Along this run-down urban strip, dotted with take-out Chinese and fried chicken restaurants, check-cashing joints, bodegas, a shelter for homeless people, a Dollar Tree and a White Castle, people would be in your face, asking you to buy. These sellers were offering a variety of heroin stamps—Blue Monkey, DOA, Donald Trump, 911, Orange Crush—to a thriving customer base. Even during the gloomiest winters, foot traffic was constant, with buyers moving from corner to corner trying to ascertain which bags were fire, which bags were bunk, and who could be trusted to sell a full load.

There’s little sign of that now. There are whispers on the streets about dealers shutting up shop, refusing to sell to anyone except to their most loyal customers, unsure of when they’ll be able to reload. The middlemen, largely also drug users, who once spent their days here copping for newbies on commission are nowhere to be found. There’s no longer anyone willing to wait on some street-corner after handing over 50 bucks to someone on the promise that they’ll “be right back.” Welcome to the coronavirus drug scene.

“Overnight, the cost of an ounce basically tripled.”

About a week previously, the rumblings had started in my online drug-user circles. Talk of dealers running low on supply, and customers panic-buying to stock up on heroin and meth in anticipation of a disruption of supply chains.  

“Overnight, the cost of an ounce basically tripled,” said Jay*, who uses various dark-web marketplaces to supply methamphetamine, which he uses himself. His regular vendor told him this was due to a shortage of precursor chemicals, most of which originate in Chinese labs. Unable to place his usual order, Jay tried to make up the shortfall by returning to the street dealers whom he had, in recent years, ditched in favor of online vendors.

“It was a mess,” he told Filter of his foray back to the streets. “The ones who did have product were already complaining about a lack of supply and unwilling to sell to anyone who wasn’t a regular. The stuff I did manage to get was cut to shit … just whack, compared to what I’ve gotten used to.”  

On the East Coast, where so much of what’s sold is a mixture of white heroin and laboratory fentanyl, the knock-on effect of China’s COVID-19 shutdown was pretty much immediate. 

“Last week my plug started talking about prices going up, not being sure when he’s gonna be able to re-up,” Lisa, a 10-year veteran of Paterson’s open-air drug markets, told Filter. “Nobody’s sure if it’s a real shortage, or just people expecting the shit to hit the fan and preparing. Either way, prices are going up, and people are freaking out.”

Disrupted Supply Chains

According to Chris Dalby at InsightCrime, the chilling effect is undoubtedly rooted in hard facts. In a March 18 piece, he explored how Mexican cartels were feeling the impact of the crisis in China.  Specifically, he described how the disruption of supply lines between Mexico and China has not only left the cartels without the precursor chemicals needed to make fentanyl, but also cut off the flow of counterfeit goods that they relied on to partly fund cross-border smuggling operations. “The global lockdown due to the coronavirus appears to be hitting legal and illegal economies equally hard,” he wrote, “but it is likely the supply chain troubles of [the Mexican cartels] is only the beginning.” 

The potential for COVID-19 to wreak havoc on drug markets—with consequences including deaths due to adulterated supply and risks taken by desperate people in withdrawal—is something that harm reductionists have been loudly flagging. Dr. Owen Bowden-Jones considered this for the Society for the Study of Addiction. There have been similar—if less extreme—heroin droughts in the past, and they may offer clues for what to expect in coming months.  

“In the past, when we’ve seen significant reductions in the availability and purity of heroin, the result has been changing patterns of use, with more people seeking treatment,” Bowden-Jones wrote. But any potential upside is offset—in the US at least—by the  fact that drug treatment services are woefully underfunded and oversubscribed. “During these periods we’ve also seen other, more worrying trends—such as heroin being cut with other drugs and bulking agents.” 

A Fixer’s Business Dries Up

Back on the streets of Paterson, the first familiar face I see is an elderly man with one leg, who goes by the name PD. He earns his living and funds his heroin habit by selling Suboxone strips and acting as a “spotter” for local youths who sell crack.

