As historian David Courtwright describes in Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America Before 1940, the typical addict of the late nineteenth century was an older middle-class woman who first started taking drugs for medical reasons, while the typical twentieth-century addict was a young man ofthe urban lower classes who had originally experimented with drugs for pleasure.1 This demographic shift was dramatic, and Courtwright convincingly argues that the contrast be? tween the ailing matron and the hustling junkie was significant in shaping our national narcotics policy.2 But in the face of these undeniable demographic dif? ferences, important cultural continuities remained. These cultural continuities bridged the demographic shift and connected the medical addicts of the 1880s and 1890s to the dope fiends ofthe 1910s and 1920s. The most important cultural continuity was the perceived femininity of ad? diction. Starting in the 1870s, doctors injected women with morphine to numb the pain of female troubles, or to turn the willful hysteric into a manageable invalid. Up through the turn ofthe century, morphine was a literal prescription for bourgeois femininity.3 Thus, by the 1890s, when the first drug epidemic peaked, approximately two-thirds of the medical addicts were women, making women medical addicts almost half of all addicts in the United States. As a result of this thirty-year association of women with addiction, both users and observers saw drug addiction as something feminine as late as the 1930s, long after men had become the majority of users.4 To show how the femininity of addiction connected the older medical addicts to the nascent urban drug culture ofthe early twentieth century, this article will focus on drug use among the sporting class in the urban red-light district. I have two reasons for analyzing drugs in the vice district. First, the urban tenderloin was the location of cities* disreputable leisure, and as such it was the site of the new addiction.5 Second, the new addicts either came from the sporting class, which was comprised of prostitutes, pimps, thieves, gamblers, gangsters, entertainers, fairies, and johns; or, they were youths who admired the sporting men and women. In their efforts to join the ranks of the sporting class, the new addicts emulated the sporting class's manners and mores?including their drug use. By focusing on drug use by prostitutes, pimps, and the gay men known as fairies, I will demonstrate how the continued cultural association of addiction with femininity shaped the perception of addiction throughout society, and influenced the decision of men to incorporate drug use into their rejection of conventional male gender roles.7 This article is divided into four parts, including a theoretical intermission. The first section is a brief description of drugs in the vice district. In the second section, I focus on opiate use by pimps and prostitutes, paying particular attention
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May 6, 2011
Robert P Stephens 
Open Access