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Quinine, Strychnine & Heroin, an oral history

Tchort

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Joined
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Lately I've been getting really interested in the earliest origins of the Heroin (or 'junkie') subculture as we know it today in the US. Whats most interesting is how information spreads among the Heroin/illicit opioid addict population: it is oral history, or oral story telling, similar to how religious or cultural traditions were passed down from generation to generation and tribe to tribe before the written word. It is well known among Federal researchers and non-profits that Heroin addicts congregate into groups, like small tribes. They use the same stuff from the same few dealers or single dealer, they get high together, borrow money from eachother, run scams/hustle together, etc. Stories are passed when one addict from one group runs into other addicts from other groups, which is constantly happening.

Rumors about drugs or different activities spread this way, and pretty soon most addicts are familiar with a certain rumor thats been picked up through the junkie grapevine. For example, the myths about Methadone being a prime example. Since the earliest MMT programs in the late 60s, diffusion of Methadone myths like Methadone gets stored in your spine and/or bones, etc

One of the earliest of these stories to diffuse is about Quinine, and Strychnine.

Addicts today often regard Quinine and Strychnine as nothing more than cuts to stretch profit for the higher up drug dealers. Documents released by most drug enforcement organizations, government and non-profit, share this view, and lump using Quinine and Strychnine to cut Heroin in with brown sugar, Mannitol, Lactose, and other non-active substances. Because we are 70 years removed from the origin of cutting Heroin with Quinine and Strychnine, the stories have been forgotten by the subculture.

I want to go over some more of the original stories regarding these two substances.

One such story regarding Quinine and Strychnine is that they are added to Heroin over other cuts because they are both characteristically bitter; like Heroin.

Powder is normally cut with milk sugar or quinine. The idea of "tasting" heroin to determine its purity comes from the days when it was cut with milk sugar. Heroin is bitter is taste. As a result of this, the more bitter the sample, the purer it is; the sweeter it is, less pure. This is one of the reasons for the introduction of quinine as an adulterant: it is bitter in taste, so a sample will be bitter regardless of how much it is cut.

http://www.heroinhelper.com/user/misc/cut.shtml

While this is a commonly passed on story, it seems to be an afterthought entirely- a coincidence, as the original reasons for Strychnine and Quinine being added to Heroin seem to have very specific origins.

Quinine was introduced as an adulterant of heroin sometime after 1939, when an epidemic of malaria spread by contaminated injection needles hit New York City addicts... Some addicts discovered that the quinine contributed to the sensation known as a "rush" immediately after injection. Heroin traffickers also discovered that the bitter taste of the quinine makes it impossible for addicts to gauge the concentration of heroin in the bag by tasting the mixture. For these and possibly other reasons, quinine has remained a standard adulterant of New York City heroin ever since.

http://www.doctordeluca.com/Library/L&ID/L&ID-12-ODmystery.htm

An important aspect of this (IV) use was the
indiscriminate sharing of unsterilized syringes for
intravenous injection of drugs. As a result, infections
spread easily among users. Fatalities were
often due to malaria, bacterial endocarditis, septic
thrombophlebitis and viral hepatitis. Interestingly,
quinine was used as a diluent in heroin during the
1930s. Addicts and those in the heroin trade
quickly realized that quinine was a cure for and
prophylaxis against malaria. Quinine as a diluent
solved the problem of transmitting malaria among
addicts sharing paraphernalia for injecting drugs.

http://www.drugpolicy.org/docUploads/meth340.pdf

The origin of using Quinine specifically as an additive cut in illicit, black market Heroin seems to be very easy to pinpoint: the 1930s outbreak of Malaria among Heroin addicts in the epicenter of Heroin activity in the US: New York City. After it had begun to be added, word of mouth spread that when taken by IV injection, Heroin combined with Quinine provided a better rush (Quinine is a central nervous system stimulant in small to moderate doses, as is the Procaine, Lidocaine and other 'Caine's found in Heroin today along with Quinine- so think of these chemicals as providing a minor speedball like rush to the Heroin rush), plus dealers found that Quinine's bitter taste masked the sugar cuts of the day, stopping users from being able to taste their product to determine purity.

The origin of Strychnine has a much more colorful history of oral stories about its origins.

Take for example the famous novel Junkie, by William Burroughs:

Hot Shot . . . Poison, usually Strychnine, passed to an addict as junk. The peddler sometimes slips a hot shot to an addict because the addict is giving information to the law.

