Junkie Mythos: The Cult of Purity and the Birth of Heroin | Th. Metzger
No drug ever promised more, or fell further. Heroin arrived in 1898 as God’s own medicine: a pure, perfected cure in which the medical profession placed its highest hopes. It ended as the emblem of defilement, disease, and death, the enslaver and despoiler of everything good. No other substance carries that mythic charge.
In an age before antibiotics, heroin was developed and prescribed as an act of mercy for patients dying the slow, strangling death of tuberculosis. Yet within a few decades both the drug and its users were utterly demonized. The user was transformed from a helpless object of pity into evil incarnate. The junkie was the bastard spawn of American xenophobia and a feverish dread of moral pollution.
In Junkie Mythos: The Cult of Purity and the Birth of Heroin, Th. Metzger traces how the junkie became a fixture of American folklore masquerading as science: the racialized outsider lurking at the edge of the national dream. The junkie is at once subhuman and superhuman — a vicious destroyer of children, a sexual predator, an agent of social decay. Born of religious mania, he remains an unholy ghost.
