The Forgotten Addicts of Seattle's Skid Road
A railroad man's harrowing story of dependency reveals the hidden suffering behind the headlines in the turn-of-the-century city.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
John Hmock, once a well-known railroad engineer, is now a slave to the morphine habit. Yesterday, he told his pitiful story to a Star reporter: 'I was working on the Union Pacific, running an engine, when one of my engines smashed into an operator’s train and my right leg was crushed above the knee. At the hospital to which I was taken, they injected morphine to quiet my suffering. At the end of six months, when I left the institution, the doctors told me not to continue the use of the drug any longer. But it was impossible to stop. The terrible pangs of the withdrawal had chained me, and I could not leave it alone. That was over seventeen years ago, and I have been a slave to the habit ever since.' It was only this morning that the Albright man who had lately been released from the county jail, also cured from the morphine habit, told a similar story. Hmock says there are fully twenty confirmed morphine fiends now residing in the Skid Road, nearly all of whom trace their present condition to the use of the drug in hospitals and other places while under the care of physicians.
“The terrible pangs of the withdrawal had chained me, and I could not leave it alone.”
Long before the modern opioid crisis, the late 19th and early 20th centuries grappled with high rates of iatrogenic addiction caused by the unchecked use of morphine in medicine. The 'Skid Road' (later Skid Row) was the epicenter for men like John Hmock, who lived in the margins of a rapidly expanding city that failed to support those discarded by the industrial labor it relied upon.
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