He mentions this idea a couple times in the book. It seems that some believe that Strychnine, being bitter like Quinine and Heroin, is only good for killing off an addict who steals, informs to the cops, etc.

Another theory of the origin of Strychnine in Heroin:

One suggestion as far as heroin is concerned is the current belief that adulterants such as strychnine and quinine originated from the Chinese heroin pills of the 1920's and that their continued use is due to the characteristic flavor they impart to the smoke. Heroin of S.E. Asian origin enjoys this dubious distinction.

http://balder.prohosting.com/~adhpage/arc_hi/heroin_varieties.txt

Focusing on a different method of use (Chasing vs IV), again this is a spin off of the belief that both Strychnine and Quinine are useful because of their bitterness (or taste). While China was the very first source of illicit Heroin in the way we know it today (i.e. a country grows poppies, harvests Opium, refines Opium, extracts Morphine, makes Heroin and ships it to the US) following the 1924 Heroin Act (as prior to 1924 and after the Harrison Act of 1914, the demand for Heroin was supplied with diverted medical Heroin from the legal prescription market, similar to how the Oxycodone addiction community uses and acquires OxyContin today).

This may very well be the origin of Strychnine in illicit Heroin, as Strychnine was a commonly used medication of the early 20th century. I cannot confirm if Strychnine/Heroin combination pills exist, but, due to the CNS stimulant nature of Strychnine, like Quinine, plus its bitterness, if such pills were crushed and vaporized/Chased, or injected, it is certainly plausible black market Heroin would contain Strychnine at the behest of the cooks because the addict community of the time and place, commonly abused Heroin/Strychnine products.

This phenomenon has happened in the case of Diconal. When Diconal fell out of favor because of widespread abuse (as did Heroin 50 years earlier), users continued to try and replicate the experience of Diconal (Dipapanone & Cyclizine) with Methadone and Cyclizine and Heroin and Cyclizine.

This proves that if another ingredient, when taken with an opioid is sufficiently pleasurable, addicts will try to continue using this ingredient even if the original products are no longer available, despite the availibility of other opioids.

And make no mistake, Quinine and Strychnine are both widely used in illicit Heroin to this day (especially Quinine):

“Tres pesos” and “benita”...
New York, NY: According to the ethnographic
source, “A user in Brooklyn stated
that the heroin was being mixed with
‘Tres Pesos’ (meaning ‘three steps’),
which is a rat poison shipped from Santo
Domingo. (They call it three steps
because after the mice inhale it they take
three steps and die.) The user said the
reaction is intense, the rush is quicker,
and they feel like they’re going to die.”
Baltimore, MD: The ethnographic source
reports that “‘benita,’ a type of heroin
cut with quinine, which has been around
for a while, is less available than before.”

http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/Pulse Check Trends in Drug Abuse, Nov 2001.pdf

For reasons outlined above, Procaine and Lidocaine have become just as prominent as Quinine and Strychnine once were, for the same reasons. This shift happened around the Vietnam war:

In a second case during the Vietnam war the price of quinine which had been the
principal cut in heroin rose in price from $6 an ounce to $36 dollars an ounce
as supplies were being earmarked for Nam driving the price up. Apparently
major wholesalers were not getting the response they wanted from their clients
when they started cutting with manitol so they got so chemists to mix up a
batch of cut that included dibucaine for a rush and heptobarbital to moderate
the toxicity of IV dibucaine. The cost factor would be of particular
significance to wholesalers who would require 100 pound loads of cut.

http://balder.prohosting.com/adhpage/arc_hi/heroin_p_dope.txt

Following Vietnam, the 'Caine class of chemicals (Procaine, Lidocaine, Benzocaine, Cinchocaine, Tetracaine, etc) have become common cuts in Heroin intended for IV injection due to the effect on the rush.

I hope someone finds this as interesting as I do.
 
Last edited:
“‘benita,’ a type of heroin
cut with quinine, which has been around
for a while, is less available than before.”

Actually I think they meant manita not benita? Manita or manite has been used for years as a cut and is/was a popular baby laxitive. The famous 70/20/10 cut was 70% manite 20% dope and 10% quinine. That was the Blue Magic cut back in the day.
 
“‘benita,’ a type of heroin
cut with quinine, which has been around
for a while, is less available than before.”

