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1. Turned On
- The University of Tennessee Press
- Chapter
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1. Turned On Almost all ofthe persons we interviewed had a vivid memory oftheirfirst use ofa narcotic, as well as the circumstances leading up to it. Like most twentiethcentury addicts, they were introduced to opiates by acquaintances, rather than by pharmacists or physicians. Coming into contact with someone who sold or gave them narcotics was not just a matter ofbad luck. As members oflower-class or deviant subcultures, they traveled in circles in which opiate use was commonplace and exposure therefore likely to occur. Because they werejazz musicians, orghetto dwellers, or marijuana smokers they stood a much better chance ofdiscovering the joys and so"ows ofheroin than people whose activities were confined to the straight world. This was afact ofpolitical as well as epidemiological significance, since the pattern oflow-life narcotic use reinforced the consensus behind thepolice approach. The relationship was circular, insofar as criminalizing drug use kept it pretty much confined to criminal circles. Heroin belonged to the night, and Anslinger meant to keep it there. 1#: asked our subjects how they felt when they first used narcotics. The reactions varied. Some individuals, like the late saxophonistArtPepper, claimed to experience a pure and powerful euphoria. In his autobiography, Straight Life, Pepper recalled that hisfirst sniffofheroin gave him asense ofwarmth andpeace he had never known; for thefirst time in his life he was free from the demons of guilt and self-hatred. ''/ looked in the mirror," he wrote, "and I looked like an angel."! For the majority, however, the high was accompanied by an intense nausea. Like the novice drinker who has had one too many, they became miserably sick. This was partly a matter of natural aversion, the body's response when first challenged by a dose ofan external opiate. It may also reflect the somewhat higher l. Art and Laurie Pepper, Straight Lifo: The Story ofArt Pepper (New York: Schirmer Books, 1979),85. 48 ADDICTS WHO SURVIVED purity ofstreet heroin during the classicera, somethingthat the addicts themselves remarked upon. TED DY Teddy was born ofblack parents in Savannah, Georgia, in 1927. His family lift was extremely unstable. His absenteefather drank himselfto death, and his mother tried repeatedly tofoist Teddy on other relatives: ''/ was like a burden to her." Eventually she ran away to New York City, but he found her andjoined her in the mid-1930s. When I was a youngster Harlem was alive. You could hear laughter. The streets would be full of people. Lenox Avenue, Seventh Avenue, all had businesses: there wasn't an empty store front along there. Seventh Avenue was like Broadway downtown. There was dope in Harlem, and crime, but it wasn't like it is now: people weren't getting mugged. Sure, there were fights, but it was basically just fights. The sectien I lived in was integrated. There were white people living right down the block on 132nd Street, and on 134th. I went to school with white kids. We even had gangs or clubs with the white kids in them. The people who owned the stores, most of them were Jews or Italians; they used to bring their kids there in the morning, and the kids would go to school with us to grammar school. When they'd complete grammar school, they'd go someplace else. I went to P.S. 89: it was the first school I'd gone to. I didn't go all that much down South-there wasn't nobody to make you go down there; it was left to your family. It wasn't compulsory to go to school the way it was here in New York. So my mother had to take me to school. I went as far as the eighth grade. I started ninth grade but I was just going, if you know what I mean: I went when I wanted. There was no one there to guide me; there was never no one home. My mother worked as a maid on Long Island. She would leave in the morning to go to work, or whatever, and she might come home two days later. So I'd be runnin' around on the streets and stealing. At that time you could go to all the five-and-ten-cent stores, where they'd have cookies and candies just laying on the shelves. I'd go and pick them up and eat them. It was like a picnic. Everything was in the open-it wasn't like it is now, where everything is in...