He’s with a slight woman who looks to be in her 60s, who has the running eyes and nose that I know only too well to associate with withdrawal. She shuffles from foot to foot as she warily takes in my approach.

After PD tells her that he knows me, she calms down a little, and laughingly explains that I shouldn’t worry about her runny nose because “I don’t have the virus.” She’s just waiting for someone to meet her with the heroin she needs to get well. 

“Motherfucker’s late, too…” she grumbles. Some things never change, it seems.

PD tells me that things have been uncharacteristically slow for the past week or so, when people on the scene started taking talk of the coronavirus more seriously. For someone like PD, who relies on passing trade, this has almost destroyed his income.

“Shit’s been real slow. Lotta folks been going back to the clinics, now.”

“Look at this shit,” he tells me, unzipping the saddle bag he has rigged up to his wheelchair. Inside are a half-dozen neat rolls of Suboxone strips, an inch or two in diameter, neatly tied up with elastic bands. “Shit’s been real slow. Lotta folks been going back to the clinics, now.”

People like PD act as a kind of unofficial treatment service for people looking to either wean themselves off of heroin or maintain for longer periods, while being leery of engaging with formal services. Their reasons are varied: Some simply can’t afford the cost of treatment without health insurance; others are worried about the impact on their livelihoods and families if word got out that they had a drug problem. For this invisible population, PD was a valuable resource.  

Now, “They scared of what’s gonna happen a week, a month from now…” PD says. “So, they say ‘fuck it’ and go to the clinic instead. Nobody wants to be left without nuthin’.”

PD’s companion suddenly pipes up.  “Who the fuck’d want to be at those fuckin’ clinics with all those sick folks, anyway?”

She has a point. Clinics in New Jersey have reacted differently to the coronavirus, with some closing altogether and offering virtual counseling sessions. Others–such as Pinnacle Treatment Centers, which operates clinics in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and California—are opting to stay open, and force patients to attend in person to maintain their prescriptions, despite Governor Murphy’s pleading for social distancing.  

Pinnacle CEO Joe Prichard said in a statement, “It is extremely important that we continue in our mission and remain steadfast for our fellow teammates and patients.”  In other words, in a state where schools, restaurants and bars have closed—and despite the feds now authorizing up to 28 days of take-home methadone doses—the fear of patients getting take-homes before they have “earned” them (via good behavior and negative urine tests) is seemingly a scarier prospect than the spread of COVID-19 among a vulnerable client base.   

As one New Jersey patient justifiably said, “I just think it’s ridiculous I have to go there.”

Lisa has gone back to her old buprenorphine prescriber, at least until things blow over. “I’ve got a good doctor,” she said. “I was just getting killed on the co-pays and shit. It was, like, a hundred bucks every time I walked in the door. Plus, the cost of the bupe, and all the rest.”

But now, she considers the relative stability of treatment a blessing. “Maybe I’ll just try [treatment] again. Until things settle down, at least.” Her doctor is currently providing consultations via Skype and Zoom, and she likes the fact that under current clinic guidelines she won’t be expected to attend mandatory 12-step meetings. (“Fuck that noise,” she laughs.)

“A month ago I hadn’t heard of coronavirus. Now it’s all anyone fuckin’ talks about.”

I ask PD if stories like Lisa’s suggest a kind of silver lining in all of this. PD considers this for a moment, laughs and asks, “Do I look like a motherfucking social worker?”

I guess not, I tell him.

“I mean, shit…”  He sucks air through his teeth.  “A fucking month ago I hadn’t heard of fucking coronavirus. Now it’s all anyone fuckin’ talks about. Meanwhile…”  he gestures at the rolls of unsold Suboxone strips in his saddle bag. “What the fuck am I s’posed to do with all this shit now?”

*The names and some identifying details of the quoted sources in this article have been changed, for their protection.

Photo of Main St, Paterson by Ken Lund via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0

The post A New Jersey Drug Market Falls Silent Amid the Pandemic appeared first on Filter.

