The nation’s first drug czar, William J. Bennett, was appointed the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George H. W. Bush. His job was to rid the country of the cocaine menace. He explained, “The typical cocaine user is white, male, a high school graduate employed full time, and living in a small metropolitan area or suburb.” Yet, the article claimed, it was black people who were disproportionately being imprisoned under harsh laws that we had designed, with the full support of most black lawmakers, to send them to jail for longer sentences.
We did this because we believed, erroneously, that the drug epidemic was rooted in African-American neighborhoods and to protect those communities, we needed harsher sentences, broader police powers, and, if need be, the lawful ability to violate some people’s constitutional rights. Everyone on every level of justice was involved: local cops, police chiefs, federal law enforcement agents, prosecuting attorneys. African-American mayors and black congressional leaders, educators, and hard-core law-and-order Republicans, had come together to battle the scourge of cocaine. We needed to come down hard on anyone connected with crack cocaine. Everybody had bought into the cause. And when it came to that fight, nobody was clearer or more focused on ridding the streets of drug dealers and addicts than Special Agent Matthew Horace.
When I hit the streets, I was merciless. I was big and badass, and my goal was to unleash my personal fury on anything in my path connected with dope. I wanted to rain down pain and suffering on them the same way they had unleashed this plague upon America. I cursed them silently and to their faces, and I helped send thousands to prison. I was relentless. I worked undercover, buying drugs and guns. I busted down doors, sometimes it seemed almost daily. I dragged scum downstairs, pulled them out of their cars, and cornered them in the alleys. You didn’t want to see me coming. I grilled them during interrogations, called them liars and thieves and punks and sissies and anything else until they broke. And, yes, I did things that I’m not proud of, because I knew the hurt heroin and crack can bring. It was not something I read about in newspapers, books, and magazines, or saw on television or in the movies. It was personal, as much of policing is—whether my brothers in blue want to admit it or not.
A cousin on my father’s side, Maurice, sold cocaine and crack. Crack was a low-cost version of cocaine popular in poor black neighborhoods because it was cheap and a small quantity could get you high. Maurice earned a bullet in the back for his dealings and was paralyzed for life.
My mother’s sister, Aunt Joan, was a heroin addict who was in and out of jail. When drugs made her an unfit mother, my grandparents raised her three children. I recall brief encounters with her when she showed up at my grandmother’s home. Her hands were always swollen, which I later found out was indicative of heroin users. My mother ultimately banned her from our home to protect my brother and me.
My mother’s brother, Uncle Jerome, was also barred from our house. As a teenager, he was a star. He was a smart, enterprising kid who always made the family proud. He held down two paper routes and later landed a job at the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was a big thing at that time, a black kid working for the Inquirer. After high school graduation, he went into the Air Force. He came back to Philly after he was discharged and got hooked on heroin. He was in and out of jail.
At some point, he crossed the wrong person and was stuffed into a cardboard box and thrown in the Delaware River. My family thinks the perpetrator was a drug dealer he owed money. He survived and showed up dripping wet at my grandmother’s house. She gave him enough money to flee the city and he landed in Baltimore, where he died. Years after he left, the people he apparently stiffed still came around asking for him.
Most of my childhood buddies were not sucked into the abyss until after I went away to college. Every time I came home for a visit, I would see someone who knew me but whom I could barely recognize—a former classmate, a fellow high school football player, a girl I had dreamed of dating. Their bodies and faces had been shrunken and twisted from cocaine use. My childhood friend Kenny, who lived a few doors down from my family, began using and was in and out of prison for many years, mostly for nuisance crimes to support his habit.
John lived on the street right behind our house. He was a few years older than me, but we played together as kids. He volunteered for the Navy to escape the gangs that by my senior year had permeated parts of the city. He returned home and got involved in the drug game. He was murdered, execution-style, on a street corner in West Philly. People from the neighborhood say he was killed by the Junior Black Mafia, a notorious street gang that terrorized inner-city Philadelphia in the mid-1980s through the early 1990s. My friend Thomas lived six doors down from us. He and I used to walk to high school together. Thomas was very talented. I always thought he would be a famous artist one day, but he also got involved with drugs and began hanging with the Junior Black Mafia. He was killed in a shootout with Philadelphia police.
Meanwhile, I could see how crack houses—three on my parents’ block alone—had transformed our neighborhood. Too many yards were now unkempt. Trash littered once-clean streets. Teenage drug dealers and their juvenile couriers controlled the corners. Addiction destroyed families as husbands and wives, locked in its deadly embrace, lost jobs, and could no longer support or raise their children. Young men and women, crippled by cocaine, abandoned their dreams and became lost souls, transfixed by an unquenchable thirst for another hit. So, you’re damned right. I was there to kick ass and take names. It didn’t register with me that I was making war on the very people the whole country and I claimed we were trying to save, until I was on the outside looking in on another drug epidemic.
