The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland

THE COMMUNAL
IMPACTS OF
DRUG
CRIMINALIZATION
IN MARYLAND
Winter 2023
Lawerence Grandpre & Natalie Flath
Research Assistant: Judith Park

Table of Contents
Executive Summary .....................................................................................3
The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland
Authors: Lawrence Grandpre, Natalie Flath & Judith Park (Research Assistant)
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................2
Introduction .........................................................................................................14
Scoping Review .....................................................................................................19
Historical Context of Drug Criminalization in the US and the Criminalization of
Blackness ..............................................................................................................21
Qualitative Study ..................................................................................................23
Conclusion ............................................................................................................38
Recommendations for Policy Advocates ...............................................................42
Appendix ..............................................................................................................49
References ............................................................................................................51

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Open Society Foundations for the financing that supported
the relationship between University of Maryland Baltimore School of
Social Work and Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle.
The research team would also like to thank the community leaders who took time
out of their commitments to interview with us. We are grateful for the faculty
advisory of
Dr. Corey Shdaimah and Dr. Brook Kearley.
Most of all, the university-based research team are forever grateful for the
mentorship, guidance, and patience from Lawrence Grandpre, who has taught
us so much about what it means to work and live in anti-racist praxis.
Authors
Lawrence Grandpre
Director of Research
Leaders of a Beautiful
Struggle
Natalie Flath
University of Maryland
Baltimore
School of Social Work
Judith Park
University of Maryland
Baltimore
School of Social Work
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Executive Summary
Written by: Lawrence Grandpre
Overview
This project attempts to reframe the harms of drug
criminalization. Influenced by African-Centered Research
Methodologies, we engaged in a literature review and
qualitative research of the communal impacts of drug
decriminalization in Maryland, with a specific focus on
Baltimore.
We discovered that targeted hyper-incarceration driven by drug
criminalization has harmed communities' ability to exercise
self-determination and thus exacerbates the impacts of white
supremacy and anti-Blackness. Moreover, we find that the
erosion of community capacity from targeted hyperincarceration
via drug criminalization has brought with it an
ecosystem of nonprofits centered on addiction that has harmed
community capacity for self-governance.
This analysis makes the case that decriminalization of drugs
must be accompanied by a vision of reparations for the War on
Drugs to accomplish the social justice outcomes advocates seek.
Also, this perspective may be necessary to generate the political
support for the successful passage and implementation of the
policy.
Decriminalization in Black and White.
The Racial Politics of “Decrim” and the Need for a New Narrative.
There is an emerging “standard narrative” around advancing drug decriminalization, used
by many advocates of all races and backgrounds. To summarize, it argues that overdose
deaths from a toxic drug supply are exacerbated by the social disruption, health impact,
and decreased tolerance created by incarceration of those suffering substance use
dependency, a reality driven by the criminalization of drug possession. Policing and
incarceration are ineffective deterrents to drug use, which should be seen as a public
health problem. This means police are “wasting money” on busting recreational drug use,
money which decriminalization (colloquially referred to as “decrim”) would free up. The
policy is often sold as freeing individuals to safely pursue drug use without the risk of
overdose or the threat of police intervention. Finally, public health officials are presented
as trusted authorities who serve the community through overdose prevention and
“evidence-based” addiction treatment, paid for in part by money saved from police
budgets.
If lawmakers and constituents could hear this argument, the advocacy strategy went, then
they would create the proper political conditions to push the policy through the state
capitals around the country.
While the standard narrative of decriminalization has persuasive value, the manner in
which I heard it presented took on an air of “common sense” that at times felt like
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“groupthink”. Also, I realize this framing has limitations. This analysis, after all, frames
the issue through the lens of “cost savings,” which can work against the notion of
economic redistribution, and “elite expertise,” which can work against notions of
participatory democracy.
I, Lawrence, a co-author of the research report, is a community researcher working with a
grassroots think tank which does extensive political advocacy on issues ranging from
police accountability to cannabis legalization from an explicitly Pan African/Black
nationalist lens. This puts me in conversation with a broad cross-section of “black civil
society,” the community groups which make up so much of Black political and civic life in
a city like Baltimore. Upon being presented with this standard narrative of drug
decriminalization, I was not surprised to find many of those who heard this argument
were generally unenthusiastic or even resistive to drug decriminalization, despite
supporting progressive policy and even progressive drug policy in the past. The comments
presented in the “standard narrative” on decrim varied, but mostly diverged from one
central point; White supremacy and anti-blackness create addiction, street-level drug
sales, survival economics, and the nonprofit industrial complex, and these operate in
ways that decrim theorists do not fully understand, turning the solutions decrim
advocates present, which sound good in theory, into ineffectual or even dangerous in
reality.
Given that many of the civic groups that have been essential to the successful passage of
progressive legislation in the state capital of Annapolis in the past have been resistant to
this standard narrative of decrim, it did not bode well for the political stakes for this
essential issue.
This research project is an attempt to bring these stories to the larger drug policy
community, to create a space for these voices to be heard, as they are often not sought out
to engage in conversation on drug policy, or worse, actively seen as antagonistic to drug
policy reform.
The result, we hope, is the beginning of redefining how advocates and researchers
understand the harms of drug criminalization. Instead of a story of individuals being
harmed by a bad policy, drug criminalization should instead be seen as communities
being harmed by a system of White supremacy that produces anti-Black policy (of which
drug criminalization is just one example).
Seen from this perspective, a new frame for drug decriminalization can emerge, one
which places reparation for the War on Drugs at its center. This reframed
decriminalization policy is not only more socially just, but it may also be politically
necessary for decriminalization to pass in a state like Maryland, whose population is over
30 percent African-American and which has one of the largest state legislative Black
caucuses in the United States (1).
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From the Bottom Up. A New Approach to
Researching Drug Criminalization
This project also set out to set a new framework for
research methodologies around drug policy. A
standard participatory action research (PAR) model
leaves the researchers to design much of the core
theory, metric, and concepts guiding the research,
leading community partners to do much of the leg
work, e.g., doing interviews and collecting data that
serves in the model the researcher largely formed.
This can be criticized by some, including me, as too
often replicating the hierarchies PAR often claims to
be studying, with community partner’s input largely
relegated to data collection, not the design of research
methodology and interpretation of that data (2).
Our process flipped this dynamic, with the
community researchers choosing to center the
analysis on how drug criminalization impacts social
capital and community capacity to build selfgoverned
institutions, with the goal of creating
recommendations for how drug policy can repair this
harm by investing in communities most impacted by
drug criminalization to exercise self-determination.
The traditional researchers then filled in much leg work, engaging in an extensive literature
review process to see what traditional academics had to say on this issue (synopsis: not much)
then engaging in qualitative research with a representative cross-section of community
experts.
Finally, expertise was defined beyond personal experience or academic/professional expertise
alone, but specifically with folks who have demonstrated a track record of not only working on
addiction, but also working on the issue in a way that reflects the culture of the impacted
communities and their work. Specifically, having an analysis of the collective impact of
criminalization on hurting community institutions’ capacity to practice self-determination
(though collective disinvestment from community organizations and through the nonprofit
industrial complex) has impacted their work.
This work was framed through the lens of engagement between community scholars guiding
the process through the use of African-Centered Research paradigm and traditional academics
incorporating elements of these approaches into their work (3).
By presenting the voices of community experts traditionally marginalized in drug policy
spaces, our research offers an opportunity to start the process of bringing tools of analysis
from the black radical tradition into drug decriminalization/harm reduction work.
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Decriminalize Blackness First
“It’s tough for me because I live in a community, and I have a child and I don’t think that
everyone should just be out here selling drugs. I’ve seen first-hand people killing each
other over drugs and that has to stop as well. I’m not anti-(de)criminalization of
substances, but we can't (de)criminalize and not improve the conditions that facilitate the
criminality at the same time. It places the blame on people, usually people of color,
people who are poor, people who have less education. It doesn’t fall on the powers that be
and the people with money.”
The quote above encapsulates a common sentiment among interviewees. Interviewees
overwhelmingly saw overdose, addiction, and criminalization as an expression of a system
of oppression, and expressed concerns the decrim didn’t speak explicitly to this system of
oppression. Without a clear theory of redistribution of investment tied to decrim, the
policy, while receiving support, was also seen as not giving the infrastructure for
individuals to fight these systems. Interviewees talked about policing being a system of
anti-black violence stemming from slave patrols, even mentioning well-known instances in
Baltimore's recent history where the police themselves were implicated in selling the very
drugs progressive advocates seek to decriminalize (4).
If policing is seen as not driven by bad policy, but as an extension of a larger societal thrust
of anti-blackness, then the benefit of eliminating possession offenses would seem to be
minimal, a finding receiving academic support from analyses observed that after the
decriminalization of cannabis, some Maryland police departments compensated for lower
cannabis arrests for increased arrests for other offenses (5).
Advocates discussed police brutality and fights for police accountability. Drug
decriminalization advocates, while speaking on the subject occasionally, were not seen as
trusted allies in the long fight to deconstruct the system of racist social control, examples
of anti-Black violence beyond policing, schooling, child welfare systems, gentrification, and
the non-profit industrial complex.
Our interviews made it clear, it is not that they were against the
decriminalization of drugs, but that until decrim advocates expressed a larger
commitment to helping their fight against the criminalization of being Black
in America, decriminalization of drugs would not be their top concern.
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Criminalization Hurt Communities,
Decrim Must Build Them Up
“There was a man... he had had some active addictions
and had been in like gangs, and he was like, ‘look, if
you want me off my heroin, you're gonna have to
create a better friendship community, cause heroin is
really faithful. It'll be there when everybody else
disappears.’”
One of the surprising elements of the conversation is
how little the interviewees talked about overdose. While
our research didn’t explicitly focus on overdose,
substance use disorder and the communal impacts of
systemic racism were center among interviewees.
Additionally, many interviewees expressed an analysis
of addiction far beyond the medical model of addiction,
tying addiction to the historical legacy of slavery and
Jim Crow, trauma from experiencing interpersonal and
structural violence, poverty, isolation, and internalized
racial self-hatred.
The interviewees' poignant quote about heroin being
there “when others leave” should be seen as core to
understanding the communal impact of drug
criminalization. Echoing the work of former Rutgers
professor Todd Clear’s work on targeted hyperincarceration
from drug criminalization creating
“coercive mobility” that destabilizing communities and
perversely, increasing crime, interviewees stated that
constant cycling of community members in and out of
jail due to hyper-incarceration produced a decrease in
collective efficacy, harming the ability of communities to
produce community institutions that can build
alternatives to the street economy (6).
However, our interviewees isolated many factors beyond
the scope of Clear’s analysis. While Clear laments the
loss of “informal social control” many of our
interviewees challenged the basic notion that selling
drugs should be seen as criminality (or needing social
control), seeing it as survival economics and an
understandable, if problematic, response to centuries of
anti-Black violence. Interviewees asserted that drug
criminalization created degrees of trauma given the
Black community's historical experience with anti-Black
violence, creating a strong demand among interviewees
for culturally specific responses rather than the generic
“community investment.”
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Indeed, this quote comes from a former addict who used Chi-gong as a form of addiction
prevention, only to find the institution he worked with impacted by a foundation shift in focus
from addiction treatment to “trauma.” “Trauma informed” care is presented by some as a “best
practice” for addressing social determinants of health care, so it being identified as trading off
with grassroots community attempts to address the harms of drug criminalization. This
exemplifies the need to center definitions of “anti-racism” produced by the communities most
impacted by White Supremacy/anti-Blackness. Moreover, the collapse of community
institutions created after a flood of interest and donations after the Baltimore Uprising of 2015
was noted as demonstrating the lack of care powerful institutions had for the humanity of
Black people, creating a further sense of distrust of philanthropic institutions.
Our research shows it is unlikely, without the explicit and intentional
commitment of community control, even the most well-intentioned philanthropic
investments will be embraced in communities most actually impacted by drug
criminalization.
Crime and Social Control Fears Constrain
Black Community Support for Drug
Decriminalization
“I support the decriminalization of certain drugs to
use the revenue to uplift vulnerable people. You got to
think, will the money be used like that? …if … it's not
being used to provide job opportunities, etc., then you
will see more desperation in the streets, and I think
that could increase crime. In many ways, this is sad.
However, this is a consequence of racial control…We
need to think about this collectively.” (J)
Many interviewees also conflated decriminalization of
opioids and other drugs with decriminalization of
cannabis, viewing both through their experience as
people who live in communities impacted by the streetlevel
drug trade. Our analysis shows the relationship
between public perception of cannabis
decriminalization and public perception of opioid
decriminalization, specifically in the Black community,
may be under-theorized in drug decriminalization
spaces. Some in pro decriminalization advocates in
drug policy spaces have argued that cannabis
legalization is a test case for opioid decriminalization.
From the perspective of some in the drug policy
community, cannabis was decriminalization
legalization with minimum social ramification, proving
we can decriminalize other substances as well. Our
findings show this may not be a view shared by some
on the ground in communities most impacted by the
War on Drugs.
Many interviewees experienced cannabis
decriminalization as part of a gateway to cannabis
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legalization, which was sold as sucking money out of the
market for illegal sales and into white-dominant
markets outside of community control. Interviewees
expressed concern about the disruption of survival
economics through cannabis legalization, and fear that
economic desperation might lead to people pursuing
other forms of survival economics that are more
disruptive of the community fabric (like theft and armed
robbery). They also expressed frustration that none of
the economic benefits of cannabis legalization seem to
be flowing to the communities most impacted by the
War on Drugs.
This should be read within the context of the Black
community's experience of drugs as a tool of social
society. Many in the Black community perceive the
increased accessibility of crack cocaine in the 1980s as
tied to federal government action. The documented
links between the drug dealing organization led by
“Freeway” Rick Ross with cocaine suppliers tied to the
U.S. backed political opposition group, Contras, shows a
strong possibility that money from US drug sales may
have been given to support rebels in Guatemala (7). This
created the perception by many that the federal
government forced, or at least allowed, crack to flood
into the Black community to create a stream of off-thebooks
funding for CIA support of death squads, while
also destabilizing the Black community in the wake of
the increased Black electoral power in American cities
and the Black Power movement. Moreover, the supply
and promotion of psychedelics was explicitly theorized
by Jolly West, one of the most infamous scientists
associated with the covert government psychedelic
experimentation program known as UK-ULTRA, as a
potential strategy of government control of the populace
(8). This means that, both drug prohibition and
liberalization of drug laws are seen by the Black
community as potential vectors of social control. Our
work shows this anxiety, rather than being relieved by
cannabis legalization, may be in fact exacerbated by
cannabis legalization and decriminalization.
The communal disruption caused by hyperincarceration
has led to intense trauma by facilitating a
culture of violence tied to illegal drug sales.
Decriminalization thus flairs up server concerns that
liberalization of possession laws might facilitate
increased street drug sales, which interviewees are
concerned about not primarily because of some moral
objection to drug use, but concern that it will fuel the
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criminal elements involved in the illicit drug trade, leading to more street violence. The
standard argument from decrim advocates, that decrim does not lead to more street drug
sales, does not address this concern, as community members expressed concern not only
about decrim making things worse, but the perpetuation of a status quo reality of
violence they deem unacceptable.
Multiple interviewees brought up the anti-violence legacy of community-led institutions
like the Nation of Islam and the Black church, demonstrating the secular, public health,
and human social service focus that has dominated the conversation around drug decrim
and how often it fails to engage critical stakeholders.
Any drug decriminalization policy seeking to gain support from people who
have framed drug policy liberalization as a tool for social control and
community destabilization must center a comprehensive response to street
violence and empower communities to address their own problems.
Go Back to Go Forward-Locating Public
Health’s Place in The History and Present
of Anti-Blackness
“I've worked in recovery homes, drug court
programs, op/in-patient, medication management
clinics, everywhere…the truth of the matter is that it
is driven by money. How much time is [it] going to
take someone to move through our treatment
protocols? So that way we can prove to the state that
we are meeting our goals, and that way we can
prove that we deserve more money than the
university. How much money do we have to do
things, to take clients into the community, or to do
things socially with clients? How much of the
creation of alternative programming is going to
take away from this primary programming that we
feel is more efficacious than whatever the alternative
programming is, and more in alignment with
potentially the funding sources? The drive is of
course more about how do we keep our jobs? How
do we keep money coming in?”
Overall, advocates spoke on the history of Baltimore,
as a comprehensive web of oppressive institutions.
One of the central takeaways is that decriminalization
advocates take accountability for their relationship
within these institutions.
While harm reduction advocates have been keen to
try to delineate their advocacy from drug courts and
mandatory treatment, arguing that decriminalization
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would take away leverage from coercive treatment institutions, community members
identified a critique of social services beyond what decrim advocates have traditionally
accounted for. There is a shared notion among interviewees that Black people in general,
not just those in addiction treatment, are subjected to degrees of dehumanization that
mean institutions, in general, do not honor their humanity or center their right to selfdetermination.
