"Heroin was only one drug among many that worried Progressive Era anti-vice reformers, but by the mid-twentieth century, heroin addiction came to symbolize irredeemable deviance. Creating the American Junkie examines how psychiatrists and psychologists produccd a construction of opiate addicts as deviants with inherently flawed personalities who were caught in the grip of a dependency from which few would eacape.

Their portrayal of the tough urban addict helped bolster the federal government's policy of drug prohibition and created a social context that made the life of the American heroin addict - or junkie - more, not less, precarious in the wake of Progressive Era reforms."--BOOK JACKET.