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| The needle and the damage done. (Illustration from Savage Sex) |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Lost Souls Delivered." Originally published in Savage Sex (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 4, no. 2, April/May 1972. No author credited.
Excerpt: "There has been certain agreements that the child might be cured of the addiction right there at the start. But little is known how much of the drug hunger remains in the makeup, thus what future demands in their young adult life they might have. So far the doctors can only report what is happening there in the hospital where they have the control. In most cases when the baby is removed from the hospital it is lost into the metropolis probably never to be heard of again."
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| Author Sophy Burnham |
Reflections: The phrase "lost souls delivered" was already familiar to me from Ed Wood's fiction. His notorious 1968 anti-drug novel Purple Thighs was originally published under the name Lost Souls Delivered. That book—which reads like it was written by Jack Webb's grandmother—is Eddie's singularly absurd take on hippies and the acid scene. The novel's hero, Adam, utters the final line of dialogue: "LSD really stands for LOST SOULS DELIVERED!"
Because of that, I thought an article called "Lost Souls Delivered" would also be about hippies dropping acid. I prepared myself for some psychedelic Dragnet-style fun. Nope. Not even close. It's actually about heroin-addicted babies and the terrible social problem they represent. That makes this one of the least fun articles in When the Topic is Sex. When Ed Wood uses the word "delivered" here, he means babies being delivered in hospitals. Why Eddie felt he needed to write about this sad topic, especially for a magazine like Savage Sex, I have no idea.
It's possible that Eddie was simply inspired by something he read, in this case a grim article called "Heroin Babies: Craving a Needle Not a Nipple" by Sophy Burnham in The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. It's about drug-addicted mothers giving birth to drug-addicted children and what happens to those very unfortunate babies once they leave the hospital. It seems that this same article ran under a different title in The New York Times on January 9, 1972. Perhaps the Herald-Examiner picked it up from a wire service.
Burnham states that this problem is most prevalent among poor black and Puerto Rican mothers, a claim Ed Wood repeats with a certain emphasis. Interestingly, Burnham's original article inspired a Bronx nurse to write to The New York Times to say that "drug use among white mothers is far from negligible." This nurse also says that white women have more access to abortion, an issue neither Sophy Burnham nor Ed Wood addresses. "Lost Souls Delivered" offers expert commentary from various doctors, all of it taken directly from Sophy Burnham's research.
So what does Ed Wood bring to the table? Well, this depressing topic provokes a few ponderous sermons from Ed. He even starts the article by decrying drug use in general:
One of the most frightening aspects of modern times is the steady and increasing use of harmful drugs by the younger generations of this modern world. No matter how many articles, newspaper stories or radio programs and television presentations are brought to the foreground little attention is being paid to the message. Even though the words are becoming more and more a message of death these people go out of their way to ignore the dangers. Many are saying, "What the hell, we're going to die one way or another anyway." And perhaps that is the deepest of the underlying thoughts concerning drugs and the people who use them. Perhaps there is somewhat of the death wish involved there. Death has been shouted loud enough both vocally and in large, tremendously black headlines, so therefore the death wish has an overpowering motivation in such things.
This entire article might be considered a stern, humorless anti-drug lecture. Now, it's possible that Ed Wood wrote this strictly for a paycheck and didn't give a damn about heroin-addicted babies, but I'd like to think that "Lost Souls Delivered" is entirely sincere. What is unclear is whether Eddie thought of his own, out-of-control alcoholism as a form of drug addiction. Did he have the "death wish" that he describes above?
Next: "Yes or No—The Candidates and Busing" (1972)