For many interviewees, a world where philanthropic resources begin to
flow into institutions tied to decriminalization presents not an alternative to the past
service ecosystem, but another vector in the commodification of Black suffering.
Moreover, the medical system itself also serves as a system of social control and anti-
Blackness. With prominent public health institutions in Baltimore having a legacy of
medical experimentation, gentrification, and currently supporting increased policing in
the city, many found there to be less of the dichotomy between policing and public
health, but rather they existed as two sides of the same system of anti-Black violence
(9,10). The primary donor of one of the nation's largest harm reduction funders, Michael
Bloomberg, in addition to his historical support for policies like stop and frisk, has
publicly supported increased policing of the very Baltimore neighborhoods
decriminalization is ostensibly serving through his support for an independent John
Hopkins Police Force (11). One of the region’s largest funders of harm reduction work,
the Abell Foundation, has had a historically fraught relationship with some in Black civil
society, perceived by some as playing an unaccountable “gatekeeping” role in the
nonprofit space, and has its own history of supporting efforts perceived by some as
racialized medical experimentation, paying for Norplant contraceptive implants in
predominantly Black teenage girls in the 1990s (12–14).
Public health’s connection with the larger apparatus of anti-Blackness and this history in
the Baltimore community puts a spectator over attempts to gain community support for
the build-out of human social services associated with drug decriminalization, for, as one
interviewee put it:
“How can we expect the same people who created the torture to fund our recovery.”
Advocates of decriminalization must grapple with the racist past (and
present) of public health institutions in order to build the sort of coalition
that can get support for a build-out of the genuinely community-controlled
and anti-racist treatment ecosystem needed in a post-decriminalization
world.
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Reparations Means Community Repair, not
Reconciliation or Reform
“In my work as a mental health provider, it was about
reconnecting to ancestral connection and veneration around
who our people were. It was about pointing out where
Eurocentric or whitewashed or White supremacist ideals have
been embedded within us. For example, African-American folks
not wanting to be Black, or seeking to have proximity to
whiteness. So, if we're thinking about this, how I might support
a person that maybe is struggling with addiction or navigating
systems, I would first define community from an African-
Centered perspective that is not reliant on white mainstream
institutions and is not led by or maintaining any level of power
over them.
…decriminalization would be easier, if we had more voices of
folks that had some critical consciousness experience where
they had the ability to see themselves in their own life, see it,
alongside what's happening politically, and then begin to
advocate and be supported by funded community supported
and advocated, so that they could be in the face of, and be
supported collectively, and transforming everything that we
think about when we think about why people use drugs. They
use drugs because they are trying to connect to spirit or are in
deep, deep pain and trying to numb that pain. How can we
create a space where everyone feels like they don’t have to
escape through a substance to heal their pain?”
Our research shows that the very definition of reparations needs
to become a critical site of political contestation. Interviews did
not predominantly use a “racial equity and inclusion” frame,
claiming that successful decriminalization would lead to equal
access to existing institutions, but an institution building
framework, which centered on the production of new,
community-controlled institutions to meet essential needs.
The definition of reparations presented by the interview subjects
did not center on repairing the divide between oppressed and
oppressor by granting the oppressed increased access to existing
political and social service infrastructure, but instead on using
public investment to build up the infrastructural capacity of the
oppressed, so they were no longer dependent on the goodwill of
the oppressor for their survival.
The Drug Policy/Decriminalization advocacy communities'
inattention to the dynamic of self-determination was not seen as
unique to harm reduction or decriminalization advocating, but
an extension of the larger society paradigm of denigration of
Black communities' capacity for self-governance, as one
interviewee noted:
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“Systems of White supremacy and anti-Blackness don't
allow the thought that Black people can be the architects
of their own solutions.”
This report endeavored to create a space where people
could imagine the solutions to the harm of drug
criminalization they would produce if they were given
license to build the institutions themselves. What they
presented are solutions which extend beyond keeping those
suffering from substance use disorder alive, and toward
building systems of human flourishing that made engaging
in the community more attractive than “dropping out” of
community life through chaotic addiction. Indeed, the
promotion of robust community institutions was framed
constantly as core to an addiction prevention system, a
rearrangement of a political and economic order that was
seen as a “best practice” to address the root causes of
addiction. This analysis is not only consistent with the work
of Bruce Alexander and his “dislocation hypothesis” of
addiction but the work of various scholars and organic
intellectuals of the Black Radical Tradition (15, 16).
For decriminalization to flourish, we must listen to what
communities most impacted by the War on Drugs are
actually demanding. A polluted drug supply and historic
disruption from a global pandemic mean many recognize
the need for drug decriminalization and overdose
prevention to survive, but these communities are
fundamentally interested in the forms of investment and
self-determination where they can not merely survive, but
thrive.
The overdose epidemic is no doubt an issue of prime
importance, but drug decriminalization can address this
issue either by co-opting the righteous indignation of
communities impacted by systemic racism into more
disappointing and dangerous reformism or embracing
being led by the community in a coalition that seeks to use
decriminalization as a catalyst to expand community
capacity for self-governance.
It is our hope that this research does its part to start a
conversation that makes the latter more possible.
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The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland
Introduction
As a new wave of drug policy reform in the U.S. reconsiders criminal legal approaches, we must examine
these policies in the context of racialized structural oppression to address and repair the societal harms
experienced disproportionately by African-American communities. To understand the harms of drug
criminalization in this context, a partnership was forged with the support of the Open Society
Foundations between a Baltimore-based, community-based scholar and a team of university-based
researchers in the fields of social work, criminology, and public health. The research team was asked to
research the harms of drug criminalization to make a case for decriminalizing the personal use of drugs.
Through consultation with the community-based scholars, the team agreed to go beyond an analysis of
the harms of criminalization that focuses on individual instances of arrests and incarceration and "waste"
of financial resources.
A research process was created to reframe the harms of criminalization around the community impacts of
racialized hyper-incarceration targeted at specific communities, with a focus on reframing
decriminalization as a mechanism to restore the civil communal fabric impacted by the War on Drugs.
The community-based scholar used African-Centered research paradigms, inclusive of various research
methodologies guided by the culture and experiences of people of African descent. African-Centered
research paradigms challenge us to account for the community-wide implications of drug criminalization
and towards reparations when thinking about decriminalization strategies. To shift power to communities
seeking self-determination and liberation from the structural oppression of drug criminalization, the
research team applied a participatory action research (also known as PAR) approach. PAR merges social
change activities with knowledge inquiry guided by those most impacted by the research. Shifting
intellectual guidance away from academic institutions that conventionally hold power over solutions, the
community-based scholar drove the research framework that informed the objectives, structure,
methodologies, and content of the report.
The first objective of this report was to conduct a precise analysis of community disruption via the
systems of drug criminalization to inform the second objective of highlighting drug policy focus areas for
solutions and repair of the community harms. The team first conducted a scoping review of academic
literature in the U.S. to critically assess the role of drug criminalization on the social conditions of
communities most often targeted by drug prohibition efforts. We found that existing academic literature
frames the harms of drug criminalization on disrupting social capital of the communal institution of
families. It also emphasized the need to strengthen access to existing external systems of support, like
drug treatment and job placements spatially and culturally outside of communities. There is little research
on how criminalization impacts individuals' ability to access or engage indigenous community
institutions. The paucity of research sheds light on the need to center knowledge production on collective
harms of drug criminalization. Research informing drug policy is missing critical perspectives and rarely
includes perspectives from impacted communities, leading us to conduct qualitative interviews with
community leaders in Baltimore.
The research team interviewed 12 Baltimore region-based key experts who identified as community
organizers, youth mentors, grassroots or academic educators, mental health and social work
professionals, harm reduction organizers, and holistic addiction providers. All interviewees provided firsthand
knowledge and experiences of structural and historical realities of drug use, criminalization, and the
drug treatment infrastructure in Baltimore. They also offered visions of a world without drug
criminalization and recommendations for state and local policies. Findings demonstrate the importance
of collective well-being in addressing substance use disorders (SUDs) and undergird the case for
reparations that allow communities most impacted by the War on Drugs to rebuild, heal, and thrive while
having local control over alternatives to criminalization.
This report outlines community harm rooted in the racialized structural violence of drug criminalization
in Maryland with a focus on Baltimore City to provide advocates with tools to inform their efforts in
advancing policy change in the state. It is our hope that this analysis will prompt policy advocates in and
out of Maryland to question and challenge assumptions regarding drug policy solutions. Understanding
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the role of criminalization in disrupting the social fabric of communities is essential to assess how anti-
Black systems of criminal legal control function in the reproduction of racial oppression and how new
visions of drug policies ameliorate or exacerbate the negative impacts of drug criminalization on
communities.
The State of Decriminalization in Maryland
At the state level, officially sanctioned (de jure) decriminalization legislation was introduced in the last
few years. These bills outline legal thresholds of possession of particular illicit drugs for personal use and
the removal of criminal sanctions around possession of drug paraphernalia. Conversations circled among
local political leaders in both state legislative chambers; however, the bills did not result in a vote.
At the city level and at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Baltimore State’s Attorney’s office decided
not to prosecute crimes of poverty, such as drug possession, implementing an unofficial (de facto)
decriminalization policy (17). A year after, local public health researchers evaluated the policy change and
found a reduction in drug-related arrests (18). The authors endorsed the uptake of decrim practices as
means to divert people who use drugs away from criminal legal system and into public health and social
services with the goal to reduce the harms associated with drug use, such as overdose (19). These efforts
are currently up for repeal with newly elected leadership.
There are real fears that decriminalization strategies could reflect anti-Black sentiment and even risk
expanding anti-Black social control and violence. Baltimore has a long history of racialized law
enforcement and an authoritarian, regulatory, and punitive relationship continues to exist between Black
Americans and the police (20). The community-based scholar, Director of Research for Leaders of a
Beautiful Struggle Lawrence Grandpre, notes that there are challenges in the political landscape for
passing drug decriminalization and other harm reduction efforts in Maryland. Civil rights leaders
expressed concern around safe consumption kits being sent to their constituents, fearing that they could
serve as relapse triggers for those in recovery. He also heard fears about crime and drug use running
rampant in a post-legalization Baltimore. Furthermore, the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland, Inc.
(LBCM) remained reticent in the decrim conversations, of which a substantial percentage of members
come from Baltimore City and Baltimore County. Legislators outside the city have also described
Baltimore as a black hole to express their frustrations about what they view as an over-investment of
financial resources by the state (21). For there to be any political advancement of decriminalization in
Maryland, it is essential to explain how systems of White supremacy impact the inequities in Baltimore
that then create a need for higher levels of state investment and to present ways that decriminalization
policy can both address addiction and crime as well as create social justice in Baltimore. This report
begins to raise these concerns and provide drug policy advocates with the language and tools necessary for
understanding the unique racialized impacts of drug policies.
Theoretical Framework:
Participatory Action Research and
African-Centered Research Paradigms
The analysis laid out in the report was created in partnership between a community-based scholar,
Baltimore-based interviewees, and university-based researchers to understand the collective harms of
drug criminalization in Maryland and how to address these harms. The research team applied PAR
approach which merges social change activities with knowledge inquiry and development (22).
Despite a commitment to community, many forms of participatory research are led by university-based
researchers and the research process is carried out by communities that are being studied. This hierarchal
mode of knowledge production maintains power structures that impede goals of liberation from structural
oppression. For this research project, the community-based scholar drove the research framework, giving
rise to the research questions and hypotheses that informed the structure and content of the report. The
community-based scholar also advised on and supported the methodological design, data collection and
analysis for the scoping review and the qualitative interviews that were implemented by the universitybased
researchers.
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The community-based scholar is informed by African-Centered research paradigms (ACRPs), a term used
to describe different research methodologies guided by the culture, knowledge production practices, and
experiences of people of African descent (23). Na’im Akbar describes what he calls the African-American
research paradigm (AARP) as one “which facilitates the best of development for all human beings (3). It
must be a ‘natural’ or generally human paradigm rather than the narrow ethnocentric paradigm that
describes a particular group of humans (3).” Akbar outlines four most relevant types of research that
makes up ACRPs as: (1) theoretical, (2) critique of falsification (deconstruction), (3) ethnographic, and (4)
heuristic (construction or reconstruction). He explains them as follows:
“Theoretical research is for the purpose of generating questions. Theory development grows
from self-reflective observation and the introspective analysis of one’s (collective) experiences.
No data beyond one’s subjective and affective appraisal of the observer's experience are
necessary. This is not unlike the procedure for the ground-breaking and paradigm-setting work
of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, William James, B.F. Skinner and the vast array of luminaries in
all fields of social science research who never produced a control group while laying the
cornerstone for Western thought.“
Curtis Banks has identified "deconstructive" or falsification research as another type of research. Such
research is concerned with an analysis of the construct validity of traditional research. The falsification
researcher is concerned with demonstrating the fallacy of the inferences and the methodological
distortions of that traditional research. Falsification research involves both theoretical dismantling as well
as empirical rebuttal.
Ethnographic research is probably the only authentic form of empirical research that is appropriate for
this point in our scientific method development. This approach permits the researcher, having passed the
“Relationship Index,” to observe Black people where they are and to try fulfilling the criteria of a worker
within the African paradigm who can begin to identify those characteristics of Black people that are most
fruitful in the light of our research model. Rather than cataloging the deficiencies of Black
people, the ethnographic researcher can identify those strengths and self-affirmative
patterns that have facilitated our growth.
Finally, heuristic research offers the bridge to our discussion of modalities. This research follows from the
ethnographic research in that it begins to articulate culturally adaptive styles and begins to demonstrate
the benefits, which come from adapting that style. The objective of this research is to fortify those
structures that have been demonstrated to be beneficial to the survival and advancement
of Black people. If tests are to be used, what kinds of tests would be most appropriate in
identifying those qualities that have emerged as valuable and effective for survival from the
ethnographic research.”
These four methodologies combine to produce ACRP research for communal benefit. ACRPs add to
existing research by incorporating often overlooked factors (23). In this report, an ACRP is used to
analyze drug decriminalization in Maryland using Baltimore as a central case study with an
understanding of how anti-Black systems have functioned in the reproduction of inequality and violence.
The goal is not to avoid wielding power, but instead, explicitly build power for oppressed people.
Community Harms of Drug Criminalization
The harms of drug criminalization that impacts the foundation of community, the community’s social,
economic, and cultural environment, are largely overlooked from the drug policy conversation (24). One
hypothesis in the social science field, the dislocation of addiction, theorizes that the root of addiction is
conditioned on the “dislocation” of people from their social and cultural aspects of life (25). The
hypothesis explains that the larger social disruption of communities is tied to a globalized free-market
society that embodies an individual ethos. This analysis also mirrors African-Centered research theories
of addiction that have processed the spiritual and cultural dislocation of Black civil life as central to the
African-American communities’ struggle with addiction (26). Major moments in history that have defined
social dislocation in Black and African-American communities include the Middle Passage and the Great
Migration (27).
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Criminological and social theories have explained how the epidemic of mass incarceration, largely fueled
by the War on Drugs, has also played a central role in social disruption (6, 15, 28). Criminologist Todd
Clear, in his book, Imprisoning Communities, argues that the disruption of social networks via statesponsored
social control has largely prevented over-incarcerated communities’ the ability to harness
community support and informal community control. His research in Baltimore found that prison cycling
largely due to drug-related offenses not only failed to control crime, but it also weakened social networks
within a community, manifesting in broader instability of social institutions, economic development, and
housing markets. Clear hypothesized the concept of “coercive mobility,” the social disruption and human
displacement caused, replaced, and reinforced by the formal sources of state-sponsored social control: the
legal, non-profit, and social service systems (29).
Although Clear’s work addresses the impact of criminalization on community institutions, the role of drug
criminalization on coercive mobility is rarely considered on addiction and in drug policy discourse. More
importantly, there is a lack of analysis on how to repair the civil institutional fabric necessary to create
functional community through the frame of ACRPs that consider explicit anti-Black violence, attacks to
Black community attempts at self-governance and community control, the nonprofit industrial complex,
and other essential concepts referred to in this report. When envisioning policy to create a postcriminalization
world, we must understand the root causes of addiction that are integral to the community
harms that are largely understudied. The social, criminological, and ACRP theoretical framings lay a
foundation to understand community harms of drug criminalization in Maryland. We raise the questions
of what causes the social disruption that influences addiction, how do we define and measure it, and what
policy responses are needed to restore community, specifically in the context of Baltimore, Maryland.
A Spotlight on Baltimore
This report is specific to the Baltimore context, outlining the history of Baltimore within broader U.S.
history in order to contextualize the collective harms of drug criminalization. The focus on Baltimore is
also prominent as this report is informed by a community-based scholar working to advance the public
policy interests of Black people, in Baltimore (30).
