The Junkies

A startling statistic last week made a front-page sensation out of a subject usually discussed only in the improbable columns of the Sunday supplements: narcotics addiction. New York City's Superintendent of Schools William Jansen, questioned during a state narcotics investigation, testified that one out of every 200 high-school students in the city are users of habit-forming drugs.

New York's traffic in drugs--$100 million a year in street sales--was the nation's worst. But eight other cities showed alarming increases in dope consumption: Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, San Francisco, Washington and Baltimore.

The heartbreaking side of it was the innocence and misdirected sense of adventure with which most boys & girls began: the New York hearing made it obvious that many started in the same spirit in which they might have tried a high dive, swallowed a goldfish or taken up a fad for wearing pink bobby socks. In many a school it was a badge of daring and popularity. One student wrote in a theme: "I know that there is about four ways you can take it. Smoking, liquid, injecting and sniffing a powder. I know some friends that use it so I thought I would try it. It was O.K."

As testimony continued--part of it played scratchily from long, tape-recorded interviews with addicts--spectators got an astonishing picture of a strange new city: New York as it appears to a "junkie." It is a city where "pushers" peddle their wares almost as casually as sidewalk balloon vendors, where children sniff heroin even in classrooms, where an innocent-looking drugstore or cafeteria may be an addicts' hangout.

A Brooklyn student testified that a boy dope peddler in his high school boasted of making from $300 to $400 a day. "I used to be the bookie in the school," said the witness. "He lost enough money to me so he should be telling the truth."

Heroin Hunting. The most startling description of the addict's New York came from a talented 25-year-old, who had made up to $245 a week as a musician, composer and arranger, but had turned to prostitution for extra money because her "habit" demanded 50 to 60 capsules of heroin a day. In her endless search for drugs, almost every corner of the city had become a hunting ground; she named scores of drugstores, bars, restaurants, hotels, schools and nightclubs from The Bronx to Coney Island where she had purchased a "fix."

The famed China Doll nightclub off Broadway was a good spot: "Two or three peddlers hang around there . . . on a quiet basis." So was Hanson's drugstore at 51st Street and Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan; so was the Garden Cafeteria across from Madison Square Garden. "You just walk in ... get a cup of coffee . . . put your money down, pick up the drugs and leave . . ." In a B-G Coffee Shop ". . . it's more of a high-class type of addict ... Cocaine buyers hang around there . . ."

Then there was Charlie's Hotel in Harlem : ". . . One of the clerks in there sells drugs, and the hotel is just for prostitution . . . It's protected by the police. One particular patrolman [named] Smitty hangs around there and the girls and the pimps pay him off . . ." And there were Lenox Avenue drugstores in Harlem, where "you go in and ask the man for needles . . . and he'll fish them out from under the counter, no questions asked." Other drugstores, the witness added, sold the "works" (a complete hypodermic syringe). "They have the pacifier and the elastic all fixed up."

She described a Bronx school where child dope peddlers would "pass it through the fence" during recess. There was the boardwalk at Coney Island, where ". . . if you just walk down . . . you will see drug peddlers who come up and say, 'Want anything? Do you use horse? Would you like to try some cocaine?'

And they don't even know you." There was a place called Reilly's: "One of these little clip joints . . . The people there know what's happening ... I say, 'Man, I'm sick,' and they say, 'Well, he'll be in in a little while.'"

For Sale Sign. As other addicts testified, the long list of places grew: Birdland, Soldier Meyer's, the Apollo Theater, the Brighton Beach subway station. Said one witness of a place called the Old China: "The junkies take off in the ladies' room . . . You have to walk up the stairs and you have a lot of junkies taking off in the bathrooms up there."

New York police, reacting to the headlines, began throwing drug "pushers" into jail in bunches--including a Broadway peddler who carried heroin in a hollow cane, and another called "Tiger Boy" because of his habit of wearing a shirt decorated with a tiger when he had goods for sale. But the furtive business had a long head start.

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