A Group Photo of "Dope Fiends", 1939.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2892

This Ken-Burns-Moment is brought to you by an interesting and unusual photo of Big City drug addicts. "60 addicts picked up in 60 minutes" bloats the caption in Elmer James Rolling screechy pamphlet called  The Silent Horror.¹ There's a wide variety of emotion going on here in this group of 60 men, and not much of that seems to sense trouble or jail. Some of the folks look to be downright jovial, making the best of a difficult situation (assuming they knew what was going on):

It turns out that as loud and unreferenced and populist this work was, or is, there are very few copies of it that made it into its future from 1939. (As a matter of record I couldn't find another copy of the thing in the stupendous WorldCat.) It was published by the Defender Press in Wichita, Kansas, which at the time had over 100,000 residents, some of whom you would have expected to buy this pamphlet--since it has some amount of scream-preaching going on in its pages, I'd figure that it had some street appeal, though none of that interest meant enough to anyone to put a copy in a library, somewhere. 

Rollings contributed at least four other narcotics-related works (“Your Girl or My Boy May be Next”, “Marijuana—the Weed of Woe”, “Junk, Junk Peddler and Junkers”, “Perils of the Poppy” and “I Saw Him Die”. There were a few other short works non-drug-related, including something on cowboy songs and also a book on bible prophesy.  

Rollings' major headings deal with the shades and players of narcotics: "Opium, the King of Dope"; "Crown Prince, Morphine"; "Cocaine, the Princess of Perdition"; "Marijuana, the Dutchess of Despair"; and the "Dope Peddlers and Addicts" round out this polemic.

Here's an excerpt from the book to give you an idea of what was going on in its pages:

"An eighteen-year-old boy in a Midwestern city smoked two "reefers" and an hour later choked his sweetheart to death because she refused his shocking, lustful advances, born in a marijuana-crazed brain... A sixteen-year-old boy shot his mother and father to death with his father's shotgun after smoking several "Mary Anns" given to him by a new friend whose acquaintance he made by chance. He could neither explain nor remember the killing when the effects of the drug had worn off and sobbed himself into hysterical grief when told of his crime. And so, on and on, runs the record of thievery, forgery, banditry, kidnapping, brutal murder, degeneracy, and rape, all chargeable to this paralyzer of conscience and inflamer of depravity --- Marijuana! "

And so, there's the deal on this pamphlet--still the most interesting aspect of it to me is that one addict photo...

Notes.

1. Published in Wichita, Kansas by the Defender Press, 1939. 8.5”x 5.5”, 45pp. Cover art plus four photos. Green wrappers. Provenance: Library of Congress, with their surplus stamp on rear wrapper and a tiny “Pamphlet Collection” on front cover.