Book Review: "The Poisoned Ivy"; "Dorm Room Dealers" PART ONE
Dope on the College Campus, Then and Now (Updated 8/31/2023)
(Note: this is one of those rough first drafts that I’ve warned subscribers and readers about in previous posts and prefaces. The text of this post is subject to rearrangement, additions, and corrections in future versions. I’ll have much more to say; I’m hoping that by publishing it now, I’ll be a little quicker about expanding it into a completed piece. The first book, from 1968- The Poisoned Ivy, by William Surface- is available free to read at Archive.org. It may require registration, but all that’s asked is an email address; there are no fees or subscription charges. https://archive.org/details/poisonedivy0000unse So anyone who wants to join an impromptu book club has the text available to read themselves. Discussion will have to wait until I open comments. I anticipate making that move in early November.)
Most Americans with no experience in illicit drug culture and the illegal economy have no idea what it’s really like. They’re outsiders to the experience- and as is typical of outsiders to any experience, they don’t really put much thought into mulling over the phenomenon, and the array of questions associated with it. The natural default setting of outsiders is a superficial perspective informed by stereotype- often by popular media, which as a rule also offers an outsider perspective informed by stereotype. There’s nothing untoward about this; it’s how humans operate. If we have no skin in a particular game, it’s categorically filed with a superficial take and then forgotten. But the resulting take is often inaccurate- which has a way of leading to problems when a subjective conclusion is solicited on a matter of political importance, especially on a public policy question like law and order.
This situation has proved to be particularly problematic in the case of the War on Drugs. A lot of people think they know what’s going on, but they don’t. It’s taken decades for the non-illicit drug using majority of Americans to learn the hard way that the population of illicit drug users- the customers on the illegal markets in forbidden substances- is not exclusively comprised of borderline personalities of subnormal intelligence who are incidentally mostly nonwhites (the punitive moralist conservative view) or hopeless and despairing children of poverty seeking to escape their oppression who are also incidentally mostly nonwhite (the paternalistic liberal view.) Only recently has public consensus come around to acknowledging that all sorts of people use forbidden drugs, regardless of educational attainment and economic class, and that the predominant group- “white Americans”, people of European ancestry- also predominates as users and buyers on the illegal market.
But in terms of popular notions about sellers of drugs, that’s a different story. The popular media continues to focus on “the gangs” and “the cartels”- mostly nonwhite (overwhelmingly categorized as African American, black Caribbean, Mexican and Central American ethnicity) career criminals participating as members of organized crime distribution networks from the source to the retail trade on the street. This characterization is not entirely inaccurate as the level of smuggling and wholesale distribution; a basis of shared marginalized identity provides marked advantages for smuggling enterprises in any illegal market. It’s the Insider thing, again; such networks are much more difficult to infiltrate, or even identify. But in the case of a market as popular and lucrative as illicit drugs, the tight association of drug dealing with gangs and cartels breaks down entirely at the retail level.
Contrary to media image, most end-user drug transactions take place within peer groups, nearly always closely aligned in age, economic class background, schooling, local proximity- and somewhat more loosely, ethnicity. The upshot being that at the hand-to-hand retail sales level, most American drug dealers are Whiteys. This stands to reason: after all, most of the buyers are Whiteys. But since the nonparticipants in the trade, the Outsiders, are most often only familiar with the phenomenon as portrayed by the news and entertainment media, their perceptions are typically biased toward viewing drug dealers as an isolated class of antisocial thugs, predominantly Black or Latino, long with a handful of Outlaw Biker Whiteys.
