New York City's Opioid Drug History

The use of opioids as pain relief has deep roots in New York City, dating back to the 1880s when doctors began prescribing morphine pills to housewives as an unregulated treatment.¹ Journalist Christopher Booker explores New York's opioid drug history — from plant-based morphine, opium, and heroin to synthetic drugs like fentanyl — in a half-hour documentary that examines drug addiction, medical treatment, and the evolving criminalization of drugs over the years.

New York City's Opioid Drug History:

"Opioid addiction has been a complex and persistent part of New York City since the Civil War. The city's long history with opioids is a story of brutal and stubborn resilience that sits upon an intractable number of victims and survivors. Each layer has left a complicated portrait of supply and demand and a broad snapshot of the social, economic, and public health impacts from a drug that the city has never been able to kick."²

"As always, with every kind of drug scare in the US, there seems to be a racial angle to it. Smoking opium was associated with Chinese immigrants. And there are all kinds of media stories or exposes about opium dens in New York City, though one of the narratives is that these are places where Chinese immigrant opium smokers would attract white women and get them enslaved to opium. This idea that white women were getting lured into opium dens where they might become sexually available to non-white men was the stuff of nightmares for the self-appointed leaders of the white race."

"It becomes so much more dangerous to be a drug user in New York City, overdoses are already a common feature of life as a drug user. But after heroin, it's so much more powerful. It's so easy to miscalculate a dose that overdoses escalate even more."

"In the early 1980s, historian David Courtwright and public health professors, Don Des Jarlais and Herman Joseph, conducted a series of interviews with opioid users like Leroy Street, who was a teenager when he started using. Leroy Street was using during a period of transition, as the federal government began cracking down on narcotics and the country was moving toward prohibition of alcohol. The early wave of restrictions that started in 1909 were followed in 1914 by the Harrison Act, which was the first federal attempt to curb addiction. By 1924, heroin was prohibited entirely."

"Under the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, the US government began stockpiling massive quantities of opium in the late 1930s. All opioid drugs are pulled off the streets out of illicit traffic and put in stockpiles, including at Fort Knox where the gold is kept, as strategic materials. Plus, the fact that war itself disrupts international shipping and smuggling routes."

"With heroin flowing into the city to a younger group of users, the jazz musicians whom they looked up to became the target of Harry Anslinger. Largely credited as the architect of the war on drugs, Anslinger relentlessly pursued everyone from Charlie Parker to Billie Holiday, and the press began writing about the dangers of this new younger heroin addict. Suddenly, the newspapers and the magazines are full of stories about 18 and 19-year-old heroin addicts. Only now, many of them are African American and Puerto Rican."