Model Airplanes are Decadent and Depraved

The Glue-Sniffing Epidemic of the 1960s

Thomas Aiello

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781609091781
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Model Airplanes are Decadent and Depraved tells the story of the American glue-sniffing epidemic of the 1960s, from the first reports of use to the unsuccessful crusade for federal legislation in the early 1970s. The human obsession with inhalation for intoxication has deep roots, from the oracle at Delphi to Judaic biblical ritual. The discovery of nitrous oxide, ether, and chloroform in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the later development of paint thinners, varnishes, lighter fluid, polishes, and dry-cleaning supplies provided a variety of publicly available products with organic solvents that could be inhaled for some range of hallucinogenic or intoxicating effect. Model airplane glue was one of those products, but did not appear in warnings until the first reports of problematic behavior appeared in 1959, when children in several western cities were arrested for delinquency after huffing glue. Newspaper coverage both provided the initial shot across the bow for research into the subject and convinced children to give it a try. This "epidemic" quickly spread throughout the nation and the world. Though the hobby industry began putting an irritant in its model glue products in 1969 to make them less desirable to sniff, that wasn't what stopped the epidemic. Just as quickly as it erupted, the epidemic stopped when the media coverage and public hysteria stopped, making it one of the most unique epidemics in American history. The nation's focus drifted from adolescent glue sniffing to the countercultural student movement, with its attendant devotion to drug use, opposition to the Vietnam War, southern race policies, and anti-bureaucracy in general. This movement came to embody a tumultuous era fraught with violence, civil disobedience, and massive sea changes in American life and law—glue sniffing faded by comparison.

1

The Sense of Smell

When Abraham Arden Brill, one of the leading American psychologists of the early twentieth century, stepped to the podium at the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in late December 1930, he was well aware that the psychological consequences of the sense of smell had long been seen as ancillary to other sensory stimuli: sight, sound, touch. His audience at the New York Academy of Medicine had spent years and volumes parsing out the intricacies of the tactile, the audible, the visual, as they related to neuroses and psychoses of all shapes and sizes. Smell played little or no role in the life of the most evolved of the species. “As a rule,” he told his audience, “civilized man is not only independent of this sense, but dislikes any odors emanating from human beings.”1 And if olfactory independence was the mark of civilization, then it was only natural that any emphasis on smelling was therefore under the purview of “animals, primitives, and even semi-enlightened people.”2 Smell was imperative for the survival and mating practices of mammals. The South American jungle Indians, the South Sea Islanders, the Möis of Indochina, the Eskimos, all had a highly developed sense of smell. Moving up the chain of civilization, even Asians, southern Europeans, and South Americans—each falling somewhere between Eskimos and honest-to-god white people on the scale of social evolution—developed cultures where the sense of smell played a role.3

This being the case, any predominant olfactory tendencies by civilized white people had to be considered aberrant. British psychologist Havelock Ellis had argued as early as 1906 that “there is a special tendency to the association of olfactory hallucinations with sexual manifestations.” Nineteenth-century sexologists like Germany’s Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Ireland’s Connolly Norman had said much the same thing. Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, most famous for coining the term “schizophrenia,” dealt with smells and their hallucinations in his seminal Lehrbuch de Psychiatrie, arguing that smell hallucinations were associated with the last stages of manic paresis and schizophrenic delusions.4

And then there was Freud. The Austrian luminary argued that the repression of the pleasure of smell in civilized adults played a direct role in certain predispositions toward nervous diseases, leading specifically to sexual repression, “for we have long known what an intimate relation exists in the animal organization between the sexual impulse and the function of the olfactory organ.” Freud was saying much the same thing in 1908 that psychologists had been saying for much of the late nineteenth century. Sex and smell were undeniably, biologically related. The following year, Freud appeared to have refined his thinking, arguing that “psychoanalysis has filled up the gap in the understanding of fetichisms by showing that the selection of the fetich depends on a coprophilic smell-desire which has been lost through repression.”5 Still, it didn’t require much of an argumentative leap to conclude that, if the sense of smell was linked to sexual problems and fetishes, smell itself could be fetishized.6

Brill was nothing if not familiar with the literature and wrung his hands over the nose and its relation to sexual development. “It is quite obvious,” he argued, “that normal sexual development must depend on the existence of an unimpaired sensorium.”7 In particular, Brill argued that defective sexual development appeared most commonly as “feminine masochism,” a baroque and ostracizing term for male homosexuality. But women weren’t immune to such deficiencies. Brill referenced the work of German otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fliess, who argued that women had genitalstellen, or genital spots, in their noses, which could be treated with cocaine to ease painful menstruation.8

But Brill had his own case studies to bolster his claim that an emphasis on sniffing and smelling was directly related to psychosis.9 As his audience looked on, he told them about patients who couldn’t respond sexually to women who smelled even vaguely like their mothers, about a patient who could only attain ejaculation by rubbing his testicles and smelling his hands. About “anal-sadism.” About mysophobia. About foot and shoe fetishes. About dementia praecox with the dominant symptom of smearing feces on the wall to be surrounded by the foul odor. About a patient who longed for dead carcasses because only the dead wouldn’t push away when he tried to hug, kiss, and smell them. “Without going any further,” Brill noted in a moment of false discretion, “we can say that this patient’s great need was to be able to wallow in the slimy carrion of some dead female body. He was not only coprophilic, but also coprophagic; he often devoured horse manure and on occasion his own excrements.”10

