New York City

Cocaine in 1980s America: Fine for the Wealthy & Well-Educated; Bad for the Poor

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Brooks Hudson, a PhD student in history at Southern Illinois University.

Crack is Wack Keith Haring
New York City “Crack is Wack” mural first painted in 1986 by artist Keith Haring. Image courtesy of cookiespi on Flickr.

The years directly preceding the American “crack epidemic” of the 1980s are worth re-examining. Cocaine was by no means new, and people had been using and sometimes smoking, or freebasing, the drug for years. In the early eighties, however, many cocaine users were well-educated white professionals, wealthy celebrities, or captains of industry. By about 1986, though, dealers began condensing cocaine into “crack” that people could smoke instead of snort. As the perception of people who used cocaine changed from white and wealthy to Black and poor, every aspect of reporting changed, too. We can see this unfold in real time, by tracking news coverage in the New York Times archive.

Hollywood Cocaine

Robert Lindsey’s front-page story “Pervasive Use of Cocaine Is Reported in Hollywood” appeared in the Times on October 30, 1982. It described how drug use had become so widespread that companies insuring movies had begun to amend their policies to reflect drug-related risks. Lindsey quoted an unpublished survey of stuntwomen that claimed more than half of the women asked actively used drugs or knew someone who did.

NYT Headline Cocaine1
New York Times, October 30, 1982.

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Exploring Fentanyl Prevalence in New York City Heroin

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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest post comes from Bilal Abbas, MPA, MSW. Bilal graduated with the MPA from Rutgers University in Newark and the MSW from Columbia University in New York City in 2018. He works at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center as a Research Coordinator, facilitating research related to heroin or opioid use treatment.

Group of Stamped Heroin Bags, NYC 2019
A group of discarded stamped heroin bags collected by the author’s study in New York City in October 2019. Image courtesy of the author.

For over half a century in New York City, heroin bags have been distinctly branded with unique markings, including with rubber stamps. From the seller’s viewpoint, stamps create brand loyalty and identify a superior product that yields more psychoactive effects. Heroin-using communities also utilize stamps to identify potentially lethal supplies and raise awareness through word-of-mouth messaging. In the 1990s, users identified and alerted others about supplies, which had caused a number of overdoses and which they suspected to be contaminated with lethal adulterants including scopolamine. [1-3]

Fentanyl has been of increasingly paramount importance in tens of thousands of preventable deaths among Americans since 2013. Fentanyl seizures in the US increased 7-fold from 2012 to 2014, while overdose deaths involving fentanyl and its analogs increased almost 47 percent from 2016 to 2017. [4] A 55 percent increase in fatal overdose was observed in New York City (NYC) between 2015-2017, and in 2017, 55 percent of overdose deaths involved fentanyl. [5]

Due to the availability of rapid fentanyl test-strips, the novel study described in this post, Exploring fentanyl prevalence in New York City, used an exploratory framework to examine and understand the fentanyl contamination in NYC stamped heroin. Examining fentanyl prevalence in NYC heroin by stamp or “brand” can raise awareness about tainted supplies and can help to reduce opioid overdoses. My team collected samples of used and discarded heroin glassine bags in NYC neighborhoods known for heroin use and sealed them within a separate plastic bag to avoid cross-contamination.

We then used fentanyl test strips, which use immunoassay technology to quickly and reliably detect the presence of fentanyl and its analogs, to test trace amounts of heroin in each bag. According to the American College for Medical Toxicology (ACMT), it is a near scientific impossibility to overdose on fentanyl from airborne or transdermal exposure. Therefore, there were no safety risks involved in executing this study. [6]

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The Room Where It Really Happened: The Fraunces Tavern Museum

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Dr. Miriam Kingsberg Kadia , professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In it, she continues her series of museum reviews, all of which you can see here. 

The Fraunces Tavern Museum is located in lower Manhattan, New York. Conveniently, given the difficulty of driving in the area, it is less than five minutes’ walk from numerous subway stops, including Staten Island Ferry (the 1 line), Wall St. (2 and 3), Bowling Green (4 and 5), Whitehall St. (R and W), and Broad St. (J and Z). Adult admission is $7, but holders of a New York City library card are entitled to two free tickets per month. A visit can be expected to take about one hour. At 3 p.m. on a Monday, I had most of the galleries to myself, but 25,000 patrons are said to pass through annually. The museum is open weekdays from noon to 5 p.m. and weekends from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Screenshot 2019-02-19 at 8.09.21 AM
The Fraunces Tavern Museum

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Mabel Dodge Luhan’s First Peyote Trip

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Today’s post comes from guest poster Dr. Chris Elcock, an adjunct professor at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 in Lyon, France, whom you might remember from his previous articles on the early years of cannabis activism and LSD in New York. Today he explores the first recorded peyote trip in Manhattan, which occurred in 1914. Enjoy!

Raymond Harrington had been enamored with Native American culture since he was a child. While he was still in high school, he successfully located an old camp site in Mt. Vernon, New York, and became employed by the American Museum of Natural History thanks to the then curator Frederick Putnam. He went on to study anthropology at Columbia University under the great Franz Boas and conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Indians in Oklahoma. One day, during the spring of 1914, he attended a party in Greenwich Village and regaled the attendees with his stories. But when the subject turned to an obscure cactus that had the power “to pass beyond ordinary consciousness and see things as they are in Reality,” everyone begged him to carry on, including the hostess, the eccentric socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan.

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When New Yorkers Turned On

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Editor’s Note: This post was written by Dr. Chris Elcock, an adjunct professor at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 in Lyon, France, whom you might remember from his article on the early years of cannabis activism published last month. Today he discusses the use of LSD in New York City in the 1960s and its effect on the city’s culture. Enjoy!

Image result for new york lsd 1960sEight years ago I developed a keen interest in the social history of psychedelic drug use and ended up starting a PhD thesis on the history of LSD use in New York City. I based my project on the premises that New York had been somewhat ignored in the scholarship and in the popular mind. When you think of LSD, you think of the West Coast in the 1960s and its colorful Haight-Ashbury scene. San Francisco certainly had a long tradition of tolerance toward Bohemians and eccentrics and it seemed quite natural that such a psychedelic scene should have blossomed there. But what about the Big Apple? As one the most influential metropolises in the entire world, surely the use of mind-altering drugs would have led to the development of a very complex scene indeed.

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