Oral history interview with Whitehead, 1981

Biographical Note

Whitehead was born in East Harlem in 1929 and lived his entire life in New York City. His family included his father, a truck driver and furniture worker; his mother, a housewife; nine sisters; and two brothers also involved in the drug trade, one of whom died in a 1977 shooting while working as a lieutenant in the Nicky Barnes syndicate. After leaving school around the age of sixteen, he became involved in using and selling drugs through connections with jazz musicians. He used heroin or cocaine daily from the late 1940s through the early 1980s. He was arrested around thirty times from 1950 onwards, spending cumulatively around eight or nine years in incarcerated on drug, theft, and other petty charges. He fathered a son during a brief marriage in 1949 and a second in 1977. Whitehead 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

Whitehead discusses his experiences spanning over thirty years as a user of heroin and cocaine and a street hustler in New York City. The interview explores his lucrative career buying and selling drugs, running numbers, committing scams and thefts, and trading counterfeit money. He was based in Harlem and the Upper East Side. He describes his perceptions of the evolution of the New York drug trade, including the ethnic and racial groups that controlled it at different levels and the decline in quality of heroin available from the 1950s to the 1980s. The discussion explores in depth the manner and frequency of his drug use, times spent in methadone or detox programs, and his physical health, as well as the economics and daily life of drug use and sales. Other topics include: his over thirty arrests and several stretches in jail and prison; his activities as a jailhouse lawyer and plans to pursue education to become a paralegal; perceptions of other drugs; experiences of two brief drug panics; his two children and relationships with women; and the satisfactions as well as regrets from his life

Subjects

• Drug abuse--United States--History--20th century.
• Drug addicts--United States.
• Drug dealers--United States.
• Drug traffic--United States--History--20th century.
• Harlem (New York, N.Y.)
• Imprisonment--United States.
• Interviews.
• Joseph, Herman, 1931- interviewer.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• Upper East Side (New York, N.Y.)
• Whitehead--Interviews.

Access Conditions

Copyright by David Courtwright