“As long as it was in the lower economic classes and marginalized groups, like musicians and people of ethnic minorities, it was OK because it was with those people,” said Spencer’s counselor, Vinnie Dabney, an African American who took his first sniff from a bag of heroin his sophomore year of high school, in 1968, and was a mostly functional user for thirty years. (Needle-phobic, he never once shot up.) Back then you could maintain that way because the drug’s potency was low—3 to 7 percent, compared with 40 to 60 percent today—and the police paid little attention, since white kids in the
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