Slanguage of the Addict

Excerpt

Just as criminals and allied objectors to ordinary life form a subsociety within society as a whole, so do addicts form a distinct clan within or closely tied to this subsociety. This was noted by H. L. Mencken (1), Sage of Baltimore, in his The American Language with a sentence highly characteristic of his style:

Also hanging about the outskirts of the professional criminals are the drug addicts, the prostitutes, and the disorderly children (not a few of them with well-to-do and even rich parents) who train for entrance into one or another of these groups.

Each of the first