Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:16 Hello and welcome to the field architecture podcast, a podcast about architecture and the real world. My name is <inaudible> and I'm here with my two co-hosts Charlie climbers. Hello, and a NewCo host. <inaudible> hi. Before we jump in, uh, this is the first time you're also, co-hosting the podcast and you joined field architecture a year ago. Would you maybe like to introduce yourself?
Speaker 0 00:00:39 So, yeah, I'm from Volta. I'm grunty, Betty's here and it's been over a year since we formed a new team and it's been really exciting to start and Sunday school conversation.
Speaker 1 00:00:55 And what do you do in daily life? Other than working on filters?
Speaker 0 00:00:58 I worked, I said assigned consultant and I also teach, uh, the university
Speaker 1 00:01:03 That's really good. Hey, and Charlie, before we jump into the episode, maybe you could introduce what you've been working on has been quite a while you've been working on this, right? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:01:11 I'm working on this project or this particular subject, which as the title suggests is the drug heroin and its relationship to urban development for maybe about half a decade now. And I've been working on this podcast for at least two years. And as that suggests, it's, it's quite a difficult subject to engage with. Heroin is a drug that's kind of surrounded by a lot of fear. It's sort of shrouded in a level of mystique. It's kind of the extreme drug that we're all warded off in our youth. So is it quite a difficult subject to talk in concrete terms about, uh, but I find looking at heroin and its effects on the city, an interesting way of understanding how, how our idea of the city and the urban is produced. I also think that it's a really good entry point into looking at the way that big shifts in the global economy and geopolitics percolate to the local level. And also I'm interested in the way that like the, the representation of heroin has given us a very, very like distinct idea of what cities are like to this day. But I also wanted to challenge that I wanted to challenge this idea that heroin is an urban thing that it's confined within the inner city, which is an idea we get from films like, uh, train spotting and the connection and midnight cowboy and loads of
Speaker 1 00:02:49 That's fascinating. But why would it be interesting to talk about this right now,
Speaker 2 00:02:53 Now? Well, for at least several decades now under the heroin has moved to non urban areas or historically places that were unaffected by it. And we need to kind of catch up with that, that reality on the ground. I think people are still generally attached to the idea that heroin and other opioids are kind of confined to the city. And because of this, there's a big gap in terms of, uh, odd sort of treatment of the problem and our understanding of how much it's affecting different places and different people who don't recite in the places where we expect it to be. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:03:36 Yeah. It's interesting. We had a lot of discussions how, uh, also this issue kind of directly surrounded them, uh, the immediate environment of, uh, the field architecture office in the, in the red light district in Amsterdam and how that was also an epicenter. So that kind of discussion was influenced or at least my thinking, but maybe also a bit of your thinking about it. But, um, when I was also wondering how, how do you look at this conversation from the perspective of Bogota?
Speaker 0 00:04:00 Um, yeah, I think I was very compelled by this bonkers and I really hope all of you enjoy it because what it really shows is how we could do it is, but also how even bees produce on EAs everywhere. It is everywhere in Emery and even way. And so from my perspective, even being born in Columbia where drugs have permeated and shape all that, all sorts of society, of course, consumer point of view, but more over from a producer point of view, and it has really shaped our internal conflict and also issues of rural development. So here, when he really does his to Charlie spoke us does is to trace this movement of dress beyond the safety of beings on find in and real.
Speaker 2 00:04:54 That's pretty interesting because that is a big part of why history and the present kind of come together in this podcast is because it's never really been an urban phenomenon. It's always only been in other phenomenon because we've ignored the production side of, of where, where drugs come from, right. Deliberately that shielded from view in the big representation.
Speaker 1 00:05:18 Wow. Really, really fascinating. This actually sounds like we should do a, uh, uh, a follow-up podcast about this very soon. So that will be great. But yeah, let's, without further ado, let's, let's start this actually episode, right? I'm, I'm very curious to listen in info.
Speaker 2 00:05:33 Great heroine is hard to place. That's basically the point of this episode to place heroin movies, music, literature, the news, public service announcements and school curriculum, all that concentrate our idea of where heroin occurs, usually placing it at the very final point of consumption, a spectacular image of a person shooting up often their first time, a fateful choice to Mark a string of bad choices. If we're ever given any idea of where that choice is made, then it's invariably some vaguely up in context, why the heroin ended up there and not someplace else is rarely explained. And certainly not in, in terms of any of the wider socioeconomic conditions that prevail and in that place, whether or not it was ever true. This <inaudible> between heroin and the city is becoming less and less easy to sustain in a globalized world, which has forced all, but the most economically productive subjects from the center of cities and out to the periphery, while at the same time, still managing to support supply chains yeah.
Speaker 2 00:06:48 Can bring heroin and all manner of other opioids to even the most far-flung places. Even before our president hyper globalized moment, heroin was only ever a drug of the city because we were taught to ignore the whole geography of production and distribution that has tended to encompass large parts of East Southeast and Southwest Asia, where the opium poppy could be cultivated, which were often quite remote from any urban centers by hiding this more extensive geography focusing instead on the individual and the urban, this representation of heroine avoids a proper confrontation with the often very intentional harm caused of vast waves of humanity who have been exposed to the drug over the past century as such and this episode, we're going to zoom out and try it to connect the dots between some of the disparate spaces and places that have been touched by heroine, exploring some of the main historical shifts in where heroin is produced, who uses it, how it gets to the places where it's used and why it ends up in the store places.
Speaker 2 00:07:54 But before we get ahead of ourselves, it's probably good to establish. First of all, what heroin actually is and how it relates to other similar drugs, we'll be talking about heroin is brand name, which was given to the chemical diamorphine in 1895 by German pharmaceutical company, Bayer, the name was chosen by their research team for the heroic feeling, the drug engendered in those who took it. It was first synthesized from morphine in 1874 by the English chemist see are older, right? But only brought to market after it was recent size. Two decades later by Felix Hoffmann, a chemist at Bayer, along with its name, I marketed heroin as a non-addictive alternative to morphine. I move with echoes in Purdue farmers, marketing of the related opioid Oxycontin, almost a century later with similarly tragic results, both morphine and heroin or opioids, meaning that they interact with the opioid receptors in our brain and body eliciting feelings of euphoria, providing pain relief and suppressing coughs among other things like morphine.