—William S. Burroughs

Like many non-medical professionals, my first exposure to the intriguing story of Dr. John Yerbury Dent and his “apomorphine cure” came via the legendary Beat writer, who struggled with heroin addiction for years. The Naked Lunch author became a tireless advocate for apomorphine after receiving it as treatment from Dr. Dent in London in 1956.

Burroughs described apomorphine—a non-narcotic morphine derivative that does not bind to the brain’s opioid receptors—as a “metabolic regulator.” Within a matter of weeks, he claimed, it not only weaned him off of heroin, but also completely rewired his brain to such an extent that he no longer desired it. For the rest of his life, Burroughs remained convinced that apomorphine had the potential to revolutionize addiction treatment.

Despite Burroughs’ cheerleading, Dent’s treatment never caught on. Prior to apomorphine’s re-emergence as a treatment for a very different condition in the late 1980s (thanks mostly to the work of British neuroscientist Andrew Lees, more on him later), the medical establishment tended to regard apomorphine as something between a curiosity and a quack-cure with niche literary mystique.

This article makes no claim about apomorphine’s potential efficacy, or lack of it, for addiction. A number of experts on methadone and other treatments that I contacted declined to comment, saying they didn’t know enough about it. (Although over the years a number of independent practitioners have used it.)

Instead, I want to get at the intriguing story behind apomorphine—one that’s relevant to how we approach potential new treatments today.

To do this, we need to hear more about the man who introduced Burroughs to the drug—a figure every bit as fascinating and controversial as the writer with whose name his is forever linked.

Dr. John Yerbury Dent

“He was an intellectual,” Warwick Sweeney, a London-based author and photographer—who also happens to be Dent’s grandson⁠—told me. “Moved easily among the best minds of his generation … but very modest, too. Dent also lived a fairly bohemian life and enjoyed what might euphemistically be called an ‘open marriage.’”

Dr. Dent. Photo via ApomorphinevsAddiction.

Sweeney is the author of The Hardy Tree, a book about his grandfather’s life and work (Bracketpress, 2019.) Although Dr. Dent’s passing in 1962 meant that Sweeney never knew his grandfather personally, he seems to have inherited his fearsome intellect and anti-establishment leanings. He has maintained a website dedicated to telling the story of Dent’s work and, more importantly, exposing what he sees as a concerted effort to block further research into apomorphine’s potential for addiction.

The theme of the medical establishment/Big Pharma as blinkered gatekeepers⁠ comes up again and again.

“If we do not understand the past, we’ll only repeat it,” said Sweeney. “And sadly, tragically, unforgivably, successive British governments have caved in to corporations who have profited from the War on Drugs.”

The theme of the medical establishment/Big Pharma as blinkered gatekeepers⁠—determined to scupper all research into a potentially valuable addiction⁠ treatment that might hurt profits—comes up again and again in this story. “Pharmaceutical researchers are told what to pursue by vested interest, which gives orders to the American Narcotics Department,” wrote Burroughs in his 1969 book, The Job. “Remember, these pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in illness. Drugs that strike at the very root of illness are dangerous.”

Apomorphine was first synthesized in 1845 by boiling morphine in hydrochloric acid, and has a complex medical history. Originally used as an emetic (i.e., to induce vomiting) the possibilities of apomorphine as a behavioral inhibitor were first explored by pharmacologist Erich Harnack, an ethnic German born in Estonia, whose groundbreaking research in the late 19th century led to apomorphine’s first association with the treatment of alcohol dependence.

Harnack’s approach was blunt: The vomit-inducing effects of the drug were used to create a Pavlovian aversion to booze. (It was this unpleasant property that led to apomorphine’s later inclusion in the “secret formula” administered to patients undergoing the now-discredited, “Keeley Cure” across the US and Europe.)

Erich Harnack. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It was on the back of Harnack’s work that the young Dr. Dent, working with the destitute dependent drinkers who wound up in his ward at North London’s St. Pancras Hospital, first started administering apomorphine in the 1920s.

