Essay topics include opium consumption in nineteenth and twentieth century America; police officers’ involvement in heroin pushing in Harlem; the use of heroin by political authorities in African American ghettos; women heroin addicts; heroin use by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, including personal narratives by veterans and their court testimony; imperialist powers’ use of opium in China to render the population subservient; contemporary smuggling routes though southeast Asia; methadone treatment; political action in the U.S. against the conditions that create addiction.