No city in Maryland is impacted by mass incarceration as much as Baltimore City, the largest city in the
state. Although home to 9% of the state's residents, 40% of Maryland’s incarcerated population are from
Baltimore (31). Also, in Baltimore City, drug criminalization disproportionately impacts African-American
populations. In 2016, the United States Department of Justice investigated the Baltimore Police
Department (BPD) and found that despite declining rates of African-American drug use across the city, 89
percent of those 100,000 people charged for drug possession were African-Americans (32). While survey
data shows that African-Americans use drugs at rates similar to other population groups, Baltimore Police
Department arrests African-Americans for drug possession at five times the rate of others. Compared to
similarities in rates of drug use across other similar African-American majority cities in America
(Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta), Baltimore drug arrests of African-Americans were between 200
and 500 percent higher (32).
The criminal legal environment is a product of the racialized structural oppression that has characterized
the landscape of the Black experience for generations. Baltimore is the first city in America to establish
block-by-block racial segregation, a policy that was followed by aggressive redlining, a contract system for
housing loans, and racially targeted subprime loans. Unemployment, low wages, poor housing,
inadequate education, and other forms of racial discrimination continue to persist. While the city hosts
wealthy institutions and businesses, large portions of Baltimore’s African-American population struggle
economically. Most relevant is the social and economic landscape that has shaped the overdose epidemic.
Baltimore City bears the greatest burden of opioid-related overdose deaths in the state. In 2020, 40
percent of overdose deaths occurred in Baltimore alone. Despite recent efforts to decriminalize marijuana
and harsher forms of drugs, overdose rates continue to rise, and rising greatest among African-Americans
(33).
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Definitions
Black Civil Society
This report addresses critical blind spots within academic literature that looks beyond the public health
framing of individual-level harms and evaluates the social disruption of communal institutions, referred
to in this report through the concept of Black civil society.
The Oxford Dictionary of Politics defines civil society as the set of intermediate associations which are
neither the state nor the (extended) family; civil society therefore includes voluntary associations, firms,
and other corporate bodies (34). Within the context of this report, Black civil society should be seen as the
interrelationship between institutions largely occupied by, serving, and/or controlled by Black people to
meet essential community needs and fulfill community desires. Analysis of Black institutions, including
mutual aid societies, shows Black civic organizations serving critical roles, meeting essential community
needs ranging from health care, burial costs, and financial savings (35). As defined by Marion Orr in the
book, Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, Black civil society undergirds the
organizational infrastructure to advance Black interests and serves as “agents of social reform on issues of
economic empowerment, spiritual development, and social and political equality (12).” Akbar notes how
ACRP research findings should be used for “the process of liberation and institution building for a
historically oppressed people (3).”
As we identify the adaptive strategies and characteristics for our advancement from our research
methods, those strategies must serve as the guidelines for structuring our institutions. Educational
institutions must offer content that advances self-knowledge as well as offering instruction through the
demonstrated modalities that build on our strengths. Economic institutions must be built that address
our critical survival needs while being consistent with our model of humanity and community. Our
religious institutions must be critiqued and developed along lines that foster our spirituality and enhance
our collective development. All of these modalities provide the ultimate objective of augmenting and
institutionalizing the African-American paradigm rooted in nature and respect for humankind.
This report focuses on formal and informal Black civil society institutions related to addiction prevention
and communal care. Examples of formal institutions include Black churches, Black-led community
nonprofits, historical Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the Black Panthers and in Baltimore
specifically, the Goon Squad, and Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD) (36). While
more informal institutions include street organizations (often called "gangs"), networks of "grey market"
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entrepreneurship, and individual people, who within the context of this lens are seen as pillars of the
community and therefore critical parts of Black civil society. Our historical analysis reveals more players
within Black civil society in Baltimore, which is expanded upon by our interviewees later in this report.
Defining Reparations from African-Centered Research Paradigms
African-Centered and Black nationalist scholars argue that Black communities have consistently produced
social and political systems to meet their collective needs as demonstrated by pre-colonial African society,
maroon societies throughout the Americas, and independent post-reconstruction Black communities (37).
However, the capacity of these communal systems has been denigrated by racist attacks ranging from the
transatlantic slave trade, chattel slavery, reconstruction resistance, Jim Crow, and more contemporarily,
the War on Drugs (15). From the perspective of our interviewees and the community scholar guiding this
research process, reparations should be seen as a key tool in rebuilding the institutional capacity of
indigenous Black civil society that existed before the War on Drugs through reparative redistribution of
power and resources. Interviewees described visions of communities where people thrive and have the
power to define for themselves what thriving looks like.
This report challenges a traditional definition of reparations, which are often defined by government
entities. For example, the United Nations defines reparations with a focus on compensation and
rehabilitation (United Nations Human Rights). Many have made the case for reparations that go beyond
individual payments and look to address collective harms based on slavery and post-slavery history in the
U.S. (37,38). In this report, we define reparations through the lens of ACRPs, which centers on
repair of community harm. This should not require repressed communities to depend on their
oppressors, but instead repressed communities should have the funding, indigenous institutional
capacity, and autonomy to be able to construct for themselves their own solutions (23).
Scoping Review
First a scoping review of peer-reviewed literature was conducted to examine the extent, range, and nature
of drug criminalization and the social conditions of communities most often targeted by drug interdiction
efforts in the United States, Black/African communities and people who use drugs. A scoping review is
used for summarizing understudied research, addressing multiple questions that give rise to the
complexity of a topic area, reveal gaps and limitations (39). Given our theoretical and empirical
understanding of the social disruption related to drug criminalization among Black communities in
Maryland and the lack of attention to Black civil society in traditional academic literature, we used the
concept of social capital as a baseline to frame how the literature describes the community-level
implications of drug criminalization. Additionally, the community-based scholar was informed by Black
elders who work on community economic development and have used social capital in their work to
analyze how policy might be rethought to center Black civil society institutions which produce productive
interconnections within the Black community (40).
Given our goal to assess the implications of drug criminalization on community, factors such as social
capital and pinpointing the social harms justified for repair, we conducted a scoping review and analyzed
the literature using Putnam’s social capital theory which delineates social capital, indigenous and external
to the community (41). Social capital is an important collective feature of social and economic well-being
(42). It serves as a form of community agency to share and exchange resources, support, and material
goods through personal and institutional assets of cooperation. For example, we evaluated the role of
social institutions between members of similar and different social and economic identities among
communities most often targeted by drug interdiction. A classical definition of Black social capital refers
to interpersonal and institutional forms of cooperation within African-American communities, while
social capital harnessed outside the community describes cross-sector patterns of trust and networks that
bridge the Black and White divide (12).
Community integrity determines quality of life and mediates access to local networks of organizations and
institutions; therefore, the review considers non-profits, Black civil society institutions, schools, and
health care facilities, etc, both locally and externally controlled (43). The scoping review also examined
the body of literature on the structural and environmental influences on these social relationships and
evaluated the extent of race consciousness (i.e., if structural racism is acknowledged) in the published
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works. Specifically, we looked at how literature incorporates the role of Black civil society institutions in
social capital research.
We used Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) five-stage scoping review framework (44), with reporting guided
by the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews checklist and explanation (PRISMA-SCr): (1) research
question development, (2) literature search, (3) study selection, (4) data charting and extraction, and (5)
data analysis and narrative synthesis. For full description of the methods, see appendix.
Scoping Review Findings
Research that examines the impact of drug criminalization on the social infrastructure and civic
institutional fabric of communities faced with high levels of drug addiction and criminalization is
minimal. A few papers outlined the role of drug criminalization on community-level aspects. Out of 46
articles related to social capital and drug criminalization, 23 described social capital relationships local to
the community, 11 described social capital externally linked to communities, and 12 described both
internal and external relationships of social capital. Five studies incorporated participatory or
community-informed methods.
In the review of social capital relationships, there was an emphasis on the disruption of family
relationships and minimal research on the impact of drug criminalization on the community environment
(45–52). There was little research on the relationship between drug criminalization and the social erosion
of community sources of support, like faith-based organizations, and more research on sources of support
that operated outside of community control, such as government and non-profit drug treatments (53–62).
This focus was on social capital by defining it in terms of the relationship with community members who
use drugs with treatment-providing institutions. The research often framed sources of support external to
impacted communities as vehicles for success, rather than on studying how structural racism and other
modes of oppression destabilizes communal conditions and indigenous forms of social capital. Although
research and practice seek to address the material suffering caused by hyper-incarceration and addiction,
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the body of literature fails to challenge the underlying assumptions behind the systems of inequity and
overlooks the productive capabilities of communities that are implicated in drug criminalization. For
example, few papers highlighted the economic empowerment resulting from accessing illicit forms of
social capital among those who use and sell drugs, as a means of survival (63,64). A critical perspective
that acknowledges the social impacts of addiction stemming from the drug trade by focusing on the
underlying conditions leading to addiction in structurally oppressed Black communities is missing from
the research.
The scoping review provided an opportunity to reveal the gaps of the peer-reviewed literature. Most
notably, the research did not consider that communities are politically starved of the resources needed to
create alternatives to the drug trade and all that comes with it. This orients policy and scholarship toward
external sources of social capital as the solution to address drug-related harms, which presents a possible
trade-off with the investments needed for indigenous forms of social capital. The gaps underscore the
importance of centering discourse around scholarly works outside the academy when centering
restorative solutions in drug policy. The gaps also highlight the limitation that there is a vacuum of
research that integrates critical perspectives and co-produces knowledge with institutions impacted by
drug criminalization. Given that Black communities have been the most harmed by drug criminalization
as a vehicle of mass incarceration and social control, the body of research is not only insufficient for
informing restorative solutions to the War on Drugs, but it is possible it can block successful pathways
toward liberation
Historical Context of Drug Criminalization in the US and the
Criminalization of Blackness
A historical roadmap provides context into the repair that is needed to address the destruction caused by
the War on Drugs. Historical context aids in the interpretation of the research completed and the
recommendations offered for which new visions of drug policy and harm reduction will be received.
In the 1930s, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) conjured racialized fears of marijuana resulting in its
criminalization and creating the threat of violence against Black communities (65). Baltimore’s own Lady
Day, Billie Holiday, was targeted by the FBN as she sang the famous song, “Strange Fruit,” in protest of
the lynching of Black Americans (66). Over the next few decades, political tactics around drug
criminalization took various forms (67). As civil rights activism for racial equality escalated and the Black
Power movement rose up, the Nixon administration declared a War on Drugs that enhanced anti-drug
efforts and saw the implementation of tough-on-crime federal policies such as mandatory minimum
prison sentences (A History of the Drug War). According to Nixon’s domestic-policy advisor, John
Ehrlichman, the War on Drugs was designed to target the enemies of the administration which included
Black Americans (68). Ehrlichman later shared in an interview:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left
and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either
against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with
heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their
leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The Nixon administration, operating through the CIA, is recorded infiltrating drugs in Black communities
and conducting SWAT raids to target Black civil rights leaders and dismantle political mobilization
(16,69,70). Black Power organizations formed across the country to defend their communities and combat
the influx of drugs. In Louisville, Kentucky, Black civil society organizations such as the Black Committee
for Self- Defense (BCSD) and Stop Dope Now formed in response to concerns of drugs being used as a
method of social control in Black communities to repress political and social activity (71). These
organizations focused on creating educational materials warning against the harms of heroin and
provided harm reduction services. Stop Dope Now was later integrated with government treatment
programs which left it without community control or funding. The Black Panthers in Louisville were also
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working with other Black Power organizations to conduct anti-drug campaigns but after facing police
repression and having members arrested with false charges, lost traction in their efforts.
The War on Drugs greatly expanded under Reagan’s administration and states were incentivized with
billions of dollars in federal aid to adopt harsh drug criminalization policies targeting low-level drug
offenders that resulted in a massive and unequal increase in drug arrests (72). Political support for these
policies was largely driven by the media fueling anti-Black sentiments regarding use of crack cocaine.
Crack users were portrayed as violent, dangerous, and immoral beings that should be locked up and being
a crack user was associated with being Black even though federal surveys at the time showed that most
crack users were White or Hispanic (73). This led to the mass incarceration of entire Black communities
and in the early 1990s, Black Americans were seven times as likely to be arrested for cocaine and narcotic
offenses than White Americans (74). Historically, the criminalization of drugs and the association of drugs
with the Black community led to the criminalization of being Black and resulted in the erosion of Black
civil society. The breakdown of Black civil society is especially concerning within the context of structural
racism and racialized social control embedded in the history of drug criminalization in the U.S.
Historical Context of Drug Criminalization in Baltimore
Historically, Black civil society institutions have functioned to ensure the survival and well-being of Black
communities as well as provide addiction and harm reduction services. From an ACRP lens, the erosion of
Black civil society is key to understanding the extent of the harm of the War on Drugs. Here we give two
examples of the Model Cities program and the Nehemiah Project that highlight how Black civil society
institutions in Baltimore have been impacted by urban renewal and their struggle for community control
of resources.
Prior to the uprisings after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, fundamental neighborhood
organizing in inner city Baltimore developed to challenge unequal power structures and build local
communal responses to inequality and oppression. Local strife over leadership and community control of
government programs in Baltimore reached a turning point after the Model Cities program was passed by
Congress in 1966 (71). The program was designed to help restructure and renew blighted neighborhoods
and Baltimore City officials drafted a proposal that focused on neighborhoods in east and west Baltimore
that had high concentrations of people living in poverty. U-JOIN, a local Black civil society organization
that advocated for the interests of poor and working-class people, publicly demanded that poor people
from inner city neighborhoods be represented in the decision-making for the proposal. They expressed
their frustration over broken promises of representation in the past by politicians and fears that the
program would become “nothing more than a junk heap of shattered hopes, broken promises and another
grab bag for governmental big shots and traditional government agencies” (71).
In 1967, Baltimore received a Model Cities planning grant of $204,000. One year later, the Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published a report that said Baltimore city officials failed to
meet their standards for community support and participation. In response, a coalition of local Black-led
organizations was formed including U-JOIN, Activists for Fair Housing Inc., Rescuers from Poverty, and
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and organized to demand control of the local Model Cities
Agency. They met several times with the mayor until a compromise was reached and the mayor agreed to
allow the coalition control of the Model Cities community organizing division and elect representatives for
a policy steering board that would approve plans for the program.
Baltimore gained national recognition as one of the few cities that won community control of its Model
Cities program so that Black people had the power to address for themselves the issues in their own
communities. From an ACRP lens, community control is critical for addressing the harms from the War
on Drugs. The fight for community control continued in the following years when the mayor appointed
Walter P. Carter, chair of the Baltimore chapter of CORE, to head the Community Action Agency (CAA).
The city council president of the time, William D. Schaefer publicly rejected his nomination and saying
that he was “too radical” which led to Carter losing his nomination (75). Many grassroot advocates who
were members of the CAA resigned from their positions in protest, but this provides a prime example of
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how efforts of Black civil society institutions, particularly around community control, were dampened and
oppressed.
Similarly, in the early 1990s, urban renewal Nehemiah Project hired an outside city planner (76). The
project coalesced investments from public and private organizations, playing a significant role in
weakening and even stamping out existing community institutions in Black Baltimore neighborhoods.
Investments made were from the top-up into government and non-profit services, hollowing out
indigenous community involvement. Community resident Athena Young carried out a street survey of
Baltimore neighborhood Sandtown in 1991:
“The diversity that we observed in our first assessment was amazing… We passed evidence of Muslim and
black nationalist activity: a Muslim carryout on Carey Street, the Nation Builders bookstore on North
Avenue, and the home of a Rastafarian, with a Haile Selassie emblem and handwritten, apocalyptic
messages posted in his windows. On ‘black business row’ on North Avenue across from the Nation
Builders bookstore, black street vendors who live in the area come out around lunchtime and stay until
dusk. Arabbers (black vendors who sell fruit, vegetables, and fish from horse-drawn wagons in West
Baltimore) gather on Winchester Street, at the stable of Sandtown’s senior Arabber, whose street name is
Fatback. There they collect their produce and merchandise to sell on the streets of Sandtown. Fatback’s
stable was later bulldozed to make way for the Nehemiah Project.” (Harold McDougall, Black Baltimore: A
New Theory of Community)
The Nehemiah Project led to further police presence in Sandtown and increased hyper-incarceration of
residents in the neighborhood. It serves as a historical example that investment in and of itself has not
proven to be liberatory. The destruction of Black civil society is not limited to the community harms of
drug criminalization and what we see as mass incarceration.
Qualitative Study
Methodology
The scoping review revealed the dearth of research on community harms of drug criminalization. Given
that research typically includes the perspectives, assumptions, and interests of those who conduct the
research, a qualitative study challenged traditional notions of research and undertook (PAR)
methodologies informed by grassroot activist agendas (22). In order to move beyond traditional and
institutionalized paradigms of understanding and solutions, information-rich community leaders were
identified and asked to participate for an hour and a half in-depth interview. In consultation with the
report’s community-based researcher, the research team developed the research questions, interview
guide, and recruitment criteria.
