5 ms·

I grew up in Baltimore City, born in the 70s. Up until the drug war in the 80s, it was a multiracial working class city. I lived near "Pigtown" one of the poore

I grew up in Baltimore City, born in the 70s. Up until the drug war in the 80s, it was a multiracial working class city. I lived near "Pigtown" one of the poorer areas, but I was never afraid to go out at night. During the summer months when it was hot and humid, I'd sleep during the day, and friends and I would sneak out and walk all over the city in the middle of the night, we were only 11-12 years old. Yes, we hung out on the stairs of our row houses, and on the corners of the streets, and played radios loud, but by and large, violence was confined mostly to bullying. In fact, we had often walked down Pratt street past Martin Luther King Boulevard with no problem from the people living in the projects. Things changed after the drug war started in the 80s. I started experiencing shootings. Kids got shot at my school. I'd hear gunshots all during the night. I even got caught up in a shootout at one point, which sounded like firecrackers going off if it wasn't for the sounds of bullets ricocheting off of the brick houses (thank god old Baltimore rowhouses had real brick facades) Many of my childhood friends became drug addicts, crack houses sprung up around my home. One of the friends I knew who I thought would graduate highschool and college, who was smart and into electronics, ended up as the neighborhood drug kingpin. Older neighbors and others who could, fled the city for the suburbs. Homes were boarded out, and soon, it looked like Mad Max. Our house sprouted bars on the windows. If it hadn't been for my 300 baud vic-modem and Vic-20/C64, I wouldn't have gotten off the streets. I mostly survived by vanishing into the online world, and staying in libraries, and avoiding the streets. To me, the war against crack cocaine is what leveled Baltimore. Not the drug itself, if the government had treated it as a public health problem, things might have turned out better. But the drug war only served to make drugs the most lucrative, most important part of the local economy, and for the losers in that economy, the dopamine it provided became an escape from despair.

