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In response to horror stories throughout the country concerning childhood deaths from sniffing model airplane glue, organizations around Louisiana would begin lobbying for legislation to criminalize the practice in 1966. State lawmakers spent much of that summer crafting an anti-glue-sniffing measure for the state. The debates that resulted from the attempt, however, never really focused on the sustainability or practical use of such a law, but instead on the kind of law it would ultimately be—whether, for example, retailers would be liable for selling glue to minors, even though model airplanes and other kits and toys required such items. Or whether the ingredients in model airplane glue could be classed as schedule one narcotics. Such questions ultimately framed a debate about the fundamental nature of the offense being committed. Ultimately, (unlike other Deep South states) Louisiana decided that sniffing glue was not a drug crime. Instead, it was a problem that affected “the health and morals of minors.”
Keywords: Louisiana, Glue, Legislation, Childhood, Parenting, Juvenile Delinquency
Louisiana, Glue, Legislation, Childhood, Parenting, Juvenile Delinquency
Lake Ponchartrain wasn’t exactly secluded, but it was far enough away from New Orleans to provide protective cover from the watchful eyes of the police. If they needed the protective cover at all. The group of teenagers had come out to the lake to get high, but in the warm spring of 1966, they weren’t technically doing anything illegal. It wasn’t heroin. It wasn’t pot. It wasn’t even LSD (which would be outlawed by the federal government later that year). The kids had come to Lake Ponchartrain to sniff glue (Baton Rouge Advocate, 21 April 1966, 4-C). Sniffing glue wasn’t technically illegal in Louisiana, but police raided the party anyway. It was a problem if not a crime.
Louisiana—like the rest of the South—had built itself over the last three centuries on personal responsibility and individual rights over and against a legislative program that further impinged on what it deemed to be its personal liberty. The year prior, southern legislators had made much the same case against the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. Glue sniffing and its discontents would provide a trial of the veracity of such claims. Most of the Deep South states would decide to solve such problems with legislation, but the machinations that provided that legislation, as well as the legislation itself, would draw clear distinctions between the states in their thinking about such conundrums and the imperatives that created such thought.
Still, despite the variance in interpretation among Deep South legislatures, all of the states in the region debated such a law, and all but Alabama passed one. The process belied the myth of the solid South, but the imperatives that drove legislatures to support such a measure did bridge the significant chasms of race, urban-rural divide, and even party loyalty, and they did so despite the fact that months prior, before the racial defeats of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, such legislation would have been interpreted as the epitome of frivolous government intervention and an assault on the personal liberty and business independence that drove white southern arguments against such civil rights mandates. The Deep South was slow to respond to the glue sniffing epidemic of the 1960s, but when it did, its state-initiated legislative agenda was far more comprehensive than any other region in the country.
The first reports of problematic behavior with model glue appeared in 1959, when a series of children in western cities were arrested for delinquency after it was discovered they had been huffing glue. The Denver Post picked up on the story and did its own expose, leading other papers to crusade in much the same way. That story, in August 1959, either provided the initial shot across the bow for research into the subject or convinced children in the area to give it a try, because over the succeeding years, Colorado’s youth experienced a legitimate “epidemic.”1
The rapid development of that “epidemic” quickly spread throughout the country. Or, perhaps, the Colorado investigations led other states to start emphasizing analysis of such behavior. And they found it everywhere. Salt Lake City’s problem became national news in short order. New York’s epidemic began in 1961, with health officials and law enforcement officers publicly ringing their hands about instances of glue sniffing and the overwhelming availability of a product that was, essentially, designed to be in the hands of children.2
There is no reason to believe that such behavior somehow avoided the American South prior to the second half of the decade. But the “closed society” of the protectionist South still in the throes of the Civil Rights Movement and its attendant political upheavals kept such concerns from the front pages of southern newspapers. There was no new social menace more threatening to the area’s traditional mores than integration. But as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 came and went, proving to the white South that civil rights was an epidemic they would never be able to quarantine, the congressional losses freed southern legislators to focus on the subtler illnesses that plagued the youth of the region.3
In April 1966, Louisiana’s Social Welfare Planning Council (SWPC) held a seminar in New Orleans on the developing drug epidemic in the state. Glue sniffing, said the American Social Health Association’s Charles Winick, was ominous. “We not only have the immediate problem of the youngster dosing himself, but this may be a prelude to a graver social pathology in addiction to the widely reported instances of death and bizarre behavior, such as walking off roofs and in front of cars”. (Lenore & Ralph, Spring 1968, p.183) If that weren’t enough, Winick told his New Orleans audiences, glue could ultimately be a gateway to marijuana, LSD, or heroin (Lenore & Ralph, Spring 1968, p.183). Louisiana’s lawmakers were listening.
On May 25, 1966, a contingent of forty-five Louisiana state representatives brought a new bill to the House floor. It was designed to amend the criminal code to regulate the sale and use of the glue used to make model cars and airplanes. The next day, the proposed legislation went to the Judiciary Committee, and by early June the bill had received a favorable report. It was then passed (with four votes against) and ordered to the Senate on June 13(House Bill No. 752, 1966, p.193; House Bill No. 752, 1966, pp.288, 330, 643, 685, 907-908).
