The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland

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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