| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Caroline Jean Acker. Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. Pp. 276. $41.95.
Between deviance and disease lies the history of modern drug addiction, according to Caroline Jean Acker, whose book sheds new light on the convenient convergence of addiction research, drug policy, and the institutional management of incarcerated addicts from the Progressive era through the 1960s. At the heart of Acker's book is the stigmatized figure of the junkie. Her contention is that this deviant, powerless against physiological and psychological drug dependence and a menace to people and property, was the creation of anti-vice reformers, doctors, bureaucrats, and scientists.	1
Acker emphasizes, as did David Courtwright's Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (1982) more than twenty years ago, the demographic underpinnings of the modern drug problem. What we believe about addiction has followed very largely from who we believe is addicted. Before the early twentieth century, all kinds of substances, including cocaine and morphine, were routinely consumed by ordinary Americans. Drug dependence was consequently perceived as an inadvertent, respectable, and often female phenomenon more likely to be caused by incompetent doctors or ineffective governments than by individuals bent on self-destruction. With Progressive efforts to regulate vice, the addict profile changed. Newly associated with masculinity, criminality, and urban poverty, drug users were no longer innocent. Accidental addicts could be redeemed. Junkies could not.	. . .

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