Dope Fiend Research Articles

The American Pipe Dream: Performance of Drug Addiction, 1890–1940

The American Pipe Dream: Performance of Drug Addiction, 1890–1940

Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage

Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage

Anatomy of an Addict: Junie McCree and the Vaudeville Dope Fiend

In 1900, performer Junie McCree debuted a new character on the stage of vaudeville theatres in New York City. In a short playlet written by McCree entitled The Dope Fiend; or, Sappho in Chinatown, the actor took to the stage in a black suit, fedora, and thick mustache to perform a comic version of an opium-smoking addict from the West of the United States. McCree's addict was marked by his slumped posture, his wisecracks and chicanery, and a broad assortment of inventive slang that was intended as a sign of the character's frontier roots. Undermining expectations regarding addicts as vicious or subhuman, this vaudeville dope fiend was charming in his insouciance and playfully eccentric in behavior. McCree's interpretation was distinct from the already established stage drunk or tramp clown; he was not sloppy or bedraggled, but more the figure of a slow-moving but cunning saloon poet. McCree quickly became famous for the portrayal, spawning numerous imitators who helped make the vaudeville dope fiend a standard character convention, recognizable to Progressive Era audiences of variety entertainment, but almost entirely ignored by modern scholarship. Dissecting the anatomy of McCree's characterization, including its sources and cultural impact, this article argues for the inclusion of the comic dope fiend in the pantheon of stage characters from the period and calls attention to popular entertainment's contribution to the national debate over drug addiction.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Long Day's Journey Into Night

From responsible users to recalcitrant dope fiends: Mapping modes of engagement with harm reduction

This article considers individuals' diverse modes of engagement with an increasingly medicalised strain of harm reduction that emphasises individual accountability for personal health and welfare. Drawing upon 1 year of ethnographic research at a New York City-based syringe exchange (“NYC Harm Reduction”, a pseudonym), I describe how drug users themselves made sense of harm reduction, negotiated its discourses of risk and responsibility, and incorporated its behavioural directives into their own body projects – or did not. While suggesting some participants' apparent absorption of risk reduction into a dominant, and enabling identity, I focus mainly upon individuals' “on-stage” performances and apparent depth of service use and acceptance while at NYC Harm Reduction. Building upon recent critiques of contemporary harm reduction's de-contextualised neoliberal subject, I discuss the crucial roles of public housing assistance and peer worker employment in incentivising participants' uptake of pro-risk reduction attitudes, and (presumably) practices. Ultimately, participants' multiplicity of approaches to harm reduction hinged upon differences in not only personality or stage of drug use, but also current living circumstances; moreover, individuals' differential engagement with NYC Harm Reduction reflected the ways in which the organisation and its government funders prioritised the material investment of certain “risky” bodies – namely, HIV-positive drug users.

