we weren’t meant to survive,
but we’ve always been good
at going about our lives
in factories and on our knees
in houses we cleaned
with tables at which
we would never eat.
But still we fell in line,
took to boot, tank, and sky.
In Busan, in Ardennes, in Hue,
young men threw themselves
over booby trap and grenade
never to return to an ostensible parade.
Strangers in a homeland
still no man’s—
the barbed lancets of a bee.
But, still, there was honey.
There were arias and
Chisholm-chiseled sightlines
as the tale of our roots writhed.
So we broke step
as we dreamed dreams
deferred again and again,
as we congregated
over hot buttered toast,
took our seats at the table,
called on our mothers
to grease and braid hair of babes,
as we curled close together
in Harlem and Trenton
on nights alight with our injuries.
To the disquieting phrasing
of Black bodies swinging,
we still curl close
to loved ones
in different cities,
teach our children
their ABCs and 123s,
how to pas de bourrées
and kick-ball-change,
as we work to lift
our fists, the needle,
put on a new record to play.
1979–1984
THE WAR ON DRUGS
James Forman, Jr.
In the spring of 1983, at a crucial moment in the history of American drug policy, Harlem congressman Charles Rangel gaveled to order the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. In Washington, D.C., heroin’s resurgence had led residents to deluge city officials with letters demanding relief from the growing number of addicts congregating on corners and sleeping on park benches. In Los Angeles, phencyclidine, more commonly known as angel dust or PCP, seemed to be taking over; the Los Angeles Sentinel, the city’s leading Black newspaper, complained that the city had become “the PCP capital of the world.” In New York and Miami, entrepreneurs were discovering that baking powder, cocaine, and a stove were all they needed to create the inexpensive and potent new product that would soon come to be called crack.
President Ronald Reagan, for his part, had already seized on illegal drug use as a political issue. “We’re making no excuses for drugs—hard, soft, or otherwise,” Reagan said in a radio address to the nation in October 1982. “Drugs are bad, and we’re going after them.” Repeating what would become one of his signature phrases, Reagan claimed that “we’ve taken down the surrender flag and run up the battle flag. And we’re going to win the war on drugs.”
Decades later, we know what that war has helped produce: ruined lives, hollowed-out communities, and mass incarceration. But could the war have been fought differently?
Dozens of witnesses appeared before Rangel’s committee with an answer to that question. Almost to a person, they agreed: if America was going to meet its drug crisis, it needed to make a robust commitment to drug treatment. According to the head of the National Institute for Drug Abuse, people who participated in adequately funded programs reduced their drug use, committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to find and keep a job.
Treatment didn’t always work, of course—some programs weren’t very good, while others limped along on shoestring budgets, and even the best ones failed sometimes. Addiction is a terrible disease, witnesses explained, and addicts often needed multiple chances before finding success. But treatment worked better than any of the alternatives and at lower cost. Since you could put eight people in a drug program for the cost of a single prison bed, treatment was what one New York official called “the cheapest game in town.”
The biggest problem with drug treatment was that there wasn’t enough of it. When a national association surveyed states about their treatment capacity, 94 percent said that they couldn’t meet their citizens’ needs. In one twenty-four-hour period, nine heroin overdose victims were brought unconscious to Boston City Hospital; emergency personnel saved them all, but because every program in the city was full, officials couldn’t offer treatment to any of them.
It was a powerful case. But not for the first—or last—time, politics, ideology, fear, and racism would prove more powerful. Ignoring the call to fund more treatment, research, and prevention, the Reagan administration did the opposite and shifted funds toward law enforcement. Where the Nixon administration had devoted two-thirds of the federal drug budget to treatment and one-third to law enforcement, Reagan reversed that ratio to what it has remained since: two-thirds law enforcement, one-third treatment. A New Jersey official, describing the massive waiting lists for programs in his state, complained to Rangel’s committee that this reallocation of funding constituted “simple abandonment by the Federal Government of the prevention and treatment field.”
By cutting treatment in the midst of a drug crisis, the Reagan administration established the template that would define drug policy in America for decades to come. The consequences have been grave and lasting. Most immediately, cutting funding for treatment denied help to people in pain. After all, behind every statistic presented in the testimony before Rangel’s committee were people, most of them poor, struggling to keep their families and lives together in the face of dependency and addiction.
But drug warriors of the era succeeded in presenting drug users in a different light. Defining addiction as an individual choice and personal failure, they contended that society bore no responsibility for the consequences. If a person became dependent on or addicted to drugs, it was because they were weak, selfish, irresponsible, or depraved. Female drug users were especially frequent targets of denunciation. For example, when asked about the challenge of caring for pregnant women addicted to crack, D.C.’s health commissioner blamed the women. “The response of a rational person would be to come in and find out whether they are pregnant, but we aren’t talking about rational people,” he said. “We are talking about women who simply do not care. The maternal instinct is being destroyed.”