yters 8y ago
It's curious the difference in response to the current "opioid epidemic". Where is the police crackdown in this case?
- cromwellian 8y ago
  There's a huge differential in the way the criminal justice system handled black people's drugs (crack), and cocaine (rich man's aspirin). A few rocks of crack got you an arrest with jail time, repeat 3 times, and a fatherless home is created with a new felon in the system. But white professionals who did coke? Slap on the wrist unless they were possessing huge amounts. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor, and exceptionally biased against poor minorities. Since Baltimore demographics are heavily represented by minorities, it's no surprise things happening differently there vs Appalachia.
  - rb808 8y ago
    I think the difference is more than race. Wealthy professional coke users don't cause a lot of violent crime or robberies.
    - bsanr 8y ago
      Don't they? If cocaine is more expensive, and the intensity of a drug war follows the amount of money involved, it stands to reason that coke users are, in actuality, causing more crime. If you were to say, "Which drug users commit the most crimes," that's a bit murkier, leaning towards poorer drug users. But it's very hard to argue that the violence at every step of the cocaine trade, particularly in foreign countries, isn't caused by the market upscale coke users create. They're only a step or two removed from that violence, and certainly the impetus for it. If police and policy-makers were serious about curbing drug use and truly thought their methods worked, they'd go after coke and crack users with the same methods and intensity.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > If cocaine is more expensive, and the intensity of a drug war follows the amount of money involved, It doesn't; the intensity of the drug war produces the amount of money involved and the street price, as it creates a barrier to entry (reducing competition) and produces supplier costs; it thus increases the minimum sustainable cost and the ability of suppliers to charge above that cost.
- draw_down 8y ago
  Well, who sells opioids, and who sells crack?
  - deogeo 8y ago
    I don't know why this comment was dead, but I'm vouching for it because it's one of the most perceptive ones - just follow the money. I'm sure all the other reasons listed also play a role, but I'm a bit surprised it escaped everyone (myself included) that opioids line corporate pockets, and crack does not. Given the extent of corporate influence in the US, I'd wager this is the dominant reason.
  - ct520 8y ago
    Pretty sure the white man gets paid off all of that
- bsder 8y ago
  First, "drug laws" have almost always been code for racism. Opium laws originally were meant to target Chinese immigrants. Marijuana laws were meant to target Hispanics. Crack laws were meant to target African-Americans. Second, the density gradient of people is quite different and thus far less profitable. Going after the opioid epidemic means going mostly after single individuals in places far less populated with people. The Internet has also dispersed most drug delivery--this is quite a bit different from when the crackdown on crack was running. Third, the age of the affected is vastly different and creates a far different optics. If you are rounding up "troubled city teens", you're not going to get much pushback from anyone. If you are rounding up "grandma", the press is going to have a field day. This is not new--there is a reason why you know who Rosa Parks is but not Claudette Colvin.
- itchyouch 8y ago
  Aren't most opioids obtained via legitimate prescriptions?
bane 8y ago
I grew up in the late 70s, early 80s not too terribly far from Baltimore and have made a number of visits to it over the years. It never had a great reputation outside of the Inner Harbor, but the reputation as a real lost city really crystalized in the late 80s and it never really recovered -- at least not in the way other major cities have had recent Renaissances. I don't really think the reputation is undeserved. In fact, it used to be a normal part of discussion that Baltimore, Philadelphia and NYC were basically where you went as a tourist to get something stolen from you, and I personally experienced that on a small scale in two of those cities. However, I never went really into Baltimore until the mid-2000s when on a number of short term contracts I had to go to near Johns Hopkins and then a couple at Morgan State. To be honest, driving through parts of Baltimore was almost indistinguishable from news clips of war torn cities in the Middle East...just absolute urban devastation...but on slow burn. Hopefully its changed, but it comes to mind as the pinnacle example of urban blight when I think of the term. My wife, who grew up in South Korea in the late 70s under a military dictator, couldn't even fathom the general level of danger and decay she saw on her few visits into the city. She says she felt better in Pittsburgh. In the early 2010s, an idealistic friend of mine moved to Baltimore, thinking that an influx of well meaning people with good jobs and money could help turn parts of the city around. They lasted 2 years before the financial burden of repairing material stolen off of their house while they were inside it started to become serious and they moved out to the "safer" city of D.C: gutters, siding, wheels on their cars, a gate, a BBQ, all sorts of things. One adventurous thief stole all the gutters off their house, two screen doors and helped themselves to a number of car parts off of one of their parked cars between the time they came home from work and went out to dinner. I know it can be turned around. NYC is generally pretty great these days. Philly ain't half bad. Even D.C. outside of the National Mall is worth visiting and most of the city has turned a corner. Baltimore actually has a lot of great islands of culture to offer, but it's a generation of hard work to get the city turned around. Another way to think about it is if D.C. and Baltimore metro areas are combined, it could be a unified urban conglomeration that hits around 10 million people, one of the largest in the country, has pretty much the entire Federal Government and many major financial hubs as well as huge biotech, startup and other tech scenes...it has a population larger than the San Francisco Bay Area and could be a much large major economic force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_metropolitan_area#Combined_Statistical_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m... https://ggwash.org/files/baltwash2.pdf https://ggwash.org/files/baltwash2.pdf
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
golemiprague 8y ago
The reason the drug trade was so lucrative in the first place was because of the break of the black family and jobs going abroad. It is exactly the same story with the opioid epidemic. The only reason there is no "war against drugs" now is because Obama couldn't care less about white people and their problems. At least Trump understand the situation and is trying to do something about it. Luckily for the whites the fact that Obama didn't care saved them from the violence of the drugs on war, but let's not pretend that there is no a big cultural different between whites and black which was responsible to the gang culture in the black community.
55555 8y ago
I just read a comment someone posted here about how DC and NYC grew up too much to support large scale drug operations and so Baltimore consequently has this fate. Then I logged in to reply to it and it vanished. I thought it was an interesting theory.
eanzenberg 8y ago
I don’t understand. You mention a number of your friends became drug addicts and then blame the gov’t for trying to fight it. Or do you think the gov’t created those addicts? I’m a bit confused.
- honkycat 8y ago
  Drugs are a public health problem. The drug was was a colssal failure. Having the police roll around the neighborhood and harass junkies helps no one. In fact over policing decimated these communities and vanished a huge part of the population into prisons. It filled prisons with non-violent offenders which were now sucked into the whirlpool of incarceration. It created a massive prison industrial complex with perverse incentives where the business of locking people up became massivly profitable. From the start, it was an authoritarian policy designed to make it easier to harass dissidents. [O] 0: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
- cromwellian 8y ago
  I blame the government for fighting it in the wrong way, by locking people up (which costs several times more, and turns non-violent offenders into violent ex-cons who can't get a job because they're ex-felons), instead of fighting it with drug treatment programs.