Women, Crime and Sexual Transgression

Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2013, 246pp, 17.99[pounds sterling] paperback Lucy Bland's Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper is an incisive and highly accomplished study of constructions of femininity and sexuality in war and post-war contexts. Through analysis of the role of young female protagonists in a range of British court trials that took place between 1918 and 1924, Bland skilfully weaves together complex arguments about gender, sexuality, class, race and national identity. Although material contained in four of the five chapters has appeared in shorter or altered forms in previously published articles and essays, the thematic synergies between the topics covered means that the book still warrants attention as a single, unified piece of work. The previously unpublished second chapter, 'Butterfly women, Chinamen, dope fiends and metropolitan allure', is an excellent addition, as it helps to bring together the different strands of Bland's arguments about 'types' of women (p4), and examines in depth the meanings generated by recurrent use of Orientalist discourse in trial proceedings, press coverage and other media. Each of the chapters introduces accounts of the key events, protagonists and context, before moving on to investigate the broader social resonances, connections and lasting corollaries of the trials. This structure is readily accessible and makes for compelling reading as it allows Bland to demonstrate her skills as both story-teller and critic. The introduction delineates the cultural significance of the figure of the 'modern woman-cum-flapper', who, Bland argues, represents 'immorality, generational challenge, and the erosion of stability, particularly in relation to gender relations and the family' as well as class and sexuality (pp3-4). Lines of enquiry pertaining to the presentation of women in criminal and legal contexts are laid out, as is the role of the popular press in sensationalising, perpetuating, and occasionally, challenging, a range of female 'types'. Bland carefully maps out important contextual details, including the impact of war and immigration on gender relations, sexuality, leisure and lifestyle, in order to provide the necessary backdrop to the events explored in the book. The legacies of the nineteenth-century newspaper and the famous trials of earlier figures such as Constance Kent and Madeline Smith are also referenced in ways that illuminate the issues under discussion. Chapter one focuses on the libel case raised by dancer Maud Allan against the right-wing MP Noel Pemberton Billing for publishing a paragraph entitled 'The Cult of the Clitoris' in The Vigilante, which implied that Maud was a lesbian. The complexity of the case and its breadth of cultural implications cannot be fully addressed in this short review, so only a brief account is provided here. Bland states that the trial was 'so fascinating at the time, for it involved a rich mix: a decadent play (Salome), a notorious figure of those days (Oscar Wilde), a celebrated Edwardian dancer (Maud Allan), and a paranoid rumour about conspiracy, German infiltration and sexual vice in high places (the Black Book)' (p16). The presentation of Maud as potentially conspiratorial and treacherous, as well as decadent, degenerate and sexually aberrant, meant that 'the defence of this criminal libel resulted, in effect, not in Billing being on trial, but Maud and Salome' (p18). Bland shows how national, wartime, sexual and class concerns were linked in this case, as the dominant idealised notion of English womanhood as patriotic, sexually conformist and morally upright was contrasted with Maud's apparent 'cosmopolitan modernity [...] sexual knowledge and sexualised dancing' which was frequently described using negative racialised discourse (p44). Chapter two explores the array of early-twentieth-century fears associated with Chinese men having relationships with English women. …

Memory and Guilt

Memory and Guilt

“That goes for Sweeny”

It is the perseverating Jamie who employs the expression “That goes for Sweeny” (as O'Neill spells the name) when he wants to dismiss a remark he has just directed at Edmund in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. This expression appears to have originated in the horse-racing and betting world, though its usage later expanded. Such is the claim—“A New Slang Phrase and How It Originated”—put forth in the New York Morning Telegraph, a newspaper published for horse-racing followers, on February 12, 1901: “That Goes for Sweeney”The slang of the racetrack is as distinctive as that of the gambling house, the stage, or the city slum, and much of it is unintelligible to the average man about town who thinks he has heard everything and knows everything.A frequent expression of disgust among racing men is “That goes for Sweeney.” Translated it signifies, “I pass it up.” “I don't want any part of it.” Ordinarily it is employed with reference to a bad proposition that does not appeal convincingly to the keen business judgment of the speaker.Sweeney is a quaint little Irishman who does the calling on the Western tracks. Whenever anything particularly shady or dubious in the way of inside information crops up it is unloaded upon Sweeney. The knowing ones reject it with the satirical comment, “That goes for Sweeney.” They don't care for it.But, although he never “gets it right,” unless by mere accident, poor Sweeney is a blithe and light hearted person, with a vein of quaint philosophy and original humor that makes him much liked by the racing people. Some of his own contributions to the slang of the period are weird and wonderful word creations.He takes a cheerful and optimistic view of the future, and is serene in the belief that one of these days some good thing that “goes for Sweeney” will put him on velvet for the rest of his life.1 Use of the expression quickly spread to other part of the sports world, to baseball and boxing, for example.2 An amusing early instance involves boxing and the courts. When Magistrate Herrman held the redoubtable heavyweight champion Jack Johnson “for consideration by the grand jury in $1,000 on the charge of whipping a consumptive negro named Norman Pinder,” he did so after dismissing Johnson's counsel's explanation. The case was “framework,” argued Johnson's lawyer; Pinder “received his injuries by falling downstairs in ‘Baron’ Wilkins's negro resort in West Thirty-fifth Street on the night of the assault.” “Tell it to Sweeney,” countered the judge.3By the end of the decade we find the phrase “that talk goes for Sweeney” employed as the writer states his credentials in “Confessions of a Dope Fiend”: Our greatest moving picture star is a “snow bird”; her name I do not care to mention, and one of our greatest song writers of the day is up against the pipe, and you can take my word for it as a gilt edged bond, for seeing is believing.In the underworld you hear of this stuff: “How do you know” and “who told you,” but that talk goes for Sweeney. I know who and what's what because I handed over the dope myself for I was a messenger boy in the employ of the Postal Telegraph company for five years and I was stationed in New York's famous tenderloin for that period.4 A more widespread use of the expression is suggested by an article in the New York Times in 1920 complaining that visiting Europeans were taking advantage of Americans, in which O'Neill's friend Benjamin De Casseres reminded his readers that “when some one got off a cock-and-bull story in our presence we used to say ‘Tell it to Sweeney,’ or ‘Tell it to the marines.’”5So widely disseminated was the phrase even by 1910, however, that it cropped up as the title of a popular song, the tag line for a local advertisement, and in the slogan for a major newspaper. “Tell It to Sweeney” was sung by Blanche Ring (1877–1961) the vaudeville and Broadway star.6 An enterprising harness supplier named Sweeney in Trenton, New Jersey, repurposed the expression to advertise his wares and expertise. “Use a Sweeney Collar for a sweenied horse,” he advised. “If you have any harness trouble tell it to Sweeney, the leading harness maker, Broad and Market Sts.”7 And it is reported that when Joseph Medill Patterson started the New York Daily News in 1919, he “crafted his paper for New York's common man, whom he dubbed ‘Sweeney.’ The paper's slogan ‘Tell it to Sweeney! The Stuyvesants will understand,’ captured the imagination of both readers and advertisers, and the paper flourished.”8

