“There isn’t a Tough Negro in the City Who doesn’t Use It”

By the time of Hopewell’s arrest in 1914, the country’s relationship with cocaine and opium had passed through a number of periods of evolution. Before the turn of the century, opiates circulated almost unhindered by regulation and doctors handed them out to middle-class women for real or imagined physical and psychological ailments. By 1900, heroin laced cough medicines and opium snuff packages blended into the pleasure and entertainment scenes of theaters, brothels, cabarets, and all sorts of amusement venues in cities like New York.Footnote ¹³ Likewise, before mainstream references connected cocaine with African Americans, late nineteenth-century physicians considered it a miracle drug and middle-class whites reveled in the merriment the stimulant afforded.Footnote ¹⁴ In his work on the subject, historian Joseph Spillane defines the period from 1885 until 1895 as the “medical era,” a time when physicians primarily regulated the supply of cocaine and debated its dangers, and patent medicine makers peddled cocaine-filled products masquerading as medicinal salves and pep-inducers to young middle-class urbanites.Footnote ¹⁵ Manufacturers produced a brigade of goods, liquors, and medicines featuring the exotic trendsetting substances, all seeking to satisfy the unconventional appetite of la belle époque.Footnote ¹⁶ Advertising independence, urbanity, and pleasure, cocaine products guaranteed mental clarity, invigoration of the senses and sexual organs, and alleviation of health issues ranging from toothaches to cancer.Footnote ¹⁷ While physicians continued to reveal the possible harmful effects of the drug, patent medicine producers and permissive pharmacists ramped up public accessibility at the turn of the century. Cocaine users easily acquired snuff boxes, coca wine, and cocaine in pure powder form from unregulated drug stores in urban centers or from street dealers, often working in conjunction with druggists, and it soon became available to poor whites and African Americans. This precipitated a change in public perception of cocaine that would evolve into racial discourse in the decades that followed.

The fact that many of these products were produced in the South hints at the origins of much of the panic about popular cocaine use.Footnote ¹⁸ Turn-of-the-century Southern newspapers and civic leaders openly linked the specter of drug addiction to Black criminality, hypersexuality, and rape, and stoked anxiety about drug-addled Black migrants spreading to the North. Cocaine, popular perception went, undermined traditional racial parameters, increased the physical prowess of Black users, and lent a dangerous mixture of unpredictability to existing issues of Black crime.Footnote ¹⁹ Considering the problem of drugs and crime in Atlanta, the Constitution paper reported on “cocaine sociables” and “clubs” that “kept a fund on hand” for a revolving stock of “dust.” Crazed and depleted by cocaine’s effects the “negro men and women” had “sunken cheeks and eyes as yellow as a person afflicted with jaundice,” the article claimed.Footnote ²⁰ In another notable full-page Atlanta Constitution article in 1905, journalist Gordon Noel Hurtel diagramed the wild vacillations between delusions of grandeur and profound depression experienced by Black cocaine users with drawings depicting four stages. In the first image a Black woman in “a dream of cocaine joy” imagined herself extravagantly dressed while in the second she experienced withdrawal and sat dazed and rumpled on the floor in clothing associated with domestic labor. In the next drawing a Black man smashed the storefront of a drugstore seeking more cocaine; and in the final stages of desperation, a woman on her knees begged for help from a police officer.Footnote ²¹ Eugenicists and pseudoscientists reinforced emerging thought about Black susceptibility to narcotics with claims about underlying corporeal weaknesses, primal violent instincts, and childlike impulses that prioritized pleasure. With tales of crazed, murderous, and unstoppable “fiends” preceding them, Black migrants experienced heightened scrutiny whether they used cocaine or not, and so did Black native New Yorkers.Footnote ²²

In fusing post-Reconstruction objectives of controlling Black bodies with early twentieth-century anti-narcotic imagery, Southern press releases contained instructions for northerners grappling with large numbers of Black newcomers. New York newspapers and periodicals drew upon the Southern panic in order to determine the state and local response to cocaine. Replicating the bombast found in Southern dailies in his articles in the Times, physician E.H. Williams sought to convince New York City readers that extreme stories of madness and impenetrability were in fact real, and his rhetoric impacted New York City’s discussions about Black migrants and criminality.Footnote ²³ Reporting on Black crime, the city’s press outlets began to similarly exaggerate the behavior and depravity of Black dealers and users.Footnote ²⁴ Although white New Yorkers also used cocaine in higher numbers than African Americans, city newspapers invariably depicted Black cocaine users as unreachably embroiled in a life of violence, vice, and crime, and in need of imprisonment and psychiatric evaluation. A 1905 article in the Evening Times declared cocaine had “captured the Tenderloin,” New York City’s most notorious vice district, and was sold in many drug stores in Harlem where it would make “man and woman a slave.”Footnote ²⁵ This popularity preceded gory stories of violence and unusual behavior that struck the same chords of concern for white New Yorkers already vibrating in Southern press releases. One newspaper reported on the murder of a white sailor during a botched drug exchange. In an apparent attempt to steal his money, three Black assailants shot the sailor twice in the chest and once in the neck, it claimed.Footnote ²⁶ Other reports blamed unseen Black “fiends” for heinous crimes and murders. The Tribune explained the death of a white cigar maker as the result of a “negro” who was “crazed by cocaine.” “The insane violence … shown by the wounds was not the work of a normal man,” the police inspector speculated. “[A]nd the burglary was poorly done,” he continued, “for who would have taken a watch worth $2?”Footnote ²⁷

