Chicago Matters; Coloring the Pipeline: Race & Drugs

[piano music] And now another special documentary, part of our series, It's About Race, Chicago Matters. If you look at the American economy, all segments of the economy, whether legal or illegal, you'd probably find that the single biggest growth sector over the last ten years has been the drug trade. Drugs are everywhere, in every city and suburb, every racial and social group. Drugs can of course destroy individual lives, and in some places they've torn apart the fabric of community life. There's a war on drugs, carried out by law enforcement agencies on the federal, state, and local levels, though it's hardly made a dent in the drug business.

This war, how it's carried out, where and against whom, is a reflection of the general racial attitudes of this society. That's what Cheryl Corley examines in this program, Coloring the Pipeline: The War on Drugs. - [Greg] Every day that they had to squeeze paths coming up and down the stairs, you know, because we were selling like 24 hours, a guy stopped that and sold it for nine in the morning until about 12 midnight, and he stopped that and started selling just at five o'clock, and then we just sold it for five hours like that. - [Corley] Greg is 40 years old, a former drug addict, for nearly 20 years shooting heroin through his veins, smoking it as well, selling drugs, working to support his habit, watching as customer after customer climb the stairs to buy a $10 bag of cocaine or heroin. - So you were in a building. - Yeah, apartment building.

Then I've sold it outside, you know. When I sold it outside, it was... - He is working now, raising his children alone, a single father. A few years ago, Greg was a junkie, a pusher, an African-American male, hooked on drugs, an atypical user, because the typical user of illicit drugs looks altogether different. - [Burnett] White, male, high school graduate. - Edwin Burnett is a Cook County public defender. - ...who lives in the suburbs. It's not as easily targeted there as it is in the urban areas where conditions seem to make African-American males more accessible to satisfy the feeding frenzy that society has for the war on drugs. Society wants to see arrests, society wants to see prosecutions, society wants to see incarcerations. The Black male in the inner city can give them that.

- According to government figures, Blacks represent about 15% of illegal drug users. Latinos 8% and whites 77%. Federal figures also belie common and pervasive misconceptions about the use and abuse of drugs by teenagers. The National High School Senior Survey, for example, shows that from 1985 to 1989, white males were twice as likely to use cocaine as Blacks. In Illinois, marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug, and white students again have the highest rates for using marijuana and for drinking. Latino students follow and African American students report the lowest rates. - [Hoch] These are for the Narcotics section alone, but last year we arrested 3,943 people. Michael Hoch heads the Chicago Police Department's Narcotics Division; a magazine about Vietnam and a Dick Tracy mug are neatly placed on his desk.

For the last 26 years, he's worked in various departments, Robbery, Homicide, Burglary, Vice Control, and now here, Narcotics. What we target here is mainly traffickers. We, I send out people every day and they purchase drugs from the dealers and we sometimes we do arrest them immediately, other times we defer and lock them up at a later date. Like last Thursday, we locked up 96 people for selling to the police. The people who are arrested by hoax undercover officers are predominantly Black, and the commander has no apologies. He says cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and other drugs are just as much a problem in white areas, but the way the drug is sold in African American neighborhoods makes arresting people much easier. In white neighborhoods, drug sales are more clandestine, sold in homes, bars, and businesses. In Black neighborhoods, a huge amount of drug sales occur on the street, recovering

addicts say sometimes you don't even have to ask for what you want. It's just that simple. - To get drugs was very easy, I mean drugs are mostly sold on any corner now, you know, whereas though, I guess, years ago you had to know someone, but today it's not like that, you can go on mostly any corner, ask who got drugs there to you, so it's that easy. - Is that how you got yours? - Yes. - So you would just go to a corner and say, "I'm ready." [laughter] - Not like that, but I guess when I came to that corner they knew I was ready, you know, but you just go to the corner and most of the times, you know, they just ask you how many, you know, and they get it, you give them your money, and you go about your business.