"I Always Kept a Job": Income Generation, Heroin Use and Economic Uncertainty in 21st Century Detroit.

This qualitative study, based on a series of 30 in-depth interviews and 109 economic surveys conducted with active heroin users residing in and around Detroit, Michigan, describes reported patterns of heroin use and income generation activities. In spite of lack of access to regular, legal employment, we found that many participants displayed a dedication to regular daily routine and a sense of risk management or control. These findings are discussed relative to past research on heroin addiction as well as recent research on the changing nature of employment. We argue that this sample fits somewhere in between the controlled or working addict, and the "junkie" or "righteous dope fiend" of urban lore. We draw a connection between these stable patterns of addiction and income generation and the demands of informal and insecure labor markets. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for further research, interventions, and public policy.

"We Weren't Like No Regular Dope Fiends": Negotiating Hustler and Crackhead Identities

We investigate how participants in the street economy of crack cocaine construct a hustler identity by contrasting their social behaviors and styles with a dialectically contrastive crackhead identity. For those who are proximate to, or involved in, the crack cocaine economy, effort is required to avoid being labeled a crackhead. Would-be hustlers construct boundaries that separate them from others on the street through talk and behavior. We draw on interviews conducted with 28 men convicted of committing violent street crimes to explore how they distance themselves from those exhibiting distasteful symptoms of crack addiction. By examining the boundaries between these two street-based identities we increase sociological understanding of the significance of offenders' identity work for shaping their conceptions of self and other, as well as their interactions in everyday street life.

Showing a New World in 1942: The Gentle Modernity of Puffin Picture Books

October 01 2007 Showing a New World in 1942: The Gentle Modernity of Puffin Picture Books Paul Stiff Paul Stiff Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Paul Stiff Online ISSN: 1531-4790 Print ISSN: 0747-9360 © 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2007 Design Issues (2007) 23 (4): 22–38. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi.2007.23.4.22 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Paul Stiff; Showing a New World in 1942: The Gentle Modernity of Puffin Picture Books. Design Issues 2007; 23 (4): 22–38. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi.2007.23.4.22 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsDesign Issues Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Are You Truly a Recovering Dope Fiend? Local Interpretive Practices at a Therapeutic Community Drug Treatment Program

Previous qualitative research on treatment programs for drug addiction/alcoholism has primarily focused on those processes whereby participants are expected to construct a new sense of self according to institutional parameters. The present article builds on that research and explores how contemporary programs attempt to resolve the problem that it is almost impossible to tell if someone has engaged in this self‐construction process. Informed by five months of ethnographic fieldwork at an adult residential drug treatment facility, the article asks: under what circumstances do program members call into doubt a client's efforts to create an institutional self, and how do they express this skepticism? The article reveals that staff and clients employ a set of local interpretive practices about community and emotions to assess whether clients are constructing the institutional self of a “recovering dope fiend.” It specifically considers how they interpret a client's emotional displays to represent that client's current self under construction. That is, a client's ability to control anger appropriately or to handle anxiety demonstrates s/he is effectively “doing the program” of self‐construction.