A purposeful sampling approach began with the community-based researcher identifying Baltimorebased
community leaders with values aligned with African-Centered perspectives and experience working
on the intersections of drug criminalization, addiction, and community economic development. After each
initial interview, we asked for further recruits and a warm email introduction. With a goal to invite
approximately 15 participants to interview, over the course of seven months in 2022, we interviewed 12
Baltimore-based community experts who identified as community organizers, youth mentors, grassroots
or academic educators, mental health and social work professionals, harm reduction organizers, and
holistic addiction providers.
Participants were offered a $50 gift card for a token of appreciation. The research process was approved
by the University of Maryland Baltimore’s Intuitional Review Board. The participants are listed below
using pseudonyms that they provided or, if they did not provide one, an assigned pseudonym. The
demographic information was also assigned to the best of the knowledge of the research team.
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Pseudonym
Occupation/Community Role
Age Group (Young
Adult: ~20-30,
Adult: ~30-55,
Elder: ~55+)
Race
Gender
Milton Community organizer/Youth leader Young Adult Black Male
J
Community social worker/Mental health
provider
Adult Black Male
Jay Community Scholar Elder Black Male
Olusola Addictions provider/Community elder Elder Black Male
Amy Holistic organizational consultant Adult White Female
Agnes Church leader Elder Black Female
Rashard Grassroots educator Young Adult Black Male
Charles Mental health provider/Community Scholar Elder Black Male
Donna Mental health provider/Community Scholar Adult Black Female
Monica Harm Reduction advocate Adult Black Transgender Woman
Tabatha Indigenous Practitioner Elder Black Female
Calvin Community mental health provider Adult Black Male
The findings shared in this report are organized into themes related to the interview guide and the values
that shaped its development. We first elicited historical events from interviewees to understand the root
causes of addiction in Baltimore and drew from historical documentation to supplement the interviewees
experiences. We then discussed the community impact of drug criminalization, concerns around
decriminalization, and insights into policy and practice recommendations. Interviews were conducted,
audio recorded, and transcribed by two academic-based researchers. The academic and community-based
researcher team together debriefed after every two to three interviews to interpret the findings and
solidify themes based on our theoretical frameworks and identify further questions for subsequent
interviews. Final themes were organized into a narrative story starting from a historical point of view to
final recommendations. The report findings are shared through the lens of the community-based
researcher, other academic and non-academic literature sources, and the lessons learned from participant
interviews. We hope that the qualitative study can be used as an example of what needs to be happening
more in academic settings to shift power and knowledge production to those most impacted by research.
Qualitative Study Findings
Interviewee Perspectives on the Community Impacts of Drug Criminalization
The interviewees from Baltimore expressed various harms felt by drug criminalization and all that it
encompasses, including the roots of addiction and its roots in racialized oppression and coercive mobility.
The interviewees spotlighted the harms directed toward Black civil society, providing tangible examples of
how systems of White supremacy created inequities seen in the epidemic of mass incarceration. The
theory of coercive mobility, brought on partially by the social disruption of drug enforcement and
bandaged up with state-sponsored social service systems is brought to light in the interviews, showing
how oppressive conditions related to drug criminalization, perpetually reinforced disadvantage.
The community impacts are contextualized by the roots of addiction in Black civil society, the realities of
coercive mobility on black autonomy, and the pressures of the prison industrial complex.
The impacts of drug criminalization were recounted as the breakdown of family and community bonds,
the psychological and spiritual dislocation from oneself and community, and the erosion of Black civil
society institutions that serve to connect one another.
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The Roots of Addiction in Black Civil Society
Interviewees identified root causes of addiction in their community to the core of systemic racism in the
U.S. The interviewees described how systems of racism played out in drug criminalization and how it
impacted Black civil society. First and foremost, it is difficult to pinpoint in the toxic cycle of addiction,
drug criminalization, and the larger historical context of racialized social control where one started and
the next began. As one interviewee said, “It's like the chicken or the egg sort of concept. If we don't ask
that question, because I think that's a whole ‘nother rabbit hole, but if we don't ask that question, then it's
confusing of what started first?” (Donna). However, a consistent theme of the historical context of drug
criminalization in Baltimore was foundational upon the racist agenda of the War on Drugs. As discussed
earlier in the report, the anti-Black agenda of the Nixon administration was noted by one interviewee:
“The whole idea of the war on drugs, I remember when Nixon did it. When he said it, we
suspected this is just a tactic to destroy the [Black] community because Black power had just,
you know, you could actually say those two words and not be knocked in the head or killed or
thrown in jail.” (Olusola)
Another example raised by a scholar who has worked in systems of drug treatment since the 70s recalled:
“In the 80s, a lot of the stuff came together. It was the War on Drugs, the school to prison
pipeline, HIV, more guns in the community, crack. All of a sudden, this is in the community. In
my mind it seems to be a reaction to the 70s when there was a raising of [Black] consciousness
and the backlash that was facilitated through the Reagan administration. More people of color
became vulnerable to substance abuse.” (Charles)
The goal of the administration was to demonize and slow the growth of Black independent political power
and Black sovereignty which they saw as a threat. This was accomplished by framing the War on Drugs as
a matter of safety for the nation. The question the interviewee posed of who is being kept safe by these
policies is critical since the War on Drugs was never meant to keep the Black community safe but instead
to create racialized violence by associating the dangers of drugs with the Black community. The drug
criminalization policies that emerged from the War on Drugs cannot be separated from the anti-Black
agenda of its origin. As one interviewee said, “the African-Centered perspective has a very cynical view of
the social policy agenda. It does recognize that there are some good efforts out here, but the system itself
is about racial control.” (Jay) The interviewee went on to explain:
“We know about the whole emphasis on drugs, particularly in the 90s, with more punishment
and criminalization associated with crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. You’ve seen that kind
of racial disparity. So in order to really, I think, get a hold of the substance abuse problem in
Baltimore City, we have to connect it to the criminal justice problem, which also is connected to
the overall problem in my view of White supremacy, which is manifested in the legacy of
persistent poverty, the disappointment and shame that is associated with being Black, the
vilification of being Black, and the kinds of disruptions to the family system.” (Jay)
The interviewee made it clear that to understand the root causes of addiction in Baltimore, one must
acknowledge how White supremacy played a role in the War on Drugs and the punitive drug
criminalization policies that followed. Harm manifests in Black civil society in vast and complex ways and
here we break them down into topic areas based on themes that emerged from the interviews.
Conditions of Persistent Poverty and Coercive Mobility
Interviewees discussed how their communities have been made economically weaker by generations of
government policies with an anti-Black agenda such as redlining, which began in the 1930s and was the
practice of “outlining areas with sizable Black populations in red ink on maps as a warning to mortgage
lenders, effectively isolating Black people in areas that would suffer lower levels of investment than their
White counterparts”. One interviewee discussed how this impacted their community, saying:
“Redlining, this had a serious impact on having a stagnant environment, people’s ability to
vision change and get out of the environment, there is some level of conditioning to accept the
day to day of the environment. The lack of quality of schools and education, as a means of
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limiting a pipeline. There’s not clear paths, you either have to take an uphill road that isn’t very
effective, or you have to hit the streets and accept these are the way things are.” (Rashard)
An environment where conditions of poor housing and education have been created and enforced by
racist policies left people without the resources needed to access the traditional job market. It also left
people feeling like there were no viable options other than turning to the streets as a means of survival or
use drugs to cope with the harsh realities. One interviewee described this phenomenon saying:
“The problem is that we know in poor communities, like Black people's communities
traditionally, there's a huge and urgent need for additional streams of income. And there's a
pretty well documented history of kids taking up that type of ownership over contributions to
the household space and again, if you a kid with no skills, no formal training, no like legitimate
connections to large money or politics or anything else, you have what’s around you and
available and so, traditionally, selling a little bit of weed is most people's introductory to being
able to go and move about and make money.” (Milton)
It was not only children in their community who were selling drugs to support themselves and their
families. The interviewee recounted:
“Like I got a homeboy right now who explained to me how he really don't want to sell coke. But
if he go get an eighth of coke and some fentanyl and cut it down, he know he could pay his rent...
there's no opportunity that I can see, that switches out for him.” (Milton)
The interviewee went on to explain that for most people, selling drugs was due to a lack of economic
opportunity saying:
“A lot of these people don't want to sell drugs. Their goal is to get to a particular
economic position and then get out... There's no alternative that allows them to do
that. It’s not like you can take that same person and get rid of their product and then like have
them work at Amazon and they'll be clearing the same amount- there's no incentive there for
that. The lack of opportunity leads to this immense economic pressure for people who don't have
those skills, just really look for in like the traditional job economy to like, engage in the drug
economy because that's where what skills and connections they have works.” (Milton)
The limited options in the traditional job market for people in their community were unable to provide
the economic opportunities that would allow people to thrive and not just survive. As a result, hidden
sources of social capital were explored to meet material needs which led people to the drug economy. In
the scoping review, we found that existing literature often framed social connections to those who use or
sell drugs as negative. But from an ACRP lens, it is important to identify these culturally adaptive
structures that have been demonstrated to be beneficial to the survival and advancement of Black people.
As one interviewee said:
“There are a lot of people that have been incarcerated for drugs. They just needed to make
money. They were trying to maintain and so a lot of brilliance is incarcerated, a lot of
entrepreneurialism is incarcerated. Not because they were addicted, but because they were
trying to survive in this system that was never really designed for their survival.” (J)
The social capital people use to sell drugs as a means of survival and economic empowerment were viewed
in a context of opportunities and constraints rather than being ruled out as negative due to the illicit
nature of the drug trade. However, interviewees were clear that they did not condone the negative social
impacts of addiction or violence stemming from the drug trade. Selling drugs was seen as an unfortunate
option for economic advancement that resulted from historical disinvestment in Black communities.
People who sell drugs can be seen as contributing members in their communities because they have the
economic means to provide for community members:
“You know, a lot of the people who youth look up to end up being the people using the drugs for
economic opportunity. Like the dealers end up being the people who have economic means to
look out for you, to drive the car, to show stability in the community, flexibility and growth.”
(Milton)
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Disinvestment in Black communities has left the drug trade as a major means of economic empowerment.
This was understood in the context of the mass incarceration of Black people due to drug criminalization.
Systems of White supremacy and their negative impacts on Black civil society can be connected to why
communities turn to the drug trade for economic opportunities and how the violence and mass
incarceration from drug criminalization policies are used to further dismantle the social, economic and
political power in these same communities.
As one interviewee put it:
“If one goes with the social control perspective and social control is racialized, then that's racial
control. What is the best way to control people? To convict them, lock them up. It is a vicious
cycle of being in prison, coming out without providing a lot of opportunities which places the
person at further risk. For what? Going back, a vicious cycle of incarceration.” (Jay)
The Pressures of the Prison Industrial Complex:
Incarceration and Police Brutality
Building prisons and keeping them filled in order to make more money contributes to community harm.
An interviewee who worked in the criminal justice system provided insight into the economic model of
prison systems in Baltimore, stating:
I was once in an executive meeting that was about all the money that was being put in a new
prison to be built. One of the things that was said, well if we keep building, they’ll keep coming.
If your perspective is that you should build more prisons because you'll fill them, then I think
you’re in the wrong line of work, and you're a part of the problem. You're not the solution. So,
it's the whole thinking that’s there, and it's real because it is an opportunity down to the toilet
paper that is sold in a prison system, this is a big money maker.” (Tabatha)
Police surveillance and brutality was also a recurring theme among participants when discussing
community harm from drug criminalization. One interviewee expressed their concern that police are
typically the answer to issues that arise in Black communities, which creates apprehension around a sole
approach to decriminalization. One interviewee recounted:
“In Sandtown, the boys were talking about the police being just another gang because they’d
jump our boys! In an unmarked car they'd come into the community, into the neighborhood and
jump out and just start knocking people around and pushing people around and, accusing
people of things. And the children experienced this. How can they go to the police with
anything when the police could not be trusted? [emphasis added] And they knew that
the police were busting people and taking their drugs and not reporting. You know the kid, the
corner boy would have to give up his stash and the police would leave him alone. Well, what
was this kind of thing? So, we're here talking to these children about trying to do the right thing
and obey the law and all that and then they say well, look at the people who are doing the law,
the contradiction there!” (Olusola)
The use of drugs to unjustly target Black people is a tactic that has been used for decades in the U.S. and is
still being done to this day in Baltimore. Increased surveillance in predominantly Black neighborhoods
where drug treatment centers are also usually located also created barriers to accessing services. One
interviewee recounted:
“A lot of time the police post up there [at drug addiction centers], assuming that these people
who are struggling with addiction gotta be into some criminal activities. If I’m trying to get
help, I have to deal with that. Be on display.” (Rashard)
Community members experienced unsolicited violence from the police and saw police officers breaking
the law which led to a lack of trust and fear. One harm reduction advocate working in policy advocacy and
community organizing mentioned:
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“Black and brown people are being targeted at higher rates for drug possession and
paraphernalia. One thing we have to combat every day in Baltimore, is drugs being planted on
people and people being stopped unjustly and searched. People are even being ticketed and fined
for having cotton or alcohol wipes. The police are taken advantage of there being a grey area.
I’m hoping that all drug paraphernalia will be decriminalized and eventually legalized so that
cops can't target Black and brown people like they're doing.” (Monica)
The Breakdown of Family and Community Bonds
When interviewees were asked how they saw the impact of drug use on their community, the core of their
concerns was the breakdown of community and conditions of violence created by the War on Drugs and
subsequent policies. Their perspective on the impacts of drug use and drug criminalization often
overlapped with the root causes of drug addiction because these factors were intertwined and fed into one
another in a vicious cycle. One interviewee stated:
“So, if we talk about how drug use and drug abuse impacts my community, I would say it
impacts a community sort of multi-generationally and the decomposition of the Black family
unit. It impacts the family, often for the individual that is experiencing the hardship, the
dehumanization process, the further dehumanization process of folks of African descent,
especially. It impacts the family unit and the individual's ability to access quality health care.”
(Donna)
The interviewee made it clear that the racialized agenda of drug policy was to target Black communities
and that it was designed to erode family systems. This was also noted by another interviewee:
The dynamics of community has changed... When I was growing up, my mother was home.
There was always that person in the community or a couple of people in the community that
even did daycare in the community, watch over, overseers of the community, and would watch
children in the community. So, there was that collectiveness. But when you then throw addiction
on top of that, you throw incarceration on top of that, you throw in the laws that came in the
70s where people had a small amount of cocaine, and they got 25 years. So, when you remove
the family systems, when you break down those systems, this is what we are seeing. It’s
impacting everybody.” (Tabatha)
The interviewee described how the responsibilities shared among community members including
childcare were essential to creating a sense of collectiveness and to building up the conditions needed for
people to thrive. The loss of community members to addiction and mass incarceration weakened social
networks as described by the concept of coercive mobility (Clear 2009). Another interviewee put it:
“The main theme is separation and separation occurs on multiple levels. It's the selective
enforcement of criminalizing drugs. There is an impact of racialized and economic trauma so
that it separates society at large, but on the individual level, it separates relatives from each
other. Because if I'm locked up, I'm removed from society. I'm incarcerated. Then I have no
physical contact, so there's no hugging, there's no kissing good night. There's no waking up in
the morning. There's no physical way of transmitting stories, traditions, family
lineage and family knowledge. And so, there's this tremendous impact of separation on the
physical. Also, the separation of relationship. I don’t know my uncle because he was
incarcerated since before I was born. I don’t know my mother because she has been in and out of
halfway homes and recovery houses because its court ordered, or because I’ve been placed in
foster care.” (J)
Physical separation resulting from incarceration leads to a breakdown in family relationships. This has an
especially deep impact on the ability of parents to raise their children.
“The criminalization of drugs may also include the foster care system because children are not
there by choice. It serves to separate. It is a tool of western and White supremacy in all kinds of
communities, not just in Baltimore.” (J)
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When you incarcerate the mothers and the fathers, where does that leave the children, right? It
overburdens the foster care system, it leads to more and more childhood trauma, and that
trauma, you know my father used to say, pain begets pain.” (J)
Children being separated from their parents and placed in the foster care system leads to a cycle of family
and community breakdown, trauma, and substance use to deal with the trauma.
Psychological and Spiritual Impacts
Historical and environmental factors leading to community harm also impact communities in ways that
are more internal to human flourishing; the psychological and spiritual conditions of harm. Using the
ACRP lens, an interviewee points out how internalized harm cannot be separated from the environmental
factors of oppression that give rise to it. The anti-Black agenda of many social policies including drug
criminalization and mass incarceration over the years has resulted in the internalization of stigma and
shame, leading to spiritual disconnect and violence within communities. As one interviewee put it:
“One of the things that mass incarceration and the criminalization of drugs does is that it labels
human beings and then it begins to dehumanize them based on those labels. Anytime you have a
war against something or someone then we create this projection of the other person as an
enemy. In order for me to engage in this war I have to, psychologically and systematically
dehumanize the other person. Because if I see them as a human, I can't really kill them with
impunity or, or incarcerate them and have a conscience about it.” (J)
The effectiveness of the War on Drugs in dehumanizing people has resulted in entire communities
experiencing psychological and spiritual suffering which can lead to substance use. One interviewee who
was a community mental health provider shared:
“When you go into people's homes and you sit on their couches and you see their lives, you
realize that entire communities are living in depressed or anxious states. That drugs are both
harming and helping things to not get as worse as they could be. They are crutches but
sometimes they are necessary when you got a broken leg. So, am I blaming you for using your
crutches? Now my leg is healed but now there's nothing but obstacles for me to trip over; what's
the usefulness of letting go of these crutches? You might as well hold on to it. They work.” (J)
The oppression of Black culture has harmed how communities see themselves and each other. This
interviewee emphasized how indigenous resources and methods of healing in Black civil society have been
actively oppressed and leaves people turning to substance use as a way to numb pain and deal with
generational trauma. Interviewees saw African-Centered values which include spirituality, sense of
purpose, and connection to community as key to addressing the root causes of addiction.