Back then, the very idea of “treating alcoholism” was a novel one. For Dent’s colleagues, standard procedure consisted of little more than pumping drunken patients’ stomachs before turfing them back onto the streets.

“I know of no medical textbook that includes advice on the treatment of acute misery or grief, no drugs are prescribed for broken hearts.”

Dent, however, pitied them and longed to do more. “Dent was always non-judgmental, which was surely part of his Quaker sensibility,” said Sweeney. “He was known as a ‘friend to drunks,’ when most doctors referred their drunks to the police.”

Or, as Dent himself put it in his 1937 book, The Human Machine: “I know of no medical textbook that includes advice on the treatment of acute misery or grief, no drugs are prescribed for broken hearts, and Dutch courage is all that is advised for terror.”

Looking for a way to break the despair, Dent began experimenting with apomorphine, and found that when he gave it to his alcohol-dependent patients, it seemed to help. In 1934, he presented his work to the Society for the Study of Addiction, theorizing that Pavlovian conditioning (that vomiting again) was behind its success.

Yet he soon changed his mind. Administered correctly⁠—how he defined this is unclear, but he experimented a lot, including with high doses⁠—the drug seemed to have a far more profound effect than simply creating a vomit-fueled aversion to booze. It seemed also to reduce craving and to help the person through the worst of the withdrawals.

“Empiricism further led Dent to reconsider his first conclusions, and to suspect that apomorphine acted through a deeper effect, related to the ‘hindbrain,’ and the suppression of craving⁠—with no recourse to aversion,” wrote Manon Auffret and Marc Verin in a 2019 article for the American Academy of Neurology. “From there, Dent continuously battled to correct his “unfortunate” first statement (1949) and to broaden the use of apomorphine⁠—even appealing to the American Medical Association for research.”

Dent would spend the rest of his professional life promoting apomorphine as a tool to fight addiction, later including heroin, while treating over a thousand people with the drug.

But his anti-theist bent and open dislike of the stuffy, conservative medical establishment of the day, according to Sweeney, helped to ensure that he remained something of a fringe figure. Sweeney also feels that a big part of the establishment’s mistrust of Dent and apomorphine was down to a simple lack of understanding.

“Like everyone else, the doctors and the neuropsychopharmacologists had been looking merely at the bio-chemical or material benefits of apomorphine,” Sweeney said. “Do not get me wrong; this needs to be properly understood. But neuroscience has separated it from every other dimension of what makes a human organism. This dimension of my grandfather needs to be properly understood, because it is complex and profound—but it is also fundamental to why he was successful with his patients but utterly useless with the politicians, and those he needed to convince to fashion policy… Like the arse-licking Anslingers, for example.”

Early Drug War Opponent; Apomorphine’s Demise

Dent’s distaste for Harry J. Anslinger, America’s first drug warrior, is documented in a series of letters he wrote opposing the creeping influence of US prohibitionist policies upon the British approach.

The “British System,” which allowed doctors to prescribe heroin and cocaine to people who were dependent, was eventually replaced by the Misuse of Drugs Act in 1971. Dent had warned that such a change would lead to a ballooning of the illicit market and an uptick in addiction.

“I fear we may turn London into a second New York.”

“If instead of the US following our very efficient methods of controlling heroin addiction and traffic, we are cowardly enough to copy their admittedly inefficient methods,” Dent wrote in one 1954 letter to Medical World, “I fear we may turn London into a second New York [referencing then-higher rates of drug addiction in New York].” History proved him right.

By the 1950s Dent was working in private practice, and it was in this capacity in the spring of 1956 that William S. Burroughs came into his orbit. In the years following his treatment, Burroughs became not only one of the best known (and most controversial) authors in the world, with the publication of his groundbreaking 1959 anti-novel Naked Lunch, but also a vocal advocate for apomorphine as a treatment for heroin addiction.