Speaker 2 00:09:01 Heroin is ultimately derived from the opium. Poppy, unlike other more recently, synthesized opioids like the aforementioned Oxycontin and also the fentanyl class of opioids, which are a product of chemical manipulation. Usually involving the base chemical pay para-dime. As I mentioned, the naming of heroin and other related opioids speaks to a general difficulty in placing heroin, the geography of heroin, where it's produced, where it's used, how it gets to the places where it's used and why it ends up in these places. All this has hardly ever really been tied together or mapped. Instead, we tend to get fed this incredibly fragmented picture, which mostly concentrates on what it's like to be on heroin and the tragic personal feelings of the individual user. For instance, here's the 1997 version of the American public service announcement. This is your brain on drugs.
Speaker 3 00:09:56 This is your brain. And this is heroin.
Speaker 2 00:10:03 The clips does Rachel Lee cook, who incidentally played Lanny bogs in teen romcom. She's all that who has shown smashing eggs with a frying pan to illustrate the apparent effect of heroin.
Speaker 3 00:10:15 This is what happens to your brain after snorting heroin. This is what your body goes through. Wait, it's not over yet. This is what's. Your friend goes through
Speaker 3 00:10:36 And your life. Any questions?
Speaker 2 00:10:42 I have some questions. Why is so little ever said about the social and economic conditions in the places where heroin use happens? Joblessness, desperation, isolation, anxiety, but also more specific geographic details. Like how much access a place has to global drug markets, how little access it has to proper health care provision and how much it has been impacted by the longterm effects of de-industrialization. All these things are subordinated to a narrative of personal choice is heroin addiction. The result of a choice? Is it a question of personal responsibility? Are all these things that happen to a heroin user bound to happen? Or does the heroin users vilification and criminalization by mainstream society at the very least facilitate their tragic discernment. Here's another public service announcement broadcast and land UK in 1985.
Speaker 4 00:11:38 Okay. So I'll do heroin a bit. Now I can control it. I can stop. If I want it to become an addict. Everyone thinks they can control heroin until it starts to control them. I can give up tonight
Speaker 2 00:12:11 Entitled heroin screws you up. This was the first heroin related public service announcement in Britain. Following the sudden spike inherent epidemics that occurred in the early 1980s. First in Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London, which came as a result of the increased availability of Southwest Asian Brown heroin. Why this sudden availability it's difficult to say, but this was also around the same time the United States government began its tacit support of Afghan warlords. Like heck Machar Badin Mueller. Nasima consider each map Muslim and <inaudible> Afridi and their fight against the communist government in Afghanistan. These warlords finance their efforts by dramatically expanding opium production, which doubled to 575 metric tons between 1982 and 1983 alone. This according to Vander fell Bob Brown in her book, shooting up counterinsurgency and the war on drugs published in 2009 by Brookings.
Speaker 2 00:13:13 If you've watched blade runner, you might recognize the Vangelis soundtrack backing the heroine screws you up. Claire. It's a fitting sound for the rest of the setting, which is about as bleak as blade runner. The guy speaking stands in this cavernous gray industrial space, a space, which is pretty common in depictions of heroin use very grim, very urban. The implication being that heroin is an urban phenomenon, no hint of its provenance in rural Afghanistan. And this is about as close as you ever get to an engagement with the actual geography of heroin. It's all in the background. And it's all about the point of consumption. Nothing explicit, less. The audience be allowed to engage properly with the wider situation in the place is impacted by heroin and the wider global situation, which brought heroin in there in the first place. No instead focus on the user, their personal experience, not on the environment, the conditions, the space around the same time that heroin screws you up was first broadcast. Another campaign launched in Scotland, taking the theme, choose life. This slogan provided the basis for the famous choose life speech, which opens and closes the 1996 film Trainspotting,
Speaker 4 00:14:32 Choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big television. Choose washing your seats. Cost compact displays and electrical <inaudible>
Speaker 5 00:14:52 Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance choose fixed interest mortgage repayments, choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure, wear a matching luggage, choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase, not into fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you on a Sunday morning to sitting on that couch, watching my numbing spit at crushing game shorts, stuffing fucking junk for the gym.
Speaker 2 00:15:21 He's on a bit longer, but I thought I'd skipped to the important bit at the end of this
Speaker 5 00:15:24 Speech, but why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose something else and the reasons, but I'm not easy. Who needs reasons when you've got a on all this,
Speaker 2 00:15:44 That being said, while the action cuts between the main character rent and taking a hit of heroin is dealer's house playing in a fireside football match with his mates and being chased through the center of Edinburgh after he and his friend of course, shoplifting, and the football game, the opposing side have matching kits play by the rules and look vigorous and healthy Rendon's team. Meanwhile are a group of individuals they cheat and their appearances untidy taken together with his visible euphoria at the dealer's house. And the rush of the chase Rendon's life is set up as an exciting rejection of mainstream society. The choice he keeps talking about is either to be subjected to the boring and aggressively mundane structures of ordinary society or give it all up for heroin and a life of crime and disorder. It may see more raw, realistic, and true to the actual experience of the heroin user. But the film's emphasis on personal choice is still there front and center. Whether you see the descent into heroin addiction as heroic or shocking, either way, the person concerned is usually depicted as having made a choice to reject mainstream society, to give it all up for a drug, even in the sympathetic portrayal, rarely do we get the impression of the mundane everyday reality of just trying to keep withdrawal sickness at Bay,
Speaker 6 00:17:09 Every six hours, you need to have shots. You need to have it, but you go on <inaudible> when you make money. Wait, when you go with the men, you make the money and you shoot it up and you go again,
Speaker 2 00:17:23 Work that's Sonia wrote obinc who for 25 years used heroin while living and often sleeping rough in Amsterdam's red light district, primarily supporting a habit free sex work and scamming tourists since entering treatment for her addiction. She's been giving homeless tours of the red light district. His, she was explaining the way that addiction to heroin binds a person to a very rigid routine, entirely determined by the need to the symptoms of withdrawal,
Speaker 6 00:17:51 Especially on the Sunday was a fairly bad day. And when there's not tourists, you know, it's it's um, yeah. Then, then, then you must in, you had to also do slowly. We could drugs to survive the six hours
Speaker 2 00:18:04 That's on your explained. This experience of dependency can be likened to a diabetic being denied insulin.
