Mainline

Mainline (pronounced meyn-lahyn)

(1) A slang term for the intravenous (injected directly into a vein as opposed to subcutaneous (skin popping)) use of injectable drugs (historically associated most with opium and its derivatives, especially heroin);  a principal or prominent vein into which a drug can be injected.

(2) To use, enjoy or imbibe something without restriction.

(3) The normal, established, or widely accepted position; major (a synonym of mainstream although without any of the the negative connotations mainstream has in recent years acquired.

(4) In rail transport (1) of or pertaining to the principal route or line of a railway or (2) of or pertaining to a surface railway as distinct from an underground, elevated or light rail one (originally as main line or main-line).

(5) In computing, to integrate (code etc) into the main repository for a software project, rather than separate forks.

(6) In civil aviation, an airline's main operating unit, as opposed to codeshares or regional subsidiaries (by extension from the railroad use).

(7) As Mainlinie (line of the Maine), a (historical and political) boundary between northern and southern Germany, roughly following the River Main.

(8) In chess, of a sequence of opening moves, the principal, most important, or most often played variation of such (ie the "main line", the orthodox sequence of opening moves considered to be "best play").

(9) In foodie slang, voraciously to consume.

(10) In longline fishing, the central line to which the branch lines with baits are attached.

(11) In plumbing, the pipeline carrying wastewater to the public drains or a septic tank.

(12) In the US and Australia, related but different models of Ford cars sold during the 1950s.

1841 (1933-1934 as applied to injectable drugs): All senses of mainline (sometimes variously as main-line or with initial capital) are Americanisms and a compound of main + line.  Main is from the Middle English mayn, main, maine, mæin & meyn, from main (noun) and related to the Old English mægen (strong, main, principal) and the Old Norse megn & megenn (strong, main).  It was cognate with Old High German megīn (strong, mighty) from which Modern German gained Möge & Vermögen (power, wealth) and akin to the Old English magan (to be able to).  Line is from the Middle English line & lyne, from Old English līne (line, cable, rope, hawser, series, row, rule, direction) from the Proto-Germanic līnǭ (line, rope, flaxen cord, thread) from the Proto-Germanic līną (flax, linen), from the primitive Indo-European līno (flax).  Influenced in Middle English by the Middle French ligne (line), from Latin linea, it was cognate with the Scots line (line), the North Frisian liin (line), the West Frisian line (line), the Dutch lijn (rope, cord), the German Leine (line, rope), the Danish line (rope, cord), the Swedish lina (line, rope, wire) and the Icelandic lína (line). It was related also to Dutch lijn (flax), the German Lein (flax, linen), the Gothic lein (linen, cloth), the Latin linea (linen, thread, string, line) & linum (flax, thread, linen, cable), the Ancient Greek λίνον (línon) (flax, linen, thread, garment), the Old Church Slavonic линъ (linŭ) (flax), the Russian лён (ljon) (flax), the Lithuanian linai (flax) and the Irish līn (lion) (flax).  The oldest sense of the word is "rope, cord, thread"; from this the senses "path" & "continuous mark" were derived.  Mainline is a noun in the sense of railways and a verb (used without object) if injecting drugs; those doing the latter known, inter alia, as "mainers" or "mainliners", the mainlined not infrequently ending up on a pathologist's autopsy table.  Mainline is a noun, verb & adjective, mainliner is a noun and mainlinging & mainlined are verbs; the noun plural is mainlines.

1952 Ford Mainline Business Coupe (US).

Ford in the US produced the Mainline between 1952-1956.  It was the base-model of its three tier offering (Ford at that time manufacturing in the US offering just a single range of passenger cars), the more highly specified models being the Customline and Crestline.  The name was dropped for 1957 when the Custom nameplate was introduced although this had nothing to do with the association of “mainline” with injecting drug users.  Although that connection had existed since 1933, it would be until well into the 1960s it came into common use in this sense.  In the US, the Mainline was offered as two & four door sedans and station wagons (the latter which in England was sometimes called a shooting brake) and two door coupé (the convertibles were restricted to the more expensive lines).