The bill was spearheaded by New Orleans congressman Eddie Sapir (from the city’s Thirteenth Ward), who assured families that those children with legitimate interests in models would not be punished. Their parents could buy them the necessary glue. Besides, he argued, both the FBI and juvenile court judges all supported such measures by state governments. Others had already passed such laws. Sniffing glue led to “cruel or violent behavior” and needed to be stopped. “Police records are full of violence and crime because of glue sniffing,” Sapir told reporters, “and it only costs fifteen cents a tube. There are no controls now whatsoever”.(Baton Rouge Advocate, 3 June 1966, 10-C)
And controls were precisely what were needed. Three days prior to House passage of the glue sniffing bill, thirteen-year-old Henry Borsch lay dead beside a half empty can of gasoline in a vacant Monroe parking lot. It wasn’t Borsch’s first time, but his worried parents had always managed to find him and stop the behavior before it got out of hand (Baton Rouge Advocate, 11 June 1966, 10-A; Monroe Morning World, 11 June 1966, 1).
While the bill moved through the House, a study sponsored by the city of New Orleans found evidence of increased narcotic use of model glue and other inhaled solvents by children eleven to thirteen years old, leading councilman Clarence O. Dupuy to sponsor a citywide anti-glue sniffing ordinance, which passed unanimously. The measure made sniffing glue illegal in New Orleans and placed restrictions on its purchase. It made selling model glue to anyone under eighteen a crime. It was, said Dupuy, “the most comprehensive legislation prepared to date in the United States to combat the ever-increasing menace of glue sniffing to children.” The SWPC endorsed the ordinance, as did the Metropolitan Crime Commission and the New Orleans Health Department (Baton Rouge Advocate, 24 June 1966, 15A; Louisiana Weekly, 2 July 1966, 2, 8).
But though the ordinance was passed unanimously, there was a debate. Councilman Walter F. Marcus, Jr. wondered about the House bill moving through the legislature and wondered whether or not the law would override the city ordinance. After all, the city’s plan ensured that glue would be sold with model kits. All sales to minors outside of those bounds would require written consent from a parent or legal guardian. Not to worry, Dupuy ensured. He would ask the Senate to amend the bill to fall in line with Orleans Parish. “This glue-sniffing has become such a menace, that the city just can’t stand by and wait to see what the legislature will do”. (Louisiana Weekly, 2 July 1966, 2, 8)
Sapir, Dupuy, and Marcus were all from New Orleans. Of the forty-five representatives sponsoring the bill, twenty-two were from Orleans and Jefferson parishes. Four more were from East Baton Rouge Parish, two more from Caddo, home to Shreveport. One was from Lafayette. Eight more were from parishes surrounding those urban areas. Only seven, in fact, were from rural outlying parishes.4 The movement, then, was fundamentally urban. Rural areas weren’t immune from drug abuse, nor were they immune from kids who spent their free time constructing models. But urban drug abuse was far more prominent, and the pitfalls that accompanied crowded city life made such drug abuse more dangerous, whether that danger came from drug-related violence or from accidents created by intoxication. “Walking off roofs and in front of cars,” after all, becomes proportionally more dangerous as the buildings get taller and the traffic becomes more congested.
It would be tempting to argue that rural areas were less likely to support such legislation because of an antipathy to excessive government legislations or because of an antipathy to urban problems in general, but that element of the urban-rural paradigm doesn’t seem to be in evidence in Louisiana’s glue sniffing debate. Two of the four house votes against the initial glue-sniffing bill came from rural parishes, but the other two came from Rapides and Calcasieu parishes, home to moderate-sized cities Alexandria and Lake Charles, respectively.5 Furthermore, when the machinations that created the law ran their course and a final vote was taken, the verdict was unanimous.
So the glue-sniffing measure was fundamentally urban because Louisiana legislators saw glue sniffing as an urban problem, but state consent was broad in its application, easily bridging the urban-rural divide.
The principals had something else in common, as well. They were all white. Still, though this was a South in the throes of civil rights, the glue sniffing measure was supported across racial lines. Founded in 1955 by Ellis F. Hull, the United Voters League (UVL) was one of a series of voting rights organizations in the state, situated amongst groups like Alexander Tureaud’s Orleans Parish Progressive Voters League, the Crescent City Independent Voters League, the New Orleans Voters League, and the New Orleans Voters Association. Its base of support was in the Second Ward, but its influence gave Hull a loud voice. And Hull wanted the glue sniffing legislation passed. “We the United Voters League, Inc. wholeheartedly support House Bill #752,” stated a letter from the UVL to every Louisiana legislator. “Because of a definite increase in the sale of large quantities of glue to minors by community stores and its improper use by buyers, this could lead to the child or children becoming a dope addict; for it is a fact that unrestricted sales of this glue have contributed to juvenile delinquency in the New Orleans area”. (Louisiana Weekly, 11 June 1966, 1, 10; Adam, 1995, p. 513)
Such was the power of the issue. Glue served to bridge the various divides that tore New Orleans and greater Louisiana apart. It was an intoxicant, and therefore influential with children and teenagers of any race or color. It was cheaper than Schedule One narcotics, so it was available largely to the poor. It was used for model airplanes and cars, so it was also in the hands of the more affluent who could afford such diversions. Glue sniffing, it seemed, left race and class in its wake, unifying both in the great cause of getting high. Or, to be more charitable, the great cause of youthful rebellion.