Representing Health - Discourses of Health and Illness in the Media

Introduction M.King & K.Watson.- PART ONE: AUDIENCE RECEPTION STUDIES Public Medicine: The Reception of a Medical Drama S.Davin.- Primitive Communications: The Case of the Radio Campaign for Asian Populations in the UK Y.Doi.- Performing Disability: Impairment, Disability and Soap Opera Viewing A.Wilde.- PART TWO: DISCOURSES OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS IN THE PRINT MEDIA AND THE INTERNET Threatened Children: Media Representations of Childhood Cancer C.Seale.- Mad Cows and Mad Scientists: What Happened to Public Health in the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Great British Consumer? M.King & C.Street.- Writing Digital Selves: Narratives of Health and Illness in the Internet M.Hardey.- PART THREE: UNRULY BODIES AND THE MEDIA 'Planting Landmines in Their Sex Lives...': Governmentality, Iconography of Sexual Disease and the 'Duties' of the STD Clinic A.Price.- Slicing Through Healthy Bodies: The Media Representation of Body Modification K.Watson & S.Whittle.- Representing 'Healthy' and 'Sexual' Bodies: The Media, Disability and Consensual 'SM' A.Beckmann.- PART FOUR: MORALITY AND HEALTH: DISCOURSES OF GOOD AND EVIL IN HEALTH TEXTS Dope Fiends: The Myth and Menace of Drug Users in Film P.Guy.- Disease, Decay and Dread: Literary Constructions of Illness A.Kershaw.

Heroin users as ‘folk devils’ and French public attitudes toward public health policy

A national telephone survey was conducted to investigate public opinions and attitudes toward drugs issues in France ( N=2009). This article aims to study: (a) how French people perceive heroin users and (b) how this perception shapes opinions toward risk reduction policy, alcohol and tobacco. Overall, 73% of respondents considered that heroin users are a danger to their friends and relatives, 59% thought that they try to lead young people to use heroin, 22% labelled them as ‘hangers-on’. A cluster analysis led to distinguish a significant minority who endorsed a stereotyped perception of heroin users, described as ‘dope fiends’. These respondents were more likely to disagree with risk reduction policy and less prone to label alcohol and tobacco as drugs, as well as to consider that cigarette smoking and alcohol abuse cause more problems in society than illegal substance use. Factors associated with these opinions and implications for public health policy are discussed.

Innocent Addicts, Dope Fiends and Nefarious Traffickers: Illegal Drug Use in 1920s English Canada.

Canada’s first widespread moral panic about drug use occurred in the 1920s. This paper argues that a new language of drug use was constructed to create this panic and shows how the “narratives of narcoticism” were influenced by gender, race and class. It concludes that these imaginary tales had a significant impact on drug legislation and on the lives of drug users.

Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century

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

The Moral Economies of Homeless Heroin Addicts: Confronting Ethnography, HIV Risk, and Everyday Violence in San Francisco Shooting Encampments

Ethnographic immersion among homeless heroin addicts in San Francisco documents far more risky practices than the public health literature routinely reports. The logics of street-based income-generating strategies and the moral economy of social networking among self-identified “dope fiends” results in almost daily shares of drug preparation paraphernalia. Public health researchers need to reconceptualize their psychological behaviorist paradigm of “individual health risk behavior” because the pragmatics of income-generating strategies and the social symbolic hierarchies of respect, identity, and mutual dependence shape risky behavior. The explanatory potentials and the applied interventions that participant-observation anthropological approaches could bring to epidemiological public health research have not been utilized effectively in the field of HIV prevention and substance use. The accuracy of quantitative public health databases and our understanding of the who/why/ how/where of HIV infection could be improved by a cross-methodological dialogue with participant-observation fieldworkers and by a greater theoretical sophistication with respect to power, violence, and extreme social marginalization.