yters 8y ago

It's curious the difference in response to the current "opioid epidemic". Where is the police crackdown in this case?

cromwellian 8y ago
There's a huge differential in the way the criminal justice system handled black people's drugs (crack), and cocaine (rich man's aspirin). A few rocks of crack got you an arrest with jail time, repeat 3 times, and a fatherless home is created with a new felon in the system. But white professionals who did coke? Slap on the wrist unless they were possessing huge amounts. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor, and exceptionally biased against poor minorities. Since Baltimore demographics are heavily represented by minorities, it's no surprise things happening differently there vs Appalachia.
- rb808 8y ago
  I think the difference is more than race. Wealthy professional coke users don't cause a lot of violent crime or robberies.
  - bsanr 8y ago
    Don't they? If cocaine is more expensive, and the intensity of a drug war follows the amount of money involved, it stands to reason that coke users are, in actuality, causing more crime. If you were to say, "Which drug users commit the most crimes," that's a bit murkier, leaning towards poorer drug users. But it's very hard to argue that the violence at every step of the cocaine trade, particularly in foreign countries, isn't caused by the market upscale coke users create. They're only a step or two removed from that violence, and certainly the impetus for it. If police and policy-makers were serious about curbing drug use and truly thought their methods worked, they'd go after coke and crack users with the same methods and intensity.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > If cocaine is more expensive, and the intensity of a drug war follows the amount of money involved, It doesn't; the intensity of the drug war produces the amount of money involved and the street price, as it creates a barrier to entry (reducing competition) and produces supplier costs; it thus increases the minimum sustainable cost and the ability of suppliers to charge above that cost.
draw_down 8y ago
Well, who sells opioids, and who sells crack?
- deogeo 8y ago
  I don't know why this comment was dead, but I'm vouching for it because it's one of the most perceptive ones - just follow the money. I'm sure all the other reasons listed also play a role, but I'm a bit surprised it escaped everyone (myself included) that opioids line corporate pockets, and crack does not. Given the extent of corporate influence in the US, I'd wager this is the dominant reason.
- ct520 8y ago
  Pretty sure the white man gets paid off all of that
bsder 8y ago
First, "drug laws" have almost always been code for racism. Opium laws originally were meant to target Chinese immigrants. Marijuana laws were meant to target Hispanics. Crack laws were meant to target African-Americans. Second, the density gradient of people is quite different and thus far less profitable. Going after the opioid epidemic means going mostly after single individuals in places far less populated with people. The Internet has also dispersed most drug delivery--this is quite a bit different from when the crackdown on crack was running. Third, the age of the affected is vastly different and creates a far different optics. If you are rounding up "troubled city teens", you're not going to get much pushback from anyone. If you are rounding up "grandma", the press is going to have a field day. This is not new--there is a reason why you know who Rosa Parks is but not Claudette Colvin.
itchyouch 8y ago
Aren't most opioids obtained via legitimate prescriptions?

