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

Acker, Caroline Jean

ISBN 10: 0801867983 / ISBN 13: 9780801867989

Editore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002

Riguardo questo articolo

Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!

Codice articolo S_471511924

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control
• Editore: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0801867983
• ISBN 13: 9780801867989
• Rilegatura: hardcover
• Condizione: Very Good

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

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.

Informazioni sull'autore

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).