1956 Ford Mainline "Coupé Utility" (Australia).

However, Australia was a smaller market and neither the three trim options nor all the body styles were offered, sales between 1952-1959 restricted to the four-door Customline, a limited number of station wagons and a locally developed “coupé utility”, a kind of light pickup which had been a feature of the Australian market since the 1930s.  The coupé utility used the Mainline name and was built on the station wagon chassis with the addition of the convertible’s X-member to permit the higher load carrying capacity, a further quirk being the Australian Fords continued until 1954 to use the old flathead V8 which had ceased to be used in the US in 1953, local models not adopting the new overhead valve (OHV) Y-Block V8 until 1955.  The Mainline remained in the Australian lineup until 1959 when the new Fairlane replaced the big car but Ford didn’t develop a coupé utility version, this body style offered on the compact platform the next year when the Falcon (1960-2016) entered local production.

Map of southern England's Great Western Main Line. 

Main Line had since 1841 been used generally to mean "principal line of a railway" and the Main Line was once Philadelphia's most desired suburban district.  Once just another rural hamlet, in the 1870s & 1880s it was transformed by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company which built expensive housing developments and hotels, hence the association of "Main Line" with the meaning "affluent area of residence", noted by 1917 and eventually used in that sense without capital letters and as the single-word mainline.  Essentially creating a fashionable suburb, the Railroad's urban development project linked Philadelphia to Paoli along the Paoli Local train-line via the station stops Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford & Bryn Mawr.  Eventually, the Main Line connected Philadelphia with Pittsburgh via Harrisburg but was later split into two lines, Amtrak's Philadelphia to Harrisburg Main Line and the Norfolk Southern Railway's Pittsburgh Line.

An emulation of Lindsay Lohan's vascular system; the thicker veins and arteries being the "main lines" (left) and Philadelphia's rail network, again (following the same practice), the thickest lines indicate Main Line status (right).   

The original slang among drug users, dating from 1933 used mainline as a noun, referring the principal or prominent vein into which a drug was most effective injected.  The verb in the sense of "inject (drugs) intravenously" was noted the following year although the associated verb mainlining didn't enter regular use until the mid-1960s and the unfortunate companion verb mainlined (dead from a drug overdose) soon followed, used in that sense by Mimi Fariña (1945–2001) for the Joan Baez (b 1941) song In the Quiet Morning (1970) which noted the death of Janis Joplin (1943–1970).  Joplin's death, although technically caused by an impact injury, happened under the influence of heroin.  Counterintuitively, despite injecting drug-use being so obviously associated with veins and arteries, it seems it was the imagery of main and secondary railway lines rather than the human vascular system (also called the circulatory system) that prompted the simile of mainline in drug-related slang.  It was probably because of the general familiarity with the word being used to describe train tracks and the often-seen graphical representation of them at stations and in carriages.  Even in medicine, mainline appears hardly used by physicians when speaking of arteries and veins, the term apparently not useful within the profession because of the need for precision when discussing such things although it may be handy for pathologists who tend often to work in retrospect.  However, there are citations where physicians and neurologists have adopted a similar metaphor (based perhaps on the rabbit warrens that are hospitals) to  explain the process of the brain using the “back passages” to restore blood-flow to areas affected by a stroke which has blocked the “main passage”, again drawing on the idea of primary and secondary lines.

In the Quiet Morning by Mimi Farina © Universal Music Publishing Group, recorded by Joan Baez (1970).

In the quiet morning, there was much despair

And in the hours that followed, no one could repair

That poor girl, tossed by the tides of misfortune

Barely here to tell her tale, rolled in on a sea of disaster

Rolled out on a mainline rail

She once walked tight at my side, I'm sure she walked by you

Her striding steps could not deny, torment from a child who knew

That in the quiet morning, there would be despair

And in the hours that followed, no one could repair

That poor girl, she cried out her song so loud

It was heard the whole world round, a symphony of violence

The great southwest unbound

La la la la la la la

La la la la la la la

La la la la la la la la la

La la la la, la la la

In the quiet morning, there was much despair

And in the hours that followed, no one could repair

That poor girl, tossed by the tides of misfortune

Barely here to tell her tale, rolled in on a sea of disaster

Rolled out on a mainline rail

La la la la la la la

La la la la la la la

La la la la la la la la la

La la la la, la la la

Gulag

Gulag (pronounced goo-lahg)

(1) The system of forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union (with initial capital).