The reality of illicit drugs retail transaction rarely registers. Consider the teenage drugs market, for example: most of it consist of high school kids selling to their schoolmates, whether in the inner city, the more affluent suburbs, or at private boarding schools in the country. Hence, the signs warning drug dealers away from selling with 500 feet of schoolyards are a joke, and they were a joke long before the advent of the pager and the cellphone. The dealers have always been members of the student body, and nothing has ever stopped them from arranging transactions for off-site pickup or delivery. Where do the teenage dealers obtain their supplies? Often from an older relative, like their older brothers. The teenagers most inclined to get into the retail drug game also have a tendency to be more physically mature than their peers, and to have more initiative and ambition than average; this is a reality that’s been affirmed repeatedly when the teenage drug trade has been studied. It’s affirmed by the fact that a large percentage of teenage drug dealers hold down jobs in the legitimate economy. Along with the benefit of providing seed capital, their workplaces- in proximity to adults- often offer the benefit of widening their social networks to obtain sources of supply. That’s been the case since the early 1970s; that’s how fast the illicit drugs market grew to maturity. Social networks of illicit drugs supply grew like mycelia beginning around 1967, and by 1975 they had spread from coast to coast.
The beginnings of that spread of the illicit drugs market from the confines of “ghetto” enclaves in a half-dozen large US cities to the wider population of American youth in the 1960s provides the topic focus of the first book in this review: The Poisoned Ivy, by William Surface. The second book- Dorm Room Dealers- is an academic study from 2008, focusing on the other end of the timeline of that proliferation of retail outlets, in a mature market long entrenched in a wider illegal drug economy that had been running rampant nationwide for decades.
Unlike Dorm Room Dealers, which is an academic study with a sociological approach that combines close observation and Insider informant access with references to other academic research and history to form its thesis and conclusions, Poisoned Ivy is a journalistic account written for the American mass market by a professional newsman with no specialized expertise in medicine, cultural anthropology, or criminology, as an overview of a situation that had only recently begun to draw the notice of the American news media in that era. As such, it’s an Outsider perspective, the view of an investigator from the “older generation” whose baseline data sources consist of other news stories in the American press, along with some scattered quotes of law enforcement statistics and a cursory overview of the most popular illicit substances, their properties and history of use, and an outline of the laws ordaining their prohibition and the criminalization of the users. There are quite a few interviews, mostly of law enforcement officials and academic administrators, but also including many quoted statements and anecdotes related by the college student population, particularly the user cohort, along with some of their suppliers. However, the book is notably low on references, footnotes and endnotes. As such, the overview presented lacks much in the way of authoritative or clearly outlined conclusions. Author William Surface clearly recognizes that there’s been a profound cultural shift. But he isn’t on the Inside of it; he’s skirting the edges. He provides only glimpses of the weird scenes of the Sixties youth culture that had begun to brew and ferment under the notice of the adult world.
That said, William Surface is a professional journalist- a capable reporter, and a good interviewer. The book is informative is terms of its ability to provide general impressions of the advent of mass popularity of illicit drugs among American youth in the late 1960s. Its tone is also revelatory in terms of its value as a period piece and an artifact of the Zeitgeist: it balances the attitudes of Ivy League youthful experimenters and their social milieu with the mainstream societal perspective aligned with police dramas of the era, like Jack Webb’s Dragnet. The perspective of college administrators and the police constitute the status quo of the adult world of American Culture that the nascent youth Counterculture defined itself against- an opposition not primarily directed as a challenge of political or economic ideology, but more as a youthful rejection of its perceived absence of vision, its unthinking acquiescence to militarist ventures like Vietnam, its lack of sensuality or vitality or grasp of the possibilities of the moment, and its perceived insistence on bland, mundane material aspirations of stability and premature maturity. Half of the US was under the age of 30 in 1970, and the sensibility of rebellious youth was bolstered by the strength of those numbers. William Surface documents the common response of the middle class parental generation of the era: the uncertainty, bewilderment, and denial associated with the first apprehension of the ingress of novelty into their world of routine and comfortable assurances. Not outright terror- the elders aren’t facing anything like the peril of their counterparts in the PRC, from the concerted youthful energies of the Maoist Red Guards of the Chinese Baby Boom. But there’s an increasingly disconcerting sense of confounded expectations: how could so many of the kids be opting out of the American future of safe, sane middle-class prosperity, to risk it all with Dope?