Likewise taking a cue from Southern press and reformers, Northern media outlets and writers helped inculcate the idea that Black migrants imported the practice of sniffing cocaine from their home states, and that they would spread the habit to unsuspecting whites. New York publications like the 1908 pamphlet entitled Prohibition Makes ‘Drug Fiends’ distributed by the United States Brewers’ Association alerted readers to the “demoralizing effect” which “the negro succumbs to quicker … than a white man” and warned that Black users rarely recovered.Footnote ²⁸ As it took hold among Black Southerners first, it then began to “spread steadily among the whites, and is causing much apprehension” the pamphlet advised.Footnote ²⁹ Confirming the dissemination of cocaine North as Blacks migrated, one Washington Post writer hoped the “curse of the negro race in all of the Southern cities” would be halted. “The evil reached Washington from the South, but owing to the strict laws of the District has thus far been held within bounds.” Yet, the article implied the popularity of cocaine among Black migrants promised continued importation.Footnote ³⁰

The presupposition that Blacks were responsible for white addiction shaped a number of lurid news stories in New York, such as one instance where a group of white teenagers alleged a Black cocaine dealer taught them “the use of cocaine” by giving them free samples “until they acquired a habit.”Footnote ³¹ Using the same logic when interviewed by the New-York Tribune, former chief of the city’s Department of Health, Bayard C. Fuller, attributed the arrival of the “‘coke’ habit” in New York to “negroes from Havana” brought to the city by a prominent shipping company hoping to break a strike. Black Cubans, Fuller argued, “introduced it into the negro districts … and from there it has spread to the whites. There isn’t a tough negro in the city who doesn’t use it, and they are the ones who distribute it now,” he confirmed.Footnote ³² Although press and police noticed whites also used and sold cocaine, the popular narrative of Black responsibility for its prevalence reduced white culpability and hinged the “drug problem” on the presence and predilections of Blacks. “The Bowery is a seething hell,” Pastor James B. Curry conceded during an interview with the New-York Tribune about cocaine use in his parish. “[A]nd its use is very general among the negroes, who seem to have been the originators of its practice.” Footnote ³³ While commentators realized Blacks had not invented cocaine, many believed they had popularized its usage because of their unique weakness to addiction.

Already concerned with prostitution, alcoholism, and a variety of other social issues, progressives folded cocaine into the list of modern “evils” in need of eradication, and focused their attention on Black cocaine users as contaminants of otherwise law-abiding whites, and as accelerants of existing problems relating to racial plurality. As such, it became the basis of public conversations about the segregation of leisure and ongoing campaigns against white slavery. Cocaine, many argued, made white women susceptible to sexual impropriety, and simultaneously exaggerated the sexual nature of Black men.Footnote ³⁴ And like alcohol, it had the capacity to lower inhibitions and spur violence. In her publication on the “slavery” of prostitution in New York City, Secretary of the New York Probation and Protective Association Maude Miner used the story of white sex worker Rose Schafer as a cautionary tale that linked cocaine and interracial sex. In the past Schafer had taken care of herself and dressed well but everything changed once she used cocaine. She was reportedly “crazy when the dope is in her,” one of Schafer’s acquaintances told Miner, and “[t]hey say she is living now with a colored feller.” For observers like Miner, cocaine added a new layer of danger to establishments frequented by Black men since white women could be found “singing and dancing in the most indecent manner with colored men,” she wrote. In one place Miner investigated, Black men allegedly introduced white women to cocaine and other drugs for the purpose of coercing them into the sex trade. “Some habitués dispensed cocaine, morphine, and opium … and gave [it] to young girls for the first time,” she lamented.Footnote ³⁵ Investigating white and Black sex workers in tenement houses, cocaine alarmist George Kneeland witnessed women using drugs and customers purchasing dope freely. The transmission of drugs, sex, and alcohol Kneeland noticed circulated in brothels and saloons, as he expected, and also in cigar stores, pool halls, cafes and “cake restaurant[s]” where pimps gathered. In the minds of many observers, cocaine therefore served as a strong element of attraction for women entering the sex trade and had a part in keeping them from leaving it, a tremendously troublesome development considering New York’s new levels of racial plurality.Footnote ³⁶

