Disaster and Loss: Drug Research in an Urban Community

ABSTRACT

Widespread drug use and drug trafficking in inner-city communities have destroyed important social and physical assets of community life, which enhanced and supported residents' personal and social well-being. This article describes ethnographic methodologies used to gain access to a central city drug-using population for the study of the intergenerational transmission of drug use. Key informant narratives report community and family asset losses. A paradigm of social disaster is presented to explicate the physical, emotional, social, and economic consequences of drug use and drug trafficking in urban communities. It is argued that researchers have not examined the social and moral effects of drug use in inner-city communities. A social disaster paradigm may help practitioners to develop practical stratagems to effect social change in urban communities that have been blighted by prevalent drug use and drug profiteering.

Presently, drug use and drug trafficking is endemic to many African American communities. Neighborhood drug traffickers operate an underground economy of social and economic exploitation. Inner-city drug profiteering promotes a street subculture of social disorganization characterized by violence, crime, and the loss of life, social ties, and physical space (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Felton, 1997). Conspicuously, nefarious drug activities have destabilized communal life in inner-city communities. In the last 3 decades, ethnographic studies (Bolland, 2001; Bourgois, 1995; Dunlap & Bourgois, 1993; Ratner, 1993; Sterk, 1999; Sterk, Elifson, & German, 2000) investigated patterns of drug use in inner-city communities during the peak period of the crack epidemic (between 1980 and the late 1990s). In these studies, as is common to most ethnography, the in-depth immersion of the researcher generates graphic accounts of the daily lives of individuals and the world in which they inhabit, a world where drugs are sold, bought, and used. With notable exceptions (Anderson, 1999; Bolland, 2001; Bourgois, 1995), the ethnographic studies of drug use and trafficking have not examined the effects of these behaviors on the social and moral fabric of African American communities or neighborhoods as entities in themselves.

This article depicts the methodology used to identify target neighborhoods in which to conduct drug research in a predominately African American urban community in a large northeastern metropolitan locale. Key informants were community residents, leaders, business owners, and other community stakeholders. This article also translates the results of key informant narrative accounts of the consequences of drug trafficking and drug use in neighborhoods where they lived and worked. The thematic interpretations that emerged from the raw data represent loss trauma within familial and communal contexts. Respondents' narratives exemplify a discourse from which to view the psychosocial impact of inner-city drug activities as a man-made social disaster, characterized by the trauma of personal, familial, physical, and spatial loss. This view of social disasters also reveals victim vulnerability and the consequential communal and individual responses of recovery. We conclude the article by noting practice implications for neighborhood social disasters.

Defining Disasters

Although there is a long history of empirical investigation of disasters in the field of sociology and cultural anthropology, this literature has not focused on the infiltration of drugs in African American communities. Nonetheless, the drug epidemic may be seen in many ways as parallel to other disaster phenomena that are typically defined in relation to broadly spread social disruption and physical harm.

Generally, the understanding of disasters evokes paradoxical cultural meanings (Stein, 1999). On the one hand, many cultures have attributed physical catastrophes, such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes, to supernatural causes. In this context, the victims of natural disasters are thought to be blameless because they had no control over the cataclysmic events. On the other hand, human-made disasters, wars, genocide, and epidemics generally invoke collective blame and guilt and warranted retribution. In such situations, disaster victims are thought to be responsible in part, because victims can exercise some control over the calamitous event. Whether human-made or natural, the aftermath of a disaster includes significant and extensive personal and social changes in the lives of those affected (Freedy, Killpatrick, & Resnick, 1993; Stein, 1999).

