Fighting 'addiction': African-American and Hispanic activism and New York City's illegal drug policies, 1946-1999

After World War II, African Americans and Hispanics in New York City were disproportionately likely to suffer from heroin addiction, and the drug trade devastated many minority neighborhoods. Leaders of those groups sought to address the problem, but they had historically tense relationships with the institutions typically employed to control it: the New York City Police Department and the medical establishment. In this dissertation, I seek to explain how African Americans and Puerto Ricans sought to address drug abuse without inviting further state control over their communities. Extending existing scholarship, I argue that African-American and Hispanic leaders pursued "community control" of drug policy, which included the creation of a Civilian Review Board of the NYPD and minority-led drug treatment centers. They also attempted to shift analyses of the drug issue from their focus on the moral and psychological shortcomings of addicts to recognition of underlying social factors.;In the late 1960s and early 1970s, during a dramatic expansion of New York City and State's drug treatment infrastructure, radical members of the local Puerto Rican population created their own drug treatment centers. Later in the 1970s, community-centered drug treatment facilities generally lost favor. Experts increasingly viewed addiction as an illness relating to brain chemistry, politicians grew disillusioned with the political and economic costs of community rehabilitation, and governments turned to methadone maintenance programs and criminal justice approaches. By the 1980s, the African-American political leadership became more conservative and attempted to eradicate the burgeoning trade in crack cocaine through "community policing" initiatives that encouraged cooperation between neighborhood residents and the NYPD.;Politicians and historians have often viewed approaches to drug addiction in terms of treatment and law enforcement, but African-American and Puerto Rican leaders often viewed them in terms of "community" versus "state" control. Highlighting how understandings of the drug problem differed along racial and ethnic lines helps to explain why it has been difficult to form an effective political alliance in favor of harm reduction policies or reform of the drug laws.