Editor’s note: As has become apparent in this symposium, how individuals read The American Disease depends on when and where they first encountered the book. In today’s post, Caroline Jean Acker, author of Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (2002) reflects on how The American Disease played in the social world of street-level drug education and ethnography in the late 1970s.
On February 1, 1979, I walked into the office of Up Front Drug Information in Miami’s Coconut Grove, my first day on the job as Coordinator of the agency. Smaller and less well known than the Do It Now Foundation or the Student Association for the Study of Hallucinogens (STASH), Up Front shared these groups’ conviction that scare tactics did little to deter drug use once people found even one of their claims false.
Founded in 1973 by Tracy Brown, Up Front assumed that if people were going to use psychoactive drugs, they would be less likely to experience undesirable effects if they had accurate information about them. Lacking clear understanding of drug effects, they risked overdose and other untoward outcomes. The organization maintained a small library (books ranged from Goodman and Gilman to Peter Stafford’s Psychedelics Encyclopedia; periodicals, from The New England Journal of Medicine to High Times), fielded questioners’ phone calls, developed and distributed pamphlets on drug effects and risks, managed a DEA-licensed anonymous street drug testing laboratory, and produced a small monthly magazine called Street Pharmacologist.
My first published writing appeared in this venue where, as editor, I accepted my own submissions. When I was hired, I knew little about psychoactive drugs, and Tracy set about educating me before he went off to law school.