My historical question is “How big of a problem was drugs in the 1930s?” and the things relating to that like how they handled the drugs, what drug was the most popular, etc. Since I’m a Criminology major with a concentration in Homeland Security I focus a lot of my studies on drugs and how drugs get into the US. So what batter topic to study than how drugs were evolving in the 1930s?
Based off my knowledge of the Great Depression, before doing research on this topic, I assumed that since the Great Depression was a really hard and upsetting time that drug use would be heavy. I assumed this because the Depression was a very sad time for everyone, so why not take some things that helped “distract” them and give them a high? The government was trying to find things to distract people like theater and folklore. 1 I also thought maybe since the government was trying to find things to help people take their mind off struggles, maybe drugs were a big problem. 2
I found my sources by searching for very basic keywords that have to do with drugs and the usage of them. Keywords such as: Drug, addict, Morphine, Heroin, Snuff box, addicted, dealer, doctor, etc. It was not easy to find sources, but with using different terms and phrases I was able to find my 10. The sources I found said very little about addiction or drug use, which I was surprised to find. They all lightly touch on the subject enough for me to get an understanding but the topics of each source as mostly about other things with the touch of drug use. For example, Drug store clerks stealing some drugs and selling them, Doctors selling drugs on the side, a few war victims being addicted to the pain reliving drugs they were given, etc. 3
I noticed while using Voyant tools that my 10 sources had a lot of similar words and topics which is good. Not just similarities describing drug use but the fact that many of the interviews were actually similar even with different stories, which is something I was worried about. I then made it so that very basic words were not included in the poll, words such as: just, said, says, got, it’s, congress, library, etc. I chose to keep these words out because they did not help my topic at all since, they are just very basic branching words. After that I was left with this:
The first picture shows me that a lot of these sources come from 1939 which could possibly mean that I need to narrow down my topic to that year since it shows up the most. I also concluded that with all the documents in the corpus not a lot of things regarding my topic show up unless you specifically look for my 10 sources, meaning there’s not a lot of talk on the question I’m asking. On the next picture I made a graph of the keywords that I was looking to find my sources to see how much they actually showed up in the corpus. The main ones are Doctor, and Drug. This shows me that majority of my interviews talked about people getting their drugs from a normal doctor. If they became addicted to those drugs or over proscribed I’m not really sure.
Based off all this I think the question I’m asking is to broad, so it would benefit me to narrow it down more. Something like “why were people addicted to drugs in the 1930s?”. Also since there is not a lot of information on just drugs in general maybe it would be a good idea to explore the other topics in my field but ones that possibly relate more to this topic.
- Wright, Benjamin, and Joseph Locke. American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook. Stanford University Press, 2019.
- “Federal Theatre: Melodrama, Social Protest, and Genius: Articles and Essays: Federal Theatre Project, 1935 to 1939: Digital Collections: Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-theatre-project-1935-to-1939/articles-and-essays/federal-theatre-melodrama-social-protest-and-genius/.
- Swenson, May. “[Folklore of Drug Store Employees].” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh001616/.
