Drug Abuse

VII Heroin Use in the Delinquent Gang

At the time of our studies, there was widespread opinion that street gangs were the centers of narcotics activity.1 It was often said that street gangs were centers of organized selling of narcotic drugs; that the gang population itself used drugs heavily; and that using members, by various means of persuasion, recruited users among hitherto nonusing boys. Actually, according to the experience of staff members, only a minority of the patients at Riverside Hospital belonged to organized gangs. This does not, however, reduce the possibility that the gangs do play the role attributed to them in the cases of gang members. It seemed desirable, therefore, to investigate the role of gangs in drug use. A study was undertaken of all the delinquent gangs in New York City that were at the time (1954) serviced by Youth Board "detached" group workers.2 Facts on drug activity in the gangs and related information were obtained from these detached group workers.

For some years, the Youth Board has been conducting a program of social therapeutic and preventive group work with antisocial gangs in New York City. In this program, a group worker makes informal contact with a gang and attempts to develop a close relationship with its members. He spends most of his time with them and is available in emergencies at all times. He participates in their legitimate activities; tries to help in planning such activities; sometimes suggests them; and, if necessary, tries to get help in procuring the resources needed to carry out such activities. He stands up for the boys in court, finds jobs for some, and obtains case-work assistance for the families of others. For all, he is available for guidance in difficult periods. Most important, and perhaps most difficult, he demonstrates that he wants to work with, rather than on, them. His approach is that of a realist, rather than a moralist. He does not preach to them. He is permissive and demonstrates that his major concern is with their individual welfare. He may advise, but he does not withdraw or display hostility or annoyance if his advice is not followed. He discourages confidences that would make him an accomplice in illegal activity, but he establishes the facts that he is not a police agent and that he can be trusted with all kinds of information. His relations with the gang members are usually highly intimate. _

The group worker thus gets to know gang members well. He 'keeps voluminous records on the boys and their activities. These data, supplemented by the worker's general knowledge of the boys, constitute the source of all the findings reported here and in earlier references to the gang study. Each of the workers filled out a detailed questionnaire about his gang and each of its members. Some of the questions applied to the entire gang—its history, activities, structure. Specifically, we asked the size and nature of groups of boys who used drugs together, where they gathered, and, most important, whether there was any identifiable personal influence or group pressure to use or not to use drugs. Other questions were for each boy—to determine who used drugs, which drugs, amounts used, trend of use, arrests for drug use, history of treatment, efforts to stop use, attitudes toward drugs, and so on. We also asked questions about the boy's background and position in the gang. The complete set of questionnaires took from fifteen to thirty hours of each group worker's time to fill out.

In all, we obtained reports on eighteen gangs, ranging in size from five to twenty-six members—altogether, 305 boys. Most of these gangs were subdivisions, based on age or special interests, of larger gangs. The median age of the boys was eighteen; most were over sixteen and under twenty. The Youth Board selected the gangs for special attention because they had an exceptionally high rate of participation in gang warfare. One measure of the chronic character of their antisocial behavior is the fact that at the time of our study they had been serviced by the Youth Board for several years. More than two-thirds of the boys had habitually participated in delinquent behavior, more than half had been arrested at least once (almost all of these having received at least probationary treatment following arrest), and about one-quarter had served sentences in institutions for delinquents. They are precisely such high-delinquency gangs as one might expect to be involved in drug use and selling (See Table K-23).

The gangs were located in three areas of the city which had very high incidence of delinquency and drug use. Eight were in Manhattan's East Harlem, four in or near the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, and six in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. In modal ethnic composition, seven were Puerto Rican, six Negro, two Italian, one Irish, and two Irish-Italian.

Extent of Use

Heroin use was not common in all eighteen gangs. In four gangs, there was no heroin use at all (let us call them "drug-free gangs") ; in eight, less than half the members used heroin ("low-use gangs") ; and in six "high-use" gangs, more than half the member were users.
Practically the only drugs in illegal use were heroin and marijuana. Of the 305 gang members, ninety-four used heroin more-or-less regularly, eighty still using it at the time of the study. About half the heroinusers'also smoked marijuana. About eighty used or had used only marijuana (these were exclusively Negro and Puerto Rican boys). What follows concerns only users of heroin. Not all the heroin-users were habitual users, even though most had been using heroin for two or three years. Less than half took one or more doses of heroin daily (Table K-1b). The rest took the drug two or three times a week or even less often, and many remained occasional users, even though some injected directly into a vein. Most of the habitual users took the drug intravenously; most of the occasional users sniffed; a few injected it subcutaneously.