When the Louisiana Senate took the bill from the House, its own Judiciary Committee found it satisfactory in early July, but floor debate led to a series of amendments proposed by a group of senators led by George D. Tessier, who was, unsurprisingly, also from New Orleans.6
Councilman Dupuy had instigated much of the amendment talk, but his desire had been to find a “happy medium” between his city ordinance and the House bill. But there was nothing medium about the proposed amendments. The House bill defined “model glue” as any substance containing one of twelve different solvents, along with “any other solvent, material, substance, chemical or combination thereof having the property of releasing toxic vapors.”7 It made sniffing or inhaling any such substances a misdemeanor, as it did selling or transferring them to minors unless the donor was a parent or guardian. Fines ranged between twenty-five and one hundred dollars and up to ninety days in jail (House Bill No. 752, Volume 1, Regular Session, 1966, pp.306-307).
Senate revisions, however, listed twenty banned solvents.8 Along with citing the illegality of inhaling those solvents, it also made “induc[ing] any other person to do so” a misdemeanor offense. It prohibited possession with intent to use and possession with intent to distribute. Sale to minors had to come with written authorizations from parents or guardians, and files had to be kept on all such sales for police inspection for at least one year. Wholesalers could only sell model glue to retailers “customarily handling such product in the ordinary course of his or its business at a fixed location.” And retailers could only sell it if they were recognized as “bona fide” in that custom. Even if retailers did receive their product through reputable wholesalers, and even if they had established credentials as the sort of place that found it necessary to sell model glue, they were still barred from selling more than one tube to any customer, regardless of age, for any twenty-four hour period. And finally, retailers could not keep model glue on public display, giving easy access to shoplifters.9
The Senate rejected every substantive amendment 24-14 (with one absentee). The new version of the bill made model glue sound a lot like a class one narcotic and put a broad range of strictures on small businesses. While paranoia about the destructive narcotic use of chemical solvents was certainly real, the imposition on sellers was more than the body of small government conservative Democrats could take. Still, when the original version of the bill was called to a vote, it passed unanimously (House Bill No. 752, 1966, pp.1509, 1513-1514, 1558-1559, 1593-1594).
The amendments that did make it through were brief cosmetic and grammatical additions, and the House quickly and unanimously approved them and passed the revised bill on July 7. It was signed later that day.10
The new law took its place in Part V of the Criminal Code, those “Offenses Affecting the Public Morals.”Part V had been modified extensively since the end of World War II. The revised statutes of 1950 included amongst its crimes against public morality statutory rape, prostitution, abortion, homosexuality and bestiality(lumped together as “crimes against nature”), and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Also included was a provision against “cruelty to juveniles,” broadly construed (Act 2 of the Extraordinary Session of 1950, Vol. 2, 1950, pp.369-373; West’s Louisiana Statutes Annotated: Revised Statutes, Sections 14:1 to 14: End, 1951, Vol. 9, pp.531-538).. By 1968, prostitution and crimes against adult morality had been excised from Part V, replaced by a new litany of “offenses affecting the health and morals of minors.” Selling alcohol and pornography to minors was off limits. So too was selling them poisonous reptiles. It was illegal to give minors tattoos. It was here, in the set of offenses particularly targeted at juveniles, which the model glue statute resided(Louisiana Revised Statutes 1972: Pocket Parts, 1973, Vol. 2, pp. 145-151).
This was an understandable trend. Childhood and its pitfalls were far more dangerous for baby boomers, who grew up in a crucible of student protest, Black Power, and the counterculture that moved around all of it. Still, the placement of the legislation is telling. The glue sniffing ban was not housed with other criminal drug offenses. Heroin, it seemed, could be dangerous to anyone, but sniffing household solvents was something clearly within the purview of adolescents. Here again is the discrepancy between the Senate’s amended bill and the House’s original and final product. The Senate amendments made the glue sniffing legislation into a drug bill. But in the minds of the bulk of state legislators, it wasn’t a drug bill. It was a bill promoting “the health and morals of minors.” Not all states would view such legislation in the same light.
In practice, however, the law gave authorities guidance as to the arrest and punishment of offenders. The law could work as a drug bill if it had to. Still, the most significant case stemming from the legislation fell wholly in line with the state’s thinking. In Louisiana v. Dimopoullas (1972), a defendant charged with indecent behavior with juveniles was simultaneously charged with using glue as an accessory to the crime. An adult woman brought model glue to the home of a minor for the express purpose of getting him high, thereby enhancing his willingness “for commission of lewd and lascivious acts.” This was transfer without parental consent. It was transfer for the purpose of unlawful inhalation. It was a version of what would later be termed statutory rape. And, ultimately, it was blatant disregard for “the health and morals of minors”.11 Such was the core of Louisiana’s thinking about model glue. Had the two conspired with, for example, cocaine, the drug charge would have superseded the couple’s “lewd and lascivious acts,” and, more than likely, the teenager would have been seen as a coconspirator. But because the glue sniffing law aided protective childcare over and against the toxin’s narcotic classification, the teenager became a victim. Louisiana v. Dimopoullas wasn’t a drug case. It was a case involving the corruption of a minor. Such subtle differences gave model glue a fundamentally unique standing in Louisiana law. It was a drug, but it was also a tool to corrupt the morality of minors. And though illegal narcotics certainly have the power to corrupt the morality of minors, they don’t necessarily have to. And there are plenty of things other than drugs—poisonous reptiles, for example—that can also corrupt their morals. The definition of the law and its placement within the criminal code ultimately changed the criminal meaning of one specific form of narcotic intoxication, making that form of intoxication a fundamentally different crime than all the others.