Despite the fact that Burroughs later relapsed a number of times, his opinion of the effectiveness of apomorphine never wavered. Indeed, he described his treatment under Dent with the zeal of the newly converted in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning A Sickness,” his preface to the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch.

“The apomorphine cure is qualitatively different from all other methods of cure,” he wrote. “I have tried them all […] I can say definitively that I was never metabolically cured until I took the apomorphine cure. […]  I suggest that research with variations of apomorphine and synthesis of it will open a new medical frontier extending far beyond the problem of addiction.” In Burroughs’ opinion, apomorphine was nothing less than a vaccine with the potential to eliminate addiction.

“Apomorphine was touted as a ‘silver bullet cure.’ It was not–and Dent never said that it was or that it could be.”

Sweeney implies that Burroughs did the cause no favors with such overstatement. “Apomorphine was touted as a ‘silver bullet cure’,” he explained. “It was not—and Dent never said that it was or that it could be.”

Still, Sweeney appreciates the author’s loyalty. “Burroughs was a radical, but a gent too. He never let Dent down and was consistent in his admiration … always.”

Burroughs in 1983. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Burroughs became an increasingly solitary advocate. As methadone, and later buprenorphine—both proven to greatly reduce mortality—came to dominate the opioid addiction medication field, there seemed to be no place for apomorphine.

The idea of using the drug for this purpose all-but died with Dr. Dent, in 1962. Although just a few years later, in 1965 and ‘67, studies in the Netherlands tantalizingly demonstrated apomorphine’s ability to increase dopamine-related activity in the brain.

Failure to investigate is resonant in an era where research into potential tools like ibogaine and MDMA has too often been blocked.

Ineffective advocacy may have played a role in the lack of further research into apomorphine for addiction. The harsh truth should also be noted—and I say this as a former methadone patient, who benefited greatly from it—that there is far more money to be made in treating people with drugs over a long period than there would be in an effective short-term treatment.

“’Maintenance’ was an anathema to Dent when abstinence was possible, but apomorphine had a bad rep,” said Sweeney. “[Prior to Dent] it was used as an aversion therapy, and aversion did not work. Dent knew this and adapted different protocols. He was a holistic practitioner. People who maintain that apomorphine doesn’t work have no idea how it is used.”

Again, I make no comment on whether or not apomorphine might work. But the failure of the scientific, medical and political establishment to fully investigate the possibility is resonant in an era where research into potential addiction tools like ibogaine and MDMA has too often been blocked.

An Uplifting Second Act

An uplifting postscript to the apomorphine story began in the 1970s, when Andrew Lees—professor of Neurology at London’s National Hospital for Neurology and University College London, and an admirer of Burroughs—found himself drawn to the story of apomorphine and began experimenting with it.

His research would eventually result in apomorphine’s rebirth as a commercial treatment (Apokyn) for Parkinson’s disease. This is a compelling story in its own right, brilliantly documented in Lees’ memoir, Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment (Psychedelic Press, 2017).

“Drugs like apomorphine should be reinvestigated as an alternative to buprenorphine and methadone in heroin addiction.”

Lees himself, whose research led to apomorphine’s glorious second act, has repeatedly expressed his frustration at the apparent lack of interest in researching apomorphine as a potential addiction treatment.

“Drugs like apomorphine should be reinvestigated as an alternative to buprenorphine and methadone in heroin addiction,” he told the Guardian in 2014. “There’s an urgent need for fresh trials in the use of apomorphine for dealing with addiction, but we are up against punitive and draconian legislation.”

I asked Sweeney if he thinks there is any possibility of apomorphine eventually coming out of the shadows for his grandfather’s intended purpose—or at least being rigorously researched.

“It could only happen if people cooperate—agencies, doctors, psychotherapists, governments and neuropharmacologists, with a unity of purpose,” he said. “It’s a conversation that desperately needs to happen.”

Detail of a poster for the 1991 David Cronenberg film Naked Lunch via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Why the Curious Story of William S. Burroughs’ Heroin “Cure” Still Matters appeared first on Filter.

