Columbia Center for Oral History Portal > Oral history interview with Emanon, 1981Biographical NoteEmanon was born an only child of African American descent on March 4, 1923 in northwest Washington, DC. He was raised by his mother and father in his grandmother's duplex near Howard University. He stopped attending formal schooling in the tenth grade, but later received his high school equivalency while incarcerated. He served around six months in the United States Army at the age of twenty before he was medically discharged for a knee injury. He started using heroin at age twenty-two and later switched to Dilaudid when the heroin in Washington, DC experienced a sharp decline in quality and rise in price in the early 1970s. He worked as a clerk in the Civil Division of the Justice Department and as a community organizer at the Washington Urban League, among other jobs. Eventually, he resorted to selling drugs and burglary to finance his heroin usage. He went to jail three times, one instance of which was for burglary during the "April Riots" or the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination riots in 1968. By the early 1960s, Emanon wanted to stop using heroin and tried a variety of methods: independently using Dolophine, and at programs at D.C. General Hospital, the Veterans Administration's program, St. Elizabeth's Hospital, and Daytop. Emanon was interviewed for the project that led to the book Addicts Who Survived. The name is likely a pseudonym for the project
Scope and ContentsIn this interview, Emanon discusses his life from adolescence through adulthood, with a special focus on his drug usage. He remarks on how feelings of fear and inadequacy kept him in the cycle of heroin addiction, and out of opportunities to advance in the professional world. He discusses his navigation of the racial prejudice he experienced at his job as an apprentice machinist at the Naval gun factory in Washington, DC and in the Army. He also comments on his job as a clerk in the Civil Division of the Justice Department, a job which he held for eighteen years while using heroin twice daily. He explains how he was able to conceal his addiction from his employer as well as his wife and three children. He delves into his many attempts, both independent and through formal rehabilitation programs, to break his heroin addiction using methadone. Programs included: DC General Hospital, a Veterans Administration hospital, and St. Elizabeth's Hospital. At the time of the interview, Emanon was fifity-eight years old, and sixteen months into a rehabilitation program at Daytop. He compares the therapeutic community model of Daytop to the maintenance model of methadone clinics he previously visited
SubjectsAccess ConditionsCopyright by David Courtwright
| |