bane 8y ago

I grew up in the late 70s, early 80s not too terribly far from Baltimore and have made a number of visits to it over the years. It never had a great reputation outside of the Inner Harbor, but the reputation as a real lost city really crystalized in the late 80s and it never really recovered -- at least not in the way other major cities have had recent Renaissances. I don't really think the reputation is undeserved. In fact, it used to be a normal part of discussion that Baltimore, Philadelphia and NYC were basically where you went as a tourist to get something stolen from you, and I personally experienced that on a small scale in two of those cities. However, I never went really into Baltimore until the mid-2000s when on a number of short term contracts I had to go to near Johns Hopkins and then a couple at Morgan State. To be honest, driving through parts of Baltimore was almost indistinguishable from news clips of war torn cities in the Middle East...just absolute urban devastation...but on slow burn. Hopefully its changed, but it comes to mind as the pinnacle example of urban blight when I think of the term. My wife, who grew up in South Korea in the late 70s under a military dictator, couldn't even fathom the general level of danger and decay she saw on her few visits into the city. She says she felt better in Pittsburgh. In the early 2010s, an idealistic friend of mine moved to Baltimore, thinking that an influx of well meaning people with good jobs and money could help turn parts of the city around. They lasted 2 years before the financial burden of repairing material stolen off of their house while they were inside it started to become serious and they moved out to the "safer" city of D.C: gutters, siding, wheels on their cars, a gate, a BBQ, all sorts of things. One adventurous thief stole all the gutters off their house, two screen doors and helped themselves to a number of car parts off of one of their parked cars between the time they came home from work and went out to dinner. I know it can be turned around. NYC is generally pretty great these days. Philly ain't half bad. Even D.C. outside of the National Mall is worth visiting and most of the city has turned a corner. Baltimore actually has a lot of great islands of culture to offer, but it's a generation of hard work to get the city turned around. Another way to think about it is if D.C. and Baltimore metro areas are combined, it could be a unified urban conglomeration that hits around 10 million people, one of the largest in the country, has pretty much the entire Federal Government and many major financial hubs as well as huge biotech, startup and other tech scenes...it has a population larger than the San Francisco Bay Area and could be a much large major economic force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_metropolitan_area#Combined_Statistical_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m... https://ggwash.org/files/baltwash2.pdf https://ggwash.org/files/baltwash2.pdf

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

golemiprague 8y ago

The reason the drug trade was so lucrative in the first place was because of the break of the black family and jobs going abroad. It is exactly the same story with the opioid epidemic. The only reason there is no "war against drugs" now is because Obama couldn't care less about white people and their problems. At least Trump understand the situation and is trying to do something about it. Luckily for the whites the fact that Obama didn't care saved them from the violence of the drugs on war, but let's not pretend that there is no a big cultural different between whites and black which was responsible to the gang culture in the black community.

55555 8y ago

I just read a comment someone posted here about how DC and NYC grew up too much to support large scale drug operations and so Baltimore consequently has this fate. Then I logged in to reply to it and it vanished. I thought it was an interesting theory.

eanzenberg 8y ago

I don’t understand. You mention a number of your friends became drug addicts and then blame the gov’t for trying to fight it. Or do you think the gov’t created those addicts? I’m a bit confused.

honkycat 8y ago
Drugs are a public health problem. The drug was was a colssal failure. Having the police roll around the neighborhood and harass junkies helps no one. In fact over policing decimated these communities and vanished a huge part of the population into prisons. It filled prisons with non-violent offenders which were now sucked into the whirlpool of incarceration. It created a massive prison industrial complex with perverse incentives where the business of locking people up became massivly profitable. From the start, it was an authoritarian policy designed to make it easier to harass dissidents. [O] 0: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
cromwellian 8y ago
I blame the government for fighting it in the wrong way, by locking people up (which costs several times more, and turns non-violent offenders into violent ex-cons who can't get a job because they're ex-felons), instead of fighting it with drug treatment programs.