Addressing New York City’s Postwar Heroin Boom

In the 1960s and early 1970s, two decades before crack ravaged New York’s inner city neighborhoods, heroin was the drug of choice. This was a problem that had been growing since the 1950s, and was particularly pronounced in African American neighborhoods. In Harlem, users could be found nodding out in doorways and buying in the open on street corners. Community groups struggled to address heroin use and its concomitant problems, such as public health, crime and quality of life. The city locked up users and dealers, but heroin use continued to grow through the early 1970s. The city’s heroin crisis helped to build support for New York State’s 1973 Rockefeller Drug Laws, the first to establish austere mandatory minimum prison sentences for the possession or distribution of hard drugs, sentences that soon became standard throughout the country.

This paper looks at what actions community groups in Harlem and the city government took and what policies they advocated and pursued in the interest of remediating heroin use prior to the 1973 drug laws. There were many structural matters that led to and came out of the heroin epidemic, such as poverty, quality of education, employment prospects, family wellbeing and more. Addressing these dilemmas was crucial to getting people off of drugs, but how to do so was unclear. Approaches such as addiction treatment and job training were clearly failing to abate the expansion of heroin use throughout the city, but why? Were there budgetary issues? Were sympathetic ways of dealing with drug abuse politically unpopular? What brought the city and state to a place where drug use became a criminal problem with social implications, as opposed to the other way around, and imprisonment the only way that the state would deal with drug users?