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Creating the American Junkie:

Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control

ISBN-13: 9780801867989
Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
By Caroline Jean Acker
Price: AUD $124.00
Stock: 0 in stock
Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 14/06/2002
Format: Hardback 288 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: History of medicine [MBX]

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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 psychiatristsand 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.

Contents:

Introduction

1 Heroin Addiction and Urban Vice Reform

2 The Opportunistic Approach

3 The Technological Fix: The Search for a Nonaddicting Analgesic

4 Constructing the Addict Career

5 The Junkie as Psychopath

6 Healing Vision and Bureaucratic Reality

7 The Addict in the Social Body

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

""Provides an excellent foundation for understanding not only the prevailing attitudes of the day but also the influence of those attitudes on current policy and theories of addiction.""

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Creating the American Junkie:

Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control