DRUG USE AND GANG STRUCTURE

Drug-taking is a clique or solitary activity, not a total gang activity. The group workers, asked whether drug use was usually individual, with other club members, or with outsiders also, told us that, in the nine gangs with the largest number of users, most heroin use involved a couple or a clique in the gang; outsiders were not in general involved. In the remaining gangs, in which at most two or three members were users, heroin was used on a solitary basis.

These are typical examples of club or clique participation (from the group workers' reports) :4

A clique of three boys, following a burglary, went to one of the member's rooms and took horse.

A clique of four met in a hallway following a gang fight and took horse—skin-popping.

At a public dance, groups of four or more go off to corners or toilets to smoke pot or sniff horse.

Howie says he has some good stuff. He gets Iry and Harry to go up to his house to snort up.

Eddie, George, Everett, and Shorty said that they were going to the movies to get high. They were going to snort some horse in the balcony. . . . Those not wanting to get high stayed on the block.

This tendency for heroin-users to separate into cliques seems to have serious effects on the cohesiveness of the gang.

The group workers also described other major activities (involving more than half the membership) besides drug use that were carried out on a clique basis. It thus became possible to classify clubs as either "dispersed" (two or more major activities carried out on a clique basis) or "cohesive" (fewer than two major activities carried out on a clique basis). Only one of the six high-use gangs fell into the cohesive category, but three of the eight low-use gangs and three of the four drug-free gangs were "cohesive" (Table K-5k). This suggests that, as the proportion of drug-users in a gang increases, the group splits into cliques, or subgroups.

As the gang breaks into cliques, its leaders become less important, decision-making is less structured, and there is some question as to who the leaders are and what the process of decision-making and of carrying out orders is. In fact, the group workers had some difficulty in answering questions on the group structure in high-use gangs. At the same time, the whole gang becomes less active, more apathetic. In examining the group workers' general comments on the predominant interests of the gangs, we found that some were described as "not having anything to do or place to go," or "avoid boredom," or "no interest in anything." Such gangs were classified as generally "apathetic." These apathetic gangs were found only among the low- and high-use gangs; none of the drug-free gangs were "apathetic" (Table K-5j).

This general lowering of activities and narrowing of interests reached almost all types of usual gang pursuits. The more drug-users in the gang, the fewer gang members engaged frequently in gang fights, vandalism and hell-raising, sexual delinquency, gambling, or active sports. However, in all gangs, similar proportions participated in robberies and burglaries, organized dances and house parties, and watched sports events (Table K-4).

The shift in the social structure, activities, and general mood of the gang was apparently noticed by the nonusing members and apparently resented. And, in general, the nonusers' feelings about users were also negative.

ATTITUDES OF NONUSING MEMBERS TOWARD HEROIN

As one would expect, attitudes toward heroin use and users were much more negative among the nonusers in low-use gangs than in the high-use gangs (Table K-3). In the low-use gangs, most of the 114 nonusers opposed the use of heroin; some had mixed feelings about it; very few thought that occasional use was all right; and only 2 per cent gave unqualified approval of heroin use. Even the smoking of marijuana was rejected; a majority were in outright opposition to it, the rest had mixed feelings on the matter, and some accepted only occasional smoking of "reefers."

The nonusers' feelings about heroin-users and smokers of marijuana was, correspondingly, hostile or derogatory. About half were hostile or derogatory about habitual heroin-users and about a fifth expressed mixed feelings; only about a quarter were tolerant. Feelings about occasional heroin-users were somewhat milder, as were those about smokers of marijuana; but even toward the occasional user nearly half expressed hostile or derogatory feelings. Occasional smokers of marijuana were treated with somewhat more tolerance.
The twenty-six nonusers in the high-use gangs were much more tolerant of heroin use and users (Table K-3). Thus, for example, more of them approved of occasional heroin use, were tolerant of habitual heroin-users, and were tolerant of occasional heroin-users. Similarly, larger proportions than in low-use gangs were tolerant of smoking of marijuana. Correspondingly, smaller proportions opposed the use of heroin and expressed hostile or derogatory feelings toward heroin-users and smokers of marijuana.

