Drug Use

Changing Views of Drug Use

Nineteenth-century African American culture was highly critical of drug and alcohol use. Some slaves refused to drink alcohol, seeing it as a mechanism of social control. After the Civil War, African Americans tended to support the prohibition of alcohol because of its link to the abolitionist cause. Furthermore, throughout this period, blacks lacked access to the prescription opiates that led to addiction for some white patients. As a result, African Americans at the turn of the century may have been more inclined to abstinence than other ethnic group.

That began to change, however, in the early 1900s, when large numbers of African Americans migrated to northern cities in search of industrial jobs. Conditions in urban centers were poor: jobs were few, housing was decrepit, and social services to help rural people adapt to city life did not exist. African American residents of urban slums suffered a crippling loss of morale. Drugs and alcohol had increasing appeal for this socially and economically depressed group.

Drug Use in Harlem

Harlem, the predominantly African American neighborhood in uptown New York City, saw the birth of a vigorous trade in illegal drugs beginning in the 1930s. In the 1960s, Black Muslim leader Malcolm X described his experiences as a marijuana dealer in the mid-1940s, noting that people all around him were using the substance, which was highly regarded by the black “hipster” culture of the era.

Blues and jazz artists of the period, including trumpeters Louis Armstrong and John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, felt that smoking marijuana enhanced their response to music. Some musicians also experimented with heroin. But as Harlem fell into deep economic decline following the Great Depression, drug use, including the use of heroin, spread beyond the artistic community.

Deteriorating Cities

In the 1950s, African Americans faced mounting social challenges. As whites and middle-class blacks fled the cities, inner-city neighborhoods and entire cities became depressed slums that were flooded with cheap heroin. Large numbers of African Americans became addicts in this period. Heroin users tended to be marginalized members of the community; many were unemployed or came from broken homes.

Community leaders, both black and white, noticed the trend but felt that the problem was limited to an urban underclass, and they were thus not inclined to offer help to heroin users. Instead, policymakers passed laws that imposed harsh penalties and prison terms for drug users. The people convicted under these new laws were overwhelmingly black.

The heroin epidemic lasted through the 1970s, with users getting younger and poorer. In time, the drug began to spread out of inner cities, especially during the Vietnam War and its aftermath. In the mid-1970s, the Nixon administration opened methadone clinics in urban neighborhoods to try to deal with the problem of heroin addiction. However, economic circum stances and the breakdown of social networks meant that some African Americans had little hope of resisting drugs. In the 1970s, methadone, phencyclidine (PCP), and “designer drugs” became available in urban areas, contributing further to the drug epidemic.

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