We learn the following snippets of information from newspaper accounts. How prevalent was heroin addiction in Mantua? That’s hard to say. Drug kingpins saw this slowdown as an opportunity to build a customer base for cocaine, which in the early 1980s arrived in the form of “crack” in poor urban neighborhoods. Increased federal enforcement and negotiations with other nations reduced the availability of heroin. In June 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs, labeling drug abuse “public enemy number one.” (This “war” would also be waged by the Reagan and Clinton administrations.) New policies were set in motion- policies that curbed the importation of Turkish heroin, established drug testing for returning GIs, and created a network of methadone clinics to treat addicts. That heroin was already deeply entrenched in cities and poor communities of color was a problem from which the publicity on drug-addled Vietnam veterans tended to divert attention. Yet the segregation effects of post-Second World War suburbanization, which resulted in middle-class whites leaving major cities for newly spawned suburbs built on a foundation of federally guaranteed mortgage loans (denied to blacks), left African Americans and Latinos stranded in declining, redlined urban neighborhoods, unbuffered (unlike their white suburban counterparts, at least until the 1970s) “from the urban ills of crime and drug abuse.” Īlthough law enforcement agencies made sporadic attempts to control the drug trade, the federal government and state law enforcement agencies treated this activity as a low-priority problem until the prospect of heroin-addicted GIs returning from the Vietnam War led to policy shifts, including funding methadone clinics to treat addicts. “Since adolescent males between the ages of fifteen and nineteen were the most prone to experiment with heroin, their swelling number in American society signaled danger,” writes Eric Schneider. The early 1960s saw the baby-boom generation reaching adolescence, now composing 9.7 percent of the U.S. Throughout the decade, this opium-based narcotic was sold with impunity in predominantly African American and Latino neighborhoods of the nation’s inner cities. Heroin loomed large in the cultural imagination of the 1960s. Heroin distribution marked the first phase of this slide. The crack epidemic did not arise in Mantua overnight as in the city and the nation-at-large, there was a long, slow slide towards crack in this neighborhood.
Social scientists describe these “new morbidities” as the harmful cumulative effects of flagrant racial inequities in housing, employment, education, and criminal justice in combination, governmental actions in these social sectors fostered an environment in which crack could thrive. In the 1980s, Mantua had the tinderbox conditions that made the highly addictive crack a deadly temptation to which many disaffected youths and young adults succumbed all too readily: concentrated poverty, lack of meaningful employment opportunities, education failure, and widespread anomie and despair. A comparison of the two census tracts that composed Mantua from 1980 to 1990 suggests the social and economic conditions that made this neighborhood a prime “social setting” for the crack cocaine epidemic of those decades.įocusing on Mantua, a particularly hard-hit community, illuminates the web of social forces that led to the widespread distribution and consumption of crack, the catastrophic effects of the epidemic, and the response of both government agencies (negative) and local community activists (positive).
As we have seen, Mantua experienced the outmigration of middle-income residents who left in search of safer and more prosperous neighborhoods, in part as a response to seriously declining conditions.