The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland

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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