1920s

The 1920s are recalled as a turning point in the history of the novel’s drug trade: Chinese pushers, finding the West unreliable, dishonest, and wrong, withdrew in large numbers. That remembered refusal belongs to a wider world in which drug supply crosses borders, dependence organizes daily time, and the past persists in the language of veteran users.

The remembered withdrawal

A narrator’s note addresses old, experienced users whose faces bear what the text calls the effects of long exposure to addiction. They are invited to remember that in the 1920s many Chinese pushers packed up and left because they judged the West unreliable, dishonest, and wrong. The recollection gives the decade a specific place in the trade’s history: it marks a moment when suppliers’ judgment of their customers and surroundings disrupted access to drugs.

The memory is framed as inherited knowledge rather than a fully narrated historical episode. Its audience is the veteran user, and its evidence is a terse remembered exchange: when an Occidental user came looking to score, the answer was “No glot.... C'lom Fliday....” The phrase turns the suppliers’ withdrawal into a recurring refusal, preserved as part of the vocabulary and lore of the drug world.

A trade across places and periods

The decade’s remembered scarcity contrasts with the later, geographically dispersed connections described elsewhere in the narration. A network of users extends through Yemen, Paris, New Orleans, Mexico City, and Istanbul; the living and the dead, people in active dependence and those in withdrawal, are linked by the drug trade. The connection itself appears not as an abstract system but as an ordinary person conducting ordinary activities in Mexico City, while users across the network endure the consequences of dependence.

A separate recollection of finding a Houston druggist after five years away shows how old relationships could remain legible within this shifting economy. The druggist recognizes the returning customer with a quick look, tells him to wait at the counter, and eventually asks what he wants. The scene does not identify this encounter with the 1920s, but it echoes the historical passage’s concern with recognition, access, and the uneven reliability of supply.

Dependence and the experience of time

The novel sets the long memory of the trade beside the user’s immediate experience of need. In the account of junk time, the body becomes the addict’s clock: time matters chiefly in relation to the next need, and drug supply operates without a dependable schedule. A customer may have to wait unless the timing of the trade happens to align with ordinary time. This description makes supply more than a matter of geography or commerce; it determines how a user experiences duration and encounters other people.

The assertion that “Junk is a one-way street” gives that dependence a stark direction. A young man asks whether the speaker is leaving, and the response rejects the suggestion that milk sugar can restore an earlier state. The line presents the path of addiction as irreversible in the speaker’s account, contrasting the possibility of beginning with the impossibility of simply returning to what came before.

Historical significance

The 1920s recollection is brief, but its placement within a larger account of suppliers, users, and cross-border connections makes it more than a date marker. The suppliers’ departure is remembered through the practical consequence of a failed attempt to obtain drugs, while later episodes show the trade continuing through different people and locations. The decade therefore functions as a measure of change in access rather than as a complete history of drug markets.

Its force also comes from the contrast between historical recollection and recurring dependence. The refusal survives as a compact phrase among veteran users, but the larger network remains active, and the individual user’s time remains governed by need and uncertain delivery. The past does not explain away the present; it supplies one of the remembered precedents through which the novel portrays the drug economy as persistent, mobile, and resistant to any dependable schedule.