Bop Apocalypse (2017, De Capo Press) is one of those rare works of social history that’s as exciting and immediate as the very best fiction. With a cast illustrious and notorious—think Billie Holiday, Lester Young (pictured above), Harry J. Anslinger, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac—it’s a multilayered insider’s view of the birth of our modern relationship with drugs. The historical and thematic connections that Torgoff interlinks are dizzying, and this—combined with his knack for making history entertaining—defines a book that’s funny, heartbreaking, at times infuriating, but always brilliant. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in jazz, Beat literature or the War on Drugs.

“Well, thank you,” Torgoff says when I tell him all of this, “that means a great deal.” He seems sweetly embarrassed.

Looking younger than his mid-60s with tousled, shoulder-length grey hair, Torgoff has the affable air of a hip university professor, or perhaps a Bay Area hippy-turned-Silicone Valley millionaire. He welcomes me into the office at his Westchester home. Fittingly, it’s stuffed with books and memorabilia related to the areas he’s been fastidiously documenting for the better part of three decades—jazz, early rock’nroll and post-modern literary ephemera fill the shelves and most of the walls.

“Legend had it that Santana was so high on mescaline that at one point he looked down and his guitar had turned into a snake.”

“Let me tell you a story,” he says. Back in 1994, Torgoff was in the backstage area of the Woodstock 25th anniversary concert, working as a field producer for the Barbara Kopple-helmed documentary intended to capture the event for posterity.

“My job was interviewing the artists,” he tells me. “And believe me, I saw the entire range of them, in terms of the drug culture. There were people in recovery, like David Crosby. There were ex-junkies like Greg Almond. There were new-wave psychedelic artists, hip-hop artists whose entire output was basically a celebration of pot culture… they were all there.”

“In the middle of it all I had a conversation with Carlos Santana. We were talking about how in the ’69 festival, he infamously went out on stage while tripping on mescaline. If you look back at the film of that incredible ’69 performance—they were doing, I think, ‘Soul Sacrifice’—it was an electrifying performance. Well, legend had it that Santana was so high on mescaline during this performance that at one point he looked down and his guitar had turned into a snake—right there in his hands!”

“Now, I knew about this, of course. So I brought up the fact that there was a whole revival of interest in psychedelics within that new generation playing the festival. As, indeed, there is now. And I said to him: ‘Carlos, how do you feel about all these kids who are here all taking acid?’’

“And he said something to me that I’ve never forgotten. He said, ‘You know—there’s a difference between self-expansion and self-deception. The journey, for all of us, is about learning the difference.”

“I mean, for me, that’s right on the money,” Torgoff concludes. “You don’t know what it’s like to be an addict until you are. You cross that threshold and then you get it… but it’s too late…. But along the way, if you could learn that difference… ? Well… It could have been a whole different story.”

Martin Torgoff. Credit: Josh Lehrer.

A Siren’s Call

In the years since Can’t Find My Way Home, his first major work, was published in 2004, Martin Torgoff has mined a rich vein as a leading documentarian of drugs and American society. He delved into television, bringing us award-winning pop-culture documentaries like The Drug Years (2006), Sex: The Revolution (2008) and Planet Rock: The Story of Hip Hop and the Crack Generation (2012). Indeed, DIGAStudios recently acquired the rights to Bop Apocalypse in the hopes of developing it into a television series.

I hoovered these shows up, in a way that reminded me of how, growing up in England in the 1980s, I craved stories of outlaw geniuses like Lenny Bruce, Chet Baker, Lou Reed and Sid Vicious. Long before I slid a needle into my own arm, I had developed a fascination with the life that remains to this day, years after my last hit of dope.

Torgoff’s work, I point out, has relentlessly explored his fascination for drug-using luminaries like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. I wonder aloud if there’s a dangerous element, a kind of siren’s call, in our cultural beatification of pop culture’s drug-addled heroes?