The leadership status of users was another indication of the nonusing members' attitudes toward them. In the high-use gangs, it was the nonusing minority that provided most of the leadership; the users were predominantly rank and file. In the low-use gangs, the users appeared to be a special subgroup. Most of them spent little time with the gang (Table K-2k), and yet they contributed proportionately more leaders than the nonusing majority (Table K-3). But those who were leaders were mostly recent users; the boys who had been using drugs for two years or more were mostly rank and file. In both types of gangs, however, members who started using heroin tended to lose their leadership status; and, conversely, as they decreased the intake or stopped using altogether, they gained in leadership (Table K-2n). Drug use apparently does not go well with leadership in a delinquent gang. This fact can be understood only in the light of our findings concerning the behavior, interests, and life style of the user.

For one thing, drug-using activity tends either to split the gang into cliques or to take drug-using members away from the gang into solitary activity. In the high-use gangs, the users tended to snort or inject heroin together, in cliques; if there was no apartment available, they gathered in hallways, toilets, or movie balconies. Users in low-use gangs went off by themselves or with drug-using nonmembers. For another thing, although only slightly more of the users in both high-and low-use gangs showed a persistent pattern of delinquency apart from the use or sale of drugs (Table K-2d), significantly more users had been arrested for such non-drug-related delinquent acts (Table K-2e) and, when arrested, were apparently more likely to be sent to an institution than were nonusers. This finding gives an objective basis to the group workers' general statement that actively delinquent gangs dislike drug-users because they are unreliable "on the job" and can get the gang into trouble if arrested.

Finally, let us remember the differences we have already noted in the users' participation in gang activities: by the selective pattern of their interests and preoccupations, the users set themselves apart from the rest of the gang. All this helps explain the loss of leadership among users.

In general, the actual balance of group pressures seems to be against, rather than for, habitual use of heroin. In not a single case did the group worker report that a gang, as a unit, exerted pressure on its members to use drugs; whatever influence to use is reported derived from a few individuals. In fact, we had very few reports of efforts to influence nonusers in their own gangs to start using heroin, even though about half the users (and a fourth of the nonusers in the high-use gangs peddled drugs. Most often, users enticed other users to continue, or they reintroduced a former user after he had stopped for a while, particularly after he had been imprisoned or hospitalized.

But there were far more reports of influence and pressure against the use of heroin, especially to cut down or stop use. Even users were more likely to behave in this manner. This finding holds for every gang with more than one or two users. Pressures not to use were, in several cases, mentioned as permeating the whole group. This was true of high-as well as low-use gangs, of drug-using gangs with a generally permissive atmosphere as well as of those with much hostility toward drug use. In one high-use gang, for instance, with little drug permissiveness and much recent decrease in drug use, members tried to get others to cut down the use of heroin—especially when one member used it a great deal—warning the boy to get off the stuff, to cut down, or to take more "pot" instead. They feared that the boy would take an overdose or get "real sick." Sometimes, getting someone to reduce the dose took the form of treating him to food, marijuana, or alcohol. "Stay with us," say the nonusers; "we'll watch over you; drink with us, it's better than junk." If habitual heroin use does not appear endemic to or especially compatible with gang life, the question arises: What is it about some gangs that allows for the spread of this habit, and what in the general climate of a gang offers effective resistance to it?

A comparison of the drug-free, low-, and high-use gangs may help throw some light on this question.

