Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control

Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control

by Caroline Jean Acker
ISBN-10:
0801883830
ISBN-13:
9780801883835
Pub. Date:
01/05/2006
Publisher:
Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN-10:
0801883830
ISBN-13:
9780801883835
Pub. Date:
01/05/2006
Publisher:
Johns Hopkins University Press
Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control

Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control

by Caroline Jean Acker
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Overview

Heroin was only one drug among many that worried Progressive Era anti-vice reformers, but by the mid-twentieth century, heroin addiction came to symbolize irredeemable deviance. Creating the American Junkie examines how psychiatrists and psychologists produced a construction of opiate addicts as deviants with inherently flawed personalities caught in the grip of a dependency from which few would ever escape. Their portrayal of the tough urban addict helped bolster the federal government's policy of drug prohibition and created a social context that made the life of the American heroin addict, or junkie, more, not less, precarious in the wake of Progressive Era reforms.

Weaving together the accounts of addicts and researchers, Acker examines how the construction of addiction in the early twentieth century was strongly influenced by the professional concerns of psychiatrists seeking to increase their medical authority; by the disciplinary ambitions of pharmacologists to build a drug development infrastructure; and by the American Medical Association's campaign to reduce prescriptions of opiates and to absolve physicians in private practice from the necessity of treating difficult addicts as patients. In contrast, early sociological studies of heroin addicts formed a basis for criticizing the criminalization of addiction. By 1940, Acker concludes, a particular configuration of ideas about opiate addiction was firmly in place and remained essentially stable until the enormous demographic changes in drug use of the 1960s and 1970s prompted changes in the understanding of addiction—and in public policy.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780801883835
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date: 01/05/2006
Edition description: Revised ed.
Pages: 288
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Caroline Jean Acker is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and cofounder of Prevention Point Pittsburgh, a needle exchange program in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. She is co-editor, with Sarah W. Tracy, of Altering American Consciousness: Essays in the History of Alcohol and Drug Use in the United States, 1800–2000 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1. Heroin Addiction and Urban Vice Reform
Chapter 2. The Opportunistic Approach
Chapter 3. The Technological Fix: The Search for a Nonaddicting Analgesic
Chapter 4. Constructing the Addict Career
Chapter 5. The Junkie as Psychopath
Chapter 6. Healing Vision and Bureaucratic Reality
Chapter 7. The Addict in the Social Body
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This is an accessible study of interest to a broad and varied audience. Acker has a good eye for the revealing quote and incident. She has undertaken an important task in seeking to configure the social historical (who the addicts were and what constituted addiction), the sociology of knowledge (the involvements of the several groups of researchers considered), and public policy.
—Charles E. Rosenberg, Harvard University

Charles E. Rosenberg

This is an accessible study of interest to a broad and varied audience. Acker has a good eye for the revealing quote and incident. She has undertaken an important task in seeking to configure the social historical (who the addicts were and what constituted addiction), the sociology of knowledge (the involvements of the several groups of researchers considered), and public policy.

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