Speaker 6 00:18:11 Uh, I'm still on the methadone and, uh, I'm a couple of years. I don't do drugs anymore, but they're still on the metal around. And, uh, and I take my two run because, uh, that I can go on with that. I can work. Uh, I, I do, I I'm tour guides when I have a group, you know, sometimes we have a discussion. And when I say, when I say, yes, I'm still on the methadone because, because in the methadone is, so this is a little piece of what is also in heroin, because otherwise, because if you don't take care of it, you get sick and then it people, and then people say, yeah, but, uh, uh, then, then, then you still do drugs. And no, I said, you can, you can, uh, I see it, like when some, when some people are a diabetic, they need insulin for, to get 24 hours, they take enough a normal life. I take methadone that I can have a normal life. Yeah. But you could choose take drugs. And the diabetic, uh, she gets sick for. So I said, I said, yeah, but I have the sickness from addiction. I tried to, uh, to, to explain the people via I take the methadone because they see it
Speaker 2 00:19:17 Truck. This diabetes analogy is also elaborated in the heroin users, a brilliant memoir by the pseudonymous author, Tom Stewart heroin user in Liverpool, in the 1980s, talking to fellow heroin, user Douggie, she writes the addict experiences, a crushing sense of being hopelessly trapped. All his actions are manipulated by bodily need. Drug addiction is recognized by many as a kind of illness and Douggie echoed that view. When he said I'm tired of living like a fucking diabetic, he was referring to his need for daily injections, registering the frustration of knowing that his life revolves around a drug in the case of the diabetic. However, everyone is at pains to ensure his supply smooth his path, make life easy and convenient for him. Indeed. No one would wish it. Otherwise the same certainly cannot be said for the heroin user, whose goal faces the obstacles of customs, police, screws, government doctors, social workers, his family, and friends, given the rents and does encounter a lot of these barriers. In the course of the film, it's maybe a bit unfair to dismiss the entire experience of heroin use that it represents still a lot of the dreary reality of heroin dependency and dependency, which in some ways, binds those addicted to heroin. Even more tightly to patterns of capitalist consumption. It's subordinated to an exciting story arc that affords venting and remarkable amount of personal agency. As it's underlined, when Renton picks the choose life mantra. At the end of the film,
Speaker 5 00:20:50 I could offer a million answers. Oh, the truth is that I'm a bad person, but that's going to change. I'm going to change. This is the last that I, so I think I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight into choosing life. I'm looking forward to it. I'm going to be just like you. The job, the family, the fucking big television, the washing machine, the car, the compact desk and electrical 10 or good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance mortgage starter, home leisure wear luggage. Three piece suite DIY gave him shorts, junk food. Children walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car choices, sweaters, family, Christmas index, pension tax exemption, clearing the gutters. Getting by looking ahead, the day you die,
Speaker 2 00:21:41 Anyone with even a passing experience of suburbia will be familiar with this list rent and maybe walking through the center of London as his voiceover says all this, but his choice of life in this final scene is a choice of suburban life. But even if we're only talking about its points of consumption, heroin is not urban per se. It's just that at the time, the global heroin market vastly favored a few globally connected urban centers that were disproportionately affected by de-industrialization and his book dreamland the true tale of America's opiate epidemic, Los Angeles based generalist, Sam can own as traces. The various causes of the now decades, long opioid epidemic. That first hit America in the early 1990s, especially impacting suburbia, smaller towns and former industrial cities in land, basically everywhere. People didn't expect this problem to occur
Speaker 7 00:22:36 Through a lot of neighborhoods, wealthy neighborhoods, and they're all anonymous. No one's out on the street. Everyone's buttoned up in their, in their houses. And it's in those neighborhoods that are very well to do no need. Economic need is not met in those neighborhoods where people are dying and getting addicted and dying from drugs use to numb pain. You'll look at their, you look at their streets. You go, what pain do could you possibly have? You know, you have big cars, you have a nice big house, big green lawn, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, and, and, and yet it's in those gophers pointed this out to me, it was a fairly underpaid police officer, um, in the Charlotte, North Carolina area who, who, who took me through one of these suburbs and said, look at this, these people are dying from pain pills. What pain man, look at this man.
Speaker 7 00:23:25 I've arrested this guy's son. And that guy over there and over there, all these different people, he was pointing out to me, these houses, he took me on a tour. We're about two hours and the whole time he's got why, you know, I mean, what don't they have? They have everything that anybody, the wealthiest people in history of the planet, well, you know, they, they don't have any connection. They don't have any community. They don't have any soul in a sense, you know what I mean? It's like lacking that. And you can see that in the very urban design that you, you see, if it's everyone, there's no sidewalks. Sometimes when there are, you don't see anybody on them, the parks are, are so sad. Those parks are so nobody's ever in them,
Speaker 2 00:24:05 Dreamland narrates an incredible story of the various people in policies, responsible for America's opioid epidemic. We'll come back to this story later on. But for now I wanted to draw attention to something that Sam said about the culture in these places, because it bears striking echoes in Brenton's final speech. At the end of Trainspotting,
Speaker 7 00:24:24 We had all this stuff, you know, we had, we had big cars and big houses and, and we had a big TV's and we had jet skis and all this stuff. And what we lacked was the, in those areas was the most important thing, which was some kind of human connection. And it was through that, you know, what is heroin, if not the ultimate drug to send you into your own isolated little, little bubble. It's like the final expression of all that is heroin. The final expression of the idea that these suburbs stand for, which is that you can buy happiness, buy enough stuff. You'll be happy, buy enough jet skis and SUV's and what have you. And you'll be happy. Well, heroin is the final expression of, of all that. You know, it's the opiate class of drugs in general, you know, pills, heroin, fentanyl, whatever you wanna do is the final expression of what that urban geography or the suburban I should say.
Speaker 7 00:25:19 Geography is, is all about, which is that we can buy happiness. We can escape the problems of the world. We can escape the crime and the cluttered nature of it, and the crowded conditions of New York city or someplace like that. By moving out to play place where we all have our own little park it's called our backyard. We don't have to associate it. We don't have to go to a public swimming pool. Could we, as we all have some women goals, and then what does that bring? It brings, well, gee, you know, the worst drug addiction that we've ever seen in this country. And what's interesting about this epidemic from an urban urbanist point of view, I would say is that this is an opiate epidemic that did not take place in a place where places, where we Americans are used to seeing that. And that would be, um, the urban area.