Importantly, Lohokare and Davar (2000) argued that disasters must be interpreted from a feminist perspective to include the unique social position of the lives of women. Lohokare and Davar contend that a more inclusive definition of disasters is needed that places socially marginalized persons at the center of social-environmental catalytic events. Correspondingly, the authors suggest that disasters may be defined to include enduring structural processes such as violence against women, poverty, homelessness, displacement, and cultural loss. Lohokare and Davar further contend that the consequences of enduring negative structural processes are comparable in their effects to most typical disasters. They defined disaster as

a natural or a human made macro-level event or process that induces disturbance, turmoil or a prolonged life-threatening environment for a community where individual or group survival is usually at stake. It is a collectively experienced phenomenon with aspects of physical or mental trauma, material loss and destruction and loss of human life or dignity. (p. 567)

Moreover, Lohokare and Davar (2000) noted that the World Health Organization (WHO) has postulated a comprehensive definition of disasters. The WHO forthrightly acknowledges distinct societal events as disasters when there is

any occurrence that causes damage, economic destruction, loss of human life and deterioration in health and health services on a scale sufficient to warrant an extraordinary response from outside the effected community area. (p. 567)

Method and Considerations

Data Collection

Ethnographic data were collected as precursors to a larger study of intergenerational transmission of substance use and nonuse. The selection of an African American urban community in a large northeastern metropolitan area, which we refer to as Hastings1 in the present article, as the study community was based on track data (U.S. Census Bureau, 1990) and police crime statistical data. According to 1990 census figures, 92.0% of residents in the study community were people of color, 75.9% of which were African Americans. All of the major state health and criminal justice surveillance systems ranked the study community in the top 10 jurisdictions reporting deaths resulting from homicide and HIV/AIDS. High levels of poverty, violence, and HIV/AIDS characterized the study community. Such was the case that 30.1% of all persons living in the community were living below the poverty level. Among African Americans, 54.0% of those living in the study community were living below the poverty level (U.S. Census Bureau, 1990).

Data were collected using participant observation, field trips, personal interviews, and a focus group. We termed this data collection procedure "ethnographic geographical community mapping." To gain greater access to a study sample, neighborhoods were selected for geographical density and concentrated drug trafficking and drug use occurrences. We reasoned that public housing sites met these criteria because of the density of dwelling units and shared neighborhood characteristics. Moreover, observational field trips and participant observation rendered the identification of specific neighborhood community resources, including churches and neighborhood social, recreational, and health resources.

The research team (principal investigator, project coordinator, and four community researchers) all collected neighborhood mapping data to determine what neighborhoods would be target research areas. All team members were women of color. The principal investigator was African American, and the project coordinator was West Indian. Three community researchers were African American, and one was West Indian. The community researchers were experienced women who were selected for their knowledge of the Hastings community. They were actually situated in the research community by way of residence or employment. The community researchers' situated residence in the Hastings community made it possible to construct a multivocal text.

Data were collected using participant observation, field trips, personal interviews, and a focus group. To gain greater access to a study sample, neighborhoods were selected for geographical density and concentrated drug trafficking and drug use occurrences. We reasoned that public housing sites met these criteria due to the density of dwelling units and shared neighborhood characteristics. Moreover, observational field trips and participant observation rendered the identification of specific neighborhood community resources, including, churches, neighborhood social, recreational, and health resources. Key informant data were collected from 25 individual interviews and a focus group. The focus group comprised eight outreach workers from a community health center's drug rehabilitation case management unit. Seven of the outreach workers were men, of which four were African American, three were Latino, and all were former drug users; one was a Latina female who had never used drugs. In the interviews held with 25 key informants, 6 were recovered drug users (2 men and 4 women). Of these, 19 were non-drug users (4 were men, and 15 were women). The 25 key informants composed a diverse group. They were residents, former residents, employees in community business establishments and human service agencies, church and agency volunteers, or stakeholders with key institutional positions, such as agency directorships, policemen, and business owners.2 The focus group sessions and individual interviews were guided by eight general questions about neighborhood life, drug effects, and drug use in the Hastings community. The timing of the individual interview sessions was generally 90 min. The focus group session was 135 min. Both the focus group and the individual interviews were audiotaped and transcribed.

