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 Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.

Today’s opioid epidemic is just the latest chapter in the story of America’s fateful love affair with narcotics. At the turn of the 20th century the scourge was not heroin and pain pills, but opium, and much of the coverage of the crisis had a strong racial element.

“How Whites Smoke Opium in Chinatown: Haunts of ‘Hop Heads’ in the Mongolian Quarter,” were the main headlines of an un-bylined investigative article that ran in the San Francisco Call on Aug. 4, 1895.

The article notes that despite stringent laws, "there are about 3,000 'fiends' or 'hop heads' in San Francisco" patronizing over 300 “joints,” dens, rooms and lodging-houses, "where the 'habit' may be indulged with impunity."

The heart of the story is a series of visits to notorious dens, including Blind Annie’s:

There were four other white people in Annie’s place. Two were women — evil looking women, though still young. All four were smoking and Annie was fondling her cats.

Blind Annie’s room has a superficial area of perhaps 120 square feet. When the door is shut, as it must be when she has white smokers, there is not a particle of ventilation unless it is from the cracks around the door. The atmosphere was stifling with the fumes of the drug that came from the four pipes and it were scarcely safe for one unused to inhaling the smoke to remain in the room many minutes.

The room is foul and dirty. Blind Annie sits in the corner on a mat that is greasy and elevated from the floor about two feet. If she tried to stand straight in her bunk her head would bang against the upper bunk before she was half straightened out—and Annie is a small creature. On the opposite side of the room there are similar tiers of bunks. Each bunk has two square Chinese mats and on every mat is a “dope” layout—a tray, a nut-oil lamp, a small box of the brown and sticky drug, a vessel for ashes, a needle with which to cook and manipulate the stuff and the bamboo pipe.

Blind Annie’s fee is graded according to the “habit” of the smoker. For two bits a very big “habit” can be satisfied for the time being—an indulgence of from thirty to thirty-five small pills. And this is the kind of “habit” those who frequent Annie’s joint usually suffer from. It is a “big habit” in the vernacular of the “fiends.” One must have courted the vice assiduously or have been smoking many years to have cultivated such a “habit.”

“I never smoke more than twenty pills at a time,” said one of the young women who was induced to show the visitors how to smoke. “That isn’t enough to put me under the influence, but it braces me up after a hard day, and that’s all I care about.

“Oh, it would soon grow if I’d let it, but I’m not going to be a ‘fiend.’ I’ve hit the pipe these five years now and am not a ‘fiend’ yet. You don’t catch this girl getting to be a ‘hophead.’”

This appears to be a popular hallucination with the victims of the opium habit—everyone knows the other is a fiend, but thinks himself or herself only a dilettanti in the vice. But the glassy eyes and shrunken frame tell their own story. 

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