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Oral history interview with Jack, 1980

Creator: Jack
Project: Addicts Who Survived oral history collection.
(see all project interviews)
Phys. Desc. :Transcript: 122 pages Sound recording: 3 reels
Location: Columbia Center for Oral History
Full CLIO record >>

Biographical Note

Jack was born an only child on September 12, 1909 in Jersey City, New Jersey. His father was an Irish, second generation American, and his mother was a German, first generation American. His parents separated when he was six years old, his mother remarried a German man when Jack was ten years old, and the three of them moved to Hamburg, Germany in 1921. Jack finished school through seventh grade in the United States, and stopped attending when his family moved to Hamburg. He first began using heroin in Hamburg in 1924 with a group of his friends. He returned to the United States alone in October of 1926 at seventeen years old, and began living in New York City and working at Commercial Cable Company. In 1928, he served four months in the Tombs City Prison for possession of heroin. In the early 1930s he began selling heroin. In 1933 he was arrested, and served fourteen months in the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, when heroin was scarce in New York City, Jack used paregoric, Dilaudid, and morphine. He also stopped selling heroin at this time. From 1946 to 1952, Jack was incarcerated for robbery in Sing Sing correctional facility. Jack went to the Morris J. Bernstein Institute around eighteen times between 1959 and 1964 to detox from heroin. He joined a methadone program in 1969 when he was sixty years old. Jack was interviewed for the project that led to the book Addicts Who Survived. The name is likely a pseudonym for the project

Scope and Contents

In this interview, Jack discusses his life in Hamburg, Germany, and New York City, with respect to his drug use and dealing. He characterizes his clientele in the early 1930s as mostly white, of German, Irish, or Italian ethnicity, and second-generation Americans. He describes a period of gradual transition taking place from roughly 1928 to 1945 during which control of the drug commerce in NYC changed hands from Jewish groups to Italian groups. He suggets that the catalyst of this transition was the murder of Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein in 1928. He also discusses the relative scarcity of heroin during World War II, and the ways he compensated, including using paregoric, dilaudid, and morphine. He describes and compares the various doctors he acquired Dilaudid and morphine from. He also describes how he stopped selling heroin during World War II because he lost many of his connections. He comments on the difference between methadone and heroin, as well as the difference between heroin and opium, and the type and class of people using each drug. Jack also delves into his ten year experience in the methadone program, and explains how it has changed over time from when it first opened in 1965

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Copyright by David Courtwright

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