Data Analysis

There were three levels of data analysis. First, the data were examined in an interactive group setting with all study team members. This approach ensured that community researchers fully participated in the analysis. In doing so, they were able to make use of their situated experiences in understanding community processes. During research team meetings, the key informant transcriptions were analyzed carefully by thorough readings, reviewing, and discussions. The content analysis of the transcribed sessions yielded general interpretations that were written in the margins of each scripted text. Second, these interpretations were reviewed and discussed for more concise thematic material, and a second writing in the margin of the text was completed. Third, a research assistant (who had not participated in the data collection) reviewed the interpretative data for thematic coding. The research assistant reviewed the data to rate the most common and consistent interpretative themes emerging from the initial content analysis.

The most common theme extrapolated across social context was that of loss, as expressed collectively, physically, personally, and culturally. The loss or attenuation of a cultural ethos is also considered here as loss. Since this data collection involved ethnographic community mapping, our theoretical framework places the phenomenon of loss within a macrosocial framework. Thus, we took the community respondents' outsider standpoint perception and interpreted the "crack epidemic" as a social disaster phenomenon.

Ethnographic Interpretation

This interpretative method requires the researcher to work from the outside to the center (Collins, 1986, 1990; Denzin, 1997; Hooks, 1984). A standpoint text starts from the lived experiences of those considered to be "other," or outside mainstream society, that is, people of color, gays, lesbians, drug users, and the like. This form of chronicling narrative renders data less objectified and abstract (Smith, 1987). In this regard, the respondents' texts reflect intersections of class, ethnicity, and gender, rendering a multivocal text. All things considered, a multivocal text is created when the researcher is located inside the cultural narrative to engage in extensive dialogue with like members of a valued cultural tradition. We suggest that respondents and researchers were situated inside an African American cultural ethos that made possible a multivocal text that was dialogically empathic (Denzin, 1997). Thus, our study results were subject to ethnographic interpretation.

"Hastings is like a disaster" and "Hastings is a beautiful community" are "in vivo" quotations that we think capture the paradox of an inner-city community trying to cope with the catastrophic effects of widespread drug use and drug trafficking during a particular historical period. Regularly, we discovered themes of loss personified in respondents' remembrances in the narration of their daily life experiences involving family, community, and neighborhood before, during, and after the crack pandemic of the 1980s and 1990s. The themes that emerged from the data were coded as "loss." Furthermore, we began to think of the themes as "lamentations," so termed to describe the feelings of distress, grief, anger, melancholy, suffering, tribulation, regret, and disappointment that characterized respondents' narratives. It is worthwhile to note that feelings of melancholy resonated in team meetings as the data were analyzed. We were aware of our emotional responses and took caution to evaluate them. Thus, while the loss lamentation epitomizes a quality of despair, like a blues idiom, it also suggests hopefulness. We found a sense of optimism in respondents' stories that seemed to indicate recovery responses to devastating social conditions.

Findings: Contextual Meanings of Loss

Generally, respondents expressed losses of physical space, social networks, and familial attachments. Overall, the contextual meanings of loss seemed centered in relational losses, as depicted in family and neighborhood life. The loss theme was integrally related to the codes of community and family. Thus, for ethnographic interpretation, we considered communal loss, physical loss, and family loss. More particularly, the data rendered the theorization of two concepts, that of communalism and familial insularity.

Communalism is a broad and inclusive theme that signifies the moral and psychosocial fabric of a community. Communalism was ascribed to depictions of interpersonal relations, social activities, and social networks that characterized belongingness, that is, personal feelings that one belonged to or had membership in a community as opposed to social isolation or separateness from community life. Representations of lived experiences that portrayed these communal interconnections were interpreted as communalism (Ogbonnaya, 1994).