Actually I think they meant manita not benita? Manita or manite has been used for years as a cut and is/was a popular baby laxitive. The famous 70/20/10 cut was 70% manite 20% dope and 10% quinine. That was the Blue Magic cut back in the day.

Benita is a slang term for parts of Baltimore according to the article, I didn't copy/paste that portion.

Quinine is still in a lot of Baltimore Heroin, though Procaine and/or Lidocaine has been more predominant it seems in scramble caps (whereas Washington D.C. scramble bags is Quinine heavy with little or no Procaine/Lidocaine).

Something I would like to add to this is more info on the medicinal properties of Strychnine and how widespread its use was in the 19th/early 20th centuries. Plus some more specific info on the needle-spread addict malaria outbreak of the '30s in NYC. Quinine was certainly a brilliant cutting agent for its physical properties, prophylactic/curative properties, and its physiological properties on the rush and high of opioids. +1 for organized crime.
 
Someone told me that "Benita" was the brand name of a cut commonly used, and purchased from bodega's. I forget which cut, but I'm pretty sure it was one of the sugars. Obviously it's nothing definite, just junkie talk. I think Rachamim actually told me that when I asked him what it referred to.
 
Someone told me that "Benita" was the brand name of a cut commonly used, and purchased from bodega's. I forget which cut, but I'm pretty sure it was one of the sugars. Obviously it's nothing definite, just junkie talk. I think Rachamim actually told me that when I asked him what it referred to.

I think it's just a slightly anglasized word for "Bonita" which mean beautiful in Spanish. Manita is defo a cut as I explained above.
 
Someone told me that "Benita" was the brand name of a cut commonly used, and purchased from bodega's. I forget which cut, but I'm pretty sure it was one of the sugars. Obviously it's nothing definite, just junkie talk. I think Rachamim actually told me that when I asked him what it referred to.

perfect example in Jay Z - I know

"Bonita applebaum, I gotta put chu on, If I didnt , when we cuttin, the feelin would be too strong"

if yall dont know, bonita applebaum is a song from a tribe called quest, so when hova mentions bonita , the applebaum shit dont mean nothing its just for the rhyme but the part that count is that he add that lil bonita thing in there, it is a clue that IMO only people in the dope game will have a understanding of wat the significance of that is. I would bet that if u put that lyric in front of someone ignorant of the dope game they will have no idea wat that means.

ANywas, there has been some quinine cut bags goin around brick city new jerz lately, to add to the topic. Good post tchort. thanks.
 
Ha, good catch lacey. Thought you didn't like Jay though? ;)

shit was goin' right and only one better
when I got my Italian connect, hittin' me with pure Heroin
moved to 116th, started seein' real dinero then
empire buildin', the shit was takin' flight
had my bitches cuttin' up like 10 Ki's a night
mixin' lactose, Bonita, and Quenii[sic]
I was the first Black nigga with mafia ties
I guess the guy writing the lyrics didn't know what quinine is, or how its spelled. Lyrics are from Shyne - The Life. Song's about Frank Lucas and Nicky Barnes.
 
love hate relationship, but when it comes to diesel rap, I gotta love it! How many times did i boot up listenin to that track playin in the background last summer........

Ah, Shyne prolly learned how to spell better when he was locked up as puffys fall boy those past few yrs....Or, more than likely is that the dumbass typing the lyrics aint kno how to spell quinine. either way dont matter.....I like this thread, hope it keep goin.
 
Some more related information on Strychnine:

An alkaloid drug obtained from the seeds of Strychnos nux-vomica. In high doses, strychnine causes severe muscular spasms which can be fatal if respiratory muscles are involved. In low doses it can act as a stimulant, boosting athletic performance. A related chemical was used by the Aztecs to enable them to complete their amazing runs which lasted up to 3 days. In the nineteenth century and the early part of this century, disreputable trainers and coaches sometimes spiked the drinks of their charges with small amounts of strychnine to give them an extra boost during very demanding competitions, such as bare-knuckle fights. In the St. Louis Olympic Games of 1904, the marathon runner, Thomas Hicks, was given strychnine mixed with brandy, in order to inject a bit more pace into his last few kilometres of running.

. . .

It is used in small doses by veterinarians as a stimulant.

. . .