- The people who are often overlooked in the nation's war on drugs are women. Although drug addiction is colorblind, Counselor Bernadine Daudel [sp?], who works with Columbus Hospital's Project Hope, a treatment center for women and their children, says African American women have a harder time getting rid of their drug problem. - The non-Black women have more support systems in place, and that may be because of the economic situation where historically we all know that there's more money in circulation among white families, you know, in ratio, as compared to Blacks. A lot of the black women that come into the program are kind of pretty much on their own, they don't have any other support. They may have a public aid check, but they don't have a more stable family environment backing them, and they certainly don't have one that has the type of finances it would take to give them that extra additional help, because we all know that the public aid money that's given out is not enough for a person to survive on from month to month. - Crack cocaine began flooding into African-American neighborhoods in the 1980s.

The biggest single group of crack users is inner city Black women of childbearing age. Some experts say the crack epidemic has contributed to nearly 375,000 newborns a year being affected. Doctors and nurses at Cook County Hospital take care of sick infants in the neonatal intensive care unit and what's called the small baby room. There are rows of sealed off glass boxes fitted with lights, aquariums of a sort, with no water inside; instead babies, small enough to fit inside a shoebox. - How much do they weigh? - Okay, see basically... - In the small baby room, the infants weigh as little as one pound. After they reach two pounds, they graduate to the neonatal room. - This is the baby and respirator, and this is the machine that helps the baby breathe.

And this baby is fighting on respirator, so maybe... - The stories about crack babies and their problems have been very visible. Reports are splashed all over newspapers and television. Those babies are generally born to black women. There are fewer reports about the babies affected just as severely by excessive alcohol use and marijuana, drugs used more often by white women. Black women have also been the target of substance abuse laws and prosecutions, even those statistics show little difference between Black and white pregnant women for substance abuse. African-American women generally have more contact with government agencies and public hospitals, and are 10 times more likely to be reported for substance abuse. Theodore Binion Taylor of the Garfield Counseling Center says much of the drug problem is political. She says many Blacks live in an environment where billboards promote drinking, liquor stores

abound, and media images show young Black men as the most persistent and prominent drug abusers and dealers. - We have struggled under the burden of these horrible, stereotypical images of Black people, you know, the lazy, drug-abusing, welfare-cheating people, and you know, some of our people internalize that. I mean, that's their destiny almost, like what else is there to do. But that has to do with, I mean, not having the choices and not having opportunities. But if we can continue to get our youngsters to believe the lie, it keeps them powerless and feeling hopeless and helpless, and then I mean, hey, it's a vicious ugly circle.

- Inside the Counseling Center on Madison Street, people say drug dealing is all around, and Greg, who works at the center, says drug abuse, came almost naturally. - Well, when I was a kid, it was like eating breakfast. It was, well, it's, I ain't gonna say it was okay, but it seemed, it looked okay. Everybody that I knew was doing it, you know, I knew very little people that didn't. Some old people were even doing it, you know. My friend's mother was doing it one time, you know, and we didn't know until she said it one time, you know, and everybody's just doing it, you know, so... - Further into the neighborhood, there is a jumble of vacant apartment buildings, littered

lots, two flats and single family homes, some neat, others weary and tattered. The streets have been devastated in part by drugs. Even so, the area is crammed with children playing games and teenagers eager to offer denials. - Oh, I don't know about how easy it is to have it, or who's having it, to tell you the truth. - All right, so you don't think it's a problem around here? - Drugs around here? No, it's not a problem right here. - Basically, it's a nice neighborhood, a lot of sports for me in it, so we try to keep it drug-free. - Do you all go to this church here, any of you? - Yeah, okay, church. - Yeah. Some of us do go to this church. - Yeah, I'll go there. - You all go? - Yeah. - All right. Sometimes. Everybody don't go all the time. Some of us go. -Okay. - Yeah. We got a little group, call ourselves the AK choir and all that, you know. - So you all hang.