Speaker 7 00:26:12 You know, heroin really grew certainly in the post-World war two era, uh, up as a, as a drug for the urban outcast, it was in Harlem. It was in New York city. It was folks who lived in like the berries core of our cities. Charlie Parker had a lot to do with that. He had a great jazz musician. He was also a heroin addict. And all these young musicians wanted badly to play like, like bird and, and they thought that heroin was part of doing that. And so it became part of the culture and dealers knew to
Speaker 2 00:26:44 Hang out with jazz musicians. I think it's so dope. That way. It's a clip from Shirley Clark's 1963, film the connection representing one of the few sympathetic contemporary depictions of heroin use in America's late fifties jazz scene. It gives a pretty decent flavor of the cool detachment and estrangement felt by people who used heroin. In this context, I'll leave it running. So you can hear the monologue of Sam played by Jim Anderson.
Speaker 4 00:27:13 You know, they got a saying in this world, it isn't the ship that will do your hand. It's the lack of no, I steal, but I only steal from people. I don't like you say, I wouldn't take a matchstick from a friend of mine. Look, Mr. Dunn, Mr. Dunn. I like telling stories, but right now I'm kind of sick. I mean, you can in this man, you have seen a lot of movies or fellows like me. It's tortious. I look, I can use five more bucks only until I get paid. I'm supposed to see this fall about a job next week. Introducing it. Well, anyhow, I'll be rolling in the bread. Then I got some powerful stories in me when that shit is flowing through my Oh man, I Mr. Dan I'm busy. See me later. Yeah, go on. Lay down a while. I guess,
Speaker 2 00:28:27 Based on a play of the same name, the connection takes place in the apartment of a group of heroin users who are being filmed for a fly on the ball documentary, a kind of film within a film between a series of long jazz improvisations, the characters anxiously pastely apartment, waiting for their heroin dealer, the connection frequently breaking the fourth wall either to borate the pretentious director or present their outlook on life. It's a great film and really quite honest for its time, but even so the role of the jazz scene in the spread of heroin and America is controversial to say the least, because this link helped forge an association between heroin and African-Americans newly arrived in Northern cities. After the great migration from the Southern States of America, an association, which was deliberately amplified as a way of criminalizing a community perceived as a threat to the status quo.
Speaker 2 00:29:20 And while heroin did proliferate in the jazz scene at this time, the impact of the wider geopolitical situation, rarely factors into this story. Heroin had mostly disappeared from the United States during the second world war. While the reduction in commercial shipping drastically reduced the possibilities for smuggling, the FBI had also seriously undermined the power. The once mighty national crime syndicate a group composed of the main families of the American mafia whose leader Charlie lucky Luciano was at that time in prison as were several of his underlings. Meanwhile, the American mafia has counterparts in Italy, in Corsica, also found themselves seriously constrained by their respective fascist governments, but the mafia bounced back following their assistance in the allied war effort and afterwards against the rising power of the communists in both Italy and France, following the war, they were basically allowed to re-establish that lucrative heroin trafficking operations, which brought heroin from Turkey through Maasais and onto the U S and Canada.
Speaker 2 00:30:23 These trafficking operations, which came to be known as the French connection or what brought Heron to the 1950s jazz scene was associated clubs harbored a fledgling counterculture that was already somewhat susceptible to it. Euphoric pain, relieving drug amid the aggressively conformist and racist atmosphere of post-war American society. These clubs provided a space for young outsiders, various backgrounds to gain what the late historian, Eric Schneider calls drug knowledge from older figures who like Charlie Parker had often developed addiction from painkiller medication upon their return from the second world war and his book smack heroin. And the American city Schneider explores the role that heroin played in urban America from the mid century onwards. Here, he is talking about drug knowledge on the pen press podcast in 2008,
Speaker 8 00:31:13 There's a cultural explanation for heroin use and it would go something like I like playing the saxophone. I know that Charlie Parker is the best saxophone player in the world. And if I want to play the saxophone like Charlie Parker, who I know is a heroin user, then I have to start using heroin too. But that knowledge, that hair, that Charlie Parker is a heroin user is absolutely useless to you unless you're in a place where you can encounter experienced users, the jazz clubs on what was called swing alley 52nd street in the West side of Manhattan was one such place that brought together, uh, jazz musicians and their hangers on, uh, all kinds of fans. Jazz was the big popular music of the 1940s and early 50 something, which is usually forgotten because of rock and roll. Uh, and it brought together all of these people in these little jazz clubs that had their origins as speakeasies.
Speaker 8 00:32:22 So right there, you have the connection to the underworld and with the end of prohibition, uh, they, uh, attracted all kinds of people to listen to the jazz, but the underworld connection was already there. And it was easy to, uh, have that ripple out into a larger community with punk rock. You have essentially a similar phenomenon occurring in the late 1970s, where there were specific punk rock clubs that, uh, casual fans of the music might show up. And if they had a desire to flirt with the dark side and heroin has always been the kind of emblematic drug that King of all drugs, the, the, the most notorious drug, then this was a place where they could acquire drug knowledge, hang out with experienced users, learn how much of the drug to use and then become involved in drug use.
Speaker 2 00:33:26 Sonia's early experience with heroin and Amsterdam and plays a similar role of drug knowledge.
Speaker 6 00:33:32 I came to work in a bar and then an in night shifts, a nice coffee. And, um, I run that there. And I was, I was saying to suffer, I see my mother's mother, right. I can do this and that. And, but it was also the first time that I come in to see the first time drugs, because, um, that, uh, that day I was starting on it when, when I was 18, something like that. And, um, the bite of us with an English man. And, uh, he say into V we going close at three o'clock. And then the people from the, from the red light district, they come to the Harlem, Modac, uh, two damn streets and their VFR, our, uh, uh, bar, we didn't open up, but the call to the, to the, to, to what they let us come in the briefcase, they knock and I open, and then we go on and to be, go on until, yeah, until the daytime until, uh, yeah. And then I come, I take my first drugs now actually, because too much noise and the people that they were complaining, the body gets closed. And then that was the first time I come into jail. Uh, I stayed there only one month. Thanks. Not smart, not so long ago I come out and I start right away. But to how you have to make your money, a hand to buy your drugs. And I fell down in the prostitution street prostitution. And, um,
Speaker 2 00:35:00 And when was this in particular? Like what, what year? 18?
