I was born and raised in the projects. On top of that, this was during the 80s and 90s, when the crack epidemic was in full swing—and from my violent, poverty-stricken patch of the inner city, I had a front-row seat to violence and addiction.
When I was around 4 years old, my babysitter left out what I thought was a toy water gun, and I decided to have some fun and spray it around a bit.
Well, it turns out that the “water gun” was a syringe, and the “water” it was filled with was heroin. Now this crackhead—and I know heroin and crack aren’t the same things, but I’d been around her and her junkie posse while they were smoking what I would later learn was crack, so they’re all crackheads in my memory— didn’t kick my ass the way you might expect for wasting her high and the money spent on it like you woulda thought but her my mom got into a crazy argument about it when she came to pick me up.
Now, my mom knew she shot heroin, but using her for a babysitter was the best option she had at the time. My other relatives were messed up with their own legal and social problems, and they didn’t live near us anyway.
My biological father had deserted us to go live in Philadelphia, and her old boyfriend used to beat on me and my baby sister so severely with shit like metal coat hangers that, a lot of times, we were left with open cuts.
You know the beatings are bad when other hood moms—who beat the hell out of their kids—are telling their gang member sons and nephews to deal with the coward on sight. It was a rough spot, and the little welfare benefits the state gives you don’t last forever, so my mom had to find temp work. We weren’t school-age yet, so it was either this or eviction. And if you get evicted from the projects, you ain’t go no place to go except family, and like I said, half of them were in jail, and the other half were just as bad or worse.
Years later, when I asked my mom about this story—just to be sure I wasn’t imagining it—she told me about the fight. My mom wanted to know why there was a loaded spike out where a 4-year-old could get it, and that junkie bird just wanted to be reimbursed. The wild part is that my mom kept letting her babysit me. Because again, what are you gonna do?
Crackheads want people to accept them being crackheads
One thing I’ve always admired about hard drug users is their unapologetic attitude toward their addiction. And when you think about it, this attitude makes sense.
If you’re into something as wild as shooting up or smoking rocks, you’re way past the point of caring what other people think. At the very least, you care more about getting that fix than you do about anything else—including (and likely, especially) other people’s opinions. Even if you’re watching their kids.
You know you’re a piece of shit. Everyone else also knows you’re a piece of shit, so why pretend? It’s your reality now, so not only do you embrace it, but you try to share it in some backward ass way to normalize it.
The hardest drug I’ve ever done was I smoked some hash off a grimy countertop through straw sticking out of a glass bowl. I did it for the dumbest reason of all—a girl I was hooking up with and her friends were smoking it, and I wanted to fit in.
Oh, and I did shrooms once, too, with this same girl, but I don’t really count that because we all ate the shrooms in peanut butter sandwiches, and one of the girl’s hippie roommates substituted the white bread for some type of walnut vegan mess and it almost killed me because I’m highly allergic to treat nuts.
Funnily enough, being high as a kite on a psychedelic probably saved my life because it kept my airways from constricting. I wasn’t gonna take my no-insurance-having ass to the hospital because I was poor and didn’t have insurance. I also didn’t have an EpiPen either.
Interesting side note: While writing this essay, I finally researched this to see if I just got lucky or if there was something to the connection between psilocybin (the official name for “shrooms”) and allergic responses like the one I had.
It turns out that shrooms have a well-researched and documented effect on the inflammatory proteins released during an allergic reaction. I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice, so don’t go blaming a random writer off the internet if you’re going through anaphylaxis and instead of taking your ass to the hospital, you decide to take a trip.
So, I’ve done some “semi-hard” drugs, but never the hard stuff, but I have been offered them on numerous occasions. For future reference of this essay, hard drugs are anything you have to cook, cut, stretch, or compress to consume. Every time I’ve been offered, it’s been while the person is about to use—or is in the middle of using—right in front of me.
I used to think it was just them being polite, but it was most likely that normalization thing I discussed earlier. I used to do the same thing in my alcoholic days when I was drinking a fifth of Mad Dog AND Thunderbird a day. Don’t hate on the bumwines. My tastes reflected my budget.
I drank everywhere, around anyone, and at any function because I needed to feel like my constant state of inebriation was accepted and, therefore, normal. That meant everyone had to know about it so they could “accept it” because, after all, alcohol is the only drug that people think you have a problem if you *don’t* do it, so in this weird, messed up way, I was trying to normalize everyone around me.
I just took it way too far, which is why I’ve been sober since December 23rd, 2013. If you want to learn more about that and what I did to kick the habit—after several attempts and near DUI experiences—check out this free chapter from my book, “Sober Letters To My Drunken Self.”