Strychnine is a potent stimulant of the spinal cord; it also increases the secretion of gastric juices and heightens sensory awareness.

http://www.answers.com/topic/strychnine

Given the time frame of the emergence of what we know now as the underground Heroin subculture, Strychnine was at the peak of being used in modern medicine.

I didn't know how potent a CNS stimulant it is, or that it induces higher perceived sensory perception. It makes sense that it was used as a performance enhancing drug-

and why it would be beneficial to add to a shot of Heroin (injecting most any stimulant with an opioid proves beneficial; though some stimulants seem to add a much greater kick to the rush, which is often more valuable and desireable than the enduring high).
 
WOW... that was amazing to read.

About a paragraph in I was thinking... "this would make a great subject for a documentary!"

I'm partially assuming that most people posting here have probably seen or at least heard about the HBO drama series The Wire.. but if not you should watch it asap.

This subject (cutting w/strychnine and hot shots) informs one of the saddest subplots/episodes of the entire series, and there is a lot of discussion throughout the 5 seasons about the intricacies of sourcing, manufacturing, distributing, and marketing H in Baltimore.
 
Tchort: We have done this topic so many times over the years.

The whole strychnine thing comes out of Shanghai and the Red Pills produced in the Tsientsien Rx plants. These pills were heroin but designed for smoking since it was at a point when opium was still the major substance of choice.

Both quinine and strychnine were added as flavor aids. That is all, not as a poientiator and not even as a dilutent, good old lactose or simply corn starch served those purposes.

Jews were the first ethnicity to involve themselves in large scale smuggling in the first years of CDS Prohibition, and they never adulterated their heroin. They began by sourcing Tsientsien and other Shanghai bulk powder, but heroin was never used intravenously in those days. There would have been no point in potentiating with any substance, let alone one to potentiate "rush" since that only takes place with IV usage.

The myth of quinine having been used to potentiate the "rush" is nonsense. It is believed, and umpteenth papers have explored it, that IV usage was merely conincidental in the early days, related to erroneous IM or SC injections. Most addicts truly believed that an IV injection would prove fatal.

So...Getting bulk powder out of eatern China they naturally were made aware of the pills...In the 20s Italian organised crime was subservient to Jewish organised crime in the US. By the late 20s organisations were operating in tandem and by the turn of 1930 Italians began involving themselves on the bottom rungs of distribution.

It was at this time that people began adulerating heroin. The usual
adulterant/dilutent being lactose because of its absolutely inert nature, accessibility and its expensiveness. Yet, heroin in its pure state has very minimal taste, and when adulterated with any amount of lactose it is practically tasteless, aside from the sweetness of lactose, which of course is merely milk sugar.

Heroin is slightly bitter, but with the lactose you could not even make out that slight after taste and so the distributors began searching for a better method. Along came those who were familiar with hom the Red Pills were manufactured, and so they happened upon strychnine and quinine, quickly leaving strychnine alone for obvious reasons.

Today the only time you will find strychnine in heroin is if you are one of the very few people who ever sees #3 heroin, an almost extinct form. It remained in use in #3 because #3 is expressly made for smoking and is adulterated at POM (point of manufacture) so that it wil uniformly have a certain compositions.

Quine and lactose became the de riguer in NYC heroin and remained so until the mid 1990s. Today you will rarely see any quinine in the US, and never strychnine.

For people of my generation or older The quinine and lactose combination can get you somewhat excited all by itself, Pavlonian Response being what it is...that is how unifomrly you could found the 80:20 mix of Lactose: Quinine mixture...
 
This is a really great thread.

If anyone is going to make claims of fact about early heroin trade please substantiate the claims with some sort of reliable information.

To state that an ethnic/religious group never did this or that is pretty extreme and flimsy in the truth department.

I don't want this thread to turn into a bitching match between two camps who have different opinions. State the difference of opinions with a minimal amount of bickering and it will all be alright.

/end trans
 
Euphoric: I made the claim because it is a fact. Furthermore, I am Jewish and I have no problem with stating the truth, even if it might be construed by others (as in "denigrating Jews," etc.).

Jews are the ethnic group that Italian OC patterened itself after (not in terms of organisational structure, that came from Salvatore Maranzano who was obsessed with Caeser and patterened the structure along Roman military lines.

The American heroin trade was highly centralised until the mid 1960s. Until that time 2 ethnicities controlled more than 90% of all US heroin on the wholesale level. There were minor operators doing their own thing but NYC, the epicenter of the US trade was sewn up.