Speaker 6 00:35:04 No, late eighties. Late eighties began. Yeah, late eighties, late eighties, something like this. And, and my, my youth, my youth from drugs get worst around because, um, uh, I, uh, then I start to doing heroin with it and I starting up shooting up with a needle in my arm. Eh, it hadn't been a cocaine.
Speaker 2 00:35:25 I also knew how available heroin was in the center of Amsterdam at the time she was using it.
Speaker 6 00:35:30 Th th they were all deals walking around, uh, just fairly, fairly busy, fairly busy here, and a, in every corner in every street. Where are you go? Where do you walk? And it's, uh, yeah. And especially because you are 24 hours in these neighborhoods that you say, you know, you know them, all this, you, yeah. You, you could buy effort everywhere. Okay.
Speaker 2 00:35:54 As soon as experienced suggests heroin use was something that entailed ready, access to the drug and ready access to a space where heroin use happens due to the underlying structure of the global economy. These spaces were relatively limited throughout most of the 20th century, they had to have some kind of direct trade link to regions where the opium poppy can be grown. China, Vietnam, Thailand, Lao, Burma, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan. So they usually had to be ports and certainly had to be places of transit, Amsterdam, London, Marcee Montreal, Berlin, but the same qualities of transit that gave these places access to heroin. Also endeared them to the kind of people who may have been out of place in more provincial settings. And it is from this combination of social rejection and access to heroin supply in a handful of cities that were similar Tanium undergoing the long-term effects of de-industrialization.
Speaker 2 00:36:51 The heroine acquired its distinct urban quality, where it became essentially urban and Bohemian, and all this was helped by the creative output from some of those people who used heroin in these places, this link between heroin art and the city is explored in a 2014 documentary for BBC radio four, entitled heroin hosted by professor Andrew Hussey, the documentary navigates the difficult question of whether there's such a thing as a heroin aesthetic and how artists who have used heroin interact with our environment. I went to meet professor Hussey in his office in Paris. Here he is talking about what in his view defines the heroin city
Speaker 9 00:37:38 In terms of space, in terms of urban space. Although heroin is a global phenomenon. I do think it's possible to talk about the heroin city or heroin cities and in the West, particularly I think New York and Berlin, um, maybe Paris, not in the West, we're close to the West, um, Tangier. But, um, if we look at, for example, New York, and we look at, you know, the representation of heroin in New York, where there's filmic representations and things like the man with the golden arm and stuff like that, but more than anything else, it finds its expression in music. And one of my starting points was I was always fascinated by the velvet underground. I've been in love with development the ground ever since I first heard them when I was about 14. And one of the things I loved about them was something to do with the space in the music. I'm fascinated by drones, I of drones in music. And it's something that, which is sort of like medieval and ancient, but it seems to me that I'm honing in on development in New York, but it's something to do with how heroin feels. And it's got to be very different from the psychedelic experience, which as we know, is colorful and expansive and full of visions. There's something else, something interior, there's something inside
Speaker 3 00:38:54 You're listening to heroin from the velvet underground is entitled first album, just where I'm going. <inaudible>
Speaker 9 00:39:42 The first velvet underground album you could actually read as if you like a transliteration of a day in the life of a junkie in New York. As simple as that, with all the variations, as you say, it of speed, you start off with, um, Sunday morning, languorous full of guilds, full of dread.
Speaker 3 00:40:15 It's just,
Speaker 9 00:40:20 And then it's followed up by waiting for the man, which is jittery, which is cold Turkey, which is I need this stuff.
Speaker 9 00:40:44 And of course the, the killer track is itself heroin. And I think the thing with heroin, the song is it starts off. If you listen to the rough demo versions as a kind of imitation of Bob Dylan, if you can believe it. And by the time it gets to the studio, it's turned into this full on the nearest thing that music can do to recreate the heroin experience, to recreate that up and down the movement of speed, the movement of the <inaudible> kind of gentleness into that jacket effect in one song, I think, I think is incredibly powerful
Speaker 9 00:41:38 And if we are moving on to Berlin, I spent some time in Berlin looking at them the way that heroine and inference culture in Berlin. And I found something else, which related it to New York, but it was something else as well. And it was this, it was the, um, heroin in Berlin during the seventies and eighties was quite freely available and very good coming from Eastern Europe through the communist block. Uh, the guy who knows about this, he's a guy called Mark. The Manchester guys lived there since the seventies. And he was the, he was the factory records operative in Berlin for a long time. And, you know, he knew all the people in the scene during Christiana F and all of that kind of thing. And, um, you know, what Mark talks about is that what created a lot of the tensions in Berlin were, um, heroin droughts.
Speaker 9 00:42:24 So the, you know, when the city ran out of heroin, that's when the music became tense, claustrophobic, very violent and very angry. And I'm thinking here of Nick cave and the birthday party, and that sense of claustrophobia, the something to do with the ins and outs of heroin, doing something physical to the body, which is not the same as acid or parts or any kind of psychedelic thing. Now, the third city I was going to mention was Tangier. And that's a little bit more difficult because obviously the key writer on heroin in Tangier was William Burroughs. And the thing with Tangier, you've got to remember as well, that Burroughs was there. The beats came there and they thought they were discovering a new civilization, a new world, which was Arab Islam, et cetera, et cetera. They were completely oriented lists without being racists. And what they were really doing was saying no to post-war America, to consumerism, commodity culture and so on. And what they found in Tangier was a kind of dream or nightmare at the end of the world. So really their experience in Tangier was not about the East was they knew nothing about, um, it was about the West and heroin was a conflict into that.