The placement of the Louisiana law would also make it fundamentally different from those of other southern states that passed similar statutes. Florida followed the next year, the Deep South state with the most urban areas. Its 1967 law not only spanned urban-rural divides, but also bridged party lines in the only Deep South state with a sizeable Republican population. Ultimately, its list of banned substances was placed in the state’s Miscellaneous Crimes laws, along with tampering with sewer systems and killing young veal for profit. Then there was Mississippi, who followed in 1968. Though, like Louisiana and Florida, Mississippi’s bill was clearly directed at adolescents, it was neither a drug nor a morality law. Mississippi placed its statute amongst“Crimes Affecting Public Health,” grouping it with other illegal poisons. The Georgia statute also appeared in 1968. It required written records of sales to everyone under eighteen, it required written consent of parents before minors could purchase glue, and it prohibited both possession with intent to use and possession with intent to distribute.12 Unlike Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi, Georgia created a drug law. Consequently, it took residence in the “Controlled Substances” section of the Georgia Criminal Code with other drugs and intoxicants.13
The following year, 1969, Alabama would attempt to pass its own glue sniffing measure, but it would ultimately fall at the hands of a dictatorial legislative leader who thought the law to be frivolous. It was 1969, a full decade since the glue sniffing epidemic had appeared. Alabama’s youth were still surely susceptible to such enticements and dangers, but gone were the national headlines. The disease remained but the hysteria had largely dissipated.
The following year, in 1970, Hawaii congresswoman Patsy Mink would crusade for a federal law to regulate glue sniffing. She remained adamant that just because the headlines had gotten smaller and the news stories had moved farther back in the paper, that didn’t mean that the problem had magically been solved. The only way to give authorities the power they needed to police the problem was to provide federal legislation.14 It was the great lesson of civil rights. Federal action, not that of individual states, led to tangible, permanent solutions. Her effort would fail, drowned as it would be by the larger imperatives of Vietnam and Black Power—the same sort of momentum that kept the Deep South from considering such legislation until the second half of the 1960s.
But the South’s eventual consideration, with whatever deliberate speed it took to arrive at that point, demonstrated that it was perfectly willing to impinge on personal liberty and Sunbelt business imperatives in aid of remedying the ills of its population, functionally nullifying all the arguments it made on the barricades of the Civil Rights Movement. Through the variations in legal intent and scope, each Deep South state, save Alabama, passed legislation that regulated the purchase, transfer, and inhalation of toxic solvents in aid of protecting the youth of the South. In the process, it developed the most comprehensive regional push to quell the epidemic, willingly bending its own legislative assumptions to ensure effective control.
Reference
Anonymous (1961, 6 October). L.I. Youths Inhale Glue in Model Kits for Narcotic Effect. New York Times, 37;
Anonymous (1962, 26 September) .City Investigating “Kicks” from Glue. New York Times, 24
Anonymous (1963, 25 April). City Plans Drive On Glue-Sniffing. New York Times, 35
Anonymous (1963, 5 December). Youth Killed in Plunge. New York Times, 52.
Anonymous (1966, 11 June) .Monroe Student Found Dead in Abandoned Car. Baton Rouge Advocate, 10A;
Anonymous (1966, 11 June). UVL Backs Legislation to Stop Glue Sniffing. Louisiana Weekly, 1, 10;
Anonymous (1966, 2 July 1966).City Council Passes Law to Curb “Glue Sniffing”. Louisiana Weekly, 2, 8.
Anonymous (1966, 21 April). Glue Sniffing Could Become More Serious. Baton Rouge Advocate, 4-C.
Anonymous (1966, 24 June). Glue Sniffing Is Outlawed by N.O. Council. Baton Rouge Advocate, 15A.
Anonymous (1982, 27 October). US Judge Orders a New Trial for Head of Louisiana Senate. New York Times.
Anonymous (1983, 5 February).Louisiana State Senate President is Found Guilty. The Spokesman-Review, 36.
Anonymous (1996, 3 June 1966). Model Glue Bill Sent to Floor by House Unit. Baton Rouge Advocate, 10C.
Becher, E. M. & the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine. The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs. Available Internet:
Chanberg, S.H. (1963, 18 December).. City Acts to Halt Sniffing of Glue. New York Times, 43.
Criminal Code: Part V. Offenses Affecting the Public Morals. (1950). Louisiana Revised Statutes of 1950, Act 2 of the Extraordinary Session of 1950 (Vol. 2, 369-373). St. Paul: West Publishing.