Familial insularity normally took place after the disaster had resulted in chaos, devastation, and confusion. Consequently, this was a period when disaster victims were making every effort to engage in adaptive recovery actions for self-protection. All things considered, familial insularity suggested an adaptation to the loss of communal life. Curiously, familial insularity seemed to stand for both defensive and protective disaster recovery responses. Paradoxically, while both communalism and familial insularity denote loss, the two processes seemingly occur at different disaster stages. We considered that the loss of particular aspects of communalism occurred at the initial stage of disaster vulnerability.

Altogether, we considered physical loss as the spatial wreckage of specific physical surroundings in the Hastings community. We understood spatial wreckage to mean the actual loss of both material structures and physical spaces. Notwithstanding, the spatial wreckage of Hastings eventually destroyed the social cohesion and relational trust of neighborhood life. Respondents saw the loss of physical space resulting from urban renewal and relocation efforts as a loss of social networks, a loss of neighborhood social institutions, and the loss of community organizational attachments. Hence, physical losses were coupled with losses experienced as communal. Conceivably, physical loss presented a disaster recovery response in view of the fact that new dwelling developments were being constructed in the community.

Communal Loss

To illustrate, Nancy, a Hastings resident, encapsulated the theme of communal loss in pensive reminisces about the decline of communal solidarity in her neighborhood.

I remember all kinds of different families. Because back then, everybody knew everybody on the street, I mean everybody. I know a lot of people out here now, but you know, not as much as I knew then. You know, you knew everybody's family. You kept your front door open [laughter]. [Field notes indicated that the laughter was a cover-up for sadness.] Seriously, you kept your front door open. You didn't have to worry about all the crap that's going on today. Especially, there was always a kid in the house. So we had about four or five kids, and if you wasn't able to leave the door open, well, you just had to. The kids were running in and out. You know everybody wanted a drink of water at different times.

Communal solidarity is clearly stated here, for this respondent, as being family centered. A type of community parenting seemed to exist among neighbors. Apparently, knowing families and knowing them well defines community. More particularly, Hastings neighborhoods seemingly were a collective of interdependent relationships that permitted families to exercise informal social control and mutual support of children. What seemed especially important to Nancy was to know persons as belonging to familial collectives and not as solitary individuals. Moreover, this respondent's statement exemplifies neighborhood surroundings as open, safe, and free. Children used their neighborhoods as playgrounds to roam and play unhampered by social-environmental dangers. Similarly, Sampson, Morenoff, and Earls (1999) have argued that spatial interdependence produces collective efficacy for neighborhood children. Moreover, the authors suggest that particular neighborhood spatial dynamics provide intergenerational closure. Intergenerational closure, it is contended, occurs when adults and children in a community are linked together, when parents know the parents of their children's friends. Thus, intergenerational closure imparts social support for children and imparts information to parents, both of which make possible social control of neighborhoods.

Street life during the crack disaster changed the quality of communal life in Hastings neighborhoods. Drug gang leaders were bold in the extreme takeover of economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. A neighborhood policeman explained how drug gangs strategically coopted neighborhoods:

Okay, what happened was the big dealers took over. They just spread out in the [housing projects]. What they do is they simply take over. What they do is that they go in and they pay the [tenant's] rent and buy the groceries for everybody in a [particular] building and they set up house. They set up lookouts on the roof and on the stairs. A lookout man. We couldn't do anything with it, and they took over all of Fairmont Gardens. [Tenant's] shut up and wouldn't talk. I mean let's face it, a mother that's got three or four kids on welfare and you know just barely has enough to eat and someone's going to come in and say keep [quiet], I'll give you $2,000 a week or a $1,000 a week, who wouldn't say yes?

Drug trafficking gangs placed armed sentries on apartment rooftops to protect drug turfs. The director of a neighborhood activist organization, Bertha Carls, described how dangerous and lethal the streets became:

Like I used to be an assessor, and you go up to [an apartment] building and people would be doing drugs right there, and they'd tell you, you can't come in right now. And when I was an assessor, the cars we had looked like police cars. So I had a brother who was a substance abuser. I had to have him go out and get all the lookouts on the roof and everything and tell them this is not a police car and I'm going to be working in this area, so don't shoot me. I took an all-black crew. So, anyway in that area, a lot of it's been renovated now. And some of them, they did take down the buildings. They got rid of the problem tenants. And there are a lot of tenant activists now.

