Dreamland (9 page)

Though fourteen, Enrique was tall enough not to arouse suspicion behind the wheel. He drove the streets of the San Fernando Valley with his mouth full of tiny balloons, following beeps from his uncles. He learned where Canoga Park ended and West Hills began. He trolled those palm-tree-lined boulevards—Sherman Way, Roscoe, and Sepulveda—that were wider than the highways back home.

Those first weeks he remembered like a fairy tale, as if everything he had heard about America were true: money, clothes, and good food seemed as plentiful as the sunshine. At the apartment, he turned on a VCR and a porno film leaped to life. His uncles ate often at El Tapatio and Pocos, a seafood restaurant. They drank at the Majestic, a bar that Nayarit immigrants frequented; as long as Enrique was with them the waitresses served him beer. His idea of becoming a state trooper evaporated, as did any thought of school.

After a few months, the uncles installed Enrique in an apartment on De Soto Avenue and gave him the keys to two cars. He would run the business—roll the heroin into balloons, take calls, direct drivers on the street. The phone rang all day until he shut it down at eight
P.M
. As he turned fifteen, he was taking orders for five thousand dollars’ worth of heroin a day. The apartment’s closets filled with stolen 501s and VCRs and porno films that addicts exchanged for dope. Enrique no longer had to worry about his jeans fading when he washed them. There were always more. He showered with fragrant shampoo, and exchanged the village pond for the swimming pool at an uncle’s house in a neighborhood full of Americans. His clients were nurses and lawyers—one of his best clients was a wealthy lawyer—prostitutes, former soldiers who’d been to Vietnam, old junkies from the barrio, and young cholos.

One day he was at an uncle’s house and the phone rang. A caller from home. His uncle’s face clouded.

“
Problemas
,” he said, his hand over the mouthpiece.

Problemas—problems—the word seemed so nondescript. But in the ranchos of Mexico, it is a euphemism for tangled webs of murder and lawlessness. Problemas were shootings and feuds that grew from a chance word, a property dispute, the theft of a sister for marriage. Problemas kept rancheros poor and fleeing north to the United States. Some great amount of the migration to the United States was due more to problemas—escaping murder, fleeing feuds—than to simple economics and poverty. Problemas could empty a rancho in less than a generation. Sometimes a village would see the problemas die out only to be reignited by a chance meeting of old enemies on a bus or a street corner years later. Rancho dances in particular bred problemas. At dances, people drank, and sex and machismo roiled just beneath the surface. In some towns, the saying was “
Baile el viernes; cuerpo el sabado
” (“Dance Friday night, body Saturday morning”). A shooting at a dance could embitter a family against another for years. Keeping track of the bewildering history of conflicts became an essential ranchero survival skill.

Something like this had divided the family of Enrique’s mother. Enrique never knew the cause of the feud between the two sides of his mother’s family, nor why his grandparents had married if the problemas were so serious. But the feud would come and go like bad weather. The phone call that morning in Canoga Park brought news that it had come again. A mass shooting in the village. Two were dead, fifteen wounded. One side of his mother’s family was to blame; the victims were mostly from the other side.

News of the shootings mainly served to remind Enrique of why he was in Canoga Park selling drugs. Back home, drug users were the moral equivalents of pedophiles. But drug sales were his pathway out of problemas. He saw dayworkers on Sherman Way, exploited, sometimes not paid—yet that wasn’t treated as a crime. They tried to work the right way and look what happened. He wasn’t forcing anyone to buy his dope. With that thought, and the problemas he was escaping, he felt peace. And the 501s didn’t hurt either.

For seven months he worked for his uncles in Canoga Park. Finally, they packed him a suitcase and gave him two thousand dollars for all his labor and sent him home. He thought he was due more, but the rancho’s ethos of poverty reigned, even in the San Fernando Valley: They could exploit him, so they did and he couldn’t object. Heroin had not changed that. In fact, he thought his uncles remained cautious villagers in many ways. They had been in the San Fernando Valley for almost a decade. Yet they still ran their business for a few months, made some money, and shut it down, less afraid of the police than of what people back home would say.

