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.
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.