Fast-forward 30 years. America is experiencing the deadliest drug crisis in its history: opioids. Heroin and opiates are killing our friends, family, and neighbors in record numbers, the vast majority of them white. In 2014, for example, 47,055 Americans died from heroin and other opium-related drugs. That is more than 3,900 people a month, more than died in the September 11 terrorist attacks, more than the highest number of murders in any year in the nation’s history. In subsequent years, the numbers have remained virtually unchanged. By April 2016, the current opioid epidemic had claimed 200,000 lives, more than all the Americans who died in World War I, three times the number of US military deaths in the Vietnam War, five times the number in the Korean War.
By any measure, the current death toll and the family destruction associated with the illegal heroin and opiate trade dwarf what we were dealing with in the crack days. At the height of crack and powder cocaine from 1984 to 1996, America averaged about 8,000 drug-related murders a year. Add to that number about 7,000 cocaine-related overdose deaths annually and the total is less than half the number of people dying each year now from opiates. The problem is magnified by the other crime that comes with it. Addicts need to get high, and they will do anything to get their fix—theft, burglary, robbery, prostitution. Additionally, dealers are lacing their drugs with Fentanyl, a synthetic opiate so powerful that it is a near-death sentence for any heroin addict who unknowingly uses it. Consequently, the number of heroin- and opiate-related deaths keeps climbing.
The accounts of all these colliding forces are painful. In Baldwinsville, New York, firefighters responded to overdose victims on three separate occasions at the same house. In each instance, the person had stopped breathing. Firefighters used the drug Narcan to save them. The victims were 21, 22, and 23. To the west in Parma, Ohio, a fire department rescue unit also responded to three overdose calls in the same house on the same day—the mother in the morning, the son in the afternoon, the daughter in the evening. The mother died.
To the north in Warren, Michigan, Peggy and Edward Babinski came home to discover their two children, 41-year-old son Edward Jr. and daughter Heather, 28, dead from a heroin overdose. A little over an hour away in Monroe County, Michigan, rescue units also responded to three heroin overdose deaths on the same day. Two of them were found in separate ro
oms of the same motel. The other was in a mobile home park. All of them were under the age of 35.
Same story in Seattle. Beginning at 11:18 a.m. one morning, fire department medics responded to an overdose call in the 7800 block of Aurora Avenue North. They found two people who could not be saved; the heroin had been mixed with Fentanyl. Two hours later, firefighters responded to another overdose in the 900 block of North 80th Street. This time it was a woman. She also died. Less than 20 minutes later, firefighters rolled on another overdose call, this time in the 900 block of North 102nd Street. They found two men unconscious. Fortunately, they survived.
Back in the Midwest, in Crestline, Ohio, the Hess family lost two loved ones to heroin on the same day. Jason Hess, 35, died of an overdose. A few hours later, his distraught mother, Barbara Fultz, took a pillow and a blanket to a cemetery behind the house, lay down on a headstone, and swallowed a bottle of Valium. “Please don’t weep for me,” her suicide note said. “I am ready for this rest. Thank you, heroin, another victim.”
It was her 60th birthday.
Finally, there is the heartbreaking photograph that went viral of a 4-year-old boy alone and bewildered in the back seat of an SUV on the side of a busy road in East Liverpool, Ohio. In the front seats were his mother and her male friend, slumped over and unconscious in a heroin overdose stupor. City officials posted the photo on Facebook to illustrate the plight of their city. One officer called it “a cry for help.”
East Liverpool, a small suburban community of just under 11,000 people, exemplifies what heroin and opiates are doing to predominantly white communities across America. Unconscious addicts have been dumped so frequently in the East Liverpool hospital parking lot that administrators developed a special alert system to treat them. Paramedics have picked up overdose victims from the Walmart parking lot, from roadside ditches, and from apartments and homes across town. At one point, it had become routine for children to see a passed-out parent jolted to life with a dose of Narcan. Drug dealers from out of state flock to the desolate streets, selling highs for $10 or $15 a hit. For too many residents, there’s little else: no jobs, no recreation. In some ways, the bleak scenario—particularly the street dealers—sounds eerily similar to my days on the streets dealing with the crack epidemic.
But the nation’s response to this opioid drug epidemic, one in which most of the victims are white, is dramatically different.
There are no evening news reports, photographs, and headlines of law enforcement officers, dressed in tactical gear, cordoning off white neighborhoods, questioning and searching white people as they make their way home from work. There are no breaking news stories about scores of addicted white parents being marched off to jail and their children shuttled into foster care. There is no erroneous media coverage about “opiate babies,” neurologically and psychologically damaged children born to white families, as there were about African-American children born to black female crack addicts.
In this new fight against heroin, doors aren’t being kicked in. Civil liberties aren’t being trampled, and victims and communities aren’t being demonized by the public and the news media as they were in my day. Heroin and opiate addicts are not filling up jails and prisons in record numbers, as the millions of crack-addicted African-Americans in the mid-1980s and the 1990s did. During the height of the war on drugs, for instance, the number of white drug offenders in state prisons increased by 110 percent. The number of black drug offenders in state incarceration, on the other hand, exploded by 465 percent. African-Americans, 14 percent of the drug users during this period, made up 35 percent of those arrested, 55 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of those sentenced to serve time.