Alongside reformers like Miner and Kneeland, reform organizations directed their drive against drug use in interracial environments. Formed in 1905 to prevent violations of New York City’s alcohol ordinances, the Committee of Fourteen (COF) came to consider cocaine a more acute menace than whiskey. COF investigations of bars, brothels, and rathskellers throughout the city yielded real and imagined instances of illegal drug and alcohol use and made direct connections between cocaine and the environment created by interracial sex and leisure. In one undercover investigation, inspector A.M. White witnessed notable contact between whites and Blacks at Percy Brown’s Café in the Tenderloin where “[w]hite girls [go] to meet colored men.” White was certain to link the “cocaine and opium fiends” that frequented Percy Brown’s with the “pimps who strive to meet working girls” in nightclubs. The same was reported of the New Belmont Club in Harlem where “cocaine fiends, streetwalkers, sissies and pimps” gathered nightly.Footnote ³⁷ In another investigation Committee member John M. Binzen discovered white women and Black men crushing heroin pills and snorting them in a house of prostitution. “This place is regarded as one of the worst in the city,” Binzen wrote. “Young white girls come in here and mingle with these niggers and must stand for anything and everything.”Footnote ³⁸ For investigators like White and Binzen, intimate interracial contact in recreational spaces implied a loosening of moral sensibilities and decorum likely produced by mind-altering substances. If reformers considered alcohol a significant factor in miscegenation, they regarded drugs as amplifiers of those proclivities. Cocaine seemed to be the lifeblood of a raucous Black and white erotic nightlife that pervaded the Tenderloin, and Committee investigators hoped its eradication would make interracial sex less likely to take place.

Racially biased models for handling drug cases emerge from reports of cocaine arrests in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In newspaper stories, white cocaine users were very often described as casualties in a war against a plague, while Blacks were depicted as threatening. After a raid on a flat in Manhattan’s “Cocaine Row,” police and a compassionate magistrate administered morphine to white cocaine dealers suffering from withdrawal in order to “prevent them from going insane.”Footnote ³⁹ In another case, detectives found a “cocaine dispensary” and arrested two white men and a woman but were “touched by the wretched appearances of the three prisoners” and “decided to give them a chance of being cured of the drug habit.” They were then transferred to the city’s workhouse along with specific instructions for their rehabilitation, including the provision of gradually decreasing doses of cocaine and morphine. “The shock to the nervous system,” the magistrate worried, “would be too great should they be deprived all at once of the drug.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In contrast, wild accounts of violence frequently attended tabloid stories of Black arrest or addiction. In one sting operation on the home of suspected Black cocaine dealer Minnie Waterman, police officers endured severe injuries when Waterman tossed a pan of “sizzling hot fat” at them and partially burned their faces.Footnote ⁴¹ In another raid of the home of Gregory Pearson, journalists alleged he attempted to toss an officer from a window before other officers beat him into submission.Footnote ⁴² Even more sensational, police accused Walter Fairweather of shooting at random in a saloon while “crazed from cocaine” and killing three patrons, including one of the men in his own party.Footnote ⁴³ Each of these stories assumed the brazenness of such violence resulted from a cocaine-induced intensification of Black latent criminal proclivities. Whether real or false, these stories all compose a typical sketch of fashionable expectations of white and Black drug users. Newspapers seemed to seek opportunities to indulge their readers with moments of Black cocaine mania, but frequently emphasized the medical aspects of white drug arrests.

First Attempts at Regulating Drug Use

In consideration of the lax standards of drug producers and patent medicine makers, reports about the negative effects of cocaine, and the perceived scourge of Black cocaine addicts in New York City, reformers sought legislation that would regulate the problem. Progressive fear of corporate disregard for public welfare, alarm at the breakdown of individual morality, and concern about poor environments, as well as their impacts on women, families, and urban safety, were all funneled into the vessel of swelling African American populations.Footnote ⁴⁴ The seriousness of the threats of cocaine fed a growing conviction that narcotic regulation would require complete prohibition and criminalization.Footnote ⁴⁵ Reformer Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote a series of eleven scathing editorials about the irresponsible distribution of cocaine and opium through patent medicines in Collier between 1905 and 1907, in which he condemned the “fraud” of “advertising bunco men” who sold medical remedies filled with narcotics and alcohol, and he pushed for regulations placed on the dispensaries.Footnote ⁴⁶ Triggered by Adams’s articles and the efforts of other muckraking journalists and reformers, the national Pure Food and Drug Act passed in 1906, a measure requiring the disclosure of all ingredients in commercial medicines or potions.Footnote ⁴⁷ Prior to national legislative attempts at drug prohibition a number of Southern states already implemented their own laws to control imagined hordes of criminals. Those embargoes would eventually influence federal laws, but in the interim, New York tried its hand at regulation. Harnessing a heightened public awareness of Black cocaine use around the turn of the century, reformers employed rhetoric meant to push legislative prohibition forward and advocate for de facto segregation. The campaign against cocaine became a lynchpin that consolidated unease about the growth of the Black population in the city.Footnote ⁴⁸

