Baltimore’s storm in a teacup

“Storm in teacup, Dryden” barked British General Murray concerning the war in Arabia in 1915.  In David Lean’s partly fictional telling of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, a Mr. Dryden of the Arab Bureau, played smugly by Claude Rains, gives an ominous response about the future role of Arabia in world politics:

“Big things have small beginnings, sir”, he said in a knowing tone.  Oh, would it were true that great music or film could enlighten us in our endeavors?

I found a copy of the Baltimore Evening Sun from 1970 in a wall of a house I was renovating on Barclay Street.  In the paper was a letter to then syndicated columnist Jimmy Breslin from a Mrs. Kaplan of Brownsville, Brooklyn.  Her concerns were for her son, 20 years old and lost to heroin addiction and the streets of New York.  I saved my precious find to remind me how little has changed with addiction in forty years, especially in the poorest jurisdictions of our nation.

Baltimore is a city where the overwhelming majority of crime is somehow attributable to addiction to illegal drugs.  In a city where perhaps one in twelve citizens has an addiction, in some neighborhoods that rate may be as great as one in six adults.  Couple this with the fact that Baltimore has hemorrhaged jobs at a greater rate than the U.S. in the past twenty years, and any researcher will tell you that our city has an epidemic of both addiction and unemployment.

The recent shrill shouts over the ‘War on Drugs’, begun by President Nixon in 1972 to combat the growing storm of illegal drugs hitting America’s streets, has become another tool for those in my party (Democrats) to cry racism for the slaughtering addiction and incarceration numbers in our nation’s underclass, in particular, the non white underclass.

Eugene Jarecki’s new film ‘The House I Live In’, is the latest cocktail party mention to go along with Michelle Alexander’s book ‘The New Jim Crow’.  Alexander is also interviewed in Jarecki’s film.  Mentioning these two people gets you entrance to America’s new liberalism, a group who wishes to externalize the endemic problems of unemployment and addiction that have settled within all our nation’s underclass.

Whether in the hills of West Virginia or the streets of Baltimore, most everyone knows someone with addiction.  While we have learned so much about treating the illness since Mrs. Kaplan wrote her plea for her son in 1970, as a nation we have focused precious little effort toward prevention and even less toward rehabilitation.  At times here in Baltimore, it seems more like 1912 than present day, where the Irish father of ten came crawling into his hovel of a tenement at dawn, too poor, too drunk or useless to aid his ten children as they dressed themselves in rags for school.

The sad death of Anthony Anderson, aged 46, near the corner of Biddle Street and Montford Avenue at the hands of Baltimore Police during his arrest, is yet another sign that we are unwilling to confront the dual problems of addiction and a lack of employment that face our city and many others too.  Mr. Anderson, who was my age, suffered years of addiction with the ancillary litany of charges that go along with funding such a life:  drug distribution and theft.  His death has been ruled a homicide and many in Baltimore are waiting to see if charges will be leveled against the police officers involved.

To assume the police officers in the case are solely responsible for the death of Anthony Anderson is to assume that they do not act with the consent of civilian authorities at City Hall.  They do.  As well, to assume the death of Mr. Anderson was racially motivated as he was black and the officers white, is to ignore how the ‘War on Drugs’ is fought on the ground, in the streets of Baltimore.

Elected leaders in Baltimore tell us to call 911 when we see drug dealing.  They tell us the emergency call is our main tool in fighting crime.  When we do call, the wheels are set in motion and police arrive.  When they catch either seller or buyer, that person is often taken down to the ground, cuffed and led away.  While the accounts of Mr. Anderson’s takedown and subsequent death vary wildly, we do know this is common practice for the Baltimore Police.

In the end, Anthony Anderson’s death may surely have been preventable if we understood that his addiction did not exist in a vacuum.  Ask any addict you know what they have done to fuel their addiction?  It doesn’t matter what color they are.  I can ask ten addicts within two blocks of my home.  They bought the drug illegally.  They stole from their neighbors, their friends, their children.  They prostituted themselves and often sent their underage children to buy or sell drugs to keep their addiction alive.  In education, in families, in employment and in policing, addiction itself has become a source of our problems.

In this column, we have offered a solution to our citizens never ending cycle of addiction in the hope of drawing new employers to Baltimore.  We offered to mandate that Johns Hopkins Hospital, for the land they have been given on the east side of the city, take control of all rehabilitation services and become the leader, with specific goals to reduce the numbers of addicts so that we may reduce the economic viability of the illegal drug trade in Baltimore.

Placing the overall responsibility for the failures of the ‘War on Drugs’ in the hands of the bigoted Southern Strategy is a mistake.   In pulling away from so many of its reprehensible political or legal practices, I fear we may repeat their mistakes.   We still ignore the most powerful and yet most spineless player in the ‘Wars’ equation.  The addict.  We do not offer same day admissions for addicts seeking rehabilitation in this city.

There is no great public mandate or political will from City Hall to abate addictions’ awful human consequences.  We havent yet reasoned that before we get an addict a job, we must first get him or her healthy.  Instead, we send in police to bully the problem in neighborhoods that grow ever poorer, less learned and less employable.

Michelle Alexander’s thoughtfully researched book and Eugene Jarecki’s film highlight the unbearable state of prisons, courts, families and the drug trade.  What neither concludes is the most glaring factor confronting us in this nation, unspecific to color.  In the last forty years and in every part of America , we have had enormous job losses and an enormous rise in the numbers of addicts and drug use.

To assume this was largely a race based conspiracy is fallacious as we saw both coming and ignored each.  Instead with addiction, we have politicized, privatized, Christianized or over medicated in the feeble hope that it would somehow go away.  It hasn’t.  We have done the same with jobs and the jobs keeping leaving.  Understanding that Anthony Anderson’s death is part of our nations blindside may give little solace to his family.  Still, it is appalling how much human capital is wasted in the name of politics and posturing.

Storm in a teacup, huh?

Robert Emmet Mara

Robert Emmet Mara has been in Baltimore since 2006. A native New Yorker, Robert came to Baltimore to do three things: work with kids, renovate houses and write a second book of fiction. Since his arrival, he has managed to do all three and more.
He has sought better oversight for his still blighted Harwood neighborhood from the city and has been asked to speak to various community association leaders on the subject of city agency relations.