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Author's Notes
Hep-cats really grew out of my first book, which was about the South Bronx. Interviewing longtime residents and sifting through old newspaper clips, I was quite surprised to discover that heroin was wreaking havoc there as early as the 1950s. Like many baby boomers, I assumed that illegal drugs became a problem only later, in the 1960s. Wanting to explore this history of drug culture, I looked for but could not find a book on the subject. And so it was that Hep-cats was born. But it was a long gestation.
My initial trip to the Library of Congress in 1985 revealed that the American drug problem was not just decades, but more than a century old. Smoking opium and hop-heads, Dope Cola, morphine fiends, these were all of the 19th-century. At this point I had been a journalist for almost a decade, but kept finding myself attracted to history. And so, feeling that this particular history was too complex to sort out with my journalistic training, I entered graduate school at Johns Hopkins University in American history in the fall of 1986. There I had the good fortune to study with John Higham and in 1992, I emerged with a Ph.D. and a thesis about the history of American drug culture. I signed a book contract and spent another three years finishing Hep-cats.
Probably my fondest memories of writing my drug book revolve around a 1994 trip to France to research the French Connection. The newspaper Le Figaro provided access to its archives in Paris and arranged for its Marseilles correspondent to meet me when I headed south to that tough and funky ville. There I found myself interviewing aged drug traffickers and retired drug cops in local cafes, where everyone was imbibing bright blue and green drinks.
Not long after Hep-cats was published in 1996, I was quite surprised to be approached by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (with whom I'd had a protracted fight over seeing old documents) about helping them create a museum of drug history. After all the years in libraries and archives, it was enthralling to see the real artifacts that the DEA had been collecting and saving for twenty-five years. My favorites were 1920s old-timey drug paraphernalia and numerous containers (one still filled with smoking opium, the other with cocaine) seized as evidence in a 1923 West Coast case and then a pair of iridescent green snake-skin platform shoes worn by an undercover agent. So 1970s! The museum opened in DEA headquarters in 1999 and has become quite an off-beat DC attraction.
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Once upon a time in America, morphine and cocaine were routinely sold in pharmacies, and "hop-heads" gathered in shadowy basements to smoke opium. So begins Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams, Jill Jonnes's ground-breaking history of illegal drugs in America. Jonnes vividly traces our first turn-of-the-century drug epidemic, successfully quelled, and then follows the story into the post-war era: starting in the jazz world of the northern cities and moving though the "flower power" 1960's to the cocaine and crack explosions of the 1980's and 1990's. |