Detroit’s Cocaine Wars

I was out of the loop. I hadn’t been keeping up with the outside world or what was happening in the streets just outside of this hospital for over three years. I had taken a promotion at Grace Northwest Hospital in Detroit as a manager in their Facility Administration. They were part of the Harper-Grace Hospital mergers, and I enjoyed the same privileges that I had at the main hospital in midtown Detroit. They were paying for me to complete my Master of Arts degree in Business Administration from Central Michigan University and I was given the time to do that, but I didn’t have much time for anything else. Having just recently been married my wife was pregnant with our first child and her Obstetrician practiced at this hospital. My children were eventually born here. I did notice from time to time graffiti appearing on the buildings in the neighborhoods surrounding the hospital, and I was later informed by one of our Administrators that it was “gang graffiti.”

The gangs tagged the neighborhoods they would be selling crack cocaine in. A new cheaper form of cocaine. Cocaine wasn’t just a rich mans high anymore. This new form of coke could be smoked in pipes, sold in rocks, for only 5 dollars, and usually came 2 to 3 rocks per buy in small plastic bags. I was told it was highly addictive. At the time I didn’t think much of it. I had enough on my plate to keep me busy and my head out of the news papers. We began having cars being stolen out of our parking lot, and thieves were being caught inside the hospital rifling through visitor’s and personnel’s purses. Our security (all retired Detroit Police Officers) thought it to be the work of drug addict’s. We beefed up security in all patient care, and visitor areas. We implemented a strict visitor policy, and that made it very difficult for those without passes to roam freely through the hospital. That didn’t keep them from trying. Our security officers would log numerous attempts of people entering our hospital for nefarious reasons, and some visitors being arrested as well for outstanding warrants. It would make my decision to take the next promotion much easier going back to the main hospital in midtown later in my career.

It took some time but the community surrounding the hospital began to change dramatically also. Homes were being put up for sale as an older population, fearing the rise in crime, looked for other places to live which were much more elder friendly. I started to see a trend which would reverberate throughout the city known as “urban mining.” At first I didn’t know what was happening. Homes were having their aluminum siding ripped off a couple strips at a time, and eventually it started happening to houses on the whole block. A colleague informed me that crack addicts were being paid by the scrap yards for the aluminum. This in turn fueled their crack habits. The crack addicts would eventually urban mine whole blocks of homes and this over the next couple of years increased exponentially. Our neonatal units began to fill at the hospital with babies twitching and jerking. Our nurses informed me they were “crack babies.” I was shocked. How in God’s name will they survive? What will happen with them.? Time would answer my question some 20 years later when I began teaching at the prison. Some of those babies survived, were now incarcerated here, and they became protégés of the drug lords. COCAINE WARS TO BE CONTINUED…