The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days: Narcotic Addiction and Cultural Crisis in the United States, 1870-1920

Abstract

Timothy Hickman has written a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship that examines the history of addiction as a social and cultural phenomenon. Hickman's work pushes the study of addiction in an important new direction: he suggests that widely held ideas about habitual narcotic use, which he calls “the addiction concept” (4), simultaneously grew out of, and helped create, a “cultural crisis of modernity” (4) in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ideas about addiction, he demonstrates, were deeply embedded in both popular ideas about gender, class, and race, as well as in debates about what it meant to be modern, including “the struggle to redefine the terms of human agency in the face of rapid technological, economic, and political change” (4–5) that lay at the heart of the cultural crisis he describes. At the same time, Hickman argues that the concept of addiction contained within it, from the beginning, the implication that habitual drug use could be either voluntary or compelled. This “double meaning of addiction” (7) helped fuel the sense of cultural crisis Hickman describes, and it was eventually codified into law by the passage of the 1914 Harrison Act. The consequence, he suggests, “was to divide the drug-using population into groups of criminals and patients while also helping to expand the roles of professional medicine and federal police authority” (151).