(2) Individually, a Soviet forced-labor camp (usually with initial capital).

(3) By association, any prison or detention camp, especially one used for political prisoners (usually not with initial capital).

(4) Figuratively, any place regarded as undesirable or one perceived as being a “punishment-post” (not with initial capital).

(5) Figuratively, any system used to silence dissent (not with initial capital).

1930-1931: From the Russian ГУЛА́Г (GULÁG, GULag or Gulág), the acronym (Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj) translated usually as “Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps” but also, inter alia, “Chief Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps”, “Main Directorate for Places of Detention”, “Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps” etc.).  The noun plural was Gulags.

An example of the way in which a bland acronym (like the 1933 Gestapo (an abbreviated form of the German Geheime Staatspolizei (the construct being Ge(heime) Sta(ats)po(lizei), literally “secret state police”) can become a byword for something awful, although technically, the acronym GULag (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj (Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps)) didn’t come into use until 1930, the origin of what quickly would evolve into a vast, nation-wide network of concentration camps lies in the legal device created almost immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917.  This was the concept of the “class enemy”, a logical crime to gazette under Marxist-Leninist theory and one that could be applied literally to anybody, regardless of their conduct; it was essentially the same idea as the crime of “unspecified offences” which appears in the judicial sentences of some authoritarian states.  Russia, as many of the Bolsheviks knew from personal experience, had a long tradition of “internal exile” and the new regime extended this concept, creating concentration camps for class enemies where convicts were required to perform useful manual labor (forestry, mining, quarrying etc).

The early camps, authorized by decree in April 1919, were the prisoner of war (POW) facilities which had become redundant after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) which concluded hostilities between Russia and the Central Powers although the first model camp was in the White Sea region, in what were once the Orthodox Church's monastery buildings on the Solovetsky Islands and the first prisoners were anti-Bolsheviks, mostly left-wing intellectuals and members of the White Army.  The Cheka, the Russian secret police (the first in the alphabet soup of the names adopted (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, SMERSH, MGB, (most famously) KGB & FSB), was allocated the role of administration.  Reflecting the love secret police everywhere have for mysterious acronyms, the Cheka created SLON (Northern Camps of Special Significance) as an administrative template for the Solovetsky Islands which, briefly, was the only camp complex in the Soviet state.  The number of concentration (usually described as “correctional labor”) camps grew sufficiently during the 1920s to outgrow the bureaucratic structures initially formed by the Cheka and in 1930 the GULag was created as a separate division of the secret police which worked in conjunction with the Soviet Ministry of the Interior overseeing the use of the physical labor of prisoners.  Although the camps were sometimes used for those guilty of “normal” criminal offences, the great majority of inmates were political prisoners who were sometimes genuine political dissidents but could be there for entirely arbitrary reasons or even as victims of personal vendettas.  In these aspects there are parallels with the Nazi's concentration camps which also worked as systems of coercion, punishment & repression although the GULag never had a programme industrially to exterminate an entire race.  There was another striking similarity in the camp architecture of the two dictatorships which were nominally ideological opponents.  The German equivalent of the GULag, the Konzentrationlager is remembered for the words Arbeit macht frei (work makes you free) rendered in wrought iron above the gates of Auschwitz I; the inscription через труд (through labor (ie get back home through working)) was the message at the prisoners' entrance to the Magaden camp in Siberia.      