Clearly, once the gangs, drug users, and drug traffickers had commandeered neighborhoods streets, the loss of safe physical spaces occurred. Later, urban renewal programs implemented by the city to rid communities of drug traffickers razed many neighborhoods; consequently, the traditional neighborhood physical structures were also lost. Municipal urban renewal programs were viewed suspiciously by residents who saw community renewal as affecting the loss of communal-centered living, and that meant the loss of a certain way of life:

Hastings is a beautiful community. I can say that because I grew up here, and I know what was here. And I've seen the face change, the people change, and I see a tremendous change coming again [here, field notes inference to the urban relocation and urban renewal programs]. When I was a child growing up, every family looked out. Ms. so and so could see you on a bus and tell your mother, "Oh I saw Helen." Now it's hard for your children because there is nothing for your children to do. We're surrounded by hospitals. We're sitting in the middle of the best of everything, but yet we have nothing. When the kids didn't have the guns to shoot one another, they made it easier for them to get them. Anything that we succeeded in trying to stop, to make life better for our children and our community, our environment, there was always something, someone coming along to take it away.

Loss of Physical Space

Ordinarily, the loss of physical space is common to disasters. In our interpretation of meanings of loss, we defined the loss of physical space as spatial wreckage of both material structures and physical spaces in the Hastings community. Interestingly, our observations led us to reason, from an ecological perspective, that the loss of physical space displaces the most significant social structures in a community, such as family, institutions, and entire neighborhoods.

The director of a drug center, Albertina Williams, stridently spoke of the present urban redevelopment project for the Hastings community. Albertina, intelligent, articulate, and politically astute as well as a recovered heroin user, saw municipal plans for rebuilding the Hastings community as perhaps more harmful than beneficial to residents. Albertina, who was sensitively aware of the changes needed to reverse the ravaging aftereffects of many drug-infested neighborhoods, was also aware of the ambiguous outcome the changes engendered. Albertina spoke of the city's renewal effort as Black dislocation. Her remarks about the physical changes of a public housing development site indicate an astute assessment of the changes taking place in Hastings:

Fairmont has now become Pairmont Gardens. It was physically run down and dense prior to the changes. This may have been precipitated based on the political outcry from the community to make Hastings a safer and livable place, but more than likely there was a hidden agenda of gentrification. The city tore down buildings, moved people out. Many families were separated and became homeless, and forced to go to shelters because they were left with no place to live. There is a big gap between the rental units in Fairmont from those in Fairmont Gardens. All of those without rental units are now homeless and forced to live in shelters. This is really Black dislocation. Some families who qualified were given Section 8 vouchers to move outside the city. Other families split up, and some of the children 17 years and up are now living in group homes, residential programs, and the like.

Mrs. Black, a single parent of four young boys and a long-time resident of Hastings, had this to say about the new housing developments constructed in her neighborhood:

And our neighborhood is just-building up, but it's deteriorating because there's rotting from the inside out. And [the mayor] is selling Hastings, Dixon, Landsbury, and the East End right from under us. Look at it. I don't know. And them houses down there at Crossing look like Crayola crayon boxes-That was his way of reconstructing the Hastings area, by moving people out.

Familial Insularity: A recovery response

Familial insularity weakened communalism, contributing to the impoverishment of neighborhood social bonds. Hastings families devastated by drug profiteering and widespread drug use desired isolation rather than connection. Thus, families retreated from neighborhood life and community activities. To some extent, in order to feel safe and protected, Hastings' residents were compelled to choose imprisonment in the privacy of their homes:

You didn't have to go downtown [to feel good about your neighborhood]. The Hastings streets were so pretty, and everywhere you walked, there were benches, and they called them "mother rests," where you could just sit. You didn't have to lock your door. You didn't have to have fences and bars. We're in prison. We are! We live in prison!