DELINQUENT GANGS WITHOUT USERS

We found, first of all, that members of the drug-free gangs were several years younger than the other gangs (Table K-2a). The boys in the drug-free gangs differed from the low- and high-use gangs in many respects which may be related primarily to their being younger. Many were still attending school, whereas most boys in the older gangs were out of school. Also, only about half the boys were habitual delinquents, compared to a majority in the other gangs (Table K-2d). More of the drug-free gangs were very active in sports, and, unlike the others, all engaged in frequent gang fights (Table K-5 a, i). Most carried on activities with the whole group, rather than in cliques. A larger proportion of their members participated in such gang-organized activities as sports, expeditions of vandalism, and general hell-raising (Table K-4). Although they seldom organized dances, more of their members participated whenever the gang did organize a dance. None of the drug-free gangs were described as "apathetic," as were five of the low- and high-use gangs (Table K-5j).

In general, members of drug-free gangs showed little concern over the use of heroin. Group workers had some difficulty in ascertaining attitudes toward drug use among the seventy-one members in drug-free gangs; they could give us no information concerning the attitudes of about one-third of the boys and even less information on their attitudes toward marijuana (Table K-3). A large proportion of the forty-nine members whose attitudes to heroin use were known had mixed feelings; the others were less hostile and more tolerant of the habitual user than were the nonusers in the low-use gangs, but not so tolerant as those in the high-use gangs. The generally more tolerant feelings about drug use in drug-free gangs probably reflects less concern about the problem and less awareness of danger from drugs than the nonusers in low-use gangs experience.

Whether any of the members of the four drug-free gangs we investigated would, as they grew older, become involved with drugs we could not, of course, predict.5 But a closer look at the low-use gangs can give us an approximate picture of the spread of drug use in a delinquent gang and of the reaction of the nonusing members to the appearance of users among them.

DELINQUENT GANGS IN WHICH USE BEGINS TO SPREAD

The pattern of activities in the low-use gangs was more similar to that in the drug-free gangs—even though the latter were younger—than to the same-age high-use gangs. More of the low-use gangs tended to engage frequently in sports (active and spectator), vandalism, and hell-raising, and more of them were cohesive. In addition, they engaged more than high-use gangs in robberies, burglaries, gambling, and club-organized sex delinquency (line-ups) (Table K-5). The picture one gets is of a comparatively more lively, active, cohesive pattern.

On the face of it, we cannot say whether the comparatively smaller number of heroin-users in these low-use gangs and the greater antipathy to drug use is a function of their greater liveliness and cohesiveness and will, consequently, continue to remain small or whether the relation is reverse; it may be that the reason these gangs are more lively and cohesive is that drug use is only beginning to spread there and that, as the number of users increases, the pattern of activities will change in the direction of high-use gangs.

The only way to discover the relations between age, activities, and spread of drug use or resistance to it would be to follow the gangs more closely from the time of onset of drug use. Our study was not designed to c&ain an intensive, dynamic picture of the gang's role in the spread of drug use. But we do have some descriptive, historical information for individual gangs which is sufficiently suggestive to warrant mention. Let us consider a few brief case histories of the low-use gangs where the pattern of using drugs is either in its early stages or has remained arrested and limited to a minority.

Low-use gang No. 12. This group began as a football team, developed hostility to rival teams, and engaged in gang fights. In the past few years, the boys, all of whom are now over eighteen, became interested in marriage, army service, jobs, adjustment after institutionalization. Some members once tried smoking marijuana, got sick, and never tried again. A peddler trying to sell drugs was beaten up by command of the leader and told never to come back. One boy used drugs, but the attitude of the others was so hostile to it that he used to go to other gangs for drug activity. He is now off drugs. The group participates in team sports, trips away from home, and other constructive program activities (initiated by the youth worker).

Low-use gang No. 13. This group also began as a ball team and was active in street fights. In time, the group fragmented. Some members got jobs and became self-supporting and independent. A small group got to use drugs, especially following periods of anxiety. They have their own leader. The group's main leader is an intelligent, dominating youngster who resents the influence of the drug clique's leader but cannot counteract a pervasive climate of boredom—"nothing to do and nowhere to go."

Low-use gang No. 19. This fighting group began, in the past few years, to lose interest in bopping. The group appears to be generally disorganized. Since gang fighting declined, drug use seems to have risen. Those members who use drugs do it individually, not as a clique. Others speak out openly against the use of heroin.