“If you couldn’t see the beauty in the madness then, to me, you were missing the point.”

“There was no doubt that the icons of my youth were all associated with drugs and alcohol,” he says. “They were all lawless, they were all drug users. Absolutely, there was a romanticism about it all that we all bought into.”

So how does he view that romanticism now?

“There is a part of it that was completely valid,” he replies. “After all, these people were doing groundbreaking things that changed the culture. They were addressing themes that needed to be addressed. They were absolutely authentic and committed in their creativity.”

“But there was also a part of it that was delusional. That was completely over the top. That was, for the lack of a better word, mad. But it was a beautiful madness. If you couldn’t see the beauty in the madness then, to me, you were missing the point of what made them so powerful.”

It’s hard to argue. After all, if it came down to a choice between Lou Reed and Cliff Richard… “There are some people who embraced drugs and destruction as a kind of destiny,” Torgoff says, with a sly grin. “I mean, look at Burroughs.”

Few, I agree, can claim to have lived so unrepentantly, changed the face of American literature, and lived to a ripe old, drug-addled age of 83. But even though Burroughs is an outlier, there are other iconic figures, like Hunter S. Thompson or Timothy Leary, who underline that drug-taking seems to be embedded as much in American literary culture as it is in rock ‘n roll.

“That’s why I find the whole concept of the drug war to be so insane,” Torgoff exclaims. “To me, it was the epitome of insanity and denial. The idea that in 1986 we passed a law in this country—the Anti-Drug Abuse Act—which basically states that the law is now for America to be a drug-free nation.”

He lets that absurdist concept hang in the air for a moment. “I mean, there has never been a drug-free society in the history of the earth!”

A Drug-Warrior Lineage

As well as the renegade drug users who—via exploits in jazz, beat literature and vanguard poetics—acted as pied pipers for the new drug age, there were also those whose very lives were dedicated to fighting what they perceived to be a biblical-level scourge.

Depending on your point of view, the villain—or perhaps antihero—of Bop Apocalypse is a man who has cast a long shadow over American society in the years since he first came to prominence. We’re talking, of course, about Harry J. Anslinger, the man who founded what would become the DEA and kicked off the War on Drugs before it had been given that name, way back in the 1930s when he outlawed marijuana.

Although Anslinger was deposed as commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1962, his hatred for drugs and drug users poisoned subsequent administrations, right up until the election of President Barack Obama. Then, as marijuana became legal in state after state, it finally looked as though America might be moving past Anslinger into some brave new world of sensible drug policy.

Until the election of 2016, that is. What was Torgoff’s reaction to the arrival of Trump, in drug policy terms?

He sighs, “Plus ça change…  I mean, when you come right down to it, there’s very little difference between Harry Anslinger and Jeff Sessions, is there? If Sessions had his way, all of the tremendous progress that we’ve seen in recent years would be simply… wiped away.”

“People who lived through the original drug war and that previous generation of crack users and dealers are doubtlessly looking at what’s going on today in utter disbelief.”

I ask Torgoff, given the country’s current backward steps, whether or not he believes we will ever see a sane approach to drug law in the United States.

“I can tell you that I never thought we would have legalized recreational marijuana as we do now. I never thought we would see that in my lifetime. That shows that real change is possible. When I finished Can’t Find My Way Home back in ’04, I had been working on it mostly through the ‘90s…  So we’d been through the rave culture at that point, and ecstasy, and the return of meth to certain areas of the country, and it was the most obvious thing in the world to me that drugs were going nowhere. It was so embedded in our DNA by that time. And it was multi-generational.”

“And just as drugs weren’t going anywhere, it looked like the drug war wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, it had been escalating since the 1980s…”

Indeed, I nod, back then being “tough on drugs” was one of those rare ideals that seemed to unite both political parties.

“Yes! The Democrats were drug warriors, just like the Republicans,” Torgoff says with a dry chuckle. “They were on board with it, 100 percent.”