Clearly, familial insularity seemed to be a strategy used to safeguard the integrity of the family against the onslaught of neighborhood drug use. The social network of drug users and drug traffickers displaced the relational social networks and social bonds of communalism. Unequivocally, familial insularity seemed a disaster recovery response of safety and protection; nonetheless, it, too, undermined the sense of communal belonging among neighborhood residents. Notwithstanding, strict insularity responses often took the form of physical punishment, evasion of neighbors, retreat into church-related activities, or social isolation.

The narrative below expresses the consistent and constant supervision single mothers exercised of their teenage daughters. Jamie wanted her daughter to attend college and have a better life than she had known. Jamie kept her daughter, Shellie, close to home, which was not straying far from the front door:

There's a lot of teens in the neighborhood, hang out as late as they want to. Yelling, cussing, swearing, smoking, and drinking. The stuff teenagers have no business doing. I have to admit that sometimes being a teenager, I dabbed in a little weed. I never did no heavy stuff. Shoplifting that only took one time before I got my ass beat and I learned my lesson. But I keep a tight rope on Shellie and she don't seem to mind. She can see the awful things going on in the neighborhood. She's only allowed to hang out with certain kids, and that's in front of the door. She doesn't go too far.

Relational Loss

Loss of family may be the most psychologically and morally devastating of all losses. The loss of family members and close friends among Hastings' respondents typically were losses as a result of drug addiction deaths. While some deaths were due to drug-related crimes, most deaths were related to either a drug overdose or HIV/AIDS. Family members had a difficult time dealing with mourning and grieving the death of loved ones resulting from drugging. Surprisingly, some families had repressed grief responses, thus making the trauma of death loss even more potent. Some family members expressed that a drug addicted family member had died long ago when she first became addicted to drugs, and it was hard to grieve when "real death" actually came. Family members expressed ambivalent feelings about caring for ill relatives with HIV. Some families reported drug use and HIV as social stigmas for the family.

A community resident, Miesha, employed as a receptionist, spoke to us about her family and the loss of family members to drug addictions:

Well, actually, I lost a sister to drugs this year. She had a toxic mixture of I would say heroin and medication that she was on. I've see that a lot of my friends have died, a lot of them have the virus now. I've seen a lot of things have happened since drugs, cocaine, crack cocaine been out. I've known many people involved in drug activity. My family, there's six of us in my family, two of which was deceased, and I was the only child out of six that was spared from drug abuse, and I'm thankful. I had parents who both drank, they were alcohol abusers, and they have since stopped now that I'm an adult. They're both recovering alcoholics, but I think seeing that I said in my mind at an early age that's not what I wanted for myself or my family once I had children, so I just stayed strong and focused.

Some key informants reported that they were deterred from using drugs because of a drugging lifestyle among family and friends around them. The disastrous consequences of drugging were so abhorrent to them that they chose not to become users. Still, the drugging of parents and friends made it impossible for nonusers to form intimate nurturing relationships with those who were addicted. Thus, non-drug users' experienced relational losses of caring, loving, empathy, and intimacy, as the drug addicted were unable to give tender and affectionate care. Nicole comments on the use of drugs by her mother:

Well, I think that just even living in a home that had been affected by drug use; by my mother. I have no problem saying this. My mother was actively using by the time I was 14, my mother was heavily using. I think it was that probably too. It played a big role in why I didn't use. I saw what the outcome was. Even though for years she was functioning. But after that, it just kind of took over. So I never kind of got into it. It scared me even more, because it really hit home. My mother was usually out of the house or in her bedroom. My sister was the one who tried that stuff, she was 5 years younger. My mother was murdered. We're not sure if it was drug related. I saw how drugs affected my home life. You know the hiding from family and the family hiding from the neighborhood and trying not to know what's going on out there and at home.