The Non-Profit Industrial Complex and Lack of Community-Led Solutions
Drug prohibition inflicted upon the urban underclass has damaged the infrastructure of targeted
communities through disinvestment, deindustrialization and building of non-profit service systems. The
impact of these processes across generations has transformed social capital and a sense of community.
Insight into the social service, non-profit industrial complex on the social arrangements and drug
criminalization sheds light on the push and pull of agency between community and non-community
institutions, with non-community institutions often being in control of resources to address community
harm from the War on Drugs. Interviewees spoke to the role of non-community institutions who
benefitted from grants designed to improve neighborhoods. Instead of helping the neighborhoods and
community in which they were situated, these institutions benefited at their expense. Interviewees
described both material harms to the community and loss of trust and hope in local and federal
government that resulted from the funneling of community-designated funds and services to these
powerful institutions. An example of this was given:
“I remember when Bill Clinton did the empowerment zone offer... We got the proposal, we got
the grant or at least it seemed. Because when the 100 million dollars was awarded, it basically
goes to the University of Maryland and to Johns Hopkins-one on the west side, one on the east
side. Where’s the 100 million dollars? Where’s the money you said was going to be for
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health and for community education? Where is it? Where did it go?! And Hopkins
expanded, the University of Maryland expanded and look at the neighborhoods
around them. They’re the same way. It was the same old thing. [emphasis added] And
I had been so naive to think that there was going to be 100 million dollars given to
Baltimore City and actually 10 cents was going to actually hit the ground. No, no. These Black
politicians worked with the White politicians in the business community. Sucked up every dime
of that hundred million dollars! Where is the evidence? It's in the buildings at the University
of Maryland and the buildings at Johns Hopkins. That's where all that money went and the fact
that the people were devastated, meant nothing. This still doesn't mean anything. People don’t
even remember the program-remember that it happened at all!” (Olusola)
It is important to note that interviewees did not view all non-community institutions as harmful but that
they saw a lack of options for Black people to own and implement their own solutions to address harm in
their own communities. One interviewee spoke to the issue of having limited options for drug treatment:
“What happens traditionally, at least in my understanding of history in Baltimore, is when you
put those large institutions in charge of stuff, the nature of those institutions and how they're
constructed tends to be a barrier. These institutions really get to be like, “Alright, you either
going to this one, this one, this one or this one and if I don't hear from you in 30 days, I'm
sending the police after you and you getting locked up.” Which is like, I'm getting threatened..
you trying to take stuff away from me, I'm a user currently and you’re stressing me the hell out.
I'm probably going to use again, which raises my risk in between. And on top of all of this, I
don't know none of them. I don't trust them, and you want me to tell them my business?! No.
And then you wonder why it don't work.” (Amy)
We heard over and over again that with a lack of Black civil society institutions, people were forced to
choose from a list of options for drug treatment that they have no connections to and do not trust. And
when people don’t want to take these options, the threat of police and incarceration is used against them.
Another issue is that institutions that are outside of the community often do not reflect the communities
that are most impacted. As one interviewee said:
“A lot of the recovery spaces are White institutions. We as Black and brown people who use
drugs in the city don’t always trust the medical institutions given the racist history. I see a lot of
oppression going on from the institutions and people in power. There is gatekeeping and
tokenization of people who use drugs.” (Monica)
Reasons for the disconnect between services and the community were explained by a White centered
medicalized approach that dominated over a view grounded in African-Centered values. For example,
Charles recalled his experience working in the addiction care environment over the years. He explained
that more and more programs focused on medication monitoring because it was more financially efficient
to do so instead of a more person-centered therapeutic approach that addressed the root causes of
addiction. In his words, the feelings of hopelessness, disconnection, and lack of acknowledgment. He
recalled that nurses were being groomed for medication management because of the less amount of time
needed to administer. Before therapists and social workers were hired to sit longer with clients to figure
out how to deal with the stressors in their lives and build on their ambitions. The disconnect was
illustrated when he mentioned that:
“A few years ago, everything was about manualized treatments. They might be developed in
Utah with people who are 7 foot tall and left-handed and that makes it evidence-based. And then
you bring it to Baltimore where people are short and right-handed and then try and apply
there. If the program can fit around the client instead of the client having to fit within the
program, then it would be more directly applicable to the person.” (Charles)
Overall, we heard that the real constellation behind the service ecosystem was related to the political
system and its ever-changing priorities, which impacts sustainability and community-grounded efforts.
Charles continued:
“Over the past 20 and 30 years, priorities have changed with the administrations and the
[person-centered] programs are hard to maintain.”
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Last, indigenous ways of healing are not widely accepted by traditional treatment models which leads to
disinvestment in African-Centered resources and organizations. One interviewee explained:
“It comes down to not wanting to not see this community worthy of the investment of the
approaches that are effective. There is no value on Black life in this country, in Black
community. There are people already in the community that are able to address the root
traumas of addiction and have positive ways to cope, those are just not those who run the
programs. Ideally in a reinvestment model, those people would be funded to do those things.”
(Rashard)
Examples of Erosion of Black Civil Society Institutions in Baltimore
In this section, there are extended accounts from two different respondents about Black civil society
institutions as examples of what has been lost and for a model of what African-Centered reparations could
look like.
Penn North Recovery Center
Black civil society institutions have played an important role in holding space for African-Centered ways
of healing. How they have been eroded is key to understanding community harm from the War on Drugs.
When drug use and addiction increased in the 60s, there was a lack of public health and drug treatment
services available. Black civil society organizations saw the need and organized to start free, communitybased
holistic centers providing harm reduction, drug treatment, and health care services. Vice News
produced a short documentary about the Lincoln Detox Center in Harlem, New York which was founded
by local community leaders including the Young Lords, the Black Panther Party, and led by Dr. Mutulu
Shakur (16). The center was established as a healing space to address heroin addiction and was the
nation’s first outpatient detoxification program to utilize methadone, acupuncture, and political education
to address the oppression and brutality of the conditions that shaped drug addiction. After nearly a
decade of serving the community, the detox center was shut down by a task force of over 200 police
officers and taken over by government-run public health entities, removing community control and
dismantling informal and indigenous social networks of care (77).
In Baltimore, Penn North Recovery Center adopted a similar model for holistic treatment in 1993 and is
still in operation today with many lessons that we can learn from. As Amy recalled:
“The Lincoln Detox project essentially... were like, we're taking this stuff into our own hands. We
can't count on these systems to take care of our people. It's not happening, it's not working. And
they opened up community acupuncture for anybody. [The Baltimore model] is built on that
same model. It's open as many hours a day as we can have volunteers in here working. You can
come in at any time, and we will work to get you clean. It's basic ear needles and the idea
behind it is it's a functional nervous system kind of calming as well as deals with the major
organs of detoxification.”
The Baltimore community clinic offered free and accessible detox services, but it also served other
purposes:
“But most importantly, it rebuilds a community, right? It rebuilds community right where
people sit and heal, and it gets you to sort the trauma that is also part and parcel of the
addictions process... And so actually just even having a community that was focused on that
healing process. So, I actually think that that's a really core component of what happens in those
healing spaces that is often really missing in some of the other kinds of treatments that happen.
So that is essentially the core of the model.” (Amy)
The core of this Black civil society institution rebuilding community to address the deep-rooted harms of
addiction using indigenous ways of healing that were not offered in traditional treatment centers. The
interviewee recounted how Black elders and community leaders in Baltimore stepped up to be a part of
this community initiative:
“There was a man... he had had some active addictions, and had been in like gangs, and he was
like, “Look. If you want me off my heroin, you're gonna have to create a better
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friendship community, 'cause heroin is really faithful. It'll be there when
everybody else disappears.” And you know you can imagine.. this is Baltimore City in 1995.
There are already lots of people right here.. they're already being treated for addictions from
various aspects of things, but it's pretty rampant right and it's not just the time, it's also crack..
and heroin, both pretty intensively. And [he] basically said, “You know, if you want me here,
then that's what it is.” And so, he would do qigong. He taught qigong and that was his thing. It
was literally a community health initiative, and that was the core. The core focus was this is a
community health initiative. This is not something imposed by county people.” (Amy)
It is important to note that these efforts were not connected to a public health initiative or a government
program. The community health initiative differs from harm reduction in that it was framed around
addiction prevention instead of overdose prevention and offers a compelling alternative to drug use unlike
other addiction treatment programs such as 12-step that operate on notions of personal blame.
Indigenous addiction service methodologies are not given space within the existing addiction services
ecosystem, necessitating a vision of reparations that creates space for indigenous interventions to flourish.
Community members at Penn North, such as the one that Amy describes below, had a great impact,
providing resources and teaching ways of healing within their own community and having ownership over
it:
“He was doing more than just qigong… You know the closest thing I could say is like, he was
really acting as a community elder, right… He'd been through the ringer. He'd been to prison,
he'd been doing drugs, selling drugs, running drugs-like he did the whole, he ran the whole
gamut... but basically came back to Baltimore was like, “I want to be part of the healing process
for other people too.” And so, it wasn't just that he did qigong, it was that he took it upon himself
to learn some of his own ancestral healing kinds of practices, and then to partner with Penn
North to really be the father figure in some ways for a community that you know, was missing a
lot of the men that like, they were taken.”
The way the elder was involved in rebuilding community and was providing alternative ways of healing at
the clinic is one example of how Black civil society institutions address community harm from mass
incarceration due to drug criminalization. The interviewee went on to explain how indigenous ways of
healing such as qigong and acupuncture were impactful in the healing process:
“So, when you put in enough community support for people to do qigong every day, what do
you learn about being in your body? You have a whole different experience of being in your
body, you actually understand something about what it feels like when things feel stuck. But
those are cultural things that happen in social settings or in work settings, or in other places
where people are being, you know, educated by each other. So, when you put a place like
Lincoln Detox or Penn North, and you start bringing in people who, from the community, who
have knowledge of ancestral herbal medicines, that's not something that you can just replace
with any modern medicine.” (Amy)
Two important points were being made by the interviewee regarding the community clinic. One was that
indigenous ways of healing would help people address many of their own physical ailments which
threatens the economic model of modern medical systems. The second was that modern medicine and
traditional treatment centers could not offer the wealth of knowledge, healing and connection that was
being built up by community members at the clinic. The aspect of community that the clinic helped
support was what made it successful as the interviewee pointed out:
“What I will say about the original practice at Penn North was that the addiction was never the
center. The people are the center, and I think that's a core thing. Also, because then people will
say this like, ‘I feel like you see me as a whole human being. I'm not just like a number, I'm not
just like one more case.' (Amy)
As interviewees mentioned previously, people with substance use disorders often experience feelings of
dehumanization, especially folks of African descent. Putting people at the center of the clinic’s mission
helped them feel seen as a person and humanized them in their struggles. The positive community
building space that was held by the clinic was unfortunately eroded over time by several factors. The
biggest issue was who had control over funding sources:
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“There's no money in the community to support a network of this really working. And then what
happens is you begin to have the traditional addictions counseling become the modality for
paying. And so now, that is still what happens mostly-is you get funding for the addictions
counseling and the addictions counseling essentially supports an acupuncture program. Or
whatever the holistic things are get funded by the traditional medical models which is difficult
on a number of levels, for a number of reasons... And so, then you end up without intending to,
the structure of a model that's supposed to be community-based healing, essentially the money
turns into the core of the structure. It always does. It just does. Like it or not, that's just kind of
how it works.” (Amy)
The issue of funding is that whoever provides the funds, drives the values and the direction of a program.
Once the community lost control of the funding at the Baltimore clinic, the money determined who got to
provide what services.
“It's like you sort of side step the whole medical system as best you can and you just do what you
can, and you get funded to do that outside of the system. But once you're embedded with the
system, you're beholden to all of those regulations. And so, it's just one of those things where it's
almost that it's either a community-based facility OR it's a medical-based facility. It's almost
impossible to really have it be both in so many cases. I mean, and this is the line that Penn North
has been trying to walk for the past however many, 30 plus years now.” (Amy)
Federal and non-profit sources of funding came with regulations that restricted the community-based
aspect of the program, so the clinic did its best to find other funding sources. But there was never enough
funding from private donors or from the community itself to be sustainable over time. The Baltimore
clinic had to look for funding sources outside of the community that saw addictions counseling as the core
of the program instead of the holistic services that were based on indigenous and community-based
methods of healing. This was an issue that the interviewee saw happening not only to the Baltimore clinic
but also to other Black civil society institutions:
“One of the things that I always see is with all of the non-profits right, is that you have
essentially somebody spending so much time writing grants- basically pays their salary at the
end of the day, if they're reasonably good at it. Or you have somebody who's a longtime donor,
and they commit to it. But even there, right when they get scared, or when their funding dries
up, or when something happens-and I know that that happened at Penn North, maybe 6 or 7
years ago, one or two of their major donors shifted priorities you know, and that can happen at
the board level, or it can happen at the socio-cultural level where people are like, “Well,
addictions, that isn't really our focus anymore. Now we're gonna look at trauma,” and they
want to deal in the mental health side of things... It's basically dependent on the ever-changing,
and because Medicaid is state run and Medicare is federally run right, you're also sort of
navigating these two different waters, and making sure you stay on top of what are all those
and then the regulatory stuff.” (Amy)
The complexity and instability tied to outside funding sources resulted in various barriers to the clinic
providing services that stayed true to its original purpose. The issue was that regardless of where the
funding came from, it would not work as long as the money was outside of the community’s control.
Another issue also came up from having those outside of the community involved:
“At Penn North, the model for a long time was that the school provided student practitioners
where they did clinical hours there, and it was sort of like this cross-training kind of a place.
Around the death of Freddie Gray, the school pulled out. Day of, the school pulled out! They
were like we're not going, and I was like, “Oh, hell no! This community is in crisis; of all the
times we need to have this here, it's today!” I was like fuck that, we're going in and so I just
called up the people and we volunteered. And basically, they [the school] were like we're not
sure when we're coming back... and I was like we're not doing that. So, for 2 years we just did a
volunteer basis.” (Amy)
The clinic depended on outside organizations to provide personnel in order to run the clinic and then
when the community experienced crisis, they were left abandoned. This dynamic is one the interviewee
said they saw repeatedly in Baltimore. They gave another example saying:
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“And then actually right out of Freddie Gray what happened was all the cameras came... and
people were like, “Well, what does the neighborhood need?” Alicia Keys came! And they [the
community] were like, we need a safe place for our kids to go. Like literally took over the
laundromat, the vacant laundromat next door, and we renovated it like, over the course of a
week and a half and then the next day the kids had a safe place to go basically, and that was it.
Of course, now where is it? It doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't exist anymore... Those people
came in one more time and said that they cared about us, and said that they were going to help
us, and then they disappeared again. Do you know what that does to people? If you talk
about the history of that part of Baltimore, it's that. People who say they give a
shit who come in and then disappear. I think that the dependency on the medical
system itself is dangerous. We're gonna decriminalize, where does the funding go?
What actually happens with it?” [emphasis added] (Amy)
The betrayal that communities have experienced leads to a dynamic of long-term loss of community buyin
and trust when outsiders come in with promises of programs and resources. As we consider how to
move forward with drug decriminalization in Maryland, it is important to center this history.
Communities are fearful that the traditional view of decriminalization with a sole public health focus will
result in the decriminalization of drugs without any accountability to the community of where the money
goes.
Rites of Passage
Another example of a Black civil society institution that was able to address issues within its own
community is Rites of Passage, a community organization dating back to the 80s. The organization
centers African-Centered principles of life-affirming spirituality and community self-esteem, whereby
indigenous elders provide youth with mentorship. A former leader of the Rites of Passage in Baltimore
recalled:
“That's what Rites of Passage was about-to teach the children, the young people and their
parents, a value system based upon the Nguzo Nane, the Nguzo Saba plus the seventh, the
eighth principle of respect. So, building around the Nguzo Nane, we had an organization where
adults tended to children. And it was the “it takes a village to raise a child” that was enacted.