The cognitive dissonance attendant to the Outsider/Insider divide is particularly acute in the case of the population that provides the focus of Surface’s attentions: American college students. The initial fascination of young Americans with illicit drugs in the 1960s didn’t result from economic hopelessness, and it didn’t percolate upward on a class basis, from the ghetto demimonde and the lumpenproletariat to the vocational working classes and the lower middle class. Instead, the market seemed to have generated practically spontaneously within the precincts of college campuses- that enclave intended to nurture the affluent middle class and the wealthy. This situation simply did not fit any popular narrative of the parental generation of Americans in the 1960s. William Surface underscores the disruptive challenge presented by the youthful surge toward what Dick Gregory once referred to as “the Sixties taking the lid off” the repressive features of American culture and society- not simply in terms of civil rights and social justice concerns, but in challenging repressive social mores and shifting away from the 1950s middle class emphasis on prosperity, stability, and the accumulation of modern conveniences toward an desire to broaden the horizons of personal experience. This including toppling taboos about the use of legally forbidden drugs- along with a corollary reframing of the effects of those that were legal, but not popularly recognized as mind-altering, to provide a more candid and complete appraisal of their properties and potential for use or abuse.
That popular rebellion by Baby Boomer youth got its initial impetus within the most venerable and prestigious academic institutions in the U.S.- the Ivy League colleges. William Surface visited all seven of them, and managed to draw quite a number of the students into his confidence in the course of his investigation.
(to be continued)
His findings portray the onset of the epidemic in criminalized substance use in the United States.
Note that I said the word “epidemic.” The introduction of novel practices into a society where they were formerly unknown takes on the form of an epidemic. Note also that I said criminalized- not merely prohibited, or forbidden. The epidemic of binge drinking by young Americans in the 1920s involved legally prohibited substances- but the users were not criminalized. Americans use of newly invented mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs had reached something akin to pandemic proportions by the 1950s- but those drugs were legal by prescription, and widely prescribed. The mode of introduction was most often through “officially approved channels”- doctors and pharmacies. The evidence of magazine advertising, widespread prescription, and popular demand indicates that few of the clients/patients/consumers had any more idea about the side effect profile of those pills than a newer generation had when deluged with the advertising-instigated expansion of opioid painkiller prescription in the 1990s.
Fortunately, amphetamines, barbiturates, and tranquilizers simply produce less serious side effects than opioids, and they aren’t as addictive- or the country would have been in the throes of a frightening pill epidemic of criminalized addicts with an overdose death toll mounting in the thousands annually 70 years ago. But that didn’t happen. The annual overdose death toll for non-opiate pharmaceutical drugs is a small fraction of the peak years of the 1990s-2000s diversion market in oxycontin. But at least oxycontin was manufactured with regard to stable amount and purity; the street opioids that addicts were driven to use after opioid pill prescription was restricted—with medical addict maintenance still forbidden—led to a death toll several times higher than the worst years of the prescription opioid epidemic.
It’s ironic to consider that just as opioid prescription was subjected to much more stringent regulation in the 2010s, the later 1960s saw Congressional scrutiny of the pharmaceutical industry which eventually led to Federal measures aimed at restricting access to prescription amphetamines and barbiturates. At first, the illicit market responded by drawing on the still-large inventory of those substances available either within US borders or right across the Mexican border, where pharmacies had been keeping their shelves well-stocked with supplies imported from American drug factories. Then the bathtub amphetamine (“whites”, “crossroads”) and methamphetamine market grew to meet expanded demand from illicit sources. Eventually, the ragged edge of the street meth scene and the low quality of bootleg amphetamine pills shifted toward another stimulant substance: cocaine.