Speaker 10 00:43:37 This is an excerpt from the 1983 film burrows, the movie in January, 1953. It is, but I remember him first and Tanja who was full of the most extraordinary energy. You could punch a typewriter or he could punch the tape recorder to death and shorter time than any man that I've ever known. He had such normal energy on those days and such the nose intention behind what he was doing. The person talking just then was Brian Jessen, who Barrows lived with in Tangier, where they together develop Barry's famous cut-up technique after Jason is Barry's himself speaking. He lived in a very comfortable hotel where he practiced pistol shooting and typewriting, um, was extraordinarily amusing. Um, during the years in Tan's year, he had written a very, very great deal. In a rather short time,
Speaker 4 00:44:42 I wrote very intensive day or, um, about two years, uh, this material, most of this material, um, went into naked lunch. I just naked lunch was extracted from this, uh, material. And also all the notes that I had written while over a period of eight years,
Speaker 10 00:45:10 You spent a great deal of his time, dashing through the streets, madly from one pharmacy to another getting chemicals that he could use and boil down and inject what gradually he began to become more and more invisible in the streets as the winter wore on. And all the Spanish kids called him. The ombre invisibly
Speaker 9 00:45:29 War brings New York, Berlin and Tangier together is they're all marginal liminal spaces. But I think very often there were specific, you know, political or economic reasons why heroin takes hold in certain places. And I'm from Liverpool. And I, I remember in the early eighties, heroin taken a grip on a younger generation. Who'd never had a William Burroughs or heard of Lou Reed to a basically working class unemployed in a city that had been wrecked by, um, um, aging capitalist forces. And I think there's a reason why that happens. The heroin takes hold a, the city was flooded with, um, cheaper alien heroin and B it was ripe to fall into the, you know, that kind of epidemic because it had a young population who could afford the drug and used it as a mass form of psychic. Self-defense
Speaker 2 00:46:27 This idea of psychic self-defense as Andrew uses it here and before we've Lou Reed and William Burroughs is a helpful way of making sense of heroines function for both writers and artists and the marginalized and abandoned youth of places deemed economically expandable by society at large using heroin was a way to reject reality as it manifests in ordinary life. But not only that, it was also a way to transform this reality. One of the early proponents of the drug's transfigured qualities was the Scottish novelist Alexander Truckee, a one-time member of the avant-garde situationist international
Speaker 9 00:47:08 As a very, very good description by Alex Truckee. When he's in he's on a barge in New York, and he describes taking a shot of heroin, a Twilight, and then looking out at the New York skyline, he sees the city transformed, not by the forces of capital, but through the force of his own mind. Now, the situation is they thought of Truckee as the kind of astronauts of inner space. They admired the way that he went into himself. And then the, the relationship between the subject and the object between subjectivity and the city is, is this is the key thing it's overturned in a dialectical movements. All of a sudden it is not the city that overwhelms and dominates the individual, but the individual who, as it were finds his or her own subjectivity unleashed in the city. Now in literary terms, this goes right back to the mid 19th century with Olin particular Gootee and lab.
Speaker 9 00:48:02 And what they used to do anecdotally, was have the club, these actually sham, which met on the Udall acetate, and they would experiment with where the subjectivity would go. And if you like, we can see this as is the birth of a kind of specifically modernist form of literature in which the artist transforms himself. And then after that moment of transformation, the art begins. So rather than as it were the modern city dominating the subject, it actually becomes the focus, the canvas upon which the artist can paint his or her vision of reality. And the situations of course thought this was very political as well. It was a way of undermining the capitalist organization of the city. And the big question that psychogeography asks is who owns the city? Is it capital? Is it labor? Is it, you know, the organization of transport to serve the needs of these things? Or can we live in a dream, come get lost in the city? Can we remake the city as a labyrinth? And I think, you know, all drugs allowed situation is to conceive of new ways of being in the city in that way,
Speaker 2 00:49:11 This idea that a person could transform the city through the force of their heroin altered mind points to a wider concept of social change, which sees progress, not as the product of collective action, but rather of individual self-expression. We already saw this with Trainspotting. The idea that choosing not to choose life somehow represents a rebellion against mainstream society, but a much more important manifestation of this idea can be found in the trajectory of various radical counter-cultural currents that developed in the United States and the wider world from the 1960s and into the 1970s at a time when heroine underwent a massive resurgence in New York city in particular, it's a common misconception that the youth quake of the 1960s and 1970s was unified in its methods of opposition to the conservative mainstream. In fact, while many understood that political organizing and collective struggle were the best, if not, the only genuinely effective means of challenging the entrenched power elite, always present was a more libertarian individualism that advocated, instead for things like returning to the land and expanding people's minds confronted with the full force of the American repressive state operators, the youth who had once fueled the sixties, radical movements, increasingly embraced this libertarian individualist lifestyle contenting themselves, where they retreat into a similar kind of ironic coolness as the Elliot scene, we see perhaps the most extreme and tragic manifestation of this growing detachment and the rising incidence of heroin use in America.
Speaker 2 00:50:48 During the course of the 1970s, ironically, it was from the war in Vietnam, that great touchstone of the sixties, radical upsurge that this new heroin problem emerged and its role suggests again, that the detachment was less a choice. I'm much more a product, a very intentional economic and social policy.
Speaker 5 00:51:12 I think that one of the significant points about the Vietnam war and drugs is that there were two fronts in that war. There was the, there was drug use on the home front, but there was a lot of drug use in Vietnam itself.
Speaker 2 00:51:24 This is a clip from the drug years, a four-part VH1 documentary released in 2006, about the history of illicit drug use in post-war American society.
Speaker 5 00:51:34 Drugs were a gift to them. A lot of these soldiers were knee deep in horror every day and saw the most repugnant things you could possibly imagine. So, you know, we liked the kids that boy it's the only way you can feel good in them, you know, 10 years ago, initially it wasn't that easy to find heroin in Vietnam, like because of the CIA and their alliances with various warlords, suddenly South Vietnam was flooded with the very pure, very cheap heroin <inaudible> I was over Vietnam. A number of times with the EA you saw stuff that was unbelievable. This is one of the plates, five drops from five. They stay inside until after they've had their other addicts wait out five and a girl comes out from the heroin and make it all done and brought Dayla. I sort of soldiers using drugs constantly. It was certainly accepted in the culture over there. I'm not sure I blame them. I might've done the same thing in the spring of 1970, you had two people overdosing the month by that fall, there were two people overdosing a day. One in four serviceman became addicted to heroin, kicking back a war, hero wounded twice verbal heart, and also a drug addict.
Speaker 5 00:53:38 Well, two things are happening. Number one, we're hearing about soldiers becoming addicts, but we're also beginning to get flooded with heroin coming back from Vietnam. And one of the early cases I worked on was a group of Sergeant majors in Vietnam, who was shipping heroin back in body bags. There might've been soldiers bringing it back for their own use and maybe in small amounts to do business, but really the heroin being smuggled famously back in body bags as being smuggled by the CIA, it was really to support the warlords of Thailand, our allies, it was to secure their favor, and many people would maintain the air America. The CIA's operation in Southeast Asia was responsible for a lot of the heroin that came in the result was blow back. You know, more drugs on the streets of American cities. It was becoming obvious that there was a direct correlation between street crime and heroin addiction. And this got Nixon's attention very quickly. We must wage what I have called total war against the public enemy. Number one in the United States, the problem of dangerous.