And suddenly, support for the drug war seemed to collapse. Today, over 60 percent of Americans support marijuana legalization.

“Of course you still have the old school,” Torgoff points out. “I mean, you can be in Colorado, and all you have to do is go next door to Kansas to see what I’m talking about. What you can be doing freely in Colorado, over in Kansas they’ll throw you in jail for as long as they possibly can.”

“I think that’s what’s happening—like so many things in this country, we’re seeing two Americas. Where drugs are concerned, the America that is more willing to be open-minded about drug policy has grown.”

And of course, the recent opioid overdose crisis has surely gone a long way toward changing the whole tough-on-drugs mentality in this country.

“Of course! I mean, you just look at how that has changed. What is so amazing about what we’re seeing happen today is that there are no romanticized heroin icons. The people in today’s opiate epidemic are just doing drugs. And these are people who are from the rust belt, from depressed rural areas. It’s completely unprecedented if you know anything about the story of heroin. And what is it that’s finally prompting action, shameful as it is? It’s that opiate addiction has finally become a ‘white’ thing. And that’s offended a lot of people, and rightly so.”

He elaborates: “In reality, back in the 1980’s there were just as many white people using crack cocaine as there were black people, but [black people] were the ones who were getting thrown in prison and given draconian minimum sentences. I mean, they were sent away for decades.”

“People who lived through the original drug war and that previous generation of crack users and dealers are doubtlessly looking at what’s going on today in utter disbelief. They’re seeing cops walking around with naloxone, saying, ‘Well, these are people too, and we need to save lives…’”

Martin Torgoff—a man who has chronicled several iterations of the War on Drugs and may yet be around to witness its endgame—shakes his head, speechless for a moment at the rank hypocrisy of it all.

“I mean,” he says, “Just think about all of the survivors of the drug wars… the mothers and fathers of those who lost their lives, or were sent away for decades over a gram or two of crack cocaine… Can you imagine what’s going through their minds as they are seeing all of this change happening in 2018…?“

He trails off. What does he suppose they are thinking, I ask?

He smiles sadly.  “I suppose,” he says, “they’re probably thinking something along the lines of: Where the hell were you when WE needed you?”

Drug Experiences as Fuel

Martin Torgoff’s personal journey with drugs began when he first smoked pot as a teenager (“It was November 4, 1968,” he informs me, with typical sharpshooter memory). In the ‘70s he embraced the poly-drug excesses of the post-psychedelic era, before it all came screeching to an end when he “crashed and burned on cocaine” sometime in the 1980s.

“When I came to the end of it at the age of 37, I realized that I needed to change my life. I couldn’t go on doing what I was doing,” Torgoff tells me. “It was obvious to me that I had to just… give up everything. … It was after that I went through a period of evaluating my journey through drugs. I really set out to understand it—first, of course, in terms of its impact on me.”

So his books grew directly out of those personal experiences?

“After all,” he confirms, “I had 21 years of dabbling in different substances in ways that both benefited and damaged me. On a positive note, drugs brought me into contact with different kinds of consciousness and ideas—poetry, art, and politics… There was a whole package of things associated directly with drug culture.  I was also aware that, by the time it was over, my use of drugs like cocaine, Quaaludes, and alcohol had damaged me. Luckily for me, they didn’t damage me to the same extent that they did others! But, the damage was still… significant.”

The tone of his voice suggests, though, that it wasn’t all bad. There’s a gleam in his eye when he talks about those first ever experiences with marijuana, for example. I put it to him that many people who’ve gotten to the point of quitting everything are left with a deep—almost visceral—revulsion for the drugs they once wholeheartedly embraced. He, on other hand, used these experiences as a kind of fuel.

“It was a very complicated relationship,” he replies. “There were things about the drug culture I really liked and felt were valid. There were things about it that turned out to be seriously delusory. Mostly I was aware that [drugs] had changed me. The whole odyssey of these books and the documentaries was really to see how they changed me, how they changed my generation… and then, how they changed the whole cultural landscape.”

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