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George Constantinou ID# 0822751

Prof. J. Bradford

LHIS-223-010: Global History of Narcotics

10/15/18

The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days

Timothy Hickman in his book “The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days” discusses the

concepts of addiction during the turn of the century, referring to many books, journals and

medical papers of the era giving us information about how addiction and addicts were viewed

from society, the general public but most importantly from the perspective of those in power.

Something that stands out from the very beginning of the book is the importance of modernity

and the technological advancements of the early 20th century, as the author mentions “relentless

mechanization and technological expansion were both consequence and a cause of the

incorporating economy, and they further complicated the assertion of human agency” (34).

Along with all the technological advancements came the medical novelties of drugs and the

habitual use of narcotics, Hickman writes “many addiction experts found in narcotics a product

of modern technology that, rather than fulfilling optimistic predictions of a world made better by

science, turned its human subjects into the slaves of human discoveries.” (35)

Hickman tackles addiction and the causes of it with three viewpoints: race, class and

gender, but behind those three are some common denominators that will make clear what

addiction is about or how the writers of the era perceived it. Most of the writers seem to agree
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that “the primary object of the addict’s confused perception lay precisely in the assertion of self-

mastery and independence” as Dr. Leslie Keeley is claiming in some of his writings. (53)

First, Hickman writes about the concept of Orientalism of the era and the way the writers

of the era tried to connect the use of opium to something alien to the US, something exotic,

usually using otherworldly imagery like Keely is doing in the next passage “the poor worn

nomad of the desert…finds in the all-potent drug, surcease of sorrow,” implying that the opium

in that sense is a way of forgetting your miserable situation serving as “the antithesis of modern

America.” (60,61) He continues by giving us some historical information about the large

immigration of Chinese people, or the “almond-eyed coryphee” as Keely refers to them, to

California and other places of the US. The author shows us that opium smoking was viewed as a

way “to surrender one’s autonomy and to become swamped in an ocean of similitude” (70)

loosing yourself of identity “through wantonness of desire” (67), letting yourself vulnerable to

the evils of desire and letting the drug be your own master. Writers of the era viewed addiction

as “slavery to the desire” (72) and as the author mentions “opium smoking was something

enjoyed by a class who were ‘slaves before they began the habit’” quoting the words of William

Rosser Cobbe. (71) The really important part of that passage is the way that race and class

connect to each other through slavery and how the concept behind slavery is the perception

weakness and inferiority by the white Americans in power. That idea is standing out in passages

as “opium smoking was thus the outward and visible sign of a hidden condition, slavery”,

“slavery remained the consequence of an inferior identity.” (71)

He later refers to the way the contemporary writers though of the cocaine problem and

how they “often viewed cocaine use as a problem somehow based in the black community

because drug experts associated black cocaine users with urban crime” (77) and how they
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believed that the black emancipation “had released what they felt was the racial essence of

African Americans: the dominance of character by (sexual) desire. The idea that racial inferiority

might partly be based on an alleged enslavement to passion” (75) and now we see the connection

to the precious quote that addicts were “slaves before they began the habit” which was a new

form of physical and psychological “slavery.” So, we are starting to see a pattern, associating

addiction to weakness of mind and human inferiority, something we can understand by the way

the writers of the era referred to the Arabs, the Chinese and the African Americans, with the

same thinking that all the other races - classes of poor marginalized Chinese workers and former

slaves – were volitional addicts for their own pleasure whereas the bourgeois white Americans

where “forced into the habit” by “the conditions of modernity” (79) implying that the only way a

white man can become and addict is through a doctor’s fault.

Hickman then writes about the drug addiction among women, and this part will come to

complete the puzzle. He writes that “there seems to have been a social investment in the idea that

women were particularly vulnerable to narcotic addiction” even though there were studies and

demographics stating the opposite. (81) The way a lot of writers warned and propagandize about

drug use was through creating the fear that “female addicts might infect the home – the citadel of

bourgeois identity” and compared the feminine fragility and masculine fortitude in order to

explain how the “temptations of modern technology threatened the self-mastery that underlay

conventional notions of middle-class individuality.” (81)

The idea was that women were considered more vulnerable to desire than men and that

also prostitutes offered desire and lust to men, tricking them into the trap of “wantonness of

desire” and introducing them to drug use, as “persuasion and seduction were the weapons of the

immoral women who corrupted this otherwise honorable young soldier.” (82) But the main
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argument they used was the weakness of mind and individuality of women as drugs would

transform the central figure of the house “into something like a fallen angel of the hearth.” (86)

Also “physicians believed that women’s weakness was not merely cultural but also biological, a

product of both physiology and environment” meaning that even their body was susceptible to

pain and discomfort making them more eager to take drugs to ease the pain, making narcotics a

temptation “even stronger for women who were biologically less able to resist them.” (87)

So, we end up again with the pattern of weakness, we see throughout the previous

passages that the contemporary writers have weakness as a common denominator for addiction.

That weakness could come either by the racial inferiority of the lazy Arabs, the corrupt Chinese,

the sexdrived African Americans that were formerly slaves and the fragile and vulnerable

women. But the way that those weaknesses affected society was purely because they threatened

the morality of the white Americans in power, trying to find new ways to suppress other people

that were starting to get more freedom. So, their perception of drug addiction was through the

lens of fear, fear of change, fear of the different and fear of losing power. It’s clear through

reading the passage that the writers “drew upon and modified older race and gender stereotypes

to find examples of people who, through viciousness or vulnerability, were unable to master the

powerful forces of desire that both animated and enveloped them” as Hickman points out. (91)

Hickman writes a sentence that shows how much the anti-drug advocates connected

addiction to the weak in power people regardless of class or race: “such an operation did nont

simply suggest that addicts were like Chinese men, African American men and women of any

race but also inevitably turned back upon itself, adding force to the stereotypes by implying that

to be Chinese or African American or female was to be like an addict.” (91)