Detroit’s heroin dependency rises in wake of bankruptcy

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The room is cramped and dark, but you can tell it is well kept. Sheets have been hung on the walls shielding the windows, stopping passers-by from looking in. The afternoon news is playing on a flat screen television. A vase of plastic, orange flowers stands in the middle of the table we are gathered round.

We are sitting in a house on the eastside of Detroit. Jenn, my hostess, offers me a glass of iced water and sits down next to me. Her light brown hair looks like it hasn’t been washed in a while and her grey, zip-up fleece has a few holes in it. She is missing an eye. “So where are you going to get your dope now?” she asks Mike.

Mike and Jenn’s dope house, an abandoned house where drug dealers move in and set up shop, got busted yesterday. Their respective $40 and $30 a day heroin habits mean they need to find a new place to go. Thankfully for them, options abound.

As the legality of Detroit’s bankruptcy is battled in court and officials from the White House to the governor’s office weigh in on how to get Detroit’s economy going again, one key element contributing to the city’s demise and stalling its recovery continues to go ignored. A silent heroin epidemic has been strangling Detroit communities for years, but has up until now been largely unreported and only talked about behind closed doors.

Its widespread, destructive popularity is a consequence of the lack of interest paid at the top towards low-income, predominantly African American urban communities. For communities locked behind the 8 Mile road border of the city, shooting up may be the only way to escape an otherwise depressing, hardship-filled reality.

In Detroit, dealing and buying drugs is easy. An overstretched police force struggles to make its presence felt in the 139-square mile, 83 percent African American city, which counts an estimated 78,000 abandoned buildings.

The drug trade has been linked to a soaring homicide rate, which last year reached its highest level in 20 years. But, for Detroit, drugs are not just a criminal and safety problem.

Ignoring the breadth and root causes of a population where addiction has taken hold is a major contributor to the city’s economic paralysis, advocates say, and the absence of programs seeking to give opportunities to Detroit’s young is only making the problem worse.

Andre Johnson, CEO of Recovery For Detroit, one of 120 organizations in the city providing services to addicts, says while addiction is a cause for local kids dropping out of high school and turning to crime to pay for the habit, it is the absence of employment and skilled vocational training prospects, the sense of living in ignored neighborhoods and a general stressed urban environment that are the reasons why some Detroiters continue to turn to drugs in the first place.

“And we can’t lock our way out of this,” Johnson says, alluding to a decades-long domestic policy of military-style crackdown on drug trade and use which contributed to the mass incarceration of over two million overwhelmingly black and brown Americans, often just referred to as the war on drugs. “What we need are new messages,” he said. “The only message on the street right now is drugs.”

For heroin, the fact that 40 percent of the Detroit population is living below the poverty line does little to affect business. Heroin is not just easy to find, it is also cheap. A mere $5 will buy you a hit.

Johnson, a large, charismatic man of 44, who is a native Detroiter and Morehouse graduate is adamant at the severity of Detroit’s ongoing “drug epidemic,” calling it the “pink elephant in the living room” officials prefer to ignore and brush underneath the carpet. While crack cocaine raised local and national alarm bells in the 1980s and early 1990s, Johnson says heroin, which became prevalent in the 1970s, never disappeared.

Of the 600 to 800 clients his 40-people strong staff, including outreach workers and clinicians, receives each month, Johnson estimates between 70 and 80 percent are battling addictions to either heroin or crack, or both. Johnson knows the effect drugs have on people’s lives first hand. He is a recovering addict of 25 years.

For doctors working Detroit Medical Center’s Emergency Room, treating heroin users is a daily occurrence. Cases will vary from overdoses to treatment of chronic abscesses caused by injection, Derek Kennedy, MD, a first-year Emergency Medicine resident at the hospital said.