Heroin: From the Civil War to the 70s, and Beyond

"Ah, when the heroin is in my blood, and that blood is in my head, then thank God that I'm as good as dead." —"Heroin," the Velvet Underground

America's long-running drug war has its roots in a real armed conflict, the Civil War. It was after that crisis that addiction to an opiate called morphine, which had been used as a painkiller and anesthetic for wounded soldiers, became a noticeable social problem in the country as its use moved from the battlefield into civilian society. Opium, the poppy product from which both morphine and heroin are derived, was the first drug that the U.S. legislated against, in an 1890 act of Congress that imposed taxes on opiates.

It was also the drug at the heart of the problem that President Nixon cited in 1969, when he laid out a 10-point plan for reducing illegal-drug use—an effort for which New York was the proving ground. "New York City alone has records of some 40,000 heroin addicts, and the number rises between 7,000 and 9,000 a year," Nixon wrote in his July 14, 1969, message to Congress. "These official statistics are only the tip of an iceberg whose dimensions we can only surmise." Two years later, Nixon also cited New York's drug problem when he pledged that "America's public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive." In other words, a war.

Local officials echoed the president. By 1978, New York City special prosecutor Sterling Johnson announced that Harlem was the "drug-trafficking center of the nation," where dealers openly sold "to the blacks who walked into the streets and the whites who never got out of their cars." And that had been the case for nearly a decade.

In the early 1970s, Phillip Panzarella worked as a patrol officer in Harlem's 30th Precinct and later in the NYPD narcotics units that were assigned uptown. A Washington Heights native who retired as a lieutenant after a legendary 40-year career in the NYPD, Panzarella was known to other cops as "Sundance" after the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He says people came from five states to buy heroin in Harlem. "There were a lot of good, hardworking people who wanted drugs off the streets, but it was just a losing battle. There was so much of it," says Panzarella, chewing on his trademark cigar butt one day in May as he sprayed the lawn of his suburban Long Island home to get rid of a horde of bugs. "It just drained the lifeblood out of Harlem, where there was no money to be made except off drugs."

At the time, flashy-dressing and high-living superdealers like Earl Foddrell, Frank Lucas (of "American Gangster" fame) and, most infamously, Nicky Barnes ruled the roost and became street idols. "Barnes is, police say, one of the biggest heroin dealers in the country," a 1977 New York Times Magazine article titled "Mister Untouchable" stated. "In his home base, Harlem, the center of the New York City drug traffic, he is regarded as perhaps the biggest. But he is more than that. To the police, to the drug community and to an extent in the uptown drug-related subculture, Nicky Barnes is a current legend ... his name alone inspires awe because of a spit-in-your-eye, flamboyant lifestyle that is perceived by the street people as Barnes' way of thumbing his nose at officialdom."

Heroin from southwestern Asia, mainly Pakistan and Afghanistan, often routed through Marseilles, France, was what most of the approximately 200,000 New York addicts were shooting in the early 1970s. John Gilbride, special agent in charge of the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, says that back then the heroin was only about 3 percent pure, which was very low compared with the 50 to 70 percent purity levels that the drug went up to over the ensuing three decades.