The Crackhead Hustle is legendary
Now, remember, my dad wasn’t around much, but one of the few times I spent time with him, I remember he used to put “The Club” on his car. A lot of the younger viewers won’t remember this, but it’s basically an oversized bike lock that you put on the steering wheel. Apparently, sales of these things are still strong, but I never see them, likely due to the proliferation of RF keys.
When I was 5, I asked him why he did this, and he told me so it was so some crackhead didn’t steal his car and sell it for five dollars. Now 5 year old me had already seen the neighbors smoking crack, so I kinda understood what a crackhead could do, but I didn’t really understand what these creatures were capable of. I just thought it was funny as hell that someone would sell a car for five dollars.
There’s this concept called “crack prices,” where something is priced absurdly low to expedite the sale of it. Crackheads aren’t exactly known for their ability to plan for the future—as evidenced by them hitting the pipe in the first place—nor are they known for their impulse control.
So, rather than try to get the best price available for the wares by negotiating, you end up with fiends who will sell you a PlayStation, a pack of ground beef, and a microwave—all stolen, some of from you the person they are trying to sell it to—for $20. And if you didn’t have the $20 in cash, they’d accept whatever you had OR the $40 equivalent in food stamps.
Food stamps are another nostalgic throwback to the 80s and 90s, so older readers, bare with me as I explain this to everyone else born after 9/11. If that’s you, you’ve probably never seen an actual food stamp outside of a museum of the ghetto history, but the hood used to have its own currency—worth 50 cents of one US dollar. Today, you just have EBT cards. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve been in the hood, but I’ve heard that crackheads have learned the technology and adapted.
When you combine the shortlived high of crack, its highly addictive nature, and the inability to run a profitable side hustle, you end up with the legendary crackhead hustle.
I was 11 the first time I became aware of the crackhead hustle. One morning my mom was on her way to work, and I was on my way to the school bus stop when we saw this junkie coming straight towards us. I was freaking out, but my mom, a grizzled veteran of many crackhead encounters, remained steadfast on her path to work. The fiend just dashed right past us like he didn’t even see us, and my mom blurted out, “I been watchin’ that same crackhead for 4 days and nights running around here trying to score.”
This always stuck with me because I couldn’t imagine staying up for 3 days straight for anything. Even when I tried to stay up late playing video games, the longest I could make it was 2 a.m. Maybe 3 a.m. if I was really in the zone and didn’t have school the next day. However, by that point in my life, I had enough experience with crackheads to know that this was most likely not an exaggeration.
Another side note. That popular meme “you ever see a crackhead say they don’t have any money to get high? Don’t get outworked by a crackhead” meme? I created that, and I’ve got the receipts to prove it. But I was just a small Twitter account when I said that, so someone just took it and ran with it. I challenge anyone to find a posting of it earlier than this.
This hustle is incredible and has led to some crazy stuff. One of my favorite news stories is of some fiends who stole a whole damn bridge and tried to sell it to the metal man. You can read that story here.
When I was 21, a crackhead broke into my apartment and stole a jar of change but ignored the PlayStation 2 because he needed to get his fix. These are the same characters who will break into your car to steal the change on your seat while overlooking everything else because that fix has to be satisfied. But hey, at least they’re polite.
When I was 12, while letting myself into the house with a calzone I picked up, a crackhead materialized out of thin air, robbed me for my food and the change in my pocket, and before he scurried off back into the darkness, said “Good look cuh.”
If you don’t speak hood, that roughly translates into “Thank you kindly, good sir.” And they probably need those manners because they deal with some of the most violent people you’ll ever meet: drug dealers.
Drug dealers are some of the worse people you’ll ever meet
I’m not talking about the dudes who used to sell “dimes and nics” or, despite the proliferation of dispensaries and the gradual legalization of marijuana, they still do. I’m talking about the guys who sell the hard stuff.
When I moved from the Terrance Village Projects to the Northview Heights Projects (shoutout to my 412 people reading this and know the exact hellholes I’m talking about), I ended up living next to a crack dealer.
Selling drugs isn’t like most businesses, and when you live next to someone involved in that line of work, you become painfully aware of that fact. There’s a good reason why the late rapper Notorious B.I.G. warned in the song “The 10 Crack Commandments” to “never sell no crack where you rest at.”
First, there were the hours. Crackheads seem to function on a circadian rhythm that’s the opposite of most people. Given the low police presence in the projects, it’s not like crackheads have some practical reason for only buying drugs after the sun goes down.
Project houses are row houses, so we shared a wall. Because of that, I could hear anytime they had a visitor who knocked on the door. Most nights, from dusk until dawn, the house next to me was a crack convenience store.
