The drug scene. How? Why? Why do we have the current drug scene, at home in the USA, and just about everywhere else in the world? Why did it all start some 40 or 50 years ago? Prior to some time around 1950-60 there was no drug problem to speak of in the United States. Yes, there were drugs in the slum areas of major cities, and perhaps in a few isolated other parts of the country, but they just didn’t exist anywhere else.

I can attest to there being no drug scene before that time. I was a high school and college student during the 1940's in North Carolina–drugs were nowhere to be seen. None of my friends used drugs nor was I aware of any others who did. After college, I lived in New York city in the early 1950's; again, no drugs anywhere around me.

I have never even smoked marijuana, something that it seems just about everyone from youths to middle-agers has. It was not because I was possessed of any more rectitude than anyone else–I certainly did my share of cigarette smoking, boozing, and beer drinking–rather, it was simply the absence of drugs in my younger years.

It is ironic that, preceding 1950-60, times were much harder for almost everyone than today: during the 1930's there was the Depression and in the 1940's we had World War II. Yet, then we virtually had no drug problem, and now we do–not only in poor neighborhoods but in affluent society, in suburbia, in small towns, in rural areas, everywhere.

In those earlier years, black people lived in a segregated society with very limited opportunities to better their lives–still, they were not plagued with the curse of drugs. Today, many young black men are involved in the drug culture–as addicts, dealers, or criminals serving prison time. Or worse yet, as murder victims; Baltimore has between 250-300 murders every year–the vast majority of victims are black males, most of whom are probably involved in the drug trade and die at the hands of rivals in that trade.

Worse still, is that respectable black families who do their best to live a decent life and teach their values to their children often suffer from the crime-related lawlessness around them–they are mugged, burglarized, and murdered just for living where they do. Two notable examples of these atrocities in Baltimore are:
-- a family whose mother and father and several children died in a fire bombing of their home a few years ago by neighborhood drug dealers in retaliation for the family having called police numerous times to report them;
–a woman whose home was attacked with Molotov cocktails by drug dealers, again in retaliation for her having reported their activities to the police (luckily, her house never caught fire).

In the early 1990's, during the Q&A part of a presentation by the then-Baltimore City police commissioner, I asked the same question that I pose above: why no drugs back then, but a plague of them now? His answer was essentially, "that’s a tough question"–a copout (sorry for the pun), I thought, for a man whose experience and position should have provided him with enough insight to, at least, have something in the way of an answer.

So, I still ask the question: why no drug scene before the 1950-60's, a plague everywhere now? I wish I could find an answer.