That Lamoka Lake Feeling

THAT LAMOKA LAKE FEELING/Barbara Sutton MY MOTHER carried huge pocketbooks with everything in the world in them but money. When she got a new pocketbook it was a bright new day, cleared up for ship sightings. The old pocketbooks she'd leave stuffed to the hilt just as they were, and they'd wind up somewhere on the floor of the hall closet with the other vinyl and plastic residue of our skinflinted lives. My mother never went much of anywhere, her excuse being her appearance: she lived in wide cottonpoly shifts and black laceless Keds with holes to accommodate the corns on her baby toes. School events to which parents needed to come, relatives' weddings, and Christmas and Easter were terrible for her, and for me and Toby, because we'd have to go shopping for a new size-22 dress. She could not bear wearing the same dress twice. On its debut the garment would become the text of my mother's life, and it always said the same thing: I hate what I am. You'd have to adopt a different mindset for this kind of shopping: what was "nice" for her wasn't what was nice for you. There was basically no cut to these enormous dresses; they were of a curious texture, like girdle fabric, big synthetic rectangles with short sleeves attached . They had matching fashion belts that any sensible, size-22 woman would discard, gold buttons or simulated leather ones, Nehru collars, fringed faux pockets, and other groovy details. Td display a specimen, lifting my arms over my head. "How 'bout this, Mom. It's purple." Often Td unknowingly venture into the 22 1/2 section of the rack, and my mother would be affronted to the point of outrage. "Td never wear a half size." She had her dignity, her standards, even though we'd hear the clink of a spoon in the middle of the night and know she was eating again. Any number of things could make my mother cry—"Ave Maria," Pattie Page, steel guitars. On Saturday nights we'd listen to an AM radio broadcast of my uncle's band, Delmar Huber and His Country Gentlemen, from where they were playing down in Pennsylvania. When Uncle Del ran through a certain series of twangs my mother would take off her glasses and sob into her fists. This was a routine in which everyone knew his part: Toby and I would pat her on the back in the way I had touched the bony fur of a guinea pig for the first time. Comfort was not a goal or even a consideration: this was simply the way you spent your Saturday nights. The Missouri Review · 259 Then my father left, and my mother had to go to work, and here is where the story that I like can do nothing much but end. Toby and I stood on the front sidewalk, watching our father's preparations for departure . He pulled Toby's ear like he always did, but this time Toby did not slap back at him like Dad's fingers were a June bug. As he backed out of the drive, he leaned through the window to tell me something. He was a gaunt man with a rugged dusting of black that never came off on his razor. "Don't wind up a dope fiend," he said, "and don't let people get under your skin." Right after this my mother began tapping frantically on a Royal portable that wobbled on its tiny metal stand. She was so huge at the typing stand that when she reached sixty words a minute it was frightening —you expected a boom, a Frankenstein bolt of lightning. Because she was a woman encumbered rather than helped by her looks, she had to type well to be able to go back to her profession as a bookkeeper; she had to do everything better than any other woman who wanted to bring home a whopping eighty dollars a week. The wardrobe for my mother's first post port-desertion job consisted of all the size-22 dresses she'd bought and immediately despised. She...

Living a responsible life: The impact of AIDS on the social indentity of intravenous drug users

The dominant image of an intravenous (IV) drug user in U.S. society is that of the unbridled ‘dope fiend’. It is common treatment literature to refer to users as diseased and pathologically unable to control their lives.Female IV drug users, as the bearers of children, even more than males, are faced with the paradox posed by conflicting social messages labeling them as irresponsible,dirty ‘dope fiends’ while approaching them as responsible citizens who need to ‘clean up their act’ for their children. The paradox of these messages creates a profound moral dilemma involving agency—the ability to develop a flow of conduct by reflexively monotoring intention, purpose, and accountability of actions in the pursuit of a goal—and the social identity to ‘junkie’. This article examines this social condition and how it affects the life and option of a woman diagnosed HIV positive. Using narrative discourse and analyzing it through the study of voice I show how an IV drug using woman uses their diagnosis to redefine her life and her social; identity, as the changes a negative ‘deviant’ image into a positive one.

Life with Heroin: Voices from the Inner City.

Life with Heroin: Voices from the Inner City.