- Huh? - So you all hang. - Yeah, we hang together. Yeah. A few of the ball players want nothing to do with the conversation and bolt to the other side of the court when they hear the question about drugs, others hear the word racism, come to join the group and confused, begin talking about police brutality. - My story is about drugs, and Black people, and white people. And how, uh... - If it weren't for the white people the drugs wouldn't be here. - Damn. - You know what I'm sayin'? - We all got no boats and ships or nothing. - The story is the white people... what I see, the white people bringing it in. - This theory, by many Blacks, that it's white racists or the government bringing in drugs to dump in the Black community is not just teenage speculation, but a belief held by many adults as well. - All right. - Thank you. - Unless they let them in. - Unless they let them in. - No. - My point, I believe they're trying to kill off the population. They're trying to let the people kill themselves instead of causing a war. - We don't have slavery now, so we have drugs and genocide.

We really do. We don't have slavery anymore, but this is just a different form of slavery. We don't see the physical chains, but they're there, they're there, and it's even worse than it was when slavery was in. At least our minds were sober and we were intact. - Frustrating? - Very frustrating. Our communities are destroyed, our families are destroyed, our people are destroyed, and I hate to see a lot of talented young Black men go to waste by selling drugs, getting in prison. Or even just using them and throwing their life away. Very frustrating. Very frustrating. - Clarence Lusane, the author of Pipe Dream Blues, a book about racism and the drug war, does not embrace the conspiracy theory. - We're putting ourselves at a disservice if we try to look at it as a conspiracy and something that's being plotted by a few individuals, and either we take out those individuals and we'll be rid of the problem or that this conspiracy is so large and so deep that we can't deal with it.

I think if we address some of these economic and social questions, we will find that a great deal of the drug trafficking and drug abuse problems in our community will be abated. Now they won't disappear totally because the ability to produce drugs locally and people wanting to use drugs has existed in society from the beginning of time, so it won't disappear, but the kind of devastation we're looking at right now, I think, is principally driven by these economic and social factors. - If you didn't know there was a drug problem in North Austin on the city's west side, you wouldn't think it. The homes are comfortable, well-groomed, flowers and small gardens decorate backyards. On a warm breezy day, the wind rustles through trees while the postman delivers mail and chats with residents. Club signs posted at the beginning of several streets are emphatic. No drugs, no loud music or loitering, no gang activity, no playing on the grass, washing

or repairing of cars on the street. It is just as suburban as neighboring Oak Park on the other side of the street. But a step just around the corner on Division Street is a jolt of urban reality. B&A Fish Market is right next door to the True Love Mission Gospel Church. Across the street, there are closed stores, empty storefronts, another church. Two young men hang out on the corner in front of D&M Auto Parts. - Am I selling drugs? - I'm not asking you that, but if you want to tell me. - No, I ain't selling drugs but do people buy drugs? Yeah. It's just about everybody out here buying drugs, you know, especially on Black people. Black folks don't have no jobs and they ain't got no other way to turn, that's where they're getting their money. They're selling drugs. - And using them as well. They're using them as well, that's why they're going in and out of rehab and they ain't doing no different for them because they come right back out here doing the same thing they were doing when they went in there.

You know the situation... on Black folks, it's hard. It says work out here, ain't no work out here. If it was, we've had so many people out here on drugs. People turn to drugs because they can't feel they can't do no better than what they're doing. All drugs do is have you depressed, don't let you do nothing for yourself, bring you down. - There is a quiet and grim acknowledgement from just about everyone, including cops, that the drug culture, as devastating as it is to communities, is a last ditch effort by many just to survive: seemingly, the only available way to make money. Despite the acknowledgement, residents want the low-level drug dealing by gangbangers, by addicts, and the violence and crime which comes with them gone. The North Austin CB Patrol is run by residents.

They ride to find trouble. Operators at a base station call in the details to police after they get radio reports from those on the street. There are usually two people per unit in different vehicles, one to drive, one to radio back what's happening. Unit 235 drived slowly through heavily pockmarked streets. They pull over to watch what's happening on a corner in front of a store. There are five, maybe six people standing there. After a few moments, a man speaks loudly. "Y'all figure it out," he says, "There's Vice down here." He starts walking towards the car. Everyone else scatters.