In the rapidly changing atmosphere around recreational drug use, New York City reformers, clergymen, and physicians spoke out against its distribution and clamored to draw boundaries along lines of race, class, and gender across the urban landscape. Pastor James Curry of the Lower East Side’s St. James Roman Catholic Church became a fervent critic of cocaine use after witnessing its effect on several of his congregants, and he pushed for some of the state’s first widescale narcotic legislation in 1907. Claiming the use of “coke” was more “widely spread among Negroes than among whites,” Curry lobbied to keep it out of Black hands by pushing laws to outlaw lax distribution from pharmacies. Passed the same year, the Smith Act made the “indiscriminate sale of cocaine” without a prescription a felony.Footnote ⁴⁹ Curry immediately utilized the law later in the year by testifying against a corrupt drug store owner.Footnote ⁵⁰ By some estimations, the new law only precipitated an increase in distribution by “peddlers” and “poor, unmoral creatures of the underworld” in areas like the Tenderloin neighborhood.Footnote ⁵¹ Although lawmakers reduced the supply of cocaine in New York City with legislation, its popularity remained unchanged on the street. Cocaine and opium dealers dispensed their wares in hotels, restaurants, pool rooms, movie theaters, saloons, and street corners all over the city, with concentrations in the Lower East Side, Broadway, Harlem, and Little Italy.Footnote ⁵² Large sections of the Tenderloin became known for open-air cocaine sales. Between Twenty-Eighth and Thirty-Third Streets on Seventh Avenue frequent and seemingly unchecked cocaine distribution gave the area the nickname “Poison Row.” Some Black migrant men sold cocaine for profits that far exceeded the menial pay they received for wage labor. One report by the American Pharmaceutical Association claimed street sellers made “enormous profit” off of a four-dollar ounce of cocaine. “Divided into pink pill-boxes and blue bottles, the ounce is sold … [a]dulterated heavily with acetanilid … to ‘sniffers’ for from $40 to $50 … Thus profits ranging from 500 to 1,500 percent,” could be made, and even more from “half-crazed fiends on the verge of the ‘cocaine leaps,’” the report concluded.Footnote ⁵³

The Smith Act was intended to disrupt the entire commerce by cutting off the supply at the head, but cocaine and opium, it seemed, stirred the city up into a mélange of profit-oriented violence and narcotic insanity. Realizing the Smith Act had a limited capacity to impact the delirium, reformers upped the ante over the next decade with evermore restrictive laws and leveraged national regulations for their cause. The 1909 federal Smoking Opium Exclusion Act banned the importation of opium for the purposes of recreational use, a move which precipitously increased the cost on the illegal market. One longtime opium smoker in New York City noted an increase in the price for “a can of hop” from $4 to nearly $50 in the same year when the law was enacted.Footnote ⁵⁴ In New York State, 1911 saw an injunction against the sale of hypodermic needles without prescription, a mandate meant to reduce intravenous use of cocaine and opium. Two years later in 1913, the Walker Cocaine Law restricted the amount of supply drug stores could accumulate at one time in order to decrease the chances of illegal distribution.Footnote ⁵⁵ Responding to requests by reformers for broader law enforcement, Governor Martin Henry Glynn signed the Boylan Bill in 1914 to outlaw cocaine possession and codify the prescription process in a way that allowed packages to be traced to their distributors.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Boylan law also provided measures for dealing with cocaine users by declaring them “dangerous to the public” and committing them to sanitariums until declared cured. By the end of 1914 nearly 2,000 drug users had been arrested for possession, of which 48 percent received prison sentences versus 2 percent who received hospital treatment.Footnote ⁵⁷ Still, in the same year one likely inflated study found that almost all Black prisoners used cocaine, in comparison to only half of white prisoners.Footnote ⁵⁸

To many observers it was clear local laws were ineffective since some street dealers bought cocaine from criminal doctors, forged prescriptions, or imported their stock from New Jersey or other states, and New York reformers joined a national push for federal laws.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, the viability of a federal law to combat moral concerns like drug use only came gradually in the new century as questions about constitutionality began to fade. Following the 1906 Pure Food Act, which governed all commercial products for consumption, congressional leverage for making such laws and growing support from some in the prescription drug trade created the substructure for a national prohibition of narcotics.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1913 New York Representative Francis B. Harrison introduced three bills meant to regulate cocaine and opium use and manufacturing. The national Harrison Act would “provide for the registration of … and impose a special tax upon all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives or preparations.” The new measure, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, systematized the acquisition of narcotics by physicians and druggists and made unauthorized possession of drugs evidence of guilt. The act also made possession of narcotics punishable by a $2,000 fine and/or up to five years in prison. Although it was a national piece of legislature, the Harrison Act had an immediate effect on New York City, noticeably reducing the city’s supply of cocaine. According to the Times, drugs were so sparse that frequent users were “in a pitiful state of craving and suffering.” Left without access, some drug users turned themselves in to police and hospitals, the report conjectured.Footnote ⁶¹

