In 1924, Congress passed the Heroin Act, making manufacture and sale of the drug illegal. As a consequence, heroin went underground. In the 1920s and early 1930s, heroin’s principal distributors were mobsters Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, and Legs Diamond. (Because all three were Jewish, heroin was often called “smack,” from the Yiddish word schmecher, meaning “addict.”) In the mid-1930s the Italian Mafia took over, specifically, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who established the “French connection.” Opium grown in French Indochina or Turkey was shipped to Lebanon where it was converted to morphine
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