Word: heroines
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...argot of the drug world, it is "paraphernalia": the necessary accouterments to merchandising heroin. The small glassine envelopes, or "bags," used to package heroin are paraphernalia. So, too, are the legal, harmless powders used to dilute the drug, usually quinine, dextrose, lactose or mannite. According to a House Select Committee on Crime investigation in New York City, peddling paraphernalia has grown into a $5,000,000-a-year business...
...Pharmacy, peddled 47 million bags over a two-year period for an estimated $ 100,000 profit. There are, of course, other users of the envelopes, such as watch repairmen and stamp collectors, but the committee concluded that most bags sold in Harlem were used to package heroin...
...good times began to go away. The theater of anger turned into the theater of cruelty. Satire declined into a kind of invective. Britain's suicide rate soared. So did crime. From 1956 to 1965, illegitimate births doubled. The money spent on gambling increased fourfold. Hard-drug usage-heroin, cocaine-multiplied ten times over. Gradually the plot of history and the quirks of society grew nastier-Suez, Profumo, the 1966 Moors murder trial. Today, Booker judges, the Great Freak-Out is over. Reality has caught up with fantasy, and the spirit of collective hangover lies upon the land...
...Edison, for example, turned away 44 addicted job seekers in 1968 and 78 last year. Companies have recently begun demanding that applicants submit to a special urine analysis; in the case of users, the test turns up traces of barbiturates, amphetamines and morphine, which the body metabolizes out of heroin. The tests have led to a burgeoning business for private laboratories; some do several hundred urinalyses a day, at $4.50 each. Even these tests are not foolproof. If a specimen shows a hint of quinine, which is often used to cut heroin, the applicant can be refused -but he could...
...then other friends of mine tell me about the Lower East Side where half the people on the street are just leaning against some boarded-up store front, expressionless, shooting heroin into their arm through a dirty needle. Or a woman yelling at her husband on the third floor of some tenement. "Jesus. I gotta seventy-dollar-a-week habit. How do you expect me to live on that...