Fairclough, A. (1995).Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 .Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Houseworth, D. E. A Study of Retreatism in Glue Sniffing and Non-Glue-Sniffing Delinquents In Utah (PhD dissertation, Brigham Young University, 1968).http://www.druglibrary.org/Schaffer/LIBRARY/studies/cu/cumenu.htm.
Kupperstein, L. R., & Susman, R. M. (Spring 1968). A Bibliography on the Inhalation of Glue Fumes and Other Toxic Vapors—A Substance Abuse Practice Among Adolescents. The International Journal of the Addictions 3, 183.
Louisiana: West Publishing Company. (Eds.). (1986). West’s Louisiana Statutes Annotated: Revised Statutes, St. Paul, MN: West Group.
McEnany, A.E. ( 2002). Membership in the Louisiana Senate, 1880-2004. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Senate.
Poynter, D.R. (2010). Membership in the Louisiana House of Representatives, 1812-2012, Baton Rouge: Louisiana House of Representatives.
Sharp, C. W. & Brehm, M.L. (October 1977). Review of Inhalants: Euphoria to Dysfunction, NIDA Research Monograph 15, 3-4.
State of Georgia. (1968). Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia (Senate Bill No. 205), 1 1194-1196.
State of Louisiana. (1966). Acts of the Legislature (Act No. 110 .House Bill No. 752).Vol. 1, pp. 306-307.
State of Louisiana. (1966). House Bill No. 752 (Twenty-Ninth Regular Session of the Legislature, 1558).
State of Louisiana. (1966). Legislative Calendar of the State of Louisiana (House Bill No. 752), 193.
State of Louisiana. (1966). Official Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Louisiana, (House Bill No. 752), 599, 601, 907-908, 1403-1404,1558, 1886.
Keywords: Louisiana, Glue, Legislation, Childhood, Parenting, Juvenile Delinquency
Louisiana, Glue, Legislation, Childhood, Parenting, Juvenile Delinquency
Lake Ponchartrain wasn’t exactly secluded, but it was far enough away from New Orleans to provide protective cover from the watchful eyes of the police. If they needed the protective cover at all. The group of teenagers had come out to the lake to get high, but in the warm spring of 1966, they weren’t technically doing anything illegal. It wasn’t heroin. It wasn’t pot. It wasn’t even LSD (which would be outlawed by the federal government later that year). The kids had come to Lake Ponchartrain to sniff glue (Baton Rouge Advocate, 21 April 1966, 4-C). Sniffing glue wasn’t technically illegal in Louisiana, but police raided the party anyway. It was a problem if not a crime.
Louisiana—like the rest of the South—had built itself over the last three centuries on personal responsibility and individual rights over and against a legislative program that further impinged on what it deemed to be its personal liberty. The year prior, southern legislators had made much the same case against the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. Glue sniffing and its discontents would provide a trial of the veracity of such claims. Most of the Deep South states would decide to solve such problems with legislation, but the machinations that provided that legislation, as well as the legislation itself, would draw clear distinctions between the states in their thinking about such conundrums and the imperatives that created such thought.
Still, despite the variance in interpretation among Deep South legislatures, all of the states in the region debated such a law, and all but Alabama passed one. The process belied the myth of the solid South, but the imperatives that drove legislatures to support such a measure did bridge the significant chasms of race, urban-rural divide, and even party loyalty, and they did so despite the fact that months prior, before the racial defeats of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, such legislation would have been interpreted as the epitome of frivolous government intervention and an assault on the personal liberty and business independence that drove white southern arguments against such civil rights mandates. The Deep South was slow to respond to the glue sniffing epidemic of the 1960s, but when it did, its state-initiated legislative agenda was far more comprehensive than any other region in the country.
The first reports of problematic behavior with model glue appeared in 1959, when a series of children in western cities were arrested for delinquency after it was discovered they had been huffing glue. The Denver Post picked up on the story and did its own expose, leading other papers to crusade in much the same way. That story, in August 1959, either provided the initial shot across the bow for research into the subject or convinced children in the area to give it a try, because over the succeeding years, Colorado’s youth experienced a legitimate “epidemic.”1
The rapid development of that “epidemic” quickly spread throughout the country. Or, perhaps, the Colorado investigations led other states to start emphasizing analysis of such behavior. And they found it everywhere. Salt Lake City’s problem became national news in short order. New York’s epidemic began in 1961, with health officials and law enforcement officers publicly ringing their hands about instances of glue sniffing and the overwhelming availability of a product that was, essentially, designed to be in the hands of children.2
There is no reason to believe that such behavior somehow avoided the American South prior to the second half of the decade. But the “closed society” of the protectionist South still in the throes of the Civil Rights Movement and its attendant political upheavals kept such concerns from the front pages of southern newspapers. There was no new social menace more threatening to the area’s traditional mores than integration. But as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 came and went, proving to the white South that civil rights was an epidemic they would never be able to quarantine, the congressional losses freed southern legislators to focus on the subtler illnesses that plagued the youth of the region.3
In April 1966, Louisiana’s Social Welfare Planning Council (SWPC) held a seminar in New Orleans on the developing drug epidemic in the state. Glue sniffing, said the American Social Health Association’s Charles Winick, was ominous. “We not only have the immediate problem of the youngster dosing himself, but this may be a prelude to a graver social pathology in addiction to the widely reported instances of death and bizarre behavior, such as walking off roofs and in front of cars”. (Lenore & Ralph, Spring 1968, p.183) If that weren’t enough, Winick told his New Orleans audiences, glue could ultimately be a gateway to marijuana, LSD, or heroin (Lenore & Ralph, Spring 1968, p.183). Louisiana’s lawmakers were listening.
