Needle Out My Arm: Methadone and Discourses About Race, Criminality, and Space in Columbus, Ohio in the 1970s
Loading...
Date
2022-05
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
In the 1970s, leaders of Columbus, Ohio grew increasingly concerned about heroin-associated crime and, in response, funded methadone in the city. These new programs were not merely public health efforts to provide drug treatment; rather, they constituted crime control measures steeped in beliefs about race and space. Fears about black "pushers" corrupting innocent white victims gripped suburban areas, fueled by racialized terrors of the criminality of the city. I argue that understanding methadone in the 1970s requires understanding the historical dichotomy that intertwined drug use with race, space, and criminality. Since the origins of opioid use in the early 1900s, courts, reporters, and policymakers have consistently treated drug use by whites as "licit," sanctioned by the medical field, and drug use by people of color as "illicit," associated with crime and deviance. Over the course of the 20th century, this racial dichotomy also gained spatial contours as a result of segregation, suburbanization, and urban disinvestment. White suburbanites consistently represented the bulk of opioid use and abuse, but Columbus continually targeted poor, black, urban areas for methadone programming. My analysis centers around two methadone programs that emerged in the early 1970s: the state-run Bureau of Drug Abuse (BuDA) and the black paramilitary group Blackman's Development Center (BDC). Both BuDA and BDC continually articulated their ideologies through the language of crime control, reinforcing the pusher-victim binary. I examine the tangled histories of these programs, analyze each group's attitudes towards methadone, and criticize how these anti-drug endeavors ultimately reinforced preexisting ideas about the racial and spatial dimensions of drug use. A historical analysis of BuDA and BDC, two of the first Columbus methadone programs in the 1970s, reveals the need to examine drug use and drug rehabilitation within the contexts of race and the urban landscape.
Description
Keywords
methadone, urban history, race, segregation, drug use, heroin