As for "documenting," over the years I and many others have done so ad naseum. As a rule I do not source because this is not a pis*ing contest but hopefully a learning experience.

When you hand somebody information they generally will not retain it. A simple analogy is a gift of cash. If you are handed 50 Dollars on your birthday, it will not seem as precious 50 Dollars you earned from a day working at a minimum wage job, yes?

If a person researches this or any other subject they will retain it a whole lot longer, plus gain more information than whatever I could possibly offer.

Phrozen: Great memory! "Bonita" was a brandname of lactose, which used to be sold, along with mannitol as an infant laxative in NYC bodegas.

It means, as some have noted, "Pretty" in Spanish. "Beautiful" would be "Hermosa."
 
Tchort: We have done this topic so many times over the years.

The whole strychnine thing comes out of Shanghai and the Red Pills produced in the Tsientsien Rx plants. These pills were heroin but designed for smoking since it was at a point when opium was still the major substance of choice.

Both quinine and strychnine were added as flavor aids. That is all, not as a poientiator and not even as a dilutent, good old lactose or simply corn starch served those purposes.

A given, and the interesting thing about this story is the oral history and folklore of the Heroin subculture itself-whether myth or fact. The original diluents for black market Heroin were various sugars and simply added to bulk up the powder.

Jews were the first ethnicity to involve themselves in large scale smuggling in the first years of CDS Prohibition, and they never adulterated their heroin. They began by sourcing Tsientsien and other Shanghai bulk powder, but heroin was never used intravenously in those days. There would have been no point in potentiating with any substance, let alone one to potentiate "rush" since that only takes place with IV usage.

The days you are describing are mainly 1914-1924: the period inbetween the Harrison Narcotics & Tax Act and the Heroin Act. Jewish gangsters began by sourcing and distributing diverted pharmaceutical supplies of Diacetylmorphine, then moved to the first international illicit drug manufacturing and distribution scheme via China.

Yep, Heroin was mostly used via intra-muscular and subcutaneous injections and in doses much, much higher than those used today (200mg-500mg per injection). IV administration was seen as dangerous and unnecessary.

The myth of quinine having been used to potentiate the "rush" is nonsense. It is believed, and umpteenth papers have explored it, that IV usage was merely conincidental in the early days, related to erroneous IM or SC injections. Most addicts truly believed that an IV injection would prove fatal.

You are correct up until you get to the point on the timeline when Heroin became completely banned in the United States (Heroin Act of 1924). Despite the origins of the Strychnine and Quinine being added to Opium and Heroin during the legal days, and the trends of use during the period of legality- the period after the Heroin Act was the birth of the Heroin scene as we know it today.

Intravenous injection and to a much lesser extent insufflation became the routes of administration most often employed due to the drop in purity and the exponentially higher price. I don't believe it can be argued that the CNS stimulation of Quinine and Strychnine don't alter and/or enhance the rush of IV Diacetylmorphine.

So...Getting bulk powder out of eatern China they naturally were made aware of the pills...In the 20s Italian organised crime was subservient to Jewish organised crime in the US. By the late 20s organisations were operating in tandem and by the turn of 1930 Italians began involving themselves on the bottom rungs of distribution.

Yes, but the turning point was the Heroin Act. After the introduction of the Heroin Act, Jewish organized crime syndicates gradually handed over the entire narcotics racket to the Sicilians.

It was at this time that people began adulerating heroin. The usual
adulterant/dilutent being lactose because of its absolutely inert nature, accessibility and its expensiveness. Yet, heroin in its pure state has very minimal taste, and when adulterated with any amount of lactose it is practically tasteless, aside from the sweetness of lactose, which of course is merely milk sugar.

Heroin is slightly bitter, but with the lactose you could not even make out that slight after taste and so the distributors began searching for a better method. Along came those who were familiar with hom the Red Pills were manufactured, and so they happened upon strychnine and quinine, quickly leaving strychnine alone for obvious reasons.

This is where the myths and lore of the Heroin subculture really come in, during this period of time. The widespread use of Quinine as a diluent to illicitly manufactured Heroin in place of or combined with sugar seems to have began around the Malaria outbreak among addicts in NYC. Around this time is when it was found that intravenous injection of Quinine (when combined with low purity Diacetylmorphine) increases or enhances the subjective rush. Since this point, Quinine has been held in high esteem by addicts.

