Heroin Use as Everyday Radicalism: Opiate Consumers and the Leftist Counter-Culture in Frankfurt am Main, 1970–80

Abstract

This article details the impact of heroin in the early to mid-1970s leftist scene, with a focus on Frankfurt am Main, but an eye to larger developments in West Germany as a whole. Heroin challenged leftist assumptions about substance use and made a deep impact on the West German counter-culture, student left, and New Left at large. Early heroin users saw themselves as part of the left, and the practices of heroin consumption can be usefully seen as a sort of everyday radical praxis. Heroin users saw in the substance a way to ‘do something’ against a society they deemed oppressive. The wider counter-culture never embraced the drug and, indeed, repudiated its use as reactionary much in the same way that they eventually repudiated the violent activism of West German terror groups. As such, heroin users took part in and helped shape the process of splintering and radicalization that defined the early 1970s counter-culture in West Germany.