But that’s getting ahead of the story. We need to return to the baseline social class and economic conditions of the illicit drug market of the 1960s. The vast majority of pre-existing illicit drug markets involved two substances- heroin and marijuana. The heroin marketplace was confined to the black ghettoes of the largest cities in the country, and a few border towns. One nexus of the trade was both: Detroit, Michigan, which had a disproportionate role in the heroin market as early as the 1950s. The marijuana marketplace was nearly as constrained as the heroin market; there was often a lot of overlap in the supply chain and the retail trade, which is one of those features common to the realm of profiteering in criminalized drugs. If “marijuana leads to heroin” under those circumstances, it’s only because other than heroin users, the only people who would even know where to find heroin were people in touch with the milieu of an illicit drug marketplace where both drugs were often available from the same seller. (Often, but not always; some retailers confined their business to cannabis; others only sold to hardcore opioid addicts, and marijuana wasn’t worth the investment and the time.)
So that accounts for the vast majority of the milieu of criminalized drug use, from after World War II to the early 1960s. It’s the substrate, so to speak- the remnant of users of cocaine, opioids, and marijuana who refused to give up their habits after the Harrison Act of 1914, the Webb decision of the Supreme Court in 1924 that forbade physicians to prescribe opioids for addiction maintenance, and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. The reprobates, who were largely found as a sub-population concentrated within the lower classes: the populations known variously as the lumpenproletariat, the street criminal element, the psychopathic poor, the dangerous classes. (The decadent demimonde of the wealthy also accounted for some demand, but their habits were discreet. They didn’t score their drugs directly on the street. They either retained more respectable sources, or they had a gofer to do the scoring for them.)
That was how the “drug problem” was viewed, in the 1950s: like an endemic disease that had been successfully corraled into a few small lawless pockets, almost exclusively confined to the neighborhoods of The People Who Don’t Matter. Black American people, along with some of the Mexican barrios between Matamoros, LA, and Stockton. With some Chinese participation in the trade, but what happened in Chinatown stayed in Chinatown.
Circa 1960, American law enforcement had no inkling that situation would ever change, from the US Bureau of Narcotics to the local police departments. Ironically, the 1960s Drug Revolution didn’t emerge outward from the ghettoes and barrios. It began with a very different socioeconomic stratum: the more adventurous and advantaged youth of the Baby Boomer generation, born at the right time. And the substance that initially provoked the most interest wasn’t heroin, cocaine, or even marijuana: it was LSD.
One of the reasons that LSD caught on was that it was gray market up until around the 1960s. Another reason is that a decade of clandestine research and experimentation with LSD had already been going on throughout the 1950s. Much of that experimentation was sponsored by the CIA, although that hardly means that everyone who got research grants was in on some nefarious mind control plot. The CIA eventually got some inkling that LSD has a way of reliably upsetting efforts to use it for social control, whether at the individual or societal level. It took some years for the clandestine government researchers to comprehend how unpredictable it was. No one had any idea of what they were dealing with unless they had used it themselves. Some of the users began straying from the original mission, as it were. Some of them got a little evangelical about it, and LSD began slopping over into all sorts of unlikely places, like Time founder/publisher Henry Luce and his wife Clare Boothe Luce, the conservative Republican, Roman Catholic convert, pioneering Congresswoman, U.S. Ambassador, writer and political lobbyist. And Captain Al Hubbard, who seems to have been in on some minor covert ops in the OSS days and later struck it rich in Canadian uranium. A guy sufficiently well-connected to have obtained firsthand LSD Experience—which by Hubbard’s own account was so transcendent and transformative that he set about trying to turn on everyone he thought would benefit from the then-legal substance. (This is an important point; one that argues against the paranoid narrative that LSD was released in the 1960s by secret elite covert ops change actors who wanted to poison the youth of America- because in the case of LSD, the prosyletizers had the firsthand experience of drinking the same concoction that they were recommending. People who intentionally peddle poison don’t drink it themselves. Some of the early acid evangelists believed in LSD enough to make it, in makeshift labs where they ended up ingesting large amounts through their skin. Whether psychedelics use is worthwhile or not is a question open to debate; the story that the LSD market has been maintained as a covert ops plot by mind controllers is drivel.)