Strychnine seems to have been abandoned by the black market Heroin syndicates at the same time it was abandoned by the entire medical community for safer and newer drugs. The timeline fits perfectly.

Today the only time you will find strychnine in heroin is if you are one of the very few people who ever sees #3 heroin, an almost extinct form. It remained in use in #3 because #3 is expressly made for smoking and is adulterated at POM (point of manufacture) so that it wil uniformly have a certain compositions.

Quine and lactose became the de riguer in NYC heroin and remained so until the mid 1990s. Today you will rarely see any quinine in the US, and never strychnine.

For people of my generation or older The quinine and lactose combination can get you somewhat excited all by itself, Pavlonian Response being what it is...that is how unifomrly you could found the 80:20 mix of Lactose: Quinine mixture...

I disagree that Quinine is rare. It still pops up very often in reports of confiscated Heroin and coroners reports of overdose deaths.

However, like I put in the original post, the Vietnam War was the turning point for Quinine. Surge in price and lack of availibility led to the introduction of the 'Caine's as bulking agents that provide an enhanced or increased IV rush due to CNS stimulation- while Procaine and Lidocaine (and to a lesser extent Tetracaine, Benzocaine, etc) have eclipsed Quinine, it is still definitely around the US.
 
Heroin is bitter is taste. As a result of this, the more bitter the sample, the purer it is; the sweeter it is, less pure. This is one of the reasons for the introduction of quinine as an adulterant: it is bitter in taste, so a sample will be bitter regardless of how much it is cut.

i have no idea why i always hear this and read this i've done pure stuff many times and it never tasted bitter at all... in fact it had a weak but discernibly sweet taste, it was nice. i'd say "yeah maybe it's just me, my taste buds are probably weird," but several friends of mine also described it as sweet tasting... maybe the base is bitter tasting?

yes yes i realize every website on the internet has this to say:

Pure heroin is a white powder with a bitter taste

and as much as it makes me want to believe i'm wrong i can recall the taste way too vividly to even consider that... plus everybody i know who tried it say it's sweet! yeahhh this is starting to drive me a little nuts...
 
Tchort: You have been looking into it since you initiated the thread and that is better than I can express, most will simply think about the issue for a day, if that, and move on.

However, if I might suggest, research the issue of the "Hepatitis Outbreak" independantly of CDS sources. For example, Departments of Health, medical researchers, archived media sources and so on and you will find an interesting fact.

Also, you can look at all the research into the Shanghai Trade, including composition of the commercial/licit products, and finally, oral histories. I believe that if you do that you will see that the "Hepatitis" issue is just another myth.

You mentioned the timeline, if you go back and look you will see that the supposed Hepatitis Outbreak took place BEFORE IV usage was widespread (in fact noone thus far knows if IV usage was really taking place aside from the posited "bad shots" that introduced IV usage in the very early 30s."

Finally, there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that quinine or strychnine potentiate the "rush." The "rush" is simply the morphine crashing through the BBB. The acetylation enhances lipid solubility, giving "heroin" a 33% advantage over unacetylated morphine. For quinine and strychnine to offer any advantage, they would have to ehance this lipid solubility since, the morphine would need to be able to cross faster and/or in more volume.

If you examine both quinine and strychnine you will see that this is impossible.



On Jewish consolidation of the trade. Indeed, until 1946 Jews continued to control up to 70% of the wholesale trade, i.e. "Importation anf 1st Tier Distrubition." It ebbed and flowed but the first real "ebbing" was in 1931, not 24.

On this issue, I would suggest "Seizure Reports," governmental reports, archived meda and oral histories (again).

"Quinine being rare.": Lactose can be had in any health food store, and is incredibly cheap. Quinine is not easy to locate, you can find it at times, in so called "head shoppes" but in the US of course these are rare. A small jar/container of it, very small is 9 times as expensive as a comaprable sized container of lactose.

You say that you have seen it frequently on Seizure Reports, I have not. If you would like, you can send me (pm) the particulars (or do it here) and I will look at them. I am not infallible, Reports come out all the time,but I have not seen quinine more than (guessing but in relative terms it about righ) 1 out of 100 examples, IF THAT.

Most retail dealers just do not care what NYC addicts preferred "back in the day." They want to make money and the
cost/scarcity of quinine precludes its usage. Tell you what though, I would love it if they did, all that garbage they compound with is hurting people.