And we had a few hundred youth over the years. And we did a lot to help them and help their
parents. I remember times when we would get a call from one of the youth’s parents, “I don't
know where he is,” and “he didn't come home” or, you know, something happened, and we have
to get up and go look for him and go find out where they were and take them home. We had
great success in terms of-because we paid pretty specific attention to children, and tried to work
with them, rather than punish them... And everything had to be substantiated by our purpose,
which was the Nguzo Saba, the value system. The value system that is celebrated at Kwanzaa
but practiced all year. And that's what was driving us as we put together this intervention.”
(Olusola)
The Nguzo Saba Principles that the interviewee mentions are as follows: Umoja (Unity), Kujichagulia
(Self-Determination), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), Nia
(Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity), and Imani (Faith). Following these values, the organization was able to
address some of the harms that stemmed from drugs and drug criminalization:
“In the 80s and 90s... the issues then in the community were of course the drug war and its effect
on people and youth and youth violence. And that's how we got involved with Rites of Passage
but younger people, the youth that we were working with, were interested in trying to save
themselves. This was at the beginning, well pretty much the beginning, of the murder rate
business. And we started the Rites of Passage in order to provide for boys an alternative to the
world of violence.” (Olusola)
When parents need help guiding their children who were struggling with substance use, they could look to
the elders in the organization for support:
“A mother could go to the leaders, and they would go and find her son and drag him home from
being in the crack house. We need more of that in the community. The positive, not only the male
[identity formation], but the positive adult assertion of community safety, and a positive
community culture. If the children are not safe, the whole community is not safe.” (Olusola)
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The interviewee talked about the history of the organization over the past 25 years and the struggles to
keep it running due to funding issues:
“We weren't looking for funding because we knew, they're not going to fund something that was
going to force them to change their weight, you know the system. Some of these kids were the
children of crack parents. Basically, we became parents. We became people who they relied on.
We know the methodology works and we have proof. However, we haven’t done research
studies. We haven't done the kind of stuff that gets you political funding. And it's, you know, it's
because how can we expect the same people who created the torture to fund our recovery.”
(Olusola)
The leaders of the organization decided not to pursue other funding streams because doing so would
require a compromise of their values. There was trepidation in receiving funding external to the
community as it imposed government regulation and removed community control:
“Once you subsidize, you regulate. [emphasis added] And that's how I look at grants and
going for government funded programs, ‘Okay, we're going to give you this money, but you
better not do this, you better not do that, and you better do these things.” So, do I want to take a
subsidy from somebody who wants to regulate me when we may disagree on what the goal is?
What is an authentic goal for this low-income Black community?' (Olusola)
However, this left the organization underfunded and led to limitations in its operations. Many Black civil
society institutions have been eroded over time by these funding dynamics, and people are left with no
civil society options to plug into for support and a sense of community. The erosion of Black civil society
institutions also impacts their ability to collectively address overdose and addiction outside of government
and white-dominant service systems. The interviewee also listed other Black civil society organizations
that provided community support to individuals and families and were trusted resources for guidance and
material assistance.
Black Civil Society Institution
Fruit of Islam (FOI)
WombWork Productions, Inc.
Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters
United
Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle
I Can’t We Can
I say No To
Barber shops
Description
Military wing of the Nation of Islam
Community centered cultural entertainment
organization
Support group for women who have lost children to
gun violence
Grassroots think-tank which advances the public policy
interest of Black people in Baltimore
Drug addiction treatment center
Drug addiction treatment center
Collaborations among local barbering organizations to
open a barber school
Perspectives of Decriminalization and other Drug Policy Efforts
Interviewees shared various perspectives on decriminalization (decrim), highlighting potential positive
effects while also raising concerns. Three main perspectives on implementing drug decriminalization
arose:
1. Decriminalization will not change the larger conditions faced by communities targeted by the War
on Drugs.
2. Decriminalization does not address community harms.
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3. Decriminalization does not recognize the values that ground communities’ responses to heal and
be architects of their own solutions.
1. Drug decriminalization will not change the larger conditions faced by communities
targeted by the War on Drugs.
Interviewees routinely emphasized the need for a critical perspective that acknowledges the social impacts
of addiction stemming from underlying conditions in Baltimore. Contemporary discourse of decrim
traditionally argues that addiction should be treated as a public health problem. A public health approach
may be positive, as it seeks to address the material suffering caused by hyper-incarceration and addiction
(24,78). However, it does not challenge the underlying assumptions behind these systems of inequity and
overlooks the productive capabilities of individuals who use and sell drugs as a means of survival and
economic empowerment (6). Interviewees consistently pointed out that the minor revisions made to the
criminal legal system fail to address the true nature of the problem.
One interviewee, a youth leader, expressed concern that proposed marijuana legalization would
exacerbate structural conditions generated by the War on Drugs.
“If you are under the age of 18, and get caught with it, it’s still a crime. And the problem is what
we know is in poor communities, like Black people's communities traditionally, there's a huge
and urgent need for additional streams of income. And there's a pretty well-documented history
of kids taking up that type of ownership over contributions to the household space. Again, if you
are a kid with no formal training, no legitimate connections to larger money or politics or
anything else, you have what’s around you and available and so, traditionally, selling a little bit
of weed is most people's introduction into being able to make money… there could be potentially
a bunch of kids, who while this product is legal both medically and recreationally, because they
are trying to provide for their families in the same way that these White cannabis companies
are, will continue to be arrested, and continue to be engaged in the juvenile justice system.”
Not only did interviewees express concern about the worsening of conditions in a post-decriminalized
Baltimore, but were clear that a communal and comprehensive response was sorely needed:
“Let's not forget about the big business of the drug trade, right? It provides opportunities for
primarily young Black men who are not gonna be a part of the so-called primary labor market.
It gives them an opportunity to make money right, but it also obviously places them at risk to be
incarcerated and murdered. So, this is kind of a grand scheme. Like autopilot since slavery, to
continue as a society to racially control certain groups, and to essentially keep them subjugated
and oppressed. Because ultimately...people don't want to give up their power and privilege.”
(Jay)
“The opportunities that vulnerable people have in the streets to make money is a way to also
keep them cool and calm. But you take that opportunity to make money in the streets then
people are going to become more desperate and if you don't have the services and the
opportunities there, to rebuild and help the people, they will become more desperate, and they
are not going to suffer peacefully. They’re going to turn that anger inward and outward, and I
would say there would be more crime on the street. Now I’m not justifying the sale of drugs in
any kind of way... Taking the opportunity away from the streets, what money can you get? A
group can become desperate. We need to think about this collectively.” (Jay)
Minor amendments proposed by the current decriminalization effort, such as re-conceptualizing levels of
thresholds of drug possession, may not address the issue in the eyes of communities that have
experienced the devastating effects of criminalization of drug possession. Interviewees expressed
concerns that current decrim proposals do not resonate with the communities faced with high levels of
drugs on the street. In the absence of politically tangible solutions for community stabilization, some
community members may find it easier to reconcile with the criminal system of drug courts out of fear of
drug-related violence. So, interviewees that raised such concerns warned about the fear of repackaging
criminal reforms into other forms of social oppression. For example, the interviewee below shared
apprehension of how the current approach will be received if they do not address structural conditions of
drugs, crime, and policing:
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“Grandmothers are the super voters in Baltimore City in the last few elections. So, those are the
votes you know are gonna happen. Those people are the people that legislators listen to
because those are the people who they need outside of their donors. And then that grandmother
is like, I want them drugs off the corner cause my, my son or my whomever was impacted in
whatever way. And traditionally, systems of White supremacy and anti-Blackness operate,
when Black people say that they need help what the answer is, is police.” (Milton)
Decriminalization fails to address community harms.
Interviewees expressed the need for drug policy to address the community context. Current decrim efforts
draw on an outlook that places blame on those who use drugs and the communities faced with high levels
of drug use. Interviewees felt that the current decrim debate rarely recognizes the systems of power that
maintain the status quo and hinders community repair from the drug war. For example, one interviewee
recalled his own experience living in Baltimore:
“It’s tough for me because I live in a community, and I have a child and I don’t think that
everyone should just be out here selling drugs. I’m not anti-criminalization of substances, but we
can't criminalize and not improve the conditions that facilitate criminality at the same time. It
places the blame on people, usually people of color, people who are poor, people who have less
education. It doesn’t fall on the powers that be and the people with money.” (Calvin)
Additionally, interviewees criticized decrim proposals as either missing or antithetical to community
values. Proposed decrim solutions do not reckon with the communal harms of cultural and spiritual
alienation in the healing and restoration in the face of addiction and the impacts of drug criminalization.
For example, a component of decrim policy advocates for increased access to drug treatment programs. In
Baltimore, most treatment programs are external to African-Centered values and culture. Although these
programs are helpful for some, one interviewee explained that the 12-step program is steeped in guiding
and shaming individuals to accountability and breaking away from their community, which is at odds with
African-Centered values of communal support and empowerment. Another interviewee, a mental health
provider in Baltimore, who grounds practice in African-Centered values, emphasized the need for Black
civil society institutions when developing healing supports for drug addiction and developing drug policy
solutions in general:
“In my work as a mental health provider, it is about reconnecting to ancestral connection and
veneration around who our people are. It is about pointing out where Eurocentric or
whitewashed or White supremacist ideals have been embedded within us. For example, African-
American folks not wanting to be Black, or seeking to have proximity to whiteness. So, if we're
thinking about this, how I might support a person that maybe is struggling with addiction or
navigating systems, I would first define community from an African-Centered perspective that
is not reliant on white mainstream institutions and is not led by or maintaining any level of
power over them.” (Donna)
Decriminalization fails communities to be architects of their own solutions.
The current decrim approach fails to shift power to the communities that have been shredded by drug
criminalization. Access to existing treatment services, as a component of decrim reform, is at risk for
exacerbating community harms. In one way, this looks like maintaining the lack of community control
over solutions to drugs and the criminalization of them:
“Let's say my uncle gets locked up for possession because he had some dope on him. Let's say he
did get a court date and he went before a judge, and the judge said, ‘Alright, you either got to do
90 days or go to a drug treatment program.” It’s going to be like this list of pre-approved
vendors that you got to go through...you don't know who works for who and what’s going to
work. Even though everybody's auntie and grandmother can cook, nobody's ever afforded the
ability to go cook in the school kitchen because there's a set of providers that we decided that we
going to go with. Because usually again, systems of White supremacy and anti-
Blackness don't allow the thought that Black people can be the architects of their
own solutions.’ (Milton)
Given the history and context in Baltimore, interviewees described how reforms have historically fallen
short when Black civil society does not lead the way, one interviewer stated:
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“It’s the values that people have that lead to policies and a stable community. And so, if you
don't have any institutions, if you don't have any people who are out there to advocate for prosocial,
pro-Black community values, then [decrim] is not going to happen.” (Olusola)
Public health advocacy is championing innovative harm reduction solutions, such as safe consumption
sites within existing institutions, while forgoing investments into the institutional infrastructure of Black
communities to lead their own efforts. One harm reduction advocate dreaded that life-saving harm
reduction interventions being advocated for in Baltimore will continue to be led by White-dominant
service providers outside of Black control. Given these current realities, I felt the implications of power
will affect the success of the harm reduction and addiction care.
Overall, interviewees opposed increased policing and were also generally apprehensive around current
decriminalization proposals. The psychospiritual pain from poverty, drugs, lack of material, social and
employment aspirations, opportunities for menial jobs in favor of drug dealing, breakdown of families
and social networks, and frustrations related to racial discrimination, set the scene for their policy
recommendation.
Conclusion
Our recommendations for policy and practice are based on what we learned from the community leaders
we interviewed, the literature mapped by the scoping review process, and lessons the community-based
researcher learned from policy advocacy. The core of the communities’ concerns centered around how
drugs have led to violence and what that means to the decriminalization movement. Now there is an
entire generation of people who have grown up surviving by selling drugs, creating an environment of
violence and criminalization. Given that the drug war fueled these conditions, recommendations are as
followed:
1. Require reparations that repair the community harms of the war on drugs
2. Ensure decrim reforms are community-led
3. Decriminalization reforms must be made with acknowledgement that interventions do not exist in
a vacuum and a critical race lens must be applied
1. Require reparations that repair the community harms of the War on Drugs
Reparations needed must be grounded in community control, economic reinvestments, and an African-
Centered ethos. The most consistent recommendation elevated by the interviewees and affirmed by the
community harms of the drug war is to invest in restoring the communal infrastructure that has been
broken down by drug criminalization for generations.
Examples of repair to the communal systems of collective care and responsibility consistently pointed to
black business investments for economic development, for example:
“Reallocate money. Put it behind local businesses, especially local businesses that have a holistic
kind of a bend. How does the money stay in the community? Local businesses that create
ecosystems, right? So that's food, and housing. It's a holistic treatment.” (Amy)
A harm reduction activist stated,
“Reparations going directly to Black and brown people and not into big organizations and then
funneled back into the community is really important. The funds get lost after funneled into the
community. Participants are not involved in major decision-making. I want us to invest in Black
and brown businesses and harm reduction organizations and beef up our communities with
things for people to do other than do drugs-like neighborhoods to be well-rounded, with parks,
and no food deserts.” (Monica)
Investments must be rooted in cultural values that acknowledge the talents, social systems, and
institutions already in the Black community. To restore communal bonds, this looks like investments into
the material, psychospiritual and physical well-being of impacted communities.
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“The African-Centered approach would not only focus on the significance of externalized
oppression, what happens outside of us (housing, discrimination, hyper incarceration) but also
how people internalize oppression (shame, stigma). If there was no material [external]
oppression, there would be no internal. If oppressed groups start to internalize the vilification
and the shame, then people cannot realize their vast potential, but turn on other African-
Americans and cannot work together.” (Jay)
Interviewees also consistently uplifted the need to reinvest into communities to restore the person
affirming work of spiritual development:
“Decriminalization would be easier, if we had more voices of folks that had some critical
consciousness experience where they had the ability to see themselves in their own life, see it,
alongside what's happening politically, and then begin to advocate and be supported by
community, so that they could be in the face of, and be supported collectively, and transforming
everything that we think about when we think about why people use drugs. They use drugs
because they are trying to connect to spirit or are in deep, deep, pain and trying to numb that
pain. How can we create a space where everyone feels like they don’t have to escape through a
substance to heal their pain?
The programs of the future in my mind hopefully will be funded better, but also will take that
funding and begin to see the importance of an integral healing where we touch on all the
available areas of a person's development, which is inside us, as individuals, our psychospiritual
selves, inside of us as groups, this is our culture, the outside of us as individuals, which is our
bodies, and the outside of all of us, which is our society and our social systems.” (Calvin)
And they continued by providing an understanding of how to do this, which consistently pointed out a
vision of African-Centered reparations from other interviewees:
“Build Black institutions that Black people have control over, resources that are in control by
Black people in their own communities. We need a comprehensive approach that really takes
into account the whole person that is also affirming of the self.” (Rashard)
Interviewee highlighted the importance of political awareness within the practice of healing:
“When we're working from an African-Centered and liberatory perspective, it means helping
folks to have the eyes to see and then have a therapist to help them work through it. When we
qualify mental health practitioners that work with folks struggling with addiction, it shouldn't
just be so that if they're in a methadone program, they can get methadone and then discharged.
Discharge isn't just when they've been clean for however long the discharge is, when they also
have the eyes to think about how society should, change how to do things from a political
awareness.” (Donna)
Another example of reinvesting into Black civil society institutions that nurture spiritual care and cultural
affirmation are Black churches in Baltimore:
“Another indigenous way, and we need to use more of this, a major institution in the Black
community, is the Black church. We need to use more churches as sites for intervention and
assistance. Conceptualize spirituality as the vehicle through which Black transformation has
occurred. It was through spirituality that Black people were able to help ourselves historically;
to fight against racial oppression and discrimination through the advancement of protest. This
was also known as race work. Race work was imbued by spirituality. I would strongly
encourage any treatment model that's going to consistently help African-Americans to rely on
the church base. Positive transformation in the Black community has been through the church,
so you’re not using everything in your arsenal if you’re not using the church. Churches across
the nation have mental health and substance use services. These services integrate Eurocentric
and African-Centered flavor, around spirituality and collective responsibility. A component of
the treatment model is demonstrating how the individual African-American particular life can
be used, not to just advance oneself, but to help to advance the broader collective African-
American community-to advance the race.” (Jay)
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A local pastor family interviewed recalled service in the church, providing care for those struggling with
addictions:
“My husband started the chapter for NA to come into the church. We partnered with various
drug treatment services and a veteran's organization. We had a bus where we would pick
people up. We had a staff of about 20-35 people and some of them were delivered from drugs,
lived through it, and came up to help. I had a lot of help–young people and mothers cooking.
There was a lot of support in that. Most of our finances were through donations.” (Agnes)
Restoration of community in the wake of policy reform must be considerate of the flow of funding
streams. In the development of drug policies, such as decrim, there will be several streams of revenue
generation to advocate for. Traditionally, funding from policy is sanctioned into pre-existing public health
infrastructure. Policy development must explicitly ensure funds go directly to support impacted
communities. New and major sources of funding are becoming available through cannabis regulatory
state taxes and the opioid settlement funds. If drug policy efforts are serious about repairing the harm
from the War on Drugs, earmarking all revenue sources for community reparations is essential.