Low-use gang No. 8. This group organized five years ago for self-protection against other fighting groups in the area. Recently, as the majority grew cool to bopping, a group of three boys broke off in open conflict with the president; soon after, these three started using heroin and acting "down with the cats." They continue making efforts to get the gang back to fights, but the majority of the members remain loyal to their president. The gang is doing well without fights. The three users are still out, and it is unlikely that they will be readmitted.

Piecing together all of our data and some of the descriptive, historical information for individual gangs, we offer the following speculation on how gang activities and changes in the gang may play a role in the spread of drug use or resistance to it. There appear to be two developmental stages in which the gang assumes differing roles with regard to drug use. In the adolescent stage (roughly under age eighteen), the street culture favors "acting out" on a gang basis. Rumbles, fights, hell-raising, and competitive sports are an appropriate expression for this age. Even if the gang includes a large proportion of anxious, inadequately functioning boys of the type we consider prone to drug use, the activities of the gang offer a measure of shared status and security and a sense of belonging. The boys do not have to face life alone; the group protects them. Escape into drugs is not yet necessary.

But, as the group grows older, two things happen. Sports, hell-raising, and gang fights become "kid stuff" and are given up. In the normal course of events, the youthful preoccupations are replaced by individual concerns with work, future, a steady girl, and the like. If most of the gang members are sufficiently healthy to face these new personal needs and social demands and engage in the new activities appropriate to their age, drugs will not attract their interest.

But, for those gang members who are too disturbed emotionally to face the future as adults, the passing of adolescent hell-raising leaves emptiness, boredom, apathy, and restless anxiety. In a gang where there are many such disturbed members, experimentation with drugs for "kicks" is likely to lead to frequent and, later, habitual use; cliques of users will grow quickly. Enmeshed in the activities revolving around the purchase, sale, and use of drugs and the delinquent efforts to get money to meet the exorbitant cost of heroin, the young users can comfortably forget about girls, careers, status, and recognition by the society at large. Their sexual drive is diminished, they maintain a sense of bélonging in the limited world of the addict, they remain children forever. They may give up all sense of personal responsibility for their lives and conveniently project the blame for their shiftless existence on "the habit."

In other gangs, where drugs are not experimented with, the disturbed members are likely to turn at this stage to overt homosexuality, sometimes accompanied by transvestitism.° Either life pattern—as drug-user or as homosexual—serves the function of establishing distance from the real-life demands of young adulthood.

In 1957, the director of another agency reported to the writers that a gang with which it had been working had been persuaded to give up narcotics. She did not, however, regard this as an unqualified success, since the gang reverted to a "bopping"—i.e., a fighting and generally hell-raising—pattern. From our present point of view, the significant point is that, if one regards the bopping and drug-using as successive but dynamically unrelated events, this should not have happened. On the independent-event hypothesis, the boys in this gang had already outgrown the bopping phase of the teen-age subculture when they turned to drugs. When they left the latter phase, however, there was no reason, on this hypothesis, for reverting to the earlier one. According to our hypothesis, on the other hand, that the late adolescent's turning to drugs is, in part, a defensive maneuver against the necessity of undertaking an adult role for which he does not feel equipped, the reversion may not be predictable, but it is at least understandable. The drugs are a means of deferring the transition to adult responsibility. When this means is abandoned, the boys revert to a frankly adolescent pattern.

Narcotics come into the life of the juvenile street gang as one of the means whereby the maladjusted and inadequate youth evades the full assumption of an adult role. If he does not take to drugs to accomplish this goal, he will find some other means. If the selection of this means is, for other reasons, an easy one (e.g., because of the availability of the drug or a social climate and attitudes favorable to experimentation with it), it is likely to be chosen.

In brief, insofar as habitual drug use makes inroads into the life of the gang, there develops a distinct subculture of drug-users within the normal delinquent gang. The two are not compatible. The delinquent subgroup often contains large proportions of comparatively well integrated and adequately functioning youths for whom antisocial acting out seemingly serves only a transitional, developmental need and who, approaching adulthood, become interested in legitimate pursuits and able to give up delinquent activities. These may be described as relatively "adequate" or "reality-oriented" youths; they look down at the users who fear, and wish to escape from, reality. The conflict between these two subgroups is basic; it comes to a head as the bulk of members reach the age of eighteen and nineteen. At this age, some face the mainstream of life, others turn from it.