Speaker 2 00:54:52 It's rare to find a mainstream documentary makes such a clear link between the war on drugs at home and the war against communism abroad. This latter war created the conditions for the French connection to be displaced as the main source of the global heroin supply by the so-called golden triangle, an area where the borders of Thailand, Lao and Miama, then Burma meet at the confluence of the <inaudible> rivers as alluded to in the clip America's allies in the war against communism, often funded their activities through opium smuggling, which would have been difficult to pull off without ready access to the sophisticated air transport capacities of the CIA's airline air America. And when the region began to host laboratories capable of producing grade four white heroine of the same quality as the labs in Marsay, they were all located in areas controlled by America's clients in the region. Meanwhile, this coincided with a coordinated crackdown on the French connection by French and us security services between 1970 and 1975, it went from supplying 80% of America's heroin to 15% as Henry Kruger says in his book, the great heroin coup the remarkable switch from Turkey must say USA to Southeast Asia, Mexico USA shifted billions of dollars and the power that comes with it.
Speaker 2 00:56:19 Heroin ravaged New York city in the 1970s to take one statistic. It's estimated that theft costs the city around $1.5 billion annually. During that decade, that's about $10 billion in today's money, a huge number, but not so surprising when you consider that as many as 300,000 inhabitants were addicted to heroin around that time. And the average yearly cost of supporting an addiction was $8,000 and may have already been suffering economically. And its population may have therefore been predisposed to a long heroin epidemic, but that heroin had to get to them first. And it did so continuously by way of the French connection. And after that, the golden triangle, by contrast, most of the cities comprising what became the American Rustbelt remained largely unaffected by this heroin epidemic because they were nowhere near the supply. But as we now know, this all changed in the last decade of the 20th century. So how did it finally get to these places to answer that, Hey, Sam can owners again,
Speaker 7 00:57:29 What happened was our healthcare system. I'm like every other healthcare system in the world began to be very impressively and heavily prescribed these pills for people who were in pain, postoperative pain, chronic pain, wisdom, tooth extraction, all kinds of new things got, got, not just dosed with opioids, but it was like enormous doses and numerous refills. Why? Well, there's this idea that Americans cannot handle pain. Oh my God, dose it. Thousand of course these pills. Now they're supposed to be non-addictive right. That's what everyone's telling us. So it doesn't matter how many of them you prescribed. So pretty soon these kids are using and then it's, Oh yeah. And I'm still in pain. And so the doc prescribed more and after a while the kids addicted and then after a, it doesn't get any more pills the doc says, no, no, no, that's it. And then turns to heroin and dies. I tell you I'm serious. I've heard at least a dozen stories like that. And I know that they're all across the country. Eleanor
Speaker 11 00:58:23 Charlie's daughter, Sage was a young mother doting on her 16 month old son, Julian in 2017, the 22 year old needed to have her wisdom teeth removed. So the dentist prescribed an opioid to handle the pain
Speaker 2 00:58:36 For a five day supply. And he said, if you need more,
Speaker 11 00:58:40 Sage did call and quickly became dependent getting several refills before she moved on to heroin just 15 months after having her wisdom teeth removed Sage overdosed and died in an airport bathroom on our way to a fourth round of rehab,
Speaker 2 00:58:56 That was a clip from a 2019 CBS New York news report. Amazingly the origin of this absurd suggestion that opioid pills are supposed to be non-addictive can be traced back to a single letter, sent to the New York journal of medicine in 1980 by Dr. Hershel Jack who reported just four addictions out of 40,000 patients who were administered powerful pain relief in drugs, but let's us, that addiction was rare. And those have no history of addiction was subsequently cited hundreds of times by other studies, all of which went towards bolstering the aggressive marketing of opioids by pharmaceutical companies. But it wasn't just the subsequent sudden availability of opioids that made these areas so vulnerable to an epidemic, more subtle geographical conditions, also varsity exacerbated the problem.
Speaker 7 00:59:47 First of all, there was a great silence surrounding it. People were affected by it who had thought of heroin as being very, very foreign to them and their communities. They didn't think that anything would happen like that. This was something you saw in movies. It was far away. And so there was this real silence surrounding it, opiate addiction, overdose, withdrawal, some, all that stuff was so foreign to people in a lot of families. So many places tried to hide it. And that meant that the next person who got addicted, didn't the family that didn't know where to turn. No, but there was no community. There was no kind of group that that would help get oriented and over and over and over all across the country that began to happen. But in many of these counties, we fund our corners through local County tax base.
Speaker 7 01:00:30 And a lot of times that means they do not have a lot of money. They do not have a lot of talent pool from which to draw the corner. This small County is so on and it was in these counties where the thing was felt most acutely. But the problem was that doctors were overworked already. Didn't have the experience, didn't know what they were seeing. Didn't have the budget. And, and so for a long time, I think that was part of what hit it, that you didn't really have coroners who knew what was going on or medical examiners knew what was going on, could figure it out. And it took a while. It took several years, I would say before, people began to realize, you know what, these people are not dying from heart attacks or they are, but the heart attack is provoked by an overdose. And that kind of thing,
Speaker 2 01:01:09 The remaining part of the story, which some sketches out in his book, perhaps the crucial part in consolidating the crisis in these places was a new network of supply. That's striking the echoed new rapid retail oriented just in time supply chain methods emerging in the legitimate economy at around the same time. And it came about through an unlikely group of Mexican drug traffickers coming from the small town of Haloscope. And the similarly small States of Nayarit
Speaker 7 01:01:40 Was from this one town developed a system in Los Angeles. Once they migrated to Los Angeles for selling heroin like pizza. And we do in the United States where you have an operator standing by to take orders, the addict calls, the number gives the order, the operator contacts one or three or four drivers. Yes. Driving around town with little balloons of heroin, usually in his mouth and beats the addict, wherever he is. And usually a fast food restaurant parking lot or someplace like that. And they consummate this deal. And so this, this way of doing heroin sales, retail, heroin sales, after while they couldn't kill each other, right. They're all from the same town. So they compete, they profits drop. What they have to do is they have to expand. They have to go somewhere else. So they moved to new markets. So new markets elsewhere in Southern California first, and then new markets elsewhere in the Western United States, Portland, Oregon, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Denver, Colorado, various places.
