked for in Jersey used to always compliment me. He said, ''Janet, you can't leave us, because I know I'm never going to get anybody to do my cuffs"-he used to wear those long sleeves with French cuffs. 2. Carl A. Trocki, "Opium and Social Control in Colonial Malaya," paper delivered at the Conference on the Historical Context of Opium...