Word: heroines
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...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...
Addicts also account for much of the $2 billion worth of tools, office machinery and other goods stolen from corporations and stores each year. In New York City, which conservatively counts 50,000 heroin addicts, about 80% of the shoplifting is attributed to drug users, including some employed at the stores. Drug abuse is particularly apparent in the stockrooms of major department stores, says Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, director of New York City's Phoenix House drug rehabilitation program...
Hardened drug users in business are generally in their early 20s and usually in low-echelon jobs. The ghetto black is still the heaviest heroin user but as his need for the drug grows, he usually drops out of the labor force. The number of white workers dependent on heroin is increasing, but the whites still tend to less addictive drugs, notably barbiturates and amphetamine capsules. Most users in industry turn on with marijuana, or pot; if nothing else, it can diminish their ability...
...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...