Practice Implications

We believe this study has sound practice implications for both social work's micro and macro practice levels. Routinely, personal and social resources are needed in any response to disaster events. Importantly, social workers are professionally positioned to address mental health concerns and the social and economic resource needs of populations affected by disasters (Zakour, 1996). The themes of loss that emerged from our key informant data represented a jeremiad response to the 1980s-1990s crack pandemic in the Hastings community, a man-made disaster of extreme proportions. A jeremiad response was considered in its common meaning to exemplify a prophetic judgment about social conditions in a given society. As such, respondent's reportage, often moralistic in tone and tenor, suggested premonitory insight about general societal conditions that develop when community members lose a sense of care and responsibility for each other. The jeremiad chord we define here was not interpreted until the third stage of analysis when the prophetic tenor of the interviews was discovered.

Researchers argue that disasters can have positive consequences for family and community. Individuals and families who are economically, psychologically, and socially well off before a disaster are likely to fully recover, and do so more quickly (Edwards, 1998). Perhaps so, nonetheless, we take issue with this argument as disasters affect social networks, social contexts, material structures, landscape, and physical boundaries of communities. Hence, we consider an ecological perspective when examining the disaster of drug use and drug profiteering in inner-city neighborhoods. An ecological perspective suggests that the individual, family, and community institutions are transactional-nested contexts that are interrelated in community life, and changes in one nested social context influences changes in all others (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).

Hastings neighborhoods have dramatically deteriorated because of drug use and drug profiteering. Thus, we infer from our analysis that Hastings requires a recovery response of reconstruction. A reconstruction plan is one that would rebuild the inner life of the Hastings community by developing a community of social bonds and social networks. Stevens (2002) has suggested that the social devastation of drug use and drug profiteering in African American inner-city communities is a disaster analogous in scope, health, and psychosocial consequences to those of national wars. Macro and micro social workers working conjointly could be useful to inner-city communities by shifting to a paradigmatic explanation of disaster in defining the impact of drug activities in inner-city communities. We suggest that micro social workers can offer services that deal with mental health needs such as posttraumatic stress disorder at the community experiential level, utilizing community meetings and groups. Finally, in order to bring about realistic social changes, inner-city communities that experience the kind of social devastation as we have described in this article will require optimistic, pragmatic, and productive approaches to action. Such approaches help communities find varied ways to reconnect with the affirmative rudiments of their past so that recovery and reconstruction becomes an accepted course of action in community rebuilding. Obviously, community leaders must be actively involved in recovery reconstruction. We think a disaster model can be successful in the delivery of effective outcomes in inner-city communities, communities that have been under siege of drug profiteers and street predators far too long.

1 Hastings is our anonymous name for a historically African American community in a major northeaster city.

2 Regarding educational and income status, no specific data were collected. However, most respondents were fairly representative of the general population of Hastings.

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Joyce West Stevens, PhD, is associate professor Emeritus, Boston University School of Social Work. Dr. Stevens's book, Smart and Sassy: Strengths of Inner-City Black Girls, examines adolescent development issues within the context of daily life. John Amson Capitman, PhD, is Director, Central Valley Health Policy Institute. Correspondence regarding this article may be sent addressed to the first author at jwestevn@bu.edu or the School of Social Work, Boston University, 264 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02115.

Authors' note. The data reported in this article are drawn from a larger study in which Joyce West Stevens served as principal investigator and John Amson Capitman served as research consultant. The study, funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, was the African American Women's Study, an investigation of intergenerational drug use and nonuse among mothers and daughters. Thanks to research assistants Alison Handy and Therese Fitzgerald for their contributions in preparation of this article, and special thanks to community researchers Rita Coven-Reid, Vernia Carter, Helen Judah, and Katherine Grannum whose knowledge and insight contributed significantly to our understanding of the complexities of inner-city communities.

Manuscript received: August 8, 2003

Revised: August 6, 2004

Accepted: August 9, 2004

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