These days, police interactions with mostly white heroin and opiate addicts are fueled by a kinder, gentler government and law enforcement policy. It’s more like a police encounter not long ago in Manchester, New Hampshire. New Hampshire is second to West Virginia as the state with the highest rate of overdose deaths.
Manchester Police Officer Ryan Boynton was eating a quick midshift dinner at the police station when an alert came over his radio to respond to a drug overdose. Boynton headed to a nearby housing complex where a young man, who appeared high, eventually opened the front door. Boynton glanced through the opening and asked the man about the call. “Oh, yeah, that’s my fiancée,” the man said.
Police already had visited the house previously on an overdose call so Boynton already suspected the man and his girlfriend were addicted to heroin and opiates. The man said his fiancée was okay and had left. Boynton talked to the woman by phone and confirmed that she was alive, for now. As he prepared to leave, Boynton offered two suspected illegal drug users this advice: “You guys gotta work on it,” he said. “There’s resources.”
“I know,” the man responded. “I’m trying, it’s really tough with her. It’s Russian roulette.”
None of this is what suspected black crack addicts would have experienced in my day. Instead, we would have found a reason to search the house and arrest the people living there. That was common procedure.
When I read the following account, I chuckled. After paramedics in Seattle rolled up on three heroin-related deaths, police issued a statement to the local newspaper: “Anyone wishing to dispose of heroin or other drugs can call 911 or contact officers at one of the city’s five precincts. Police also are encouraging people who feel they need to use heroin to be sure not to do so alone.” Additionally, Sergeant Sean Whitcomb was interviewed by the paper, and offered this advice to heroin users: “From a practical standpoint, if you must use, if you’re going to use, don’t do it alone—and don’t have the other person get high at the same time. Have someone who can call 911 and start CPR. We have Naloxone. We can save your life. We just need to be called.”
That was certainly not American law enforcement’s attitude during the days of crack cocaine. Local cops were locking up African-American addicts as fast as they could catch them. Consequently, four out of every five people arrested for drugs were charged with possession, not sales. Trust me, if you had shown up at a police station to turn in drugs, as that Seattle officer suggested, you were going to jail for possession. If you were caught on the street with five grams of crack, you were going to prison, because, back then, crack was the devil, and anything associated with it was tainted. Powdered cocaine, which most white people used, had one set of lower punishments. With crack, it was either rehabilitation, death, or incarceration, and since the first choice was unavailable to most black addicts, they were left with the remaining two outcomes.
I do not advocate we return to the failed drug policing practices we used during my days on the street. Despite efforts by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Donald Trump to reinstate those arcane policies, the nation is dealing smartly with the current drug crisis as a public health problem and a law enforcement concern, rather than allowing punishment and imprisonment to be our first response. But the idea of this more humane, effective approach is not new. It was offered when we were locking up black addicts and sending them off to prison at an astounding rate.
But the nation wouldn’t listen.
Nobody was voicing that refrain more fervently than Kurt Schmoke, then the first black elected mayor of Baltimore. Schmoke served as mayor of Baltimore from 1987 to 1999. He notes that “Race still matters when it comes to dealing with criminal justice issues. Most elected officials are talking about [opioids] as a public health problem, because the race of the victims is different, versus the 1980s when the perception was that the victims were mostly black.”
Schmoke pointed to his effort in the late 1980s to halt the spread of HIV among African-American heroin addicts as an example. Before the arrival of HIV/AIDS public officials were not treating drug addiction as a health issue, he said. Instead, addiction to heroin and crack cocaine was a crime, which lead to the acceleration of black incarceration during the mid 1980s into 2000. Public health officials, however, found early on that the deadly
disease HIV/AIDS was being spread through those populations where infected addicts swapped needles. As mayor, Schmoke proposed a needle-exchange program, giving addicts clean syringes in exchange for their possibly HIV/AIDS-infected syringes to slow the spread of the disease and subsequent deaths. City and state leaders wouldn’t hear of it. Those people, they said, belonged in jail. It took Schmoke four years to convince local officials to implement his needle-exchange program. Nobody wanted to treat heroin addiction among African-Americans as a public health concern then.
Baltimore is a microcosm in many ways of the disparity in how we—black and white—respond to crime regarding black America as opposed to white America. If there ever was a place in America that epitomized the idea that black lives don’t matter, it is Baltimore by every measure of well-being.
The median income for white families in Baltimore is $60,550, compared to $33,610 for black families. Among black men between the ages 20 and 24, nearly 1 of every 3 is unemployed, as opposed to 1 in 10 among their white counterparts. The life expectancy in 15 predominantly black Baltimore neighborhoods is shorter than in North Korea. In 8 predominantly black Baltimore neighborhoods, the life expectancy is worse than in Syria. Baltimore teens between 15 and 19 years old face poorer health outcomes and a bleaker economic outlook than those in economically distressed cities in Nigeria, India, China, and South Africa. Teens in Baltimore, along with those in Johannesburg, South Africa, saw the highest prevalence of sexual violence, substance abuse, depression, and physically transmitted sexual diseases in the world.
The Black and the Blue Page 7