Narcotics and Self-Esteem

That the turning to narcotics is at least temporarily effective in preserving self-esteem in the face of inadequacy for adult roles is strikingly underscored by a doctoral dissertation of Stanley M. Schiff,7 conducted under the supervision of one of the writers. The features of the design of Dr. Schiff's study most germane to the present discussion are as follows:

Five groups of subjects were selected from a prison population. All groups were matched or found to be equivalent with respect to education, intelligence, ethnic composition, and neighborhoods of residence. Two of the groups consisted of individuals under twenty-one years of age, one being composed of habitual drug-users and the other of nonusers. The remaining three groups consisted of individuals over twenty-one years of age—one of nonusers, one of habitual users who had become habituated during their teens, and one of habitual users who did not begin to use drugs before their twenty-first birthdays. The two younger and the three older groups were, respectively, matched for age. All subjects had, of course, been sentenced to varying prison terms for diverse violations.

The level of self-esteem of each subject was assessed by a technique known as a Q-sort.8 In its essence, the technique requires that the subject rank a series of items according to a specified criterion. (The technique can, depending on the criterion, be adapted to many purposes, not merely the measurement of self-esteem.)

After careful review by a group of psychologists familiar with the population, eighty items were selected from an initial set of two hundred, each item describing some personal attribute. The review was concerned with the relevance ( i.e., to make certain that the possession or lack of the attribute was likely to make a difference to the kinds of individuals being studied), with the comprehensiveness of the items (i.e., to make certain that the various facets of a personality were represented and that the set was not overloaded with items involving any particular aspect of a person), and, finally, to ensure the intelligibility of the items. Each item was typed on a separate card. For the benefit of Spanish-speaking subjects, a set of cards with the items in Spanish translation was used.

The items dealt with sexual identification and roles, attitudes toward authority, educational values, views on moral issues, passivity, aggressiveness, impulse control, relation to others, feelings of dependence and independence, feelings of personal adequacy, level of aspiration, emotional maturity, and level of frustration. The initial items submitted for review were drawn from existing personality scales, other studies employing the Q-sort technique, statements by drug-users and nonusers to prison psychologists, and suggestions by some of the prisoners. Some sample items from the set finally used were:

I think that there's something wrong with me. I like money, and I want lots of it.
I want to have someone love me. I feel down in the dumps a lot.
I feel relaxed when I pass by a cop. I stand for what I believe is right.
I think that life is one big rat race.
I think I satisfy the girl when I have sex.
I think that I'm as smart as the next person.
I wish people would stop telling me what to do.

The subject first selected the items which were most aptly descriptive of himself, then a set of items that were next most aptly descriptive of himself, and so on until he got to the items least descriptive of what he thought he was like. When he was through with this task, he again sorted the items, but this time the criterion for sorting was the kind of person he would most like to be. When he was through with the second task, he once again sorted the items, but this time in terms of the kind of person his parents would like him to be. A fourth sort was based on the kind of person his friends would like him to be. A final sort required that he first select the one from a series of categories of individuals—e g, minister, businessman, and the like—whose opinion of the subject made the most difference to him and that he then sort the items in terms of the kind of person this individual or class of individuals would like him to be. The five Q-sorts were carried out in two sessions.

A comparison of how the items were sorted in the self-description task and how they were sorted in each of the succeeding tasks yields a series of measures of how the subject's self-image falls short of various ideals. The larger the discrepancies—or, equivalently, the lower the correlations—between the self-descriptive sort and each of the others, the more he falls short of his various ideals. For purposes of analysis, the discrepancies between the first and each of the last three sorts were averaged. The procedure thus yielded two scores—a measure of the discrepancy between a person's perceived self and his own description of his ideal and a measure of the discrepancy between his perceived self and the ideals that he attributes to significant others. Schiff also considered two derived scores—one which consisted simply of whichever of the first two scores put the perceived self in the most favorable light and the second, of whichever put the perceived self in the least favorable light. Except for the last score, which yielded no dependable results, it does not make any difference which of the scores is taken as the measure of self-esteem; the results are the same. Table K-6 presents the averages of the first two scores.