What is sometime neglected in the history of the GULag (and other systems of concentration camps) is that while it is well-understood as part of a system of repression, there were genuine attempts to locate the camps in places where the labor extracted from the inmates could be applied to the maximum benefit for the state, something of great significance because in 1929 comrade Stalin (1878–1953; Soviet leader 1922–1953) announced a programme of rapid industrialization and the first of a succession of five-year plans. In support of this, the Politburo abolished any distinction between political and other crimes and intruded a unified network of camps to replace the hitherto dual prison system.  From this point, accelerating from the mid-1930s, archipelagos of camps were built (substantially by the prisoners) close to sites of huge economic projects such as a canal from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea, gold mining in Kolyma and lines of communications such as the Baikal-Amur Mainline.

The GULag’s second great growth spurt happened during Stalin’s “Great Terror” in 1936-1938 when the upper echelons of the Communist Party, the armed forces, the civil service and even the GULag management were subject to purges and while there were many executions, most were sent to the camps which, never designed for such numbers, were unable to handle the mass influx and the already high death rate increased sometimes threefold.  During comrade Stalin's great purges, the (whispered) joke was that the Russian population consisted of (1) those in the gulag, (2) those just released and (3) those about to go back.  On a somewhat smaller scale, rapid inflows also happened in the early years of World War II because of the need to imprison those deported from territory just occupied by the Soviet Union (Eastern Poland, the Baltics, Bessarabia) but this pressure on capacity was more than off-set by the sudden release of many prisoners to meet the needs of the Red Army which had suffered massive losses in the Nazi invasion.  Needing troops, all was suddenly forgiven and it wouldn’t be until 1945 that the numbers in the camps began again to trend upwards, reflecting the waves of arrests among the ranks of the Red Army, former German POWs and ethnic minorities, including Soviet Jews.  The Cold War also fed the GULag.  In 1948-1949, Stalin launched the construction of new megalomaniacal projects, including the Volga-Don Canal, new power stations, dams, and communications, among them the Dead Road and a tunnel and railway to Sakhalin Island, both of which, despite a horrific death-toll, proved impossible to build and were cancelled when Stalin died in 1953.

After Stalin’s death, an amnesty was announced for many of those serving sentences for criminal offences and almost all of those deemed to have committed “minor offences” were released although political prisoners remained imprisoned and it wasn’t until “the thaw” under Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971; Soviet leader 1953-1964) that widespread releases were ordered after almost four million political crime cases were reviewed and in 1957, as one of a number of reforms, the GULag was abolished and most of the camps shut down.  Khrushchev himself announced that the Soviet economy would no longer based on the slave labor of prisoners which, as a piece of economic analysis was true but while the numbers of political prisoners fell, they did not disappear although they tended now to be only imprisoned for genuine opposition to the regime, dispatched most frequently to labor camps in Mordovia or in camps clustered around the Urals. The conditions remained grim but the death rates were tiny compared to those suffered in Stalin’s time but what also disguised the extent of post-Stalinist repression was than many dissidents were technically not imprisoned but instead declared insane and incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, many of which closely resembled prisons.  There, the “insane” were often subject to cruel & unusual “medical” procedures.

The number of people who passed through the GULag can never exactly be known but, using archival material which became accessible after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, historians have estimated between 15-18 million were imprisoned and the death-toll may have been almost 10%, the overwhelming majority of whom were from Russia or the constituent republics of the USSR but others were foreigners, mostly Czechoslovaks, Poles, Hungarians & Frenchmen.  The network of camps dotted around the USSR consisted of almost 500 administrative centres, each running as few as dozens or as many as hundreds of individual camps, historians having documented just under 30,000.  In the West the term GULag became widely known only after the publication in 1973 Russian of novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's (1918–2008) three-volume The Gulag Archipelago, described by the author as "An Experiment in Literary Investigation" which he wrote between 1958-1968, using documentary sources including legal papers, interviews, diaries, statements and his personal experience as a GULag prisoner.

Map of the GULag camp distribution, Plain Talk magazine, 1950.

However, both the system of slavery and the word “GULag” had, during comrade Stalin’s time, been publicized in the West, remarkably accurate maps published in 1950 in the US in Plain Talk (A US anti-communist monthly magazine, 1946–1950) magazine but, despite it being the high Cold War, the revelations didn’t resonate in public consciousness as they would a generation later when Solzhenitsyn released The Gulag Archipelago.