Such had always been the case. Napoleon had an overdeveloped sense of smell, as did Cardinal Richelieu, Henry IV, and even the notorious American socialite Clara Ward, who made a name for herself in the 1890s by marrying a Belgian prince and spent the rest of her days referring to herself as the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay. Oscar Wilde had discussed such smell attractions in The Picture of Dorian Gray, as had Emile Zola, Ben Jonson, and Somerset Maugham. Baudelaire, Poe, Shelley, Nietzsche, Tolstoy. All of them fretted over the particulars of smell. But Brill left no stone unturned. God himself had problematic smell disorders before humans became further civilized. “Jehovah was particularly fond of the sweet savours of burnt offerings—an odor which one would hardly relish nowadays.”11 His children slowly began to refrain from such gifts as humanity developed further and thus learned to repress such problematic relationships with odors.12

And that was the thing. “Cultured humanity has a greater capacity to repress sexual smells than any other feelings. . . . Olfaction is endowed with greater affectivity than any of the other sensory activities despite their common origins.” It was a catch-22 for humanity. Repression of olfactory tendencies was a hallmark of civilization and thus understandable and, for lack of a better word, good. But at the same time, that repression, like all repressions, could double back and cause significant neurotic disorders, particularly sexual disorders. “When man assumed an erect posture and turned his nose away from the earth, smell fell more or less into disuse, which increased with the advance of primitive civilization, when the first sexual taboos were established,” Brill argued. “But, as the first taboos were primarily of an incestuous nature and smell was still an active sex function, primitive man was under special stress to curb this sense.”13 For all of its other problems, that repression ultimately brought us out of the ooze, made us civilized, and kept us from the uncivilized horrors of the South Sea Islands or the Arctic Eskimo population.

Of course, there was one group among the truly white and civilized that had yet to fully develop, a group that was, in constitution, far more primitive than adults: children. Smell gradually declined as children aged, or perhaps it moved back from the conscious mind to the subconscious. But until that transition was complete, children were always going to be fundamentally at risk. Their emphasis on odors put them closer to the primitives than their civilized parents. Journalist Gare Hambridge used a questionnaire to rank the most pleasing odors for adults, and the overwhelming winner among men was the scent of pine. Pine was second among women’s favorite smells. And pine, Brill commented, “has, of course, a marked resemblance to that of turpentine.”14 The Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi had noted as early as 1916 that odors of turpentine, gasoline, and other chemicals led directly to the “sublimation path of anal-eroticism,”15 and such fondnesses surely began in childhood, as children showed a marked tendency toward the smell of turpentine, gasoline, and similar solvents. The adult push for civilization had placed the children of properly cultured parents in the center of a dangerous game.16

The stakes were clearly high. Civilized white people might be able to look laughingly at the olfactory tendencies of animals, shaking their heads as dogs sniffed each other’s asses. They might be able to raise their noses in judgment at the Third World and its inhabitants and use smell as another problematic justification for the latter’s inferiority and lack of social evolution. But they couldn’t stomach either of those reactions when it came to their children. They actually cared about white kids. And white kids were at risk.

Between October 1931 and July 1933, researchers in San Antonio, Texas, recorded seventy-two cases of gasoline and kerosene poisoning in children ranging from ten months to four years old. The children weren’t sniffing it. They were drinking it. But the aroma suckered them in. In one case, a seventeen-month-old boy drank an ounce of kerosene. Doctors tried a gastric lavage. They tried hypodermic atropine and caffeine sodiobenzoate. Nothing seemed to work. Two hours after the child’s admission, his temperature had risen to 106.5, and an hour after that he died. Another boy drank gasoline and died less than two hours later. Of course, not all of the cases were fatal. Overall, 28 percent of gasoline patients died, 9.2 percent of kerosene patients, but all suffered dramatic painful symptoms. Still, “the toxicity produced by the ingestion of coal oil or gasoline need not cause the great concern that aspiration or inhalation of these hydrocarbons causes.” The prognosis became markedly darker when the patients aspirated the products along with ingesting them, which created pneumonitis in the lungs. But breathing the fumes of the petroleum-based products also produced disorders of the nervous system ranging from cyanosis to convulsions to coma. “We feel,” the researchers argued, “that the toxic fractions of these oils reach the vital centers of the central nervous system much more rapidly and in larger amounts when absorption takes place in the lungs. Absorption of these substances from the gastrointestinal tract alone is much slower.”17

Again smell had proved dangerous, particularly to those who had yet to develop. It was the attack on the nervous system, and the respiratory center motor areas in particular, that turned out to be so troublesome. And the most dangerous aspect of such poisonings wasn’t through the mouth. “The prognosis may be said to be in direct ratio to the amount of the hydrocarbon that enters the lungs.”18 The aroma drew children to the toxic chemicals, and whether they chose to drink the chemicals or not, it was the clarion call of that smell that ultimately felled victims.

Of course, if gasoline was a rare commodity then such cases would be a curiosity more than anything else, but the danger that came from such findings was heightened by the fact that gasoline was becoming more and more common (a phenomenon that would, one generation later, push inhalation of glue into the forefront of the national consciousness). Americans were using a billion more gallons of gasoline in 1940 than they had in 1927, pushed by the rise of the automobile. In the late 1930s, the number of gasoline pumps grew at an annual rate of a hundred thousand. While researchers continued to chronicle that growth, however, the public never adopted the widespread fear of narcotic abuse that they would in later generations. As mentioned in the introduction, the paranoia of the 1930s emphasized marijuana.19

Still, there’s no way that any researcher wringing his hands over the potential ...