Methadon’t: African Americans and Methadone Maintenance, 1969-1977

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on American Incarceration, from the Early Republic to the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract

In the early 1970s, a heroin addiction epidemic peaked across most inmate demographics in the United States, though its earliest stages disproportionately affected African American prisoners. Paradoxically, the free black community was largely opposed to the use of methadone, a then-novel maintenance drug hailed in scientific and popular presses as a “magic bullet” in addiction treatment. The free community’s ambivalence was rooted in three substantive critiques. The first was structural and held that the state should improve social conditions that lead to drug use before making people quit heroin. The second concerned user health and focused on methadone’s real and imagined effects on the body. The final critique linked maintenance drugs to slavery: methadone could entail, at best, increased state surveillance and, at worst, a new system of biochemical bondage. Using the writings of African American politicians, community leaders, activists, and journalists, this paper traces the rise and fall of these ideas, concluding with some implications for the historical and contemporary study of race issues in drug maintenance behind bars.

Author

• Kyle Bridge, University of Florida