The Harrison Act and other New York State laws lacked effectiveness also because of the complex nature of debates about how to handle drug addiction. Was it a crime, or was it a medical issue? New York State and the country would vacillate back and forth between these two ways of thinking for much of the post-World War I period. In the years following the passage of the Harrison Act as drug use became more widely studied, physicians more frequently accepted the idea addiction was a medical issue. Armed with this new understanding, New York City officials opted to treat drug users rather than demonize them, when they deemed it appropriate. In 1919 the New York State Narcotic Drug Commission asked all state health officers and city mayors to establish local drug treatment clinics and inaugurated a health department conference on the subject to be held in New York City as well as cities like Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse.Footnote ⁶² But such organizational largess toward users was not widespread and did not last long. In one example, the Worth Street Clinic, which opened in New York City in 1919, distributed heroin and cocaine to about 1,000 patients per day at its peak, but shuttered its doors in less than a year.Footnote ⁶³ Other treatment centers like that on Worth Street faded away likely as result of a lack of public support, but also because of two national Supreme Court decisions that outlawed addiction maintenance.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1919 the Supreme Court decision in Webb et al. v. United States ruled that opiates could only be prescribed for non-maintenance purposes. In response, a number of clinics across the country opened to provide a legal alternative to substances like opium.Footnote ⁶⁵ The sort of political will to treat drug users represented by Worth Street also faded as a result of some of the developments of the 1920s. New York City’s Bureau of Social Hygiene implemented a Committee on Drug Addictions in 1919 seeking to apply scientific analysis to the problem of drug use and placed long-term treatment on the list of options. However, over the next decade the bureau increasingly conceived of drug addiction in punitive rather than medical ways.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Volstead Act and the start of alcohol prohibition reinforced an existing popular connection between substance use and other forms of criminality such as prostitution and illegal gambling. Although debated, public and professional opinion in New York began to shift decidedly toward criminalizing cocaine and opium consumption since they both clearly bolstered criminal networks, particularly in the new world of temperance. For many New York City progressives, efforts against prostitution meant efforts against an array of urban vices and social problems, including drug use.

As this history makes clear, the perception that cocaine and opium negatively impacted citizens and produced criminality did not emerge solely from the fervidly racist imaginations of reform ideologues and melodramatic news writers. For all races, drug addiction and the urban vices that accompanied use and distribution of drugs often did lead to criminal behaviors that plagued communities and haunted users and their families. Looking back on the effect of a decade of alcohol prohibition and the official ending of medical drug treatment in the city, Committee on Drug Addictions members Charles Terry and Mildred Pellens published The Opium Problem in 1928. The authors presented research that argued federal and state prohibition, like the Harrison Act, and the discontinuation of drug maintenance programs intensified problems of addiction and necessitated the creation or expansion of dangerous underground economies. Since drug addiction was a medical problem, they asserted, the end of maintenance, and the inability of users to seek help from physicians without being arrested forced reliance upon a subculture, and placed people who needed help into the hands of criminals.Footnote ⁶⁷ Critics of punitive drug prohibition like Pellens and Terry understood addicts as normal people who became victims of a disease, but they could not account for those seemingly hopelessly lodged in a criminal Black market. However, as we have seen, this perspective did not prevail largely because of the difficulty of convincing public, private, and political interests to commiserate with criminals.Footnote ⁶⁸ The political changes of the 1920s, including prohibition and the conservative leanings of the decade, made it less likely the perspectives of reformers like Terry and Pellens would ultimately stick, and the continuously changing racial demographics of the city also played a part.

The Realities of Drug Use

Cocaine and opium were big business in New York by the time national legislators got around to addressing them in 1914. In a full-page exposé on drug sales in the city in 1912, the New-York Tribune described a vibrant and pervasive trade with participants from all races. “Street sellers” peddled “decks” of cocaine on major thoroughfares of Manhattan’s Tenderloin neighborhood “without an apparent thought of police.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Monopoly-holding dealers kept active gangs of gunmen at their “beck and call to drive out … any other ‘coke pedler’ [sic] who has the temerity to invade” their territory. Centered in Chinatown, the city’s opium traffic radiated outward to Columbus Circle, Second Avenue south of 14th Street, and the Tenderloin where 50 cent “shells” circulated out of various venues, including cigar stores and candy shops.Footnote ⁷⁰ Cocaine in particular, according to the Tribune, flowed with impunity in the section of the Tenderloin between 26th Street and 41st Street on Seventh and Eighth Avenues.Footnote ⁷¹ Sellers ranged widely from Jewish gangsters operating on the Lower East Side, in Harlem, and in Brooklyn, to newspaper boys who distributed cocaine and “dope” to sex workers and clients on the street.Footnote ⁷² Chinatown’s storefronts often hid lounges and brothels where opium could be secured easily and used openly, and entire blocks in Midtown were given over to its sale, according to author Stephen Crane who investigated the subject.Footnote ⁷³ Cocaine users were similarly diverse with actors and actresses, military men and women, and newspaper writers making up a notable percentage of buyers and venders.Footnote ⁷⁴