The driver is nervous and wants to make sure my mic and his buddy's CB radio are out of view. It is a tense moment, although the driver and his companion both chuckle and talk about how they need different disguises so they won't be recognized. The man outside walks by, takes a quick look and goes on. - Yeah, they're out here. Ain't no two ways about it, they are here. And they're slick with it. They got [inaudible] four or five people looking out. Coming like it wasn't nothing. - Members of the North Austin CB groups say they recognize they may just be shifting drug dealers to other neighborhoods.

They say better pushers be run out than homeowners and other residents. In the long run, the drug dealers usually end up in one of two places, if not both. The first is a hospital. Cook County Hospital's trauma unit is on the third floor. Gunshot wounds, stabbing, severe injuries are as common as the monitors and whirring machines which help keep people alive. There were nearly 21,000 drug admissions in Chicago emergency rooms in 1989. African-Americans accounted for 54% of the emergency room mentions where race was noted and cocaine was a factor. For whites, it was 37%. Gloria Hall is a shift nurse for the trauma unit at Cook County. What she sees is the aftermath of violence. The end of battles over gang turf to sell drugs.

The fights over drug sales. If they want to really kill them, they would shoot them in the head or something now. Shoot them in... gunshot wounds to the chest. If they want them paralyzed. They know they shoot them in the spine. We get a lot of kids during this summer that we sent to rehabs that is paralyzed from the neck down, paralyzed from the waist down or something like that so it could be anything. Some deaths are being maimed for the rest of your life, you know, it happens. - So you've seen a lot. - I've seen a lot. Like I said, it's really bad and I talked to a lot of kids a lot of times. I said, one thing that bothers me most is that you go out there, you push drugs for somebody in the street. You stand on this corner and you get paralyzed and when you're here, do the drug dealer, do the big man that's driving the Mercedes, do they send you flowers, do they come by and say hi, do they give you anything if you have a child or they buy your child or anything like that? No they don't. - Nurse Hall gets interrupted, a badly bruised man with pins in his legs wants to urinate standing up. He is handcuffed to his hospital bed.

The sheriff's deputy who had been standing outside the hospital door comes in. He talks to the nurses and denies the request. Nurse Hall calls it inhumane. The deputy will not say if the man's injuries are drug-related or not. In the lobby of the Cook County Court Building, at 26th and California, guards frisk visitors extensively after they go through a metal detector. Suspected drug dealers and gangbangers are part of the thousands who come in through other doors, escorted by sheriff's deputies and police into court rooms. Night Bond Court in Branch 57 is always busy. Relatives and visitors sit on wooden benches scarred with initials scratched in with pens and pencils. To the left of the judge's bench, as the door swings open, you can see the crowd of people mostly Black men waiting for their names to be called. Many are familiar with the drill, others are reminded by sheriff's deputies. Hands behind the back, walk forward, stop at the judge's bench, bring your hands forward.

They come in t-shirts, sweaters. There are a few women. Many face charges of possession, not for very much, usually a gram or two. Police officers who made the arrest sit in jury boxes. For them, it's a familiar procedure, just like making the bust. Officer William Davis. - I can sympathize with them. I don't condone what they do and I will lock them up, any chance I get. I'm telling you, from my point of view, maybe not as an officer, but maybe as just a person, I can understand why some people go there, well, they don't have any other options. That's not my fault, that's the community's fault, because the community could do better for their people. - Although whites dominate the drug trafficking industry and are the majority of drug users as well, it is Blacks who are most often convicted. Author Clarence Lusane: - The attitude towards young African-Americans to a great degree is that they cannot be rescued

they are on their way to being lifetime criminals and we need to punish them now and show them that either they straighten up or they will get more punishment. The attitude towards a lot of young whites is that well, they really didn't mean this. This is just the act of youthfulness and it can be forgiven. Again, studies have shown that for the exact same crime, young African-Americans are seven to ten times more likely to be convicted and to be sentenced, but... and that is straight up a function of racial attitude and not any other factors. - The focus on law and order, arresting drug dealers and addicts who commit crimes to support their habits, is one step in combating the drug problem, say experts, but the emphasis on law and order, mandatory sentences for some drug offenses, and the lack of legislation or dollar set-asides for treatment is causing a crisis of its own: prison overcrowding. The inmate population in Illinois far exceeds capacity and by the year 2000, officials