Timothy Leary eventually showed up as the most mediagenic Influencer for LSD. His star turn as Guru of Acid is where The Poisoned Ivy picks up the plot. But there were plenty of more low-key and discreet advocates for the psychedelic revolution who preceded him. Over the course of the 1950s, LSD began achieving increasing appeal among influential people with adventurous minds.
As The Poisoned Ivy makes clear, the college kids had little more idea of the nature of psychedelic drugs than their elders. But quite a number of them decided that it was door worth opening. The Poisoned Ivy contains some anecdotal data and statistics on LSD use and its hazards and bad outcomes. I found most of the information poorly referenced, but much of it aligned roughly accurately with other sources I’ve read.
But the topic of the sociocultural aspects belongs in another post. This post is about Economics. This post is about Markets, and how they’ve changed over the decades. And also Labor Forces, and how they’ve changed.
In 1969:
The price of a pound of bricked regular-grade marijuana (1%-2% THC; high CBN content due to staleness and overheating) from Mexico—the most common product in 1968—was about $100-$160 lb. $10-$15/oz. A joint was
There was bettter grade marijuana, but it in high demand, and it was scarce. Supply was hit or miss, for most consumer markets. When it was available, the price was not much higher than the usual grade. The social capital of being the Plug for high-grade marijuana definitely featured as an attraction for a lot of people, in 1969.
LSD went up in price—and availability—after it was Federally banned in 1966, from $3.50 a (strong) dose to $7.50-8.00 on the retail market.
The prescription pills—amphetamines and barbiturates—were silly cheap. $20/100 to $0.50 apiece.
Beer was $1.25 a six-pack.
Tobacco cigarettes were $0.35 for a pack of 20. Free packs were sometimes handed out on the street, to any random passerby who looked like they were older than age 12.
Think that price comparison over.
That’s one of the most important things to know about the drug scene in 1968: it cost very little to get high. In the case of pot and most pills, arguably cheaper than even the lowest grade of alcoholic beverage. (Also: there were a lot of American tobacco smokers. Large percentages of Americans, from teenagers on up.)
The exception on the illicit market was heroin, which seemed to always cost $3-$5 a dose. And the retail market for that product was informally zoned to be exclusively located in neighborhoods of the nonprosperous, the nonwhite, and the new arrivals.
The market for heroin had broadened considerably by 1968, although not even close in comparison to 1998. Some influential parts of the counterculture and youth culture held to an ethos opposed to its presence; and just in general, the vast majority of illicit experimenters had a healthy respect for the fact that heroin is a potentially lethal drug, and they avoided it. They declined to seek it out. Although others did. Some later found that they had to seek it out, to the tune of $60-$100 a day.
Perhaps the largest addition to the consumer base for opiates in the 1960s consisted of Vietnam veterans. It’s important to note that even American soldiers who were situational users or addicts in Vietnam typically quit using heroin once they were back in the US. But that was a substantial population for a few years there, and some of them did keep on with their heroin use and heroin habits when they got home.
However, the most crucially important role played by American armed forces veterans in the “1960s drug epidemic” was in expanding the market for marijuana. They were the first population of American youth to be exposed to high-grade marijuana of Southeast Asia; some of them found ways to bring duffel bags of the commodity home, and seed stock. Vietnam vets didn’t just add to the customer base; they were over-represented as smugglers, particularly by airplane. Vets were also over-represented as domestic pot growers, from Maui to West Virginia. The military has a way of producing people who are well-trained in skill sets like smuggling, concealment, firearms handling, and security.
The advent of high-grade marijuana was the next step in the evolution of the market. (The expansion of the pot user and dealer market to the high schools and middle schools was arguably the most important development in its sociocultural aspects. But for now, we’re just talking economics.)
The step after that was the discovery that the nation of Colombia produced very powerful marijuana. And, coincidentally) another mind-altering substance with an unheralded, unprecedentedly lucrative potential: cocaine.
(to be updated)