With respect to level of self-esteem, the two younger groups did not differ from each other, and they did not differ from the adult users who had become habituated to drugs in their teens. These three groups did, however, differ from the other two adult groups; their level of self-esteem was much higher.

The picture would have been somewhat clearer if Schiff had also been able to study comparable individuals who did not get into trouble. He was not able to do so, and it is not certain that the Q-sort items he used would have been equally appropriate. It is conceivable, but it seems to us most unlikely, that normal late adolescents would also not differ from the two teen-age groups that Schiff studied; we would expect them to show higher levels of self-esteem. It is also conceivable that the comparable normal teen-agers would show higher self-esteem scores than comparable normal adults. It is, finally, conceivable—and this again seems to us to be most unlikely—that, if the latter were to turn out fo be the case, the drop in self-esteem from the normal teen-age to the normal adult group would be of the same magnitude as that found by Schiff; we would expect that, if a drop occurred at all, it would be smaller. Schiff argues, quite reasonably, that, if anything, the change in the normal population should go the other way; adolescents have ample grounds for questioning their personal worth.

If our expectations for the comparable normal population are taken seriously, it becomes difficult indeed to escape the conclusions of Schiff's findings that: (1) for the kinds of inadequate individuals who become involved in crime and/or narcotics use, the transition to adult status is, in fact, traumatic, with a resultant sharp drop in self-esteem; and (2) turning to narcotics before the transition is made prevents or markedly delays this development. Note that, in the off-drug personality, at least, the act of turning to narcotics does not restore self-esteem to its adolescent levels. This is implicit in Schiff's finding that the adult users who had started to use narcotics after they had become adults were no different, in this respect, from the nonusing adults. The key fact in Schiff's finding is that the adults who had become habituated as teen-agers apparently remained like the comparable teen-agers in level of self-esteem.

It thus appears that, to the inadequate individual, the postponement of adulthood is not merely a defensive maneuver; it is an adaptive one as well.

Summary

If we may trust the experience of those staff members of Riverside Hospital with whom we have discussed this issue, only a minority of the cases who become seriously enough involved to be committed to the hospital ever belonged to organized gangs. On the face of it, therefore, street gangs cannot be considered a major factor in the spread of heroin use. Even for those who do belong to gangs, the weight of the evidence is that the gangs merely provide an arena in which the use of narcotics can develop. If anything, the gangs play an inhibiting role with respect to the incontinent use of drugs. They not only tend to discourage incontinent use, but they also satisfy needs which may otherwise lead to earlier use. They offer a sense of solidarity and belon-ging, and they provide inadequate individuals with channels of achievement and recognition that enable such boys to avoid confronting their own inadequacy in the normal channels of legitimate competitive endeavor. It is apparently precisely at the point where the gangs become relatively inadequate in satisfying such needs and at the point where the threatening onset of adulthood becomes imminent that many of these individuals turn to narcotics. The Schiff study indicates that, for such individuals, the use of narcotics helps to preserve their self-esteem, presumably by freeing them of the obligation to confront their responsibilities as adults. "A monkey on my back" is a convincing alibi for a lone, lost soul.

 

1 Cf. Dale Kramer and Madeline Karr, Teen-age Gangs (New York: Henry Holt, 1953).

2 Cf. Reaching the Unreached (New York: New York City Youth Board, 1954). The word "detached" does not refer to a state of mind, but to the fact that the worker's center of operations is outside the agency plant.

3 References are to the summary tables in Appendix K.

4 Before filling out the questionnaires, each of the group workers made a list of the gang members about whom he had information. Next to each name, he entered a pseudonym which was consistently used in referring to that individual. We had no occasion to see the true names.

5 A check with the group work supervisor in February, 1956—two years after the original data were collected—brought us the information that, in only one of those four gangs, did a splinter group form in which heroin was used by some members. Since these gangs remained under the supervision of a Youth Board group worker, this course of events cannot be taken to be representative of a natural group process.

6 This information was obtained from Youth Board workers in an informal communication.

7 Stanley M. Schiff, "A Self-Theory Investigation of Drug Addiction in Relation to Age of Onset" (New York University, 1959).

8 An elaborate internal check established that the subjects were able to follow the seemingly complicated instructions.

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