believe 26 new prisons would be necessary to meet the demand. Female inmate population has also grown. There are attempts to make some changes; an organization called TASC, Treatment Alternatives for Special Clients, is part of the state's effort to place nonviolent drug offenders in programs outside of the jail system. Melody Heaps is the president and founder of Illinois TASC. - We try and relate to the law and order and the law enforcement community, but what we've seen over the last, I think, six years particularly, is a real emphasis on "get tough on drugs," "just say no," somehow thinking that if we can criminalize the young addict, put them in prison, that that's going to make a difference in their life, and all we've done is create a better criminal. No involvement of substance abuse treatment, no addressing of that person's addiction and they come out more addicted, more aggressive, less likely to be able to be rehabilitated than ever before.

And what we see is this is happening to our young people, to young adults, to young males in particular and unfortunately, I think, to young minority males. - Critics say much of the problem can be attributed to mandatory sentencing laws, laws enacted by Congress and many states in response to a public outcry over street drug trafficking. Federal officials say about 50 of the nation's 680 federal judges are refusing to hear drug cases as a result, protesting the sentencing procedure. And just recently, the U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said she would order a review of the federal sentencing guidelines. Clarence Lusane says this would probably be the most important step in revamping the war against drugs and making sure that drug laws are less discriminatory. - What that process has done is criminalize an entire generation, soon to be a generation and a half, of young African-Americans, young Hispanic-Americans, all around this drug trafficking.

And the way we see this manifested is in the kind of cultural expressions that have become popular in a lot of our communities. We've seen a fusion to a great degree of street culture, youth culture, and jail culture. For example, a lot of the ways in which young people are addressing our young Black males with the head rags, with the sagging pants, is right out of the prisons in terms of how they dress in the prisons. And to see that kind of mix is a very poignant statement on what's happened to young people where you don't have now a few people who may know somebody that's in jail. We talk about young people who are their friends are in jail and there's no problem with them going to see them going to be there with them, where to some degree in some communities it's become a rite of passage to do some jail time. Now as long as that's what's being enculturated, then we cannot rescue our communities.

And part of beating that back is to deal with the mandatory minimums where we say no. When young people are caught in these situations, we have to on a case-by-case basis make a determination of what's the best way to rescue this young person. - Lusane says for some, the answer may indeed be jail depending on how heinous their crime was. For others, it may be treatment alternatives. Advocates for change in the drug war, say maybe the best way to get people and more importantly politicians who craft the laws to realize that there must be change is to talk about costs. Melody Heaps of TASC. - If you're going to build a prison, per cell, per bed, I believe you're talking $67,000. That's an enormous cost for an individual. If you want to put that same individual in an outpatient setting, we're talking $2,500. If you want to put that person in a residential treatment program for a year, you may be

talking $10,000. Now you figure the difference, which is most likely to change that individual's behavior, spending $67,000 to build the cell, plus the $16,000 to $25,000 to incarcerate them, or $10,000 to treat them at the highest end of the treatment scale. - Authorities are beginning to realize the implications. They must also recognize what impact new programs and legislation would have on people of color, the people who nationally have a relatively low level of substance abuse. The answers are important to people like former heroin addict Greg, who still face temptation every day. - It was like right over there in McDonald's, there was a little guy came in and gave me two bags of dope. I didn't say no, I just pushed it back at him because I didn't want that anymore, and the guy got mad because I didn't want it, you know. And, you know, a lot of people, they're proud about what I do. I'm proud of myself, you know, because I thought I was going to die a dope fiend, a drug

addict, you know. - What Greg does now is work and raise his children. Sometimes he travels to his old neighborhood to let people who knew him before see that it's okay not to use drugs and not to sell them. He passes out cards with the phone number of his counseling center, just in case someone else is ready to make a change. I'm Cheryl Corley. - Coloring the Pipeline, The War on Drugs, was produced by Cheryl Corley and edited by Gary Covino, the associate producer was Nora Moreno and the studio engineers were Robert Newhouse and Grant Barger.