I won’t say his name. The ones who lived through it already know who I’m talking about. An infamous drug dealer in Detroit recently died of natural causes. No shootout. No prison cell. No dramatic ending. Just life catching up with him. But long before his heart stopped beating, the damage he and his crew caused to this city was already done. And neighbors like mine are still paying for it.
My
great-grandparents’ home sat on the 2500 block of Richton on Detroit’s west
side. That house represented hope. Like many Black families who came north
during the Great Migration of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, my family arrived in search of stability, factory jobs, steady paychecks, and a better future. It was a
Black middle-class block. I remember milk and juice being delivered. I remember
neighbors correcting you if you stepped out of line. And you knew when you got
home, the correction would continue (AKA Ass Whipping). That was community. That was ownership.
That was pride.
Then narcotics hit
the block. Not just drugs, but the culture that came with it. The glorification.
Romanticizing. The idea that poisoning your own neighborhood made you a hero.
It didn’t. It made you a destroyer. Drug gangs turned once-stable streets into
open-air markets. Homes that held generations became staging points for
trafficking. Young men who could have been engineers, teachers, or tradesmen
became soldiers in a war against their own people. Jail or graves became the
two predictable outcomes.
As a 25-year Black
police veteran, I’ve been called every name in the book for wearing this badge.
Sellout. Traitor. Worse. But I’ve never seen the same energy directed at the
men who flooded our communities with narcotics. I’ve never seen organized outrage
against the dealers who armed teenagers and normalized violence. I never heard
anyone call them out for destroying blocks like 2500 Richton. Law enforcement
gets the blame for the symptoms. The dealers rarely get blamed for the disease.
Even though the
drug wars of the 70s, 80s, and 90s aren’t as visible today, the fallout
remains. Drive through those neighborhoods. You’ll see it in the vacant lots,
the generational poverty, the trauma that never got addressed. I watched too
many young men grow up under that shadow, either swallowed by the system or
buried before they turned 25. It got so bad that my family moved further west, near
the edge of the city, trying to shield my brother and me from the influence of
drug gangs. That’s what survival looked like.
So, when I hear that one of the architects of that
destruction died peacefully, I don’t feel closure. I think about what was taken
from my grandparents’ block. I think about what was stolen from families who
just wanted the same American promise they moved north for. To the former drug
dealer who was a killer, who informed on his own crew when it benefited him,
who helped destroy my grandparents’ community, you don’t get a hero’s farewell.
The streets you poisoned still haven’t recovered. F-U.
Comments