Drug Decriminalization in Maryland Through an African Centered Research Paradigm- Analysis and Recommendations

geographic boundaries between Black and white becomes ever more imperative for those
wishing to maintain white racial dominance.
This geographic separation is evident in reports of increases in suburban heroin use as a
consequence of tightened restrictions on opioid prescribing leading to dwindling
prescription opioid supplies (NIDA, 2014). As one paper from Fargo put it: “That's a
direct conduit... They were using diverted pain meds, then the price for too high. Some
switched to heroin (Nowatzki and Benshoof 2011).” In our analysis, we found that the
transition from prescription drugs to heroin is often couched in a theme of contagion – that
is, the transition from prescription pills to heroin is leading to a mixing of suburban and
urban drugs and drug users. For example, a Chicago Daily Herald article reported:
“Suburban teens who fall into the trap of heroin use often drive to West Side...to buy the
drug” (Daily Herald 2001).
White people searching for drugs in urban areas are not only crossing geographic
boundaries, they are crossing boundaries that lead them from the imagined safety of the
suburban and rural white community and exposing themselves to the violence that
supposedly characterizes the inner city drug markets. As Elijah Anderson points out, white
and black spaces are perceived as distinctive, and black spaces are seen as dangerous by
many whites: “[f]or the larger society, from the nightly news and media reports of rampant
black-on-black crime ... images of the black ghetto loom large” (2015: p.13). In addition,
the contagion runs both ways. Just as white people are portrayed as seeking drugs in urban
areas, so too drug dealers from urban areas are portrayed as infiltrating white
communities. As this account from Madison, Wisconsin explains:
[T]he drug is being transported by street gangs and drug trafficking
organizations along the interstate system from Chicago. Communities from
the state line to the Fox River valley, and through the east side of the state
from Milwaukee on south, have been inundated with the drug [Elbow 2011]
The problem being described here is the breakdown of the segregation between white,
supposedly drug-free, non-violent communities and black and Latino supposedly drugfilled,
violent communities. This threat of miscegenation logically calls for reinforcement
of the social-geographic boundaries between white and black or brown neighborhoods,
symbolically undergirding disparate policy responses.” (Netherland and Hansen, 2016).
This analysis contextualizes the quote explicitly from the Human Rights Watch around the tragedy
of the War on Drug being seen in the exclusion from social services, which were never sufficient
for racialized populations. But for White America, this exclusion marks an explicit “squandering”
of “whiteness.” Moreover, their analysis of the racialization of the concept of “contagion”
implicates public health methodologies as themselves reflecting racialized logics of “containment”
in service of “racial dominance” and reflective of racial anxieties around miscegenation. This is
important for researchers, as even research projects which use a public health frame for addiction
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