Consider the case of Italian drug store operator Emanuele Sabbatini who was the first pharmacist arrested and convicted under the Smith Act in 1908 for allegedly supplying cocaine to a dealer who sold to “girls all over Chinatown.” Entrapped by the police in a sting operation similar to the arrest of Lottie Hopewell, Sabbatini claimed he was set up by the dealer who was attempting to save himself from prison.Footnote ⁷⁵ Regardless, the druggist was sent to prison and fined for his part in making neighborhood women “crazy from the use of cocaine.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In another case around the same time, white drug dealer Petey Egan received a five-month sentence and a $100 fine for “selling the drug to negroes” in the Tenderloin.Footnote ⁷⁷ Egan, who lived in a “negro quarter” and was caught distributing to Black customers, claimed to be a detective himself who had “to mingle in with these cocaine fiends, and oftentimes had to act like one to gain his purpose” one officer testified in court. “I did make it as hot as I could for people around there,” who dispensed cocaine, Egan later said.Footnote ⁷⁸ Ultimately, he also accused police and one witness of framing him for narcotic possession and using the drug together in front of him on the way to the police station.Footnote ⁷⁹ The revelation of Egan’s wealthy background as a migrant from a posh neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio, a former college student, and a business owner likely swayed the jury in his trial to one side. Yet, the power of police testimony against him led to his conviction.Footnote ⁸⁰ Whether guilty or not, he likely understood that stereotypes of Black cocaine users might help his situation. In this case, they failed to absolve him of guilt, but his arrest and conviction, and that of Sabbatini, are two examples that make clear how white distributors also faced the law once ordinances like the Smith Act were put into place. Blacks were not the only targets of the war against cocaine in New York City, but popular press implied they were a primary driving force behind the presence of narcotics.

As historian Caroline Jean Acker has argued, what drug use means to the user is often dependent upon the environment it takes place in.Footnote ⁸¹ For African American men and women, cocaine and opium bolstered a sense of freedom in public and commercial spaces by literally increasing the potential for pleasure and possibly augmenting their consumption power when sold or traded for other goods. Both drugs also may have been tranquilizing substances that alleviated the psychological and physical burdens they carried around New York City. Drugs additionally composed a major draw for middle-class whites who ventured into Harlem and the Tenderloin looking for thrills and sex, thereby changing the terms of Black spaces of leisure. By the time of prohibition, one six-block section of Fifth Avenue in Harlem earned the moniker “Coke village” and whites descended upon the nightlife scene, as one writer put it, for sex and music “washed down by poisonous liquors and more poisonous drugs.”Footnote ⁸² Chinese opium dens and African American Black-and-Tan bars often shared the same blocks and customers and formed an important part of a sensual nightlife rife with opportunities for interracial sex and non-normative erotic experiences. Like alcohol, cocaine and opium lubricated this scene and added a level of cache that was irresistible to most visitors and some residents. Alongside restaurants, theaters, cabarets, and pool halls, they provided an entry point into a world of illicit thrills, particularly for bands of middle-class white tourists seeking New York’s notorious pleasures.Footnote ⁸³ New York’s raft of laws passed to reduce or prevent drug use beginning in 1907 and the deemphasis on drug treatment centers combined with the varied enforcement procedures of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. The result was an environment where African Americans experienced heightened scrutiny around substances and leisure, but fewer of the benefits related to treatment and rehabilitation.

Like white opiate users, Blacks who experimented with morphine, opium pills, or heroin frequently found that it soothed untreated psychological and physical issues in addition to lubricating social life.Footnote ⁸⁴ Unfortunately, many also discovered how treacherous a drug addiction could be. For many African Americans, drug use left them struggling with addiction, dislodged from their community, and in the hands of state supervision: a condition they frequently lamented openly. A number of intake records for women arrested and sent to Bedford Hills Reformatory make this history clear. For Philadelphia native Issie Bailey, narcotics interlaced a lifestyle that sent her to prison multiple times for prostitution and parole violations. Beginning her use of heroin and cocaine in 1914 through spending time with “bad company,” she admitted to an internment in a Philadelphia hospital in 1921, and to taking between 20 and 30 grams of heroin by hypodermic needle daily by her arrest in 1924. Paroled in March of 1925 she was returned to Bedford Hills only weeks later when her sister notified the parole board she was “doing the same as she was before … staying out all hours and she will not work.”Footnote ⁸⁵ With information from her sister, officers located Bailey and discovered her in the act of using heroin.Footnote ⁸⁶ After another release later in the year, she wrote parole personnel proclaiming her intent to “do the right thing” but regretted the limitations placed on her by the stigma of her addiction and arrest record. “[I] wouldn’t care for everybody both white and Black to point a finger at me and say here come a girl just came out of jail,” she explained while requesting that parole investigators not visit her job.Footnote ⁸⁷ After yet another parole violation police apprehended Bailey with opium in 1926 when an acquaintance notified the reformatory that she was “living with a man” in Harlem and “taking drugs again.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Her cycle of arrest and parole violation only ended when the reformatory approved her marriage to a longtime sweetheart in 1927 and released her to his care in the spring of 1928.

