One September afternoon at the end of the 1990s, I was waiting for a bus at the intersection of Centre Avenue and Kirkpatrick Street in the Hill District on my way back home in the east end of town. At the time, this was epicenter of what probably was Pittsburgh’s largest outdoor illegal drug market.

I could look across Centre and up Kirkpatrick to Wylie Avenue where the Pittsburgh NAACP was located, just a few hundred feet from where I stood. Directly across Centre was an abandoned gas station. A new Carnegie Library is now on that site in the heart of the Hill.

Two white city policemen were on Kirkpatrick near the NAACP office searching a young black male, presumably for drugs. While this was taking place, a car traveling north on Kirkpatrick crossed Centre and parked at the gas station. A young white male was driving. Two white females were with him.

Two black men on Centre immediately walked over to the car. They obviously knew the driver. A transaction took place through the window between the driver and one of the men. This being a drug market, this presumably was a drug deal. It took maybe a minute. Then the car rolled away, leaving the Hill, with the drugs presumably finding their way into a white neighborhood elsewhere.

The police officers who were searching the black male up the street could plainly see what was going on. But they did nothing. They had watched what must have been the most conspicuous illegal drug couriers in America do a deal. They had watched three white people in a black neighborhood conduct business in an open drug market that most black residents shunned like the plague.

In Pittsburgh, this often happens with white drug couriers and the police in black communities.

A drug epidemic is now sweeping the country. The media report daily on rising numbers of overdoses, suicides and other aspects of this ongoing tragedy — especially how they are spreading through largely white suburbs and rural areas. They describe how millions of people are getting hooked on prescription painkillers, then discover it’s cheaper to buy street heroin to maintain their habits. 

But little media coverage has been devoted to one particular role that race plays in this national epidemic.

Now it’s all about treatment

I haven’t seen coverage in and around Pittsburgh that compares the numbers of white and African-American drug overdoses. Black people are acutely aware of this. But they conclude that, if the establishment is as worried about this epidemic as it appears to be, then it surely must be overwhelmingly a white crisis.

All of a sudden mainstream white Americans, and their representatives at the local, state and national level, are echoing the black community’s decades-long demand for more prevention, rehabilitation and education programs to combat illegal drugs. They aren’t talking about throwing more drug users in jail.

What happened on Centre Avenue that September afternoon is repeated daily in majority-black Pittsburgh neighborhoods with open drug markets. It is repeated across the United States in black neighborhoods with similar problems. White drug addicts of every description purchase illegal drugs at these markets. And this has been going on for decades.

Any honest person should be able to see the obvious connection between today’s drug epidemic in mainstream white America and the drug markets that fester in black neighborhoods. And then they must come face-to-face with some damning facts about race that not everyone has the courage to admit out loud.

By serving a significant portion of white demand, drug markets in black communities reduce the scale of illegal drug trafficking in majority white neighborhoods. This has helped keep white drug trafficking indoors, which does not produce the level of violence endemic to outdoor trafficking — or as many arrests of drug dealers.

Media reports of increasing home invasions and other violence in white enclaves is reason to assume that this relative tranquility is ending, even though the media often do not report this white-on-white violence as drug-related.

Any honest person has to admit that, by far, black Pittsburgh has led the city’s struggle against illegal drug trafficking. But the powers-that-be in Pittsburgh, and elsewhere, have ignored this struggle.

What about white family values?

Some 45 years ago, the Homewood Brushton Community Improvement Association launched a six-month campaign and documented the names of individuals, automobile license plate numbers and other data on Homewood’s then-embryonic open drug trafficking. The association held a large public meeting at the Homewood YMCA and gave this information to top police officials. The city promised to nip open drug markets in the bud. It never did.

About the same time, the city dismantled, without wanton police violence, the sprawling open drug market on Walnut Street in predominately white Shadyside. This was Pittsburgh’s largest open drug market in living memory.

In “Pillars of Fire,” the noted historian Taylor Branch reports that, in 1960, then-U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem read into the congressional record the names, dates, locations and dollar amounts of pay-offs related to criminal activities in Harlem. This included illegal drugs. The New York City police had confiscated this information from a former police officer who was working for “the mob.” The news media and the federal, state and city governments ignored Mr. Powell.

The illegal drug market in Harlem had the same relationship to nearby majority-white enclaves, in, say, Connecticut, that the Centre Avenue market had to, say, Bethel Park.

These black markets have fed the drug habits of Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Anglo-Americans, Polish-Americans and other European-Americans addicted to heroin and whatever else.

Now, white America is besieged with a heroin and opioid epidemic. “More than 8,000 Americans died of heroin-related overdoses in 2013 — nearly three times as many as those who died in 2010,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Meanwhile, mainstream white America has stigmatized drug addiction in the black community as a crisis of family values. In April 1989, for example, the late Pittsburgh Mayor Sophie Masloff met in her office with a delegation from the now-defunct Homewood Roundtable to address the outdoor crack-cocaine trafficking that had cropped up in Homewood. The mayor gave a typical establishment response: The parents of the young drug dealers in Homewood did not know where their children were. Irresponsible black parents were the root cause of the problem.

This nonsense makes white America’s battle against drugs even harder. The March 24, 2002, Post-Gazette ran a front-page story titled “Heroin’s Hold,” referring to rising drug abuse in Pittsburgh’s majority-white suburbs. One section of the story carried this subheadline: “Don’t Blame Parents.” Perhaps it should have read: “Don’t Blame White Parents.”

Race or, to be more precise, racism, is at the margins and at the center of the U.S. heroin epidemic. And this racism cannot be ignored.

Fred Logan is a longtime Homewood resident whose commentaries also have appeared in New York Amsterdam News, The Review of Black Political Economy and other publications.

First Published: May 15, 2016, 4:00 a.m.