On May 25, 1966, a contingent of forty-five Louisiana state representatives brought a new bill to the House floor. It was designed to amend the criminal code to regulate the sale and use of the glue used to make model cars and airplanes. The next day, the proposed legislation went to the Judiciary Committee, and by early June the bill had received a favorable report. It was then passed (with four votes against) and ordered to the Senate on June 13(House Bill No. 752, 1966, p.193; House Bill No. 752, 1966, pp.288, 330, 643, 685, 907-908).
The bill was spearheaded by New Orleans congressman Eddie Sapir (from the city’s Thirteenth Ward), who assured families that those children with legitimate interests in models would not be punished. Their parents could buy them the necessary glue. Besides, he argued, both the FBI and juvenile court judges all supported such measures by state governments. Others had already passed such laws. Sniffing glue led to “cruel or violent behavior” and needed to be stopped. “Police records are full of violence and crime because of glue sniffing,” Sapir told reporters, “and it only costs fifteen cents a tube. There are no controls now whatsoever”.(Baton Rouge Advocate, 3 June 1966, 10-C)
And controls were precisely what were needed. Three days prior to House passage of the glue sniffing bill, thirteen-year-old Henry Borsch lay dead beside a half empty can of gasoline in a vacant Monroe parking lot. It wasn’t Borsch’s first time, but his worried parents had always managed to find him and stop the behavior before it got out of hand (Baton Rouge Advocate, 11 June 1966, 10-A; Monroe Morning World, 11 June 1966, 1).
While the bill moved through the House, a study sponsored by the city of New Orleans found evidence of increased narcotic use of model glue and other inhaled solvents by children eleven to thirteen years old, leading councilman Clarence O. Dupuy to sponsor a citywide anti-glue sniffing ordinance, which passed unanimously. The measure made sniffing glue illegal in New Orleans and placed restrictions on its purchase. It made selling model glue to anyone under eighteen a crime. It was, said Dupuy, “the most comprehensive legislation prepared to date in the United States to combat the ever-increasing menace of glue sniffing to children.” The SWPC endorsed the ordinance, as did the Metropolitan Crime Commission and the New Orleans Health Department (Baton Rouge Advocate, 24 June 1966, 15A; Louisiana Weekly, 2 July 1966, 2, 8).
But though the ordinance was passed unanimously, there was a debate. Councilman Walter F. Marcus, Jr. wondered about the House bill moving through the legislature and wondered whether or not the law would override the city ordinance. After all, the city’s plan ensured that glue would be sold with model kits. All sales to minors outside of those bounds would require written consent from a parent or legal guardian. Not to worry, Dupuy ensured. He would ask the Senate to amend the bill to fall in line with Orleans Parish. “This glue-sniffing has become such a menace, that the city just can’t stand by and wait to see what the legislature will do”. (Louisiana Weekly, 2 July 1966, 2, 8)
Sapir, Dupuy, and Marcus were all from New Orleans. Of the forty-five representatives sponsoring the bill, twenty-two were from Orleans and Jefferson parishes. Four more were from East Baton Rouge Parish, two more from Caddo, home to Shreveport. One was from Lafayette. Eight more were from parishes surrounding those urban areas. Only seven, in fact, were from rural outlying parishes.4 The movement, then, was fundamentally urban. Rural areas weren’t immune from drug abuse, nor were they immune from kids who spent their free time constructing models. But urban drug abuse was far more prominent, and the pitfalls that accompanied crowded city life made such drug abuse more dangerous, whether that danger came from drug-related violence or from accidents created by intoxication. “Walking off roofs and in front of cars,” after all, becomes proportionally more dangerous as the buildings get taller and the traffic becomes more congested.
It would be tempting to argue that rural areas were less likely to support such legislation because of an antipathy to excessive government legislations or because of an antipathy to urban problems in general, but that element of the urban-rural paradigm doesn’t seem to be in evidence in Louisiana’s glue sniffing debate. Two of the four house votes against the initial glue-sniffing bill came from rural parishes, but the other two came from Rapides and Calcasieu parishes, home to moderate-sized cities Alexandria and Lake Charles, respectively.5 Furthermore, when the machinations that created the law ran their course and a final vote was taken, the verdict was unanimous.
So the glue-sniffing measure was fundamentally urban because Louisiana legislators saw glue sniffing as an urban problem, but state consent was broad in its application, easily bridging the urban-rural divide.