2. Ensure decrim reforms are community-led
Interviewees laid out mechanisms for restoring community. One, center Black civil society support
systems into policy development and ownership over community responses to harm reduction and
addiction care. One interviewee explicitly advised to:
“… write out or exclude large White institutions. Oftentimes police are gridlocked into working
with state institutions to enact or inform things, we need to figure out a work around in order to
ensure that it can actually be led by the grassroots and Black folks.” (Donna)
Drug policy is missing organic expertise around the prevention of addiction. Community leaders, such as
youth mentors and pastors have grassroots experience working to heal community harms brought on by
generations of addiction and criminalization. Although there are dedicated voices in the conversation in
the community, they are left out of drug policy development circles. One interviewee in harm reduction
dreamed of a Maryland where community was at the core of harm reduction services, stating:
“I would love for the participants to own them and run them, but I feel like that's never going to
happen. White people from Johns Hopkins are going to own and run them. But my hope is that
we will start mentoring people within the community to take over the executive director
positions and community organizing positions. There is a separation between us and the people
most affected.” (Monica)
Not only did we hear this from the interviewees, but also the scoping review of the academic literature
bore witness to this. When examining the literature on communal harms of drug criminalization, there
were no research papers on the dynamics of drug criminalization and Black civil society. Not to mention,
only three articles were informed by people impacted by drug criminalization.
“There should be criteria for developing work groups or people who sit in decision making
spaces for decrim stuff, would bring in that perspective of where people who are most impacted
are coming from.” (Milton)
The story of Alicia Keys coming and making a big fanfare about there being investment in community and
then after she left, the community conditions staying the same, speaks to the urgency for community
control. When the dominant system is based upon views of the Black community as essentially deficient
and void of indigenous responses, all investment is considered inherently good because it assumes it is
better than nothing. We heard arguments about how political organizations and nonprofit networks
become empowered to act and speak on behalf of Black civil society. Designated with legitimacy to
address key issues, “established anchor” institutions have the political, economic, and built infrastructure
to suck up resources. One quote that stood out about drug courts demonstrates the danger of building
political infrastructure that is not owned and controlled by community:
“I've seen it first-hand how things like drug court programs, whose job it is to provide an
alternative form of punishment, rehabilitation to clients, but whose money is driven by grants.
Their incentive again is money, which means they need a constant influx of people coming into
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drug court. They have to graduate from drug court, which means usually you have to graduate
from the program, but primarily the incentive is not the person's improvement, it's how do we
keep our jobs at the court-the prosecutor, the judge. I’ve seen it first-hand, internally the
criminality of the system itself. People are buying and selling clients to each other, literally seen
trading clients among court officials working together to make sure that only certain programs
receive clients because they are affiliated with one program and then funnel clients from that
program to get clients only from them. In some way shape or form there's some way that the
court system, the drug court system, inadvertently ends up harming people that results in
higher rates of drug use instead of lower rates of drug use.” (Calvin)
The lessons learned from this research presents a unique opportunity to re-interrogate the assumptive
logic of the barging that is being made in drug policy circles and harm reduction spaces. In order to rescue
critical ventures like Overdose Prevention Sites from decades of underfunding, the core of how the
community experiences harm reduction is tied to the political and economic institutions that facilitate
and exacerbate mistreatment, gentrification, and other forms of social control.
Grandpre himself raises concerns about the dangers of non-community institutions having control of
resources in a piece about the Nehemiah project in Baltimore (76). Non-community institutions measure
investment with tangible outcomes while what the community values is less tangible, leading to a
disconnect in what is seen as good investment:
“I talked to the lead fixer for the Nehemiah project… He was candid, he said: 'Look, I work for
foundation and these are people with a lot of money they are used to investing it in a certain
way. And what they are looking for is what we call deliverables.’ In other words, they want
something physical so they can say ‘we brought this building.’ They can’t say ‘we brought a
better relationship between John and his wife.’ They can’t say “we brought a better experience in
school” unless they can trace him in every grade and his grades were higher. That was too soft
of them. They were looking for clear, physical evidence, i.e., ‘put up a building (76).'
3. Decriminalization reforms must be made with acknowledgement that interventions do
not exist in a vacuum, therefore, a critical race lens must be applied
Last, mechanisms of drug treatment investments through criminal justice diversion of decrim must
counter anti-Black treatment systems already in place. Removal of criminal sanctions, such as diversion
from arrest, does not necessarily remove police presence and other forms of social control in communities
grappling with high levels of drugs. Decriminalization, such as shifting levels of drug thresholds, may
sustain disparate racialized enforcement and may also shift the criminalization of low-thresholds of drug
use into other forms given the inherent anti-Black systems already in place. For example, in one
predominantly Black county in Maryland, Kozlowski and colleagues found that after a policy shifting
misdemeanor marijuana possession from a criminal arrest to a citation went into effect, enforcement
activity for marijuana arrests did not decline; in fact, other misdemeanor arrests replaced marijuana
arrests (5). Shifting focus to solely drug decriminalization policy efforts of low-level drug possession
diverts attention from the contextual conditions of the policing apparatus in Maryland.
Given the conversations of policy harassment and brutality, there is a concern that even if small quantities
of drugs are decriminalized, police may have flexibility in reporting to round amounts up to possession
with intent to distribute, overcharging with factors like resisting arrest or assaulting an officer, or even
planting weapons to create additional violent charges. Decrim needs to directly engage police reform to
deal with this dynamic.
We heard the stories of police harassment, such as stealing drugs in order to resell them. Whether
Baltimore policing is a result of the financial gain of direct sale of drugs by police, or by police benefitting
from the increased budgetary support that the War on Drugs provides, police have an incentive to create
panic around drug use to justify their position (32). There was very little analysis in the decrim literature
that engaged with notions of police actively promoting drug use in the Black community for their own
benefit, as supported by the work of Gary Webb, that crack cocaine was intentionally sold to black
communities to create a pipeline of cash to fund off the books CIA work in Latin America or to destabilize
the Black community (7). The role of seeing drug use promoted by officials implicates communities' ability
to trust that interventions offered, like decriminalization and other harm reduction efforts, such as
overdose prevention sites.
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Policymakers and researchers interested in productive and emancipatory research must challenge the
simplistic notion that Portugal represents a “best practice” in drug decriminalization. There must be
interrogation of the social construction of knowledge that does not only disrupt prevailing notions of
decrim but is also void of research-related biases. For example, there needs to be more awareness to
challenge police authority within drug policy implementation of social control. In Baltimore, analysis of
drug decriminalization should include analysis of civilian oversight institutions, including the limitations
of their oversight capacities because of legal obstacles such as the Maryland Law Enforcement Officer’s
Bill of Rights.
In conclusion:
Interviewee recommendations made it clear that we must incorporate community perspectives into drug
policy solutions. Interviewees also emphasized the need to invest in Black Civil Society institutions that
have been deeply disrupted by drug criminalization. These are complex issues, and the solutions are
complex. We learned that a few edits to the system are unlikely to produce the intended impacts of a sole
public health approach. Decrim policy must be grounded in promoting the peace that was undone largely
by the War on Drugs. The work toward reparations that repairs the harm should be rooted in community,
led by the community, and for the community.
Recommendations for Policy Advocates
The co-author, Lawrence Grandpre, born and raised in Maryland, has worked extensively over the past 8
years in the state capital of Annapolis on a variety of legislative issues ranging from bail reform, police
accountability to cannabis reform. This report set out to create resources to help advocates push for drug
decriminalization. Based upon the findings of this report, and the co-author’s experience with legislative
advocacy, a list of recommendations has been created to provide concrete takeaways for those seeking to
advocate for policy change in the state of Maryland.
These recommendations are presented with the intent of starting a conversation around bridging the
space between the sorts of people participating in this study, representing Black civil society members
who have worked to restore the civic capacity of the Black community to operationalize self-governance,
and with institutions and communities working on drug policy who often do not engage these perspectives
and understand the concerns these communities have. The goal is for rethinking and reconceptualizing
the work.
A full interrogation of the findings of this document is beyond the scope of this paper, but this paper felt
incomplete without inclusion of these 4 central observations.
1. To Overcome “Criminal Justice Reform Fatigue,” Focus on Community Investment
In our work pushing cannabis reform in Maryland, we at Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle have been
surprised that some of the lawmakers who in the past had expressed support for drug policy reform
seemed unenthusiastic around cannabis legalization. Some discussed pass criminal justice reform efforts
failing to provide them with the resources they need to fundamentally change conditions in their districts.
Recalling that the “progressive” nature of these bills are used to justify not doing redistributive policy by
those in Democratic Party leadership, essentially allowing them to say, “we already did our social justice
thing.” If social justice policy is treated as a box to check off, then some lawmakers have stated they would
rather save their political capital for policy which they felt has more transformative impact on their
communities, like community economic development policy.
This dynamic, which I have dubbed “criminal justice reform fatigue,” is echoed by interviewees in this
report. Folks expressed frustration in superficial and failed reforms that claimed community investments
which don’t materialize or benefit them. An example of this is the Maryland Justice Reinvestment Act
(JRI), which despite claims to use the savings from limiting incarceration of “non-violent drug offenders”
to invest in communities, failed to produce investment in community-based alternatives to incarceration,
with an analysis of JRI’s reinvestment efforts noting technical assistant providers feedback:
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“Brown et al. (2016) report that they believed that there was not a consensus regarding evidencebased
methodologies for community development from justice-reinvested funds. By comparison, the
criminogenic risk and needs literature provided guidance on EBPs. Furthermore, the EBP focus was
consistent with JRI technical assistance providers’ expertise in working with state agencies. The TA
providers argued that a justice system focus for JRI better aligned with their skills and experience
than a focus on communities. As Brown and colleagues report, one TA provider acknowledged
‘we’re not community redevelopment experts.’ Although JRI TA providers did not dispute the fact
that disadvantaged communities had great needs, they also pointed to legitimate weaknesses in
state corrections systems’ operations and argued that these problems needed to be addressed. These
problems provided opportunities for change without needing to take a place-based approach to
justice reinvestment (79).”
It is important to note that these failures to invest in community came not from active resistance to the
concept of reinvestment, but from methodological concerns about “evidence-based practices” being
centered and reporting expectations to state and federal government agencies. This technocratic inertia
often overwhelms good intentions in the midst of policy implementation, a reality that threatens the
ability for drug decriminalization to deliver on lofty rhetoric around community impact.
Policy advocates should make it clear that, rather than a revenue-saving or revenue-neutral bill, decrim
should be seen as an investment in community capacity to do the work and to work with stakeholders in
affected communities to identify what forms of investment meet their needs.
This also means decrim advocates would have to do away with one of the arguments most prominently
associated with the drug decriminalization position, that money from ending drug criminalization can be
reinvested into the community. Police funding, despite a nationwide “defund the police” movement, has
largely gone up in major metropolitan areas. Moreover, much of decriminalization advocacy comes at a
state level, while most police departments are funded largely at the municipal level (80).
Claiming that decrim working largely at a state level can deliver what a nationwide protest movement can
not and shifting money from police to social services at a city/county level, will likely lead to the sort of
disappointment and backlash expressed by interviewees in this report. Advocates will likely not be able to
deliver on promised investments, further eroding community trust, and potentially harming support for
future reform efforts.
Decrim advocates should be honest with themselves and learn the complex realities of how public money
flows. Assume your audience is smart enough to hear the hard truth about how difficult it is to win longterm
sustainable funding for community-controlled political and social service infrastructure and
strategize with those within civil society who are committed to doing the long, hard, systemic work of
shifting resources.
2. End Deference to Exogenous “Best Practice” Models
Our work demands a rethink of the well-intentioned but ultimately short-sighted rush to import “best
practice” models for drug decriminalization from other states (like Oregon) or even overseas (like the socalled
Portugal model drug decriminalization) into places like Maryland. The Oregon model, for all of its
potential benefits, still vest decision-making power largely within the professional public health
institutions, which in Baltimore have a particularly fraught history when it comes to race relations.
Additionally, the Portugal model, though lauded as “proof” that decriminalization can work, may not be as
clean of a fit as decrim advocates tend to claim. America, unlike Portugal, is home to a child “welfare”
system which has a massively disproportionate racial bias toward investigating and separating Black
families, with over 50% of Black children subject to a family welfare investigation at some point in their
lives (81). Is there much doubt that, in places like Baltimore, a Black citizen's involvement in a
theoretically “non-criminal” Portugal-style drug counseling system would be more likely to trigger
increased scrutiny from the family regulation system, with potential consequences of permanent family
separation? The researcher was surprised to learn that Portugal’s lauded decrim model does have
potential punitive elements (82). While these are often not used in Portugal, is it not likely that the same
model would produce different results in a nation defined by anti-Blackness? Why should grassroots
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advocates trust the experience of other nations that decriminalization didn’t increase drug sales, drug use,
or violent crime, given these nations have fundamentally different histories, demographics, patterns of
violent crime, and gun laws? Is it surprising that Black community members don’t quite show trust in the
rigor of decrim advocate’s analysis of White Supremacy?
This is not to say this model is inherently bad, but its presentation uncritically as a best practice model for
American policy must be rethought, and the communities have legitimate concerns about these models
which must be met with legitimate answers. Whatever system is presented for decrim, putting community
control and structure accountability to the community at its center will be key to preventing decrim from
potentially becoming another vector of anti-Black violence.
Places have fundamentally different political histories, needs, and importantly, indigenous cultural and
community resources. Seeing how criminalization prevents these resources from being cultivated, and
how decriminalization can build community-controlled infrastructure that cultivates these resources,
should be central to future research and policy work on decrim.
3. Be Prepared to Negotiate “Thermostatic” Criminal Justice Policymaking and Reject the
Violent/Nonviolent Offender Dichotomy
Fordham University professor John Pfaff in his book, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarcerationand
How to Achieve Real Reform notes that drug policies have regularly relied on a “standard story” of
mass incarceration, driven by mandatory minimums for nonviolent low-level drug offenses, to push
“pragmatic” drug policy reforms (83). He notes that this standard model no longer corresponds with
reality, writing:
“In reality, only about 16 percent of state prisoners are serving time on drug charges—and very
few of them, perhaps only around 5 or 6 percent of that group, are both low level and
nonviolent. At the same time, more than half of all people in state prisons have been convicted of
a violent crime. A strategy based on decriminalizing drugs will thus disappoint—and disappoint
significantly....”
In Maryland specifically, Pfaff notes that:
“Maryland, generally more liberal than South Carolina, passed a reform bill in 2016 that also
cut sanctions for nonviolent crimes while increasing punishments for some violent ones in order
to avoid looking ‘soft on crime.’” (ibid).
The concern is echoed in some grassroot policy advocates, who are concerned not only that the focus on
non-violent drug offenders trades off with the deeper issues of the larger anxieties lawmakers in the state
have around Black criminality, specifically in Baltimore City, a place over coded with conceptions of
criminality in the eyes of many lawmakers, that continues to drive more criminalization policies.
Moreover, there is concern at “thermostatic” effect, where decreasing criminalization on lower-level drug
crimes gets paired with increase criminalization on other fronts. It is possible that drug policy advocates
will be asked by some to support these sorts of increased criminalization on violent crime laws as a quidpro-quo
for support on drug decriminalization.
My group, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, has consistently pushed back against Democrat and
Republican supported mandatory minimum/sentencing enhancement legislation in Annapolis. In this
work, we have had to develop our own alternative version of the “Standard analysis” of mass
incarceration, one more compatible with criminal justice reform that includes sentencing reform for the
violent offender who actually make up the majority of those incarcerated in state prisons today. I am
presenting an abbreviated form of this analysis in an appendix to help drug policy advocates respond if
they are faced with a request to support increased criminalization of “violent crime” in exchange for
support for drug decriminalization.
Using this analysis to push back against sentencing enhancement and mandatory minimums has allowed
us to push non-reformist reforms that we believe help build the social political infrastructure needed for
police and prison abolition, while taking community concerns for public safety serious and concretely
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addressing these concerns. They have also often put us at odds with lawmakers and the Democratic Party
leaderships, with one prominent member of the Democratic leadership in 2018 labeled our group part of a
“criminal lobby,” insinuating that our rejection of sentencing enhancements and mandatory minimums
was out of love, fidelity, and affection for the individuals driving violence in our community and our
support was on their behalf (84).
While we have successfully been able to pass legislation despite clashes with the Black Caucus and
Democratic Party leadership, too many in the advocacy space have not shown an appetite to take this sort
of criticism, believing that relationships with lawmakers, negotiation, bipartisanship, and concessions are
the only path to political success. It is unlikely that a bill as contentious as drug decriminalization will be
able to pass through the same negotiated, bipartisan concession-based model of advocacy that produced
something like the Justice Reinvestment Act. Moreover, even if decriminalization could pass this way, it is
unlikely that more complex negotiations over resource investment in the community can be produced
through this legislative advocacy methodology, as the failure of JRI to produce substantial community
investment shows.
