When the Black Panthers and Young Lords Teamed Up to Fight Addiction with Acupuncture
Hyperallergic, May 20, 2021: When the Black Panthers and Young Lords Teamed Up to Fight Addiction with Acupuncture
“Founded in 1970 in the South Bronx by an alliance between the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and other revolutionary groups, Lincoln Detox was an attempt to provide alternative methods of drug addiction treatment. This was just as Nixon’s War on Drugs was revving up, which was of course in fact a war on poor people by other means — on one end it’s been alleged that intelligence agencies funneled drugs into impoverished areas, while on the other end police incontestably used the presence of drugs as a pretense to brutalize those areas. In between were underfunded, token efforts at care for addicts. Dope Is Death tells the story not just of Lincoln Detox, but also of how that whole generation of activists and freedom fighters were continually attacked by the state for trying to build a different, better world.”