The principals had something else in common, as well. They were all white. Still, though this was a South in the throes of civil rights, the glue sniffing measure was supported across racial lines. Founded in 1955 by Ellis F. Hull, the United Voters League (UVL) was one of a series of voting rights organizations in the state, situated amongst groups like Alexander Tureaud’s Orleans Parish Progressive Voters League, the Crescent City Independent Voters League, the New Orleans Voters League, and the New Orleans Voters Association. Its base of support was in the Second Ward, but its influence gave Hull a loud voice. And Hull wanted the glue sniffing legislation passed. “We the United Voters League, Inc. wholeheartedly support House Bill #752,” stated a letter from the UVL to every Louisiana legislator. “Because of a definite increase in the sale of large quantities of glue to minors by community stores and its improper use by buyers, this could lead to the child or children becoming a dope addict; for it is a fact that unrestricted sales of this glue have contributed to juvenile delinquency in the New Orleans area”. (Louisiana Weekly, 11 June 1966, 1, 10; Adam, 1995, p. 513)
Such was the power of the issue. Glue served to bridge the various divides that tore New Orleans and greater Louisiana apart. It was an intoxicant, and therefore influential with children and teenagers of any race or color. It was cheaper than Schedule One narcotics, so it was available largely to the poor. It was used for model airplanes and cars, so it was also in the hands of the more affluent who could afford such diversions. Glue sniffing, it seemed, left race and class in its wake, unifying both in the great cause of getting high. Or, to be more charitable, the great cause of youthful rebellion.
When the Louisiana Senate took the bill from the House, its own Judiciary Committee found it satisfactory in early July, but floor debate led to a series of amendments proposed by a group of senators led by George D. Tessier, who was, unsurprisingly, also from New Orleans.6
Councilman Dupuy had instigated much of the amendment talk, but his desire had been to find a “happy medium” between his city ordinance and the House bill. But there was nothing medium about the proposed amendments. The House bill defined “model glue” as any substance containing one of twelve different solvents, along with “any other solvent, material, substance, chemical or combination thereof having the property of releasing toxic vapors.”7 It made sniffing or inhaling any such substances a misdemeanor, as it did selling or transferring them to minors unless the donor was a parent or guardian. Fines ranged between twenty-five and one hundred dollars and up to ninety days in jail (House Bill No. 752, Volume 1, Regular Session, 1966, pp.306-307).
Senate revisions, however, listed twenty banned solvents.8 Along with citing the illegality of inhaling those solvents, it also made “induc[ing] any other person to do so” a misdemeanor offense. It prohibited possession with intent to use and possession with intent to distribute. Sale to minors had to come with written authorizations from parents or guardians, and files had to be kept on all such sales for police inspection for at least one year. Wholesalers could only sell model glue to retailers “customarily handling such product in the ordinary course of his or its business at a fixed location.” And retailers could only sell it if they were recognized as “bona fide” in that custom. Even if retailers did receive their product through reputable wholesalers, and even if they had established credentials as the sort of place that found it necessary to sell model glue, they were still barred from selling more than one tube to any customer, regardless of age, for any twenty-four hour period. And finally, retailers could not keep model glue on public display, giving easy access to shoplifters.9
The Senate rejected every substantive amendment 24-14 (with one absentee). The new version of the bill made model glue sound a lot like a class one narcotic and put a broad range of strictures on small businesses. While paranoia about the destructive narcotic use of chemical solvents was certainly real, the imposition on sellers was more than the body of small government conservative Democrats could take. Still, when the original version of the bill was called to a vote, it passed unanimously (House Bill No. 752, 1966, pp.1509, 1513-1514, 1558-1559, 1593-1594).
The amendments that did make it through were brief cosmetic and grammatical additions, and the House quickly and unanimously approved them and passed the revised bill on July 7. It was signed later that day.10
The new law took its place in Part V of the Criminal Code, those “Offenses Affecting the Public Morals.”Part V had been modified extensively since the end of World War II. The revised statutes of 1950 included amongst its crimes against public morality statutory rape, prostitution, abortion, homosexuality and bestiality(lumped together as “crimes against nature”), and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Also included was a provision against “cruelty to juveniles,” broadly construed (Act 2 of the Extraordinary Session of 1950, Vol. 2, 1950, pp.369-373; West’s Louisiana Statutes Annotated: Revised Statutes, Sections 14:1 to 14: End, 1951, Vol. 9, pp.531-538).. By 1968, prostitution and crimes against adult morality had been excised from Part V, replaced by a new litany of “offenses affecting the health and morals of minors.” Selling alcohol and pornography to minors was off limits. So too was selling them poisonous reptiles. It was illegal to give minors tattoos. It was here, in the set of offenses particularly targeted at juveniles, which the model glue statute resided(Louisiana Revised Statutes 1972: Pocket Parts, 1973, Vol. 2, pp. 145-151).
This was an understandable trend. Childhood and its pitfalls were far more dangerous for baby boomers, who grew up in a crucible of student protest, Black Power, and the counterculture that moved around all of it. Still, the placement of the legislation is telling. The glue sniffing ban was not housed with other criminal drug offenses. Heroin, it seemed, could be dangerous to anyone, but sniffing household solvents was something clearly within the purview of adolescents. Here again is the discrepancy between the Senate’s amended bill and the House’s original and final product. The Senate amendments made the glue sniffing legislation into a drug bill. But in the minds of the bulk of state legislators, it wasn’t a drug bill. It was a bill promoting “the health and morals of minors.” Not all states would view such legislation in the same light.