Dozens of villagers welcomed Enrique home to his isolated rancho and the Toad, a few miles outside the town of Xalisco, Nayarit. The poor kid from the Toad was now admired as the only village boy to cross the border alone. He gave his money to his mother, keeping two hundred dollars. He bought a bottle of Cazadores tequila and the party that night was big. Older folks besieged him with questions. A few friends took him aside and asked for help finding the kind of work he was doing. He put them off, but saw that apparently word had spread more than his uncles had realized. He wanted to get back to California himself in a few months.

He was only fifteen and people were coming to
him
for favors. It was a luxurious feeling and he bathed in it. As the night mingled with tequila and took the edge off the stifling heat, the stereo played his favorite corrido, “El Numero Uno,” by Los Incomparables de Tijuana.

Enrique pulled his Beretta 9mm and howled as he held it high and fired it into the air.

The Poppy

The story of the opium poppy is almost as old as man.

Opium was likely our first drug as agricultural civilizations formed near rivers. Mesopotamians grew the poppy at the Tigris and Euphrates. The Assyrians invented the method, still widely used today, of slicing and draining the poppy’s pod of the goo containing opium. “The Sumerians, the world’s first civilization and agriculturists, used the ideograms
hul
and
gil
for the poppy, translating it as the ‘joy plant,’” wrote Martin Booth, in his classic
Opium: A History
.

The ancient Egyptians first produced opium as a drug. Thebaine, an opium derivative, is named for Thebes, the Egyptian city that was the first great center of opium-poppy production. Indians also grew the poppy and used opium. So did the Greeks. Homer and Virgil mention opium, and potions derived from it. The expanding Arab empire and later the Venetians, both inveterate traders, helped spread the drug.

Early civilizations saw opium as an antidote to the burdens of life—to sorrow and to pain—and as an effective sleep inducer. They also knew it as lethally poisonous and intensely habit-forming. But its benefits made the risks easy to overlook.

In the early 1800s, a German pharmacist’s apprentice named Friedrich Sertürner isolated the sleep-inducing element in opium and named it morphine for Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep and dreams. Morphine was more potent than simple opium and killed more pain.

War spread the morphine molecule through the nineteenth century. More than 330 wars broke out, forcing countries to learn to produce morphine. The U.S. Civil War prompted the planting of opium poppies in Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina for the first time, and bequeathed the country thousands of morphine-addicted soldiers. Two nineteenth-century wars were over the morphine molecule itself, and whether China could prevent the sale on her own soil of India-grown opium. The drug provided huge revenues essential to the British Empire and was one of their few products for which the self-sufficient Chinese showed an appetite. That it lost two of these Opium Wars to the British explains China’s infamous and widespread opium problem in 1900 where only moderate numbers of addicts existed in 1840.

In 1853, meanwhile, an Edinburgh doctor named Alexander Wood invented the hypodermic needle, a delivery system superior to both eating the pills and the then-popular anal suppositories. Needles allowed more accurate dosing. Wood and other doctors also believed needles would literally remove the patient’s appetite for the drug, which no longer had to be eaten. This proved incorrect. Wood’s wife became the first recorded overdose death from an injected opiate.

In the United States, more opium came with (newly addicted) Chinese immigrants, who smoked it in back-alley dens within Chinatowns in San Francisco and elsewhere. Opium dens were outlawed, and after Chinese immigration was made illegal, the practice of smoking opium eventually declined, too. Morphine replaced it.

Patent medicines with morphine and opium, meanwhile, were sold as miracle cures. These elixirs were branded with names evoking quaint home remedies. Opium was the active ingredient in, for example, Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, which was used to pacify children. These remedies were marketed aggressively in newspapers and popular media. Patent medicines sales exploded, rising from $3.5 million in 1859 to almost $75 million by the twentieth century.