The thing that’s most strongly etched in my memory about living next to this drug dealer wasn’t the frequent door knocks throughout the night or the occasional break-ins. It was the violence—and not the violence against other drug users or drug dealers, but the violence against his girlfriend.
I’ve witnessed a lot of violence in my life, but there is something uniquely disturbing about only hearing it—especially when it’s such a one-sided beatdown. I can still hear the pain and fear in the woman’s screams just as easily as I can hear the smacks and thuds of her against the wall. I’m sitting here thinking maybe we should call the police, and my mom told me she’d kick my ass worst than that if we did. I didn’t get it then, but she was just trying to keep us safe from retaliation.
The type of person willing to beat on a woman like this has no qualms about attacking someone else’s children. My sister once played a prank that resulted in this guy being hit with an egg. In response, he chased her to our back door and tried to push his way in to get to her. I pushed him back so hard that he fell over. For the rest of that summer, I lived in fear that he was going to shoot me.
I’ve met dealers of all different substances. My general experience has been that the harder the drug, the worse the human being that deals it. This is likely a result of the ruthlessness you need to get into and survive the game.
Harder drugs are worth more money, so the competition is tougher, and that requires a more dangerous person to succeed. It’s not like you beat the competition by running a better ad campaign and a bigger marketing budget. On the street, the rules of the jungle apply. It’s survival of the one with the most firepower and the least fear of going to prison.
Legalizing drugs might solve a lot of problems
Speaking of prison, this is the major reason I’m for legalizing all drugs. Yes, some people will use them who otherwise wouldn’t legalization means they would no longer have to go to a part of town where wearing the wrong colors could get you shot to score.
And yes, that would probably result in a few more addicts. But right now, if you really want to sniff, snort, or smoke something that requires a bic pen and some chore boy, you’re gonna do it anyway, regardless of the laws on the books.
At least this way, there will be regulations to make sure you don’t get some stuff hot with fentanyl. But more importantly, all the violence associated with the dope game—intended and collateral— will come to a screeching halt.
Drug users, themselves, are relatively harmless. While someone going through withdrawa is certainly more likely to rob you, drug users are generally not violent criminals.
A U.S. Department of Justice report titled “Drug Use, Dependence, and Abuse Among State Prisoners and Jail Inmates, 2007-2009” reports that only 14% of those incarcerated for violent crime commited the offense for money to buy drugs. 14% isn’t 0, but you get the idea.
Crackheads are more likely to break into your house and scurry off if you shine a light on them than mug you in the street and shoot you. The same report by the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that 39% of people jailed for crimes of property theft committed them to get money for drugs.
Most of the violence that comes out of the drug game is the result of rivalries between different dealers at all levels.
Drive-bys and shootouts at the retail street level are between rivals trying to control territory or take care of witnesses. And while addicts sometimes lose their lives over drug debts, don’t believe everything you see in the movies.
Killing your customers is bad for business because
- It draws the attention of the police, who are explicitly tasked with making your job as hard as possible.
- You’ve killed a customer. Any half-decent drug dealer never sells drugs on credit anyway, so this is kind of a moot point.
At the wholesale level, it’s the same game but on a bigger stage. The cartel violence in Mexico has been going on for almost 40 years, has ripped apart Mexico, and is bleeding into the United States. That violence is between the cartels fighting for control of the market and has led to rampant corruption and the deaths of thousands of people NOT in the cartel.
Imagine what legalizing drugs would do. Making it a legal commodity would simultaneously raise tax revenue and dramatically reduce the violence since these things would become not respectable businesses, but businesses nonetheless. If you doubt that, ask yourself how often you’ve seen a place selling liquor or cigarettes shot up. Those places sell an addictive, destructive poison, but it’s all legal, so they compete legally.
My argument isn’t perfect, and I’ve changed my mind on this a few times over the years, but I think that’s the only way the war on drugs ever ends. As far as I’m concerned, drugs have won that war, and we need to be negotiating terms of peace and reparations.
But let’s be honest. The government doesn’t really want the war on drugs to end. Not only is it profitable for them, but you might find out that some of the people you trust most have been junkies the whole time.
Hard drug users are never who you expect
Not every addict looks like what you expect an addict to look like. Many are doctors, lawyers, politicians, and members of law enforcement. I have a friend who was a pretty big player in the dope game in my city for a while, and he told me that many of his customers were people on the nicer side of town who’d connected with him through various ways, one of which was getting arrested.
A 2016 survey of 12,825 lawyers found that 7.4% of them, had used opioids or cocaine in the last 12 months. 5.5% of doctors used the hard stuff in the past year. Anywhere from 20-30%of first responders (police, firemen, EMTs) have struggled with addiction.
I don’t care about most people getting high, but there are some professionals where it’s not a good idea for you to be doing lines, on or off duty.
