Detroit’s heroin dependency rises in wake of bankruptcy

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Official numbers further confirm heroin as a dominant presence. According to statistics from Michigan’s Bureau of Substance Abuse and Addiction Services, heroin was the most common primary substance listed by the thousands of patients admitted to substance abuse treatment facilities in Detroit in 2012, in contrast to the state of Michigan overall, where it was alcohol. Of the admitted Detroit residents counted, 95 percent declared either no income, or an income below $10,000 a year.

The use of heroin has continued to go unreported in Detroit, whereas in the surrounding, richer, mainly white suburbs, rarer cases of heroin overdoses – which at the Detroit Medical Center are routine – make the news.

In Detroit, officials continue to raise the issue of drugs within the context of crime and criminal crackdown.

Last month, the FBI declared Detroit’s violent crime and homicide rates for 2012 as the second worst in the country, coming in just behind Flint, Michigan. Detroit’s homicide rate is over eleven times the national average, and over half of homicides have been linked to the drug trade.

In an effort to stem the rise of homicides and violent crime, Detroit’s Mayor Bing announced the launch of the Detroit One program last March, a collaboration between law enforcement at local, state and federal levels together with community organizations. When the program launched in March, Bing reported the raid of a staggering 105 drug homes, and the confiscation of $2.7 million worth of drugs in the space of just six days.

But Andre Johnson, who works at the heart of communities tackling this issue, has never heard of Detroit One, and raids are doing little to affect Detroit’s scattered community of users or lift up communities’ economic woes. Even though Mike and Jenn’s dope house had just been raided, Mike, who is 45 and has been a Detroit-based heroin addict most of his adult life, cannot remember the last time he heard of one.

“Put simply, this city is a free rein for a drug addict,” he said explaining he could go about the city to buy drugs without worrying about being stopped by the police or arrested. “There are so many problems, there’s so much crime, cops don’t have time for shit like me.”

Mike says he avoids passing the 8 Mile Road confines of the city, where better-endowed law enforcement from the surrounding counties await to stop suburbanites returning home after trips into the city buying drugs.

Detroit’s strained police force have added to Detroit’s negative press over the last few months, registering an average response time to 911 calls of 58 minutes.

Longtime Detroit residents say the response rate is faster in the more gentrified areas, including midtown and downtown, where coffee shops and microbreweries are frequented by a white crowd of college-educated professionals who have recently joined artists and students moving to town for the first time in a couple of generations. In poorer, predominantly African American areas, the police sometimes do not come until the next day, Malik Yakini, a leading community and food justice activist, who also used to be a Detroit school principal, said.

In some communities left to their own devices, Mike says drug dealers are stepping in and stopping crime where police are not. A high crime rate is not good for business. “Your car’s not going to get broken into there, you know. Because they [the drug dealers] want it to be safe, so that people can come down and buy their dope.”

But, as the less and less popular American war on drugs winds down, predominantly black communities that are now being under-policed may become locked up “in a different sort of prison in which there is no recourse to the state, or its laws,” warns professor of political science Kimberley Johnson, who directs the urban studies program at Barnard College and Columbia University.

Back at the table with Jenn and Mike, our conversation is interrupted by a knock on the door. A young man comes in, looking worried. He tells us there is a cop car on the street. Jenn’s partner Chris has just gone out to buy drugs.

Jenn scurries out the door just in time and manages to stop him. Once the commotion settles down, she heads to another room and reemerges with a small wad of cash. She hands the young man ten dollars. A few minutes later, he comes back with a package.

“So how are you settling in to the area?” Jenn asks me, after she resumes her place by my side. Next to the vase of plastic flowers is an open box of needles. She has taken one of the plastic tubes out. She is getting ready to inject.