In London in 1874, Dr. Alder Wright was attempting to find a nonaddictive form of morphine when he synthesized a drug that he called diacetylmorphine—a terrific painkiller. In 1898, a Bayer Laboratory chemist in Germany, Heinrich Dreser, reproduced Wright’s diacetylmorphine and called it heroin—for
heroisch
, German for “heroic,” the word that Bayer workers used to describe how it made them feel when Dreser tested it on them.

Heroin was first believed to be nonaddictive. Heroin pills were marketed as a remedy for coughs and respiratory ailments. With tuberculosis a public health threat, this was no small point. As junkies ever since have discovered, heroin is an effective constipator and was thus marketed as an antidiarrheal. Women used it, on doctor’s orders, for menstrual cramps and respiratory problems. Doctors didn’t have much else to prescribe for pain or disease. Thus addiction exploded—to a drug that people believed was safe because doctors said so.

This aroused U.S. public opinion, which forced the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. The law taxed and regulated opiates and coca-leaf products, while allowing doctors to use them in the practice of medicine. But it was transformed into America’s first prohibition statute when police started arresting doctors for prescribing opiates to addicts. Addiction was not yet considered a disease, so an addict technically wasn’t a medical patient.

Physicians soon stopped prescribing the drugs. People with real pain were left to endure. Addicts, meanwhile, turned to crime. “[Because the addict] is denied the medical care he urgently needs,” one medical journal reported, “he is driven to the underworld where he can get his drug . . . The most depraved criminals are often the dispensers of these habit-forming drugs.”

A government campaign demonizing “dope fiends” followed, aided by a compliant media. The addict was a deviant, a crime-prone, weak-willed moral failure. This idea stuck and informed the view of junkies for decades. The mythic figure of the heroin pusher also emerged. He supposedly lurked around schoolyards and candy stores, giving youths habit-forming dope, hoping for future customers.

With slight medical benefits compared to its high addiction risk, heroin ought to have passed into history. Instead, heroin replaced morphine on the streets. It thrived because it was tailor-made for dope traffickers. Heroin was easy to make, and cheaper than morphine. It was also more concentrated, and thus easier to hide and more profitable to dilute. The highs, and the lows, too, were quicker and more intense than those of other opiates. An addict craved heroin several times a day, and physically had to have it to function; so he was a terrific customer.

Traffickers and mafias made heroin’s career. New York established itself as the country’s heroin center in part because the drug’s early manufacturers were located there. Once heroin was made illegal, it came clandestinely through the city’s port from Europe and Asia. New York’s immigrants sold it on the street: Chinese and European Jews, among them, and much later, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, and Dominicans. The logic of heroin distribution allowed New York to remain the nation’s principal heroin hub through most of the twentieth century. While the drug came mostly from Asia, the Middle East, or Colombia, the drug was taken in at New York’s port, distributed by endlessly replenished immigrant or black gangs, and from there sent up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest.

Marijuana, like wine, has been hybridized into endless varietals. But heroin is a commodity, like sugar, and usually varies only in how much it’s been cut—that is, diluted—or how well it’s been processed and refined. Thus, to differentiate their product, dealers learned to market aggressively, and New York City is where they learned to do it first.

Italians apparently led the way. In the 1930s, “an aggressive new generation of Italian gangsters began infiltrating the drug traffic, replacing other groups, notably the Jews,” wrote historian David Courtwright in
Dark Paradise
, his history of opiate addiction in America. “Not only did the price increase, but the level of adulteration as well.”

New York’s Italians pioneered heroin pushing, giving free samples to new customers. Their weak dope made injecting it popular. Injecting heroin sent what little heroin was in the dose directly to the brain, maximizing euphoria. Injecting begot nasty public health problems—among them, later, ferocious rates of hepatitis C and HIV. (Mexican black tar added to them. Because tar is a semiprocessed, less-filtered form of heroin, the impurities that remain in the drug clogged addicts’ veins when injected. Unable to find veins, addicts shoot it into muscles. “Muscling” black tar heroin, in turn, leads to infections, rotting skin, botulism, even gangrene.)