Now, as you may or may not know, English is not my best language, so I want (if you will) to have you clarify something; Aew you stating that "Caines" (sic) began to eclipse quinine in the Nam Era?

Forgive me in assuming but working from the premise of my having understood you correctly, that is absolutely incorrect. That only took place in the mid-90s onward, and began with that Colombian garbage flodding the East Coast.

Colombians utilised the same well entrenched distribution conduits that they had for cocaine over the previous 20 years.

This is owing to the fact that these groups had alot of experience adulterating and diluting cocaine but none with heroin.
 
Cretination:"Sweet in taste.": That is because you and your friends are not doing unadulterated (pure) heroin. You are tasting various sugars used to bulk it up (lactose being the most common).
 
I found where I first read the information concerning an outbreak of Malaria among NYC Heroin addicts, and found a source that documents both the outbreak and the emergence of Quinine as a cutting agent in black market Heroin.

One clue to the true cause of Syndrome X is its initial appearance about 1943, its relative rarity for the next few years, and its recent rapid increase in frequency. The time sequence obviously suggests that the cause of Syndrome X must be some factor introduced about 1943 and affecting a vastly increased number of addicts during 1969 and 1970. Heroin clearly does not qualify; it was widely used long before 1943. Indeed, a highly significant fact about Syndrome X is that it has become more and more frequent as the amount of heroin in the New York City bag has gone down and down. These deaths are, if anything, associated with "underdose" rather than overdose.

One theory sometimes advanced is that Syndrome X deaths are caused by the quinine in the bag. Quinine was introduced as an adulterant of heroin sometime after 1939, when an epidemic of malaria spread by contaminated injection needles hit New York City addicts thus the time of introduction fits the Syndrome X timetable. Some addicts discovered that the quinine contributed to the sensation known as a "rush" immediately after injection. Heroin traffickers also discovered that the bitter taste of the quinine makes it impossible for addicts to gauge the concentration of heroin in the bag by tasting the mixture. For these and possibly other reasons, quinine has remained a standard adulterant of New York City heroin ever since.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/cu/cu12.htm

Source: Milton Helpern, "Epidemic of Fatal Malaria Among Heroin Addicts in New York City," American Journal of Surgery, 26 ( 1943)

I will try and find the text to this article.

As far as the beginning of the end to Jewish syndicate domination of the Heroin black market and the beginning of the ascent of Procaine, Lidocaine, Tetracaine, etc as cutting agents over Quinine- in both instances I simply mean the Heroin Act of 1924 for the former and the Vietnam War for the latter as the turning point for both. Change would not become readily apparent for several years later in both cases, but, in my opinion, these are the factors that led to these changes.

For the latter, the example I would use is the quote from Howard Lotsof (founder of Ibogaine's use for treating addiction; and lifelong advocate of Ibogaine treatment and addiction rights & treatments in general) used in the original post:

In a second case during the Vietnam war the price of quinine which had been the
principal cut in heroin rose in price from $6 an ounce to $36 dollars an ounce
as supplies were being earmarked for Nam driving the price up. Apparently
major wholesalers were not getting the response they wanted from their clients
when they started cutting with manitol so they got so chemists to mix up a
batch of cut that included dibucaine for a rush and heptobarbital to moderate
the toxicity of IV dibucaine. The cost factor would be of particular
significance to wholesalers who would require 100 pound loads of cut.

Here is a quote from an academic article that explores the history of the Chasing method of using Heroin in the Netherlands:

From 1980 on SWA (south west asian) heroin dominated the Dutch illicit market. This product has seldom been found as the hydrochloride salt; the base form prevailed.16 For that reason, IDUs add an acidifier to make an injectable solution. In contrast with the salt, heroin base is quite effective on smoking. it volatilizes much better -under laboratory conditions ±60% of the heroin base is recovered, which is about three to four times as much as for the salt form. 16 However, illegally processed South West Asian heroin base also contains many diluents and processing impurities. (table 3.5) These compounds influence the volatilization of heroin to a great extent. The most important admixture in the beginning of the 1980s, procaine hydrochloride, causes a strong degradation, reducing bio-availability to about 12%.

http://www.drugtext.org/library/books/grund/chasdra3.htm

I have yet to scratch the surface of the Chinese Heroin trade of the teens and 1920's; though that is certainly a subject I look forward to pursuing :)
 
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