Some examples of specific vectors of criminalization to be on the lookout for are laws criminalizing public
camping in cities, panhandling, driving under the influence, possession with intent to distribute, traffic
violations, increased penalties for child support, restitution payment (victims services), possession of an
“illegal weapon” (knife or gun), and occupational licensing laws. Any/all of these laws can be a tool of the
thermostatic criminalization that can undo the intended results of drug decriminalization.
Similarly, there is an increase in the use of private security in American cities, many of whom are armed
(85). Even if decriminalization passes, and police forces lack the authority to arrest people for drug
possession, armed private security turns relatively minor crimes, like shoplifting, loitering, and public
intoxication, into a potential capital offense. Engaging with advocates of creating an accountability system
to address this reality will be a useful addition to drug decriminalization advocates legislative agendas.
4. Engage in Rigorous Study on the History and Culture of Black People
Decrim advocates need to engage in rigorous study on the history and culture of Black (African) people.
To accomplish this, advocates will have to engage in study that:
First. Critically interrogates traditional academic sources and supplements this curriculum is subjugated
knowledge from the Black Radical Tradition.
Second. Look to real world models and “organic intellectuals.”
And
Third. Reflect in their own personal culture, values, and experience.
The existing academic sources tell only part of the story when it comes to the Black community and drug
policy, and uncritically accepted in the narratives produced by these sources risks presenting a skewed
view of how the Black community engages with drug policy. The history of harm reduction detailed in
“Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction Is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction” details historical
tension between some in the drug policy space, the Black church and some Black elected offices, which
was accused of “respectability politics” in the 90s when some Black churches and Black elected officials
opposed needle exchange amid the AIDS crisis (86). Even somewhat sympathetic texts still narrate the
history of the Black community in relation to drugs as essentially “conservative,” specifically targeting
Black elected officials and Black nationalist/Pan African political formations as promoting drug
criminalization (87). This analysis ignores the history of state violence that neutralized radical and
progressive forces in the Black community, leading to reactionary coaptation of the rhetoric of “Black
Power” after the violence of COINTELPRO led to the demobilization, arrest and even murder of more
progressive Black Nationalism and Pan African political formations in the Black community (88). The
history of the Black church also reveals there have always been progressive and regressive factions of the
Black church, and painting the entire Black church with a broad reactionary brush dismisses a politically
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powerful independent Black institution with a unique history as serving as a base of service provision for
the Black community relative to addiction (27).
This report is influenced and framed by texts largely excluded from mainstream academic conversations.
It is important that those seeking to create policy for the Black community have a deep engagement with
the culture of Black/African people. This includes understanding culture as more than the artifact that is
often reduced to (food, dress, dance) and to see culture as “a process that represents the vast structure of
behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, habits, beliefs, customs, language, rituals, ceremonies, and practices
peculiar to a particular group of people, and that provides them with a general design for living and
patterns for interpreting reality (89). Engaging with text from the likes of those cited in this text and
others who applied African-Centered thought to analyze the “help profession” of human social service
(Wade Nobles, Marimba Ani, Amos Wilson, Na’im Akbar, Joanne and Elmer Martin) will be essential. It
is especially important to engage with folks, like those interviewed in this report or those in the academic
world, like the authors of the excellent text “Doin’ Drugs: Doin’ Drugs: Patterns of African American
Addiction”, who have applied African-Centered thought explicit to the issue of addiction and drug policy
(27).
Also, looking to real world models for the experiences of how these models came to fruition to see how
drug policy can mirror successful approaches in other areas. One example of this is the work of Newark
Community Street Team. In addition to providing a variety of services around violence prevention which
have helped cut Newark's murder rates almost in half over the past 7 years, the group has recently been
tapped to do naloxone distribution (90). Their model including the use of credible messengers, many of
whom are formerly involved with street organizations or “gangs” to help engage street organization and
prevent retaliatory violence by doing conflict meditation. This organization explicitly frames their work as
a response to the War on Drugs as a continuation of slavery and has a community membership structure
that ensures residents of Newark have a formal mechanism to hold the institution accountable (90,91).
This report shows that the communities vision for successful decriminalization extends beyond naloxone
and overdose prevention, but in addition to more upstream interventions into the conditions that drive
addiction. Institutions like those engaging in violence prevention, which are already on the ground in the
neighborhoods experiencing high rates of overdose and have a high degree of credibility with the
community, should be preferred in funding structures giving grants to do harm reduction work. Even with
the recent push toward social justice in grant making, this does not always happen, as seen with grants for
violence prevention work, grassroot organizations are often at a disadvantage, leading to more established
nonprofits with more connections to the academic and federal funding world getting preferred grant
allocations (92).
This is not to say addressing this problem will be easy. Federal grants are notorious for specificity and
onerous reporting requirements and paperwork burdens. Nonetheless, those who have decision-making
power over resources related to harm reduction at the state, local, and foundation level should take
affirmative steps to ensure criteria that can be de facto exclusionary of Black grassroots organizations.
Examples of common requirements for grants that risk being exclusive of Black grassroots organizations,
despite being on face “race neutral,” are capital requirements, requirements for possession of 501c3 status
(as compared to fiscal sponsorship) and requirements for possession of audit financial statements. If
these are present in grant applications, advocates can challenge that they be deemed essential (as opposed
to preferable), or weighted too much in the decision-making matrix to exclude grassroots organizations
who have the potential to do good work but may not be able to meet these requirements. If these
provisions are included, advocates should ensure that there are substantial capacity building resources
given to grassroot organizations before the application period to help them apply. Those who receive
grants will likely need help with reporting requirements, bookkeeping, and others often overlook
administrative burdens like obtaining insurance.
Finally, advocates will have to look at themselves and their assumptions. In traditional advocacy, it is
common to see those opposed to your policy as opposition to be neutralized. A shift will be needed to
understand that, while some in the Black community may never support decriminalization or legalization,
simply moving folks from a vehement opposition to soft opposition or neutral, can be a great victory.
Adopting this posture towards policy advocacy might be hindered by anxiety around conflict and
dichotomous (friend vs enemy) thinking, two of the characteristics presented in the Tema Okun’s essay
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“White Supremacy Culture” as hindrances to social justice work (93). A full analysis of how drug
decriminalization should be reformed through the lens of a critique of White supremacy culture and a fullscale
analysis of what an African-Centered addition prevention and treatment system would look like was
beyond the scope of this report, but this report shows there are also fundamentally cultural differences
between how communities engage with questions of progress and evaluate the world that are potential
points of tension on drug policy. Difference around conceptions of time (linear vs cyclical), relations to
spirituality (secular scientism vs African centered notions of embodied spirituality), and cultural
conceptions of progress (individual and technological vs communal and social) are all potential sticking
points around potential future collaboration between public health/drug policy advocates and the Black
community around constructing mutually agreeable drug policy.
Another tenant of White Supremacy culture, Okun, outlines the desire for control, which can perhaps help
explain the anxiety or relative silence in the drug policy community around the need for community
control. An analysis of Google Scholar articles shows there are roughly 4% of articles discussing harm
reduction even mention “community control,” with roughly half of the articles mentioning community
control focused on international harm reduction work. In a world where “penal populism” has been
derided as the cause of the incarceration boom, with prosecutors and politicians attempting to cover their
tail after any overdose or murder by engaging in performative “tough on crime”/“tough on addict” policy,
the solution offered by some has been to turn deeper into deferring to experts and technocracy being the
mechanism of insulating criminal justice and drug policy from backlash.
This, however, can and has been used against those seeking to redistribute power and resources to the
communities directly impacted by drug criminalization.
Alternatively, embracing community control is corrective to this approach, and looking to the Black
radical tradition can be a tool to see how a deeper analysis of the history and culture of African people can
help provide a blueprint for more emancipatory drug policy. As seen with the civil rights movement
setting the stage for women’s rights, the American Indian Movement, and queer liberation struggles, I
believe that engaging with the Black radical tradition can hold the seeds for the drug policy community to
more comprehensively address concerns around community control and technocracy for a variety of
communities. While associated with Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, the original “Rainbow Coalition” was
formed by the Chicago Black Panther under the leadership of Fred Hampton, with him brokering strategic
alliances with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the poor working organizing group the Young Patriots
Party (94). They adopted the slogan:
“Unity in the Community! Black Power to Black People! White Power to White People! Brown
Power to Brown People! Yellow Power to Yellow People! Red Power to Red People.”
While many today would balk at this language, this call for multi-ethnic pluralism sets the stage for a
recognition of mutual self-interest that can unite the Black and Latino communities most impacted by
drug criminalization with the lowering class of white communities which have often been the most
vehement opposition to redistributive policy.
In Maryland, this approach has already yielded concrete benefits on the drug policy front. When we
presented our policy proposal for reparations for the War on Drugs, which our calls to redistribute tax
revenue from cannabis legalization to localities to repair the harms of drug criminalization met with
concerns from progressives that the “Bad, Trump Supporters” in Western Maryland and the Eastern shore
would do bad things with the money if we gave them local control. This raises the concerning prospect
that local control to the communities most impacted by the War on Drugs could be denied because of
fears of what racists would do with similar local control, an example of how paternalistic attempts to
“protect” communities can boomerang and deny them the very control the advocates seeks to safeguard.
We responded by putting basic guide rails to prevent abuse (they can’t be used to fund police and can’t be
used to replace already allocated funds to prevent backdoor defund of other programs) and basic
reporting requirements on these funds to ensure transparency, but not capitulating to calls these funds be
distributed centrally by a racial equity “czar” appointed by the governor.
We also made it clear that, even if we don’t always agree with how working-class white people define how
they want to address addiction, as I don’t have the authority to assert a solution on their behalf, and I
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trust working-class people in turn would know what would work best for them. At the very least, local
control gives progressives a fighting chance to influence where the funds go at a local level, a battleground
more conducive to grassroots mobilization than the state capital of Annapolis. In this way, our demand for
local control for the Black community had opened up space for working class white communities to
exercise a degree of local control for themselves, not to mention predominantly Latino communities likely
to be significant beneficiaries of funds designed to disproportionately support areas where the majority of
cannabis related arrests occurred.
Critiques of technocracy and defenses of local control come from many different ideological and political
positions. What a Pan African radical means when they present a critique of technocracy might be
different from what a white Republican means, so rather than the knee-jerk response of seeing folks who
make this criticism as “conservative,” perhaps it’s time to hear what they have to say. You don’t have to
always agree, but, regardless of the race and political affiliation of the person providing the criticism,
genuinely listening may be a good place to start.
None of this is to say that this will be easy, but a robust conversation on these dynamics can create the
space for drug policy and drug decriminalization to evolve. The frame of “evidence based” policy, public
health language, and the “standard narrative” of drug decriminalization is a protective cocoon that is
incubating drug policy and protecting it from opposition. It is increasingly, however, also becoming a
source of constriction, preventing the issue from spreading its proverbial wings and engaging with
community’s desire for self-governance and a redistribution of power and resources. For drug
decriminalization to fly among the masses, it will have to enter a more vulnerable butterfly state, able to
ride the winds of change stirred by the people. Like the proverbial butterfly off the coast of Africa flapping
its wings eventually causing a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, it is only in this more chaotic state where
the beating wings of change in drug decriminalization and harm reduction kick up can begin to intersect
with and magnify other social justice struggles, creating storms of resistance that can coalesces into forces
strong enough to fundamentally disrupt the sea of white supremacy and anti-Blackness we are all still
swimming in.
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Appendix
An Alternative Analysis of Violent Crime/Why “Tough on Crime” Policies Fail
Mandatory minimums and sentence enhancement for so-called “repeat violent offenders” mostly fail to
address or deter serious violent crime, sweeping up individuals who have criminal records largely because
they're living in massively over policed neighborhoods where the criminal justice system is used to
addressing behavior which in other neighborhoods is addressed through social work or mental health
interventions.
Realities like the racial bias school to prison pipeline, refusal to offer different programs to Black
offenders, over prosecution of Black youth in the adult justice system, overcharging illicit plea deals,
overzealous elected prosecutors trying to bolster their “tough on crime” bona fides and general over
policing of the Black community means the many of the demonized “repeat violent offenders” targeted by
sentencing enhancements are victims of circumstance who would be better addressed through social
services than a prison system largely denuded of rehabilitation services.
Similarly, mandatory minimums for gun possession sweep up those peripherally involved in black market
economic activity, often carrying an illegal gun because they work in cash economies and have no ability
to appeal to courts or police if they are robbed. This is sometimes, but not always, the drug trade,
including any so-called “gray market” work where cash payment is common (security, party promotion,
plumbing, etc).
Also, many people simply live in dangerous neighborhoods and may feel they need a gun to protect
themselves and their families. Most of these individuals cannot get legal weapons for self-defense as
growing up in working class Black neighborhoods means many have been caught up in drug sweeps and
other vestiges of racial targeted policing which precludes them from getting legal weapons.
All of this means there is little to no deterrent effect of these laws, as people are more afraid of starving or
being a victim of street violence than they are of being caught by the police. This means it is the
fundamental conditions of surviving in their environment that drives individuals into a situation where
they can be swept up by these laws.
While advocates claim these laws are needed to address public safety, and would only impact a small
number of the “worst of the worst” offenders, the reality is we already have severe mandatory minimums
for violent crime and weapon possession, and far from impacting only a few, these laws are the real reason
we have hundreds of thousands of people incarcerated in a prison industrial complex which exposes those
caught up in it with undisclosed violence and trauma (83). This long sentence isolated many young men
and women from community support and the mainstream economy, meaning they are more likely to
commit crimes when they get out, and these crimes may be more severe (95). Even if individuals locked
up are in street organizations (so-called “gangs”), locking them up fails to disrupt the business model of
these organizations. It instead creates a “job opening” in the underground economy, one quickly filled by a
person often before only peripherally involved with the “street game” and often younger than the person
who was incarcerated, further the cycle of material deprivation, survival economics, incarceration, and
recidivism into the next generation (ibid). Finally, this constant churn of individuals in and out of prison
destabilizes communities, shredding the social fabric of the Black and brown communities most impacted
by mass incarceration, destroying their ability to build the sorts of institutions needed to create alternative
street economy (6).
All of this makes violent crime more likely, not less likely, in the future.
While we seek an abolitionist praxis toward policing, we recognize communities have very real public
safety needs, with many in these communities demanding policing be part of the solution to violent crime.
However, even if one believes police can play some role in addressing violent crime, a focus on mandatory
minimums and sentence enhancements are a get out of work free card for shoddy police work and
prosecutors who want the threat of an increased jail sentence to leverage pleas out of the accused because
they lack confidence in their ability to win a conviction. This means they don’t have to address the
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systemic corruption and incompetence in the police force. Police corruption directly implicated the ability
of prosecutors to get convictions, with many officers on the police force unable to be called to testify in a
trial, less defense lawyers be able to bring up their own record of wrongdoing and thus bring their
testimony into question.
Lack of accountability and a history of excessive use of force on Black communities by police destroys the
ability of the community to trust police, so much so that even when the community deems someone in the
community a risk to the public safety, they feel they have no recourse, as the police incompetence and the
general sense that police don’t care if poor Black people kill other poor Black people means that
cooperating with them is seen as pointless. There is also the very real threat of retaliation for testifying
against someone, where the police’s lack of investment in witness protection means even the rare person
willing to work with the police will likely fear for their safety.
Historically low conviction rates for major police forces around the nation is a testament to the inability of
police to do their jobs, meaning giving them more power is unlikely to lead to the justice victims of violent
crime seek (96).
This also explains why these efforts fail to deter violent crime produced by organized street violence, as
these individuals, unlike most offenders, can often afford very good lawyers, and they believe, often
correctly, that the police are incompetent and even if they are caught they will not be convicted. They also
believe that without public cooperation, they are unlikely to be caught. There is little concrete evidence
that there is any long term, general deterrent effect from increase policing, increasing sentence length, or
mandatory minimums when it comes to violent crime (97,98). Only certainty of arrest seems to have any
deterrent effect, and policing accountability to the community is the prerequisite for the community
cooperation that makes arrests possible, meaning even if deterrence is of primary importance, police
reform is a necessary prerequisite to this largely theoretical “deterrence.”
In the short term, efforts like police accountability, including community oversight of police internal
investigations and complaints of police brutality, will help rebuild trust in the community that police are
accountable to and thus can be trusted with some degree of cooperation. Increase support for efforts like
witness protection to allow the community, if they so choose, to help the police serve the one function
most believe they legitimately need to serve, arresting and convicting the small fraction of those in the
community who are actually the drivers of violence in our communities. This investment should be
conditioned upon investments in community-controlled violence prevention, mental health services and
economic opportunity, which can serve to end the need for policing as we know it. These services must be
owned and controlled by the community and response to unique conditions that drive violence in our
communities.”
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