In practice, however, the law gave authorities guidance as to the arrest and punishment of offenders. The law could work as a drug bill if it had to. Still, the most significant case stemming from the legislation fell wholly in line with the state’s thinking. In Louisiana v. Dimopoullas (1972), a defendant charged with indecent behavior with juveniles was simultaneously charged with using glue as an accessory to the crime. An adult woman brought model glue to the home of a minor for the express purpose of getting him high, thereby enhancing his willingness “for commission of lewd and lascivious acts.” This was transfer without parental consent. It was transfer for the purpose of unlawful inhalation. It was a version of what would later be termed statutory rape. And, ultimately, it was blatant disregard for “the health and morals of minors”.11 Such was the core of Louisiana’s thinking about model glue. Had the two conspired with, for example, cocaine, the drug charge would have superseded the couple’s “lewd and lascivious acts,” and, more than likely, the teenager would have been seen as a coconspirator. But because the glue sniffing law aided protective childcare over and against the toxin’s narcotic classification, the teenager became a victim. Louisiana v. Dimopoullas wasn’t a drug case. It was a case involving the corruption of a minor. Such subtle differences gave model glue a fundamentally unique standing in Louisiana law. It was a drug, but it was also a tool to corrupt the morality of minors. And though illegal narcotics certainly have the power to corrupt the morality of minors, they don’t necessarily have to. And there are plenty of things other than drugs—poisonous reptiles, for example—that can also corrupt their morals. The definition of the law and its placement within the criminal code ultimately changed the criminal meaning of one specific form of narcotic intoxication, making that form of intoxication a fundamentally different crime than all the others.
The placement of the Louisiana law would also make it fundamentally different from those of other southern states that passed similar statutes. Florida followed the next year, the Deep South state with the most urban areas. Its 1967 law not only spanned urban-rural divides, but also bridged party lines in the only Deep South state with a sizeable Republican population. Ultimately, its list of banned substances was placed in the state’s Miscellaneous Crimes laws, along with tampering with sewer systems and killing young veal for profit. Then there was Mississippi, who followed in 1968. Though, like Louisiana and Florida, Mississippi’s bill was clearly directed at adolescents, it was neither a drug nor a morality law. Mississippi placed its statute amongst“Crimes Affecting Public Health,” grouping it with other illegal poisons. The Georgia statute also appeared in 1968. It required written records of sales to everyone under eighteen, it required written consent of parents before minors could purchase glue, and it prohibited both possession with intent to use and possession with intent to distribute.12 Unlike Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi, Georgia created a drug law. Consequently, it took residence in the “Controlled Substances” section of the Georgia Criminal Code with other drugs and intoxicants.13
The following year, 1969, Alabama would attempt to pass its own glue sniffing measure, but it would ultimately fall at the hands of a dictatorial legislative leader who thought the law to be frivolous. It was 1969, a full decade since the glue sniffing epidemic had appeared. Alabama’s youth were still surely susceptible to such enticements and dangers, but gone were the national headlines. The disease remained but the hysteria had largely dissipated.
The following year, in 1970, Hawaii congresswoman Patsy Mink would crusade for a federal law to regulate glue sniffing. She remained adamant that just because the headlines had gotten smaller and the news stories had moved farther back in the paper, that didn’t mean that the problem had magically been solved. The only way to give authorities the power they needed to police the problem was to provide federal legislation.14 It was the great lesson of civil rights. Federal action, not that of individual states, led to tangible, permanent solutions. Her effort would fail, drowned as it would be by the larger imperatives of Vietnam and Black Power—the same sort of momentum that kept the Deep South from considering such legislation until the second half of the 1960s.
But the South’s eventual consideration, with whatever deliberate speed it took to arrive at that point, demonstrated that it was perfectly willing to impinge on personal liberty and Sunbelt business imperatives in aid of remedying the ills of its population, functionally nullifying all the arguments it made on the barricades of the Civil Rights Movement. Through the variations in legal intent and scope, each Deep South state, save Alabama, passed legislation that regulated the purchase, transfer, and inhalation of toxic solvents in aid of protecting the youth of the South. In the process, it developed the most comprehensive regional push to quell the epidemic, willingly bending its own legislative assumptions to ensure effective control.
Reference
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Anonymous (1962, 26 September) .City Investigating “Kicks” from Glue. New York Times, 24
Anonymous (1963, 25 April). City Plans Drive On Glue-Sniffing. New York Times, 35
Anonymous (1963, 5 December). Youth Killed in Plunge. New York Times, 52.
Anonymous (1966, 11 June) .Monroe Student Found Dead in Abandoned Car. Baton Rouge Advocate, 10A;
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Anonymous (1966, 2 July 1966).City Council Passes Law to Curb “Glue Sniffing”. Louisiana Weekly, 2, 8.
Anonymous (1966, 21 April). Glue Sniffing Could Become More Serious. Baton Rouge Advocate, 4-C.
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