To date there has been little study of the responsiveness of narcotics use to changes in the labor market, either in the aggregate or in the motivations of individual users. It is the authors' hypothesis that narcotics use is one of several interrelated social responses to labor market failure. What exactly has constituted this "failure" has varied from episode to episode in the growth of widespread narcotics use in American society. The authors develop the argument that the labor market primes the flow of working-class adolescents into a hypothetical hustler pool. This typically happens when, in conditions of high unemployment and absolute reductions in or deflation of the value of welfare payments, the only remaining income-earning alternative is in the criminal labor market, otherwise known as the hustle. Once society realizes that not only is the socioeconomic pattern of narcotics use the same as it was a century ago, but that the problem of widespread addiction is a recurrent and cyclical one, it will be forced to examine the social constants which have operated in each case or episode in the cycle. This report is intended as a first statement of what these constants are and how they work. (Author)