Others who struggled with addiction like Bailey sought help from medical institutions like Bellevue Hospital but found it only placed them into the crosshairs of legal officials. Concerned about his wife Penelope’s health and her extensive use of morphine, Douglas Welch brought her to a doctor, but was unaware she would be handed over to police. “I was very much disappointed,” Welch later wrote prison personnel, “because [the doctor] left me under the impression that she was being sent to a hospital and would be treated.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Instead, the hospital delivered Penelope to the Bedford Hills women’s reformatory for a ninety-day sentence. Described by intake agents as an “ordinary looking light-colored negress” who was “inclined to be impatient and insubordinate,” Penelope began her prison term in the late summer of 1924. By that time, she had injected morphine for fifteen years after being prescribed the drug by a physician, and she told her interviewer she was “disgusted” with the habit and wanted to be cured.Footnote ⁹⁰ However, her husband became worried about the impact of her sentence on her health and happiness after visiting the institution and he campaigned for her release. “She is very thin and … is a sick woman and I want her here where I can see her,” he pressured. “I am satisfied she will not have to go back to that drug again.”Footnote ⁹¹

Penelope Welch and Issie Bailey eventually received discharge into the care of family members and certification of recovery, but others were not so fortunate.Footnote ⁹² Bridget Barber also received a prison sentence when she confessed to an opium addiction as a patient at Bellevue in 1922. Suffering from long-term drug use as Welch did, Barber had already been certified free from addiction in 1921, but admitted to taking heroin once more to treat a toothache and was sent back to Bedford.Footnote ⁹³ After using cocaine and morphine for a number of years, Rebecca Lee faced charges under the Harrison Act multiple times and nearly eleven years behind bars by 1919 when she was arrested for prostitution.Footnote ⁹⁴ After discharge in the fall of 1920 she was once again imprisoned when various family members complained to authorities of her conduct. With a history of arrests, escapes from corrective care, and “mania for suicide” and “fancies,” observers considered Lee to be violating the terms of her conditional release with erratic behaviors.Footnote ⁹⁵ In one letter, her sister Daisy implored parole personnel “in the [name] of God please come and get my sister as quick as possible” because she had recently “made a perfect disgrace of me and my house.” Under the influence of “that dreadful drug,” Daisy claimed, her sister “challenged me for a fight and used me like any dog [then] fell out in the street unconscious.”Footnote ⁹⁶ By the spring of 1921 Lee’s failure to convince parole personnel at Bedford of her rehabilitation garnered her a longer sentence at Auburn Prison for women.Footnote ⁹⁷

Although New Yorkers of all races partook of the city’s drug culture, African Americans like Bailey, Welch, Barber, and Lee were particularly vulnerable in ways that illustrate the unique conundrums of drug use for Blacks. Often dealing with financial straits, they might find themselves entangled with underground economies out of necessity, because of their proximity to distribution outlets, or while in search of pleasure or treatment for health issues. Strains on household income caused by employment discrimination and joblessness had the capacity to encourage one to become a distributor of cocaine or opium, but at considerable risk. As historian LaShawn Harris’s research makes clear, early twentieth-century African Americans, and Black women in particular, were uncommonly exposed to the deployment of criminal informants, both Black and white. Race made them targets of emerging narcotic regulation and blatant popular biases about Black drug use, and criminality in general, and it made them less likely to receive medical attention for their addictions than their white counterparts. As such, the cases of these women illustrate both the meaning of drug use as a therapeutic agent and as a unique hazard for Black New Yorkers. In Lottie Hopewell’s case it is likely she sold cocaine out of her apartment, but her predicament hints at the treatment many Blacks faced when stigmatized as bad actors. Criminal informants like Albert Benson often used their ability to give information to police in order to soften the blow of their own misgivings, and their information and testimony had the capacity to entrap guilty parties or brand innocent targets with a mark of culpability. Men and women might be removed from their families and jobs and face false arrest and imprisonment. The deception and betrayal of informant arrest might also reinforce the feeling of threat and vulnerability that Blacks experienced in public spaces. For those like Hopewell who may depend upon income from underground economies, arrest and the confiscation of valuable capital could also have devastating impacts. Whether guilty or not, such busts placed the subjects into the purview of the criminal justice system and hindered legitimate or makeshift ways of providing for themselves and their families.Footnote ⁹⁸

