By the late 1980s New York City’s epidemic of crack cocaine use was in full swing. Having arrived in the US at the start of the decade, this highly addictive cocaine composite – more affordable than its powdered form – had quickly created a national crisis. There were also fears that this lethal drug might soon be used on a similar scale across the pond. So in October 1987, the Observer Magazine took to the streets of Harlem and Manhattan, meeting those fighting on all fronts against crack cocaine’s devastating consequences: law enforcement, healthcare workers, and 81-year-old Clara ‘Mother’ Hale, who ran a clinic for children whose parents had been consumed by addiction.
Certainly, 35 years on, New York and American drug use have evolved hugely. Descriptions of dealers communicating with teams of lookouts via walkie-talkie on Lower East Side streets likened to ‘drugs bazaars’ would be hard to find in the gentrified district today. But what’s striking is how little has changed when it comes to society’s dismal failure to tackle the plague of addiction. Still, gaps left by the state are filled by volunteers and charity work. Then and now, policing of substances – and the sympathies extended to those affected – is shaped by inequality and racial bias. As Mother Hale put it: ‘The United States could have stopped drugs years ago. But they didn’t want to, because they thought it was only the Black and the Hispanics.’
And, of course, there’s the futility of criminalising addiction. So little has changed. Drugs continue to be available on both sides of the Atlantic to those who desire them; the justice system is still ‘clogged’ with people who need access to healthcare. As Maria, a 17-year-old drug courier, explained then: ‘[the authorities] are chasing it. But it goes somewhere else. It’s like a dog chasing a cat. The dealers just keep moving it.’