Speaker 7 01:02:35 And it's finally in the late nineties when they made the jump over the Mississippi river or black tar heroin has never been seen before in the history of the United States and is really a Mexican drug sold only in the Western United States. Hey, go over across the river land in Columbus, Ohio. And it's at that moment when you get these two forces just colliding in Columbus, Ohio first, and that whole region around Columbus, Ohio. That's why I wrote about these guys because they were the first to figure out and then systematically exploit with their system, this a coming market for heroin that was promised by, by all these pills, uh, being so massively prescribed.
Speaker 2 01:03:15 When I said earlier, that heroin is only oven. If that's, as far as it can get, this is what I meant. The common feature of places with heroin problems is not the city, but social isolation, despair, institutional neglect, anime. These are the conditions that make heroin seem appealing, but the heroin needs to get there first. And how it got there is through a series of supply chain innovations that made it easier, even preferable to sell heroin in smaller places rather than in the big city.
Speaker 7 01:03:48 Certainly these crew leaders understood that if they could unlock the power of retail, that retail is more profitable than wholesale, except for the retail. And the drug business is very risky. You get arrested all the time. They realized that what cops and the public and the media and the politicians thought was a successful drug bust is when they caught people with lots of dope money and guns. And they designed a system that produced the opposite, no guns, the money I'll get sent back to Mexico very quickly. You have 5,000 bucks. You send it back to mom and very, very little dope. They knew that a lot of dope meant a lot of years in prison. So you want to have small amounts so that parents, the just-in-time idea that you get it every other Tuesday, and then you go through it. But at no point, do you have 20 kilos of heroin on your premises?
Speaker 7 01:04:41 You know, you only have maybe two kilos and you go through that at the most, you know, and maybe it's even a kilos. But what I found interesting is they learned just by trial and error, so-and-so got 20 years for that. Well, we're not going to do that anymore by it more frequently and in smaller quantities. And then we understand that that, that won't lead to high prison sentence, but they don't understand also that their system was based around the idea that heroin addicts prize a few things more than anything else, reliability above all. You got to tell me where I'm going to get my dope every single day, several times a day, no violence. I don't want to get beaten up. I don't want to get robbed. I want to get mugged and also uniformity of supply. So every day I can buy this stuff.
Speaker 7 01:05:28 I know it will not be leak on. It will not be cut, will be 10th of a gram in every balloon. And it'll be just the right amount. And that will maybe have, those are the three things that heroin addicts, a bubble prides. And they designed a system that, that satisfied all that. And at the same time was the opposite of what the public and the police and the media thought was a great drug bus. So it never seemed to a lot of people like the police brass. Like these guys were much of anything because you never found the diamond encrusted testicles and the jet skis and the stacks of cash. And a lot of dope. It was always just pittance. You know, I went to one guys bus one time, this guy had a few sticks of a Walmart's furniture, a small little flat screen TV, some porno Mexican tornado and shoot 'em up movies and a big pile of clothes. That was it. That's all that I had. He had, he had like just nothing
Speaker 2 01:06:31 In the midst of a global pandemic that has exacerbated already rampant inequality, procarity and pervasive economic and social despair. It's reasonable to assume that demand for pain relief has increased since the 1990s period that Sam covers in his book, but things have also gotten much worse on the supply side of the global opioid trade. Since then, right now, there are labs in China and more recently, Mexico, which have the capacity to manufacture and sell synthetic opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil online to anyone in the world, respectively 50 and a hundred times more potent than heroin and completely odorless. These drugs are much cheaper and much easier to make and distribute. Just a kilo of fentanyl has a street value of approximately $2 million. And the equivalent of just a few grains of salt is enough to kill someone, a modern globalized self-regulating just in time. Economy has enabled opioids to travel far beyond the cities that they became associated with in the latter half of the 20th century free from the limits of the post-war global supply chain. Now more than ever, the geography of opioids has reached its final natural place alongside a modern geography of economic and social despair. But the situation isn't completely bleak, where I spoke to Sonia in Amsterdam, the failed architecture office, joining the outer Kirk in Amsterdam's red light district was an area not too long ago, filled with hundreds of people using heroin openly on a daily basis. Here's Sonia describing the situation. Now I think the, I don't know, <inaudible>
Speaker 6 01:08:16 They let the people who are addicted, you know, um, they ask them if they don't want in the project, you know, that they can work something, but by farming or just easy work, that gets five Euro for it for or 10 Euro for a whole day, you know, that they have to do something, but they do the free heroin. Now, you know, the, the people who just don't want to kick off, okay, let him, but now they, they, they give the medicine, I'll a heroin. They make it in the few seat. A hospital is he had an Amsterdam. And, um, then the, the, the guys it's all about my <inaudible> and they have to go in a, um, room. Some, they shoot some, their snips on their smoke and, uh, that downs to criminality because for helping you do everything, because I, you know, I compare the heroin with Gib, the, the failure Bay from now it's the head, the head of from the time before.
Speaker 6 01:09:17 So, so, so I see it there because it's also an a, an, uh, uh, uh, fiscal, uh, uh, addiction. That's heroin, tourists do everything for that. Just, uh, you have now also medicine medicine, uh, uh, um, Gib, you have said also this, they are now more quicker with the solve the problem. Okay. When we give, we give them free, you know, on the, uh, uh, supervise, you know, on the cameras and everything, you know, you can do your thing, but then the, then they don't have to go on the street to sell the money to, you know, to retains. And that's such a cool change, more, uh, pensions, you know, treating you as human beings, you know? Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2 01:10:04 Well, Sonia is describing here as a policy response, which prioritizes harm reduction and regulation over abstinence and prohibition, or acknowledging that heroin addiction is a medical condition, which needs treatment rather than punishment and control and spatial times what this amounts to is a more serious and sober engagement with the possible places where heroin use and supply could happen in order to minimize the negative impact of law and order policies, organized crime, poverty, and desperation that usually accompany widespread use of opioids. But if there's one thing that this meandering historical geography was meant to illustrate, it's that our economic system benefits from mass addiction to a powerful pain relieving drug, whether it be in the neutralization and criminalization of the poor homeless and marginalized, the enrichment of pharmaceutical companies, or the support of corrupt anticommunist regimes, why prevent places from lapsing into despair when there's such a lot of money and power to be gained from doing nothing