Perhaps also pressured, to some extent, by the demands of his habit and the steady encroachment of cocaine regulation, Albert Benson found himself on the receiving end of police sympathy in 1914. Inversely, facing progressive fervor to control cocaine and lopsided racialized scrutiny, Blacks like Lottie Hopewell often stood little chance of a fair hearing during drug cases. In his court statement, Benson told of how he bought “hundreds of packages” of “stuff” from the defendant and her husband over the few months before her arrest.Footnote ⁹⁹ Prosecutors also prodded her about her previous arrests implying she was a sex worker, and alleged Hopewell used her daughter as a drug courier.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Whether these allegations were true or not, Hopewell objected to the methods of the police in entrapping her and denied the charges, at one point calling her arrest a “frame-up.” Claiming she had never seen cocaine in her life, she accused Benson and the arresting officers of planting drugs on her when they entered her apartment.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Hopewell described a chaotic scene where her daughter wailed loudly, her dog barked menacingly at the intruders, and one officer assaulted her with the butt of his gun during the raid. He “took [his] revolver and … thrust it in my face and … split my lip up” she explained. “[H]ere is the scar right there, and it bled. My little girl was hollering and crying and I was trying to caress her and the blood from my lip bled all over her apron.”Footnote ¹⁰² As a witness for her mother, Hopewell’s daughter, Helen, corroborated her counterclaims maintaining Benson scattered “little white papers on the floor and the table” before the police entered the room, and that one of the officers “busted my mother in the mouth,” with a gun.Footnote ¹⁰³ On the other hand, the prosecutor raised questions about the veracity of Hopewell’s story when cross-examining her child. Hopewell testified she and her daughter shared the apartment with another woman who was away at the time, and that she worked at a nearby laundry but had the day off when she was arrested.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, Helen revealed her mother never left the house for work, and that sometimes “she would send me to get a headache powder” from the drug store.

With the full story inconclusive by the end of the trial, it seems likely Hopewell supported herself and her daughter by distributing cocaine, but despite her probable guilt, the campaign to trap her, and the treatment she received during her arrest and trial divulge the cumulative effect of the association of drug prohibition with African Americans. Southern post-Reconstruction hyperbole designed to vindicate harsh measures against Blacks traveled north of the Mason-Dixon line alongside Black migrants, and had a part in constructing the narratives, imperatives, and anxieties that impelled regulation in the North.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Although it is certain some Blacks used cocaine around the turn of the century, it is uncertain whether or not they consumed it more frequently than whites. A 1912 Annual Report by the Board of Health determined 56 percent of the cocaine users in Jacksonville, Florida, were Black. However, Black men and women comprised only 200 of the city’s 538 drug users. These numbers may reflect Jacksonville’s lower Black population, but they also indicate that proportionately, African Americans chose cocaine more frequently than whites did. This changed dramatically a year later. In 1913, the proportion of Black cocaine users declined by 16 percent as the number of white users skyrocketed from 43 percent to 65 percent. The report showed only 179 confirmed Black cocaine users to 445 whites. Another study done of “acknowledged drug addicts” by the Health Commissioner of New York City showed a similar imbalance in white and Black drug users. Out of 2,723 users, 2,338 of them were white and only 385 were African American. Although this study did not differentiate between drug types, it indicates white drug use continued to rise after 1900.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Despite the likelihood whites and Blacks used cocaine and opium in proportional numbers, perception won out and the objectives of Southern lawmakers became those of their Northern counterparts. Treating cocaine as a Black-induced pandemic, it only made sense to extricate white casualties and quarantine the problem.

Despite the Harrison Act and the raft of New York State and local ordinances, cocaine remained popular into the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the decade to follow, alcohol prohibition under the 1919 Volstead Act in some ways replicated previous nationwide laws against cocaine and opium and had a part in utilizing the apparatuses of substance restriction used against narcotics. Prohibition proponents had been using much of the same racial and nativist rhetoric for decades and triumphed in instituting that bombast nationally in the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ That decade saw the emergence of what Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine coined “punitive prohibition,” the sort of severe retributive justice popularly associated with drug law enforcement in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ That the reality of that system of prohibition remained, in many ways, swayed by racial discourse, popular stereotypes, and political decrees to control real or imagined crime waves is not surprising. National drug laws and prohibition both stemmed from the same deeply racial anxieties about American life. When New York reformers forged city and state charters against cocaine and opium in the flames of Jim Crow racial and eugenic rhapsody, they were simply responding to the anxious fears of a society beyond their control. However, in the process, they not only borrowed their stances from Southern attitudes about race and drugs, but they furthermore encouraged national legislation based upon unequal enforcement and the bias of racial conventions. Thus, we can see New York City’s emerging drug prohibition in the early twentieth century as materializing out of the same stimuli as white slavery and anti-prostitution movements, and simultaneously helping to lodge those imperatives into the national agenda. Like in those crusades, sentiments circulated that emphasized Black actors far beyond reality and trended toward saving whites from their clutches, and the efforts of progressive white New Yorkers had a part in establishing prejudices as part and parcel of American drug legislation.