Many urban
African American communities are adversely impacted by illegal drugs. The jagged circular saw of drug introduction,
addiction, peddling and incarceration leaves broken minds, bodies and spirits
in its wake. These urban environments
are defined by discrete boundaries delineated by blight and the presence of law
squads curiously trolling the streets for prey to feed the prison industrial
complex. The inhabitants of disfavored
urban areas do not receive fair treatment nor do they enjoy protection from
environmental and health hazards. The
birth of disorder in urban African America was woven into the fabric of the
U.S. ultimately to deny access to and influence on the structure of the
American republic.
We may regard
urban dwellers mired in drug addiction as ‘others’, ‘them’, ‘those’, ‘not
us’. However, we fail to realize the
‘otherness’ of those in our own suburban and rural families. It is all about location and selective
enforcement. It is much easier to find a
needle in a haystack than a farm field.
Drug dependence and substance abuse is all around us and none of us is
immune to the effect of substances on our lifestyle and environs. Drug abuse is an environmental justice
issue. As long as a community is
corroded by the effects of drugs, the powers that be will not ensure a safe and
healthy condition. So, what do we do;
what is within our power to change; what is the first step? It starts with me; the individual. We cannot wait for the world to change, we
must make that change. Our personal
action can ripple into a movement of waves with an energy that erodes away the
rot on the face of our society.
Black Organic
is honored to share the truth of one man who is leading the way. Mr. Clarence Brown is a recovering
heroin addict; 27 years immersed in the culture of consequence, every activity
controlled by craving and avoidance of severe physical and mental distress.
“I’m beginning to receive so many opportunities, help
from friends. God put these people here
for me. With his help, I’ve surmounted
some serious odds and I believe that I can do great things, but none of them
are going to be for me, per se. I will
not end up with a big house or a big car.
I will get what I need to help those people who come behind me.” “Maybe I could stop somebody else’s kid from starting
because I’ve been there. General
knowledge will help people decide, who are on the fence.”
When did you start
using drugs and what lead you to start using?
I started when I was 20, messing with cocaine and weed. It was straight curiosity, no peer pressure,
nobody egging me on. What was in the 10
dollar bag? It must have been about
1981. I kept seeing it on TV and saw my
friends doing the stuff; they spent money on it. It was just a bag of leaves. Then I realized okay, it’s kinda fun and
thought everything else would be more fun.
I did not get into heavy drug use until I got to Baltimore at 22 and I
stated seeing stuff; people preparing needles and I was like wow, I want to try
that. I was never middle class, just
lower, lower, lower middle class and my parents were proud of us going to
college, but they thought and imparted to us that we shouldn’t jump too high
because you’re gonna get smacked down. I
went off to Radford University and met a woman at University of Virginia and
followed her to Baltimore when she got sick.
I was just hanging around Baltimore and was dippin’ and dabbin’. I dated a woman for nine years who, we
thought, could not get pregnant. We had
a daughter and I was not ready. I
disappeared; fell off the face of the earth.
I was making lots of enemies in the streets and I didn’t want anyone
looking for me, but finding her. In the
midst of my heroin addiction, I was able to work in security and made good
money. I held it down. I was at the Latin Palace on Broadway for five
years and then ended up on The Block on Baltimore Street for another 10 years. I just wanted to find out what’s up with the drugs. Once I got the feeling, I just wanted to do
it more and more. I thought nothing
could hurt me, that I couldn’t be stopped. I soon realized that I had no shield;
that I was open.
What was your
lifestyle while using drugs? What were
some of the things you would do?
It was a gradual thing.
I started off living with my daughter’s mother and we worked; moving
forward. But there was no way to do that
because I was taking money. I would
snort, snort, snort all weekend. It
happened until I moved away when my daughter was 3 years old. I lost all contact with her when she was 7
and just got back in touch with her this year.
It got to the point where the pull of drugs was so strong, I didn’t care
and I became a full time drug user, became a hustler; I didn’t have a good game,
my speech was not quite what it needed to be.
I was good at generating sympathy.
Go to the bus stop and say I needed to get to a job interview and people
would offer five more for lunch. Then I
would go up the street and get more money, get enough money to do what I needed
to do. But the whole time, I was able to
hold down a job. It was possible to make
four or five hundred and night and still be a bum. I didn’t have any food and could not pay
rent. It was easy to sustain addiction
because I was getting paid every night and I lived as if I always had
money. Yes, you do… and then you don’t.
What was your worst
moment while on drugs?
My absolute worst moment is when I got locked up about the seventh
or eighth time. It got to the point
where no one would have me at their door because I was doing all that slick
stuff. I was running for the girls. A guy gave me 60 bucks and of course, I was
getting something for me. A cop caught
me and I had six pills, dope. I put the
pills in my pocket, which was full of candy wrappers and thought they couldn’t
find it. Anyway, I get locked up and I’m
so sick. I was already quite a bit sick
when I went to get copped. I had still
had one pill still down in that pocket.
I thought I would stick my hand in my pocket, pull the sweatshirt over
my head and pull the pill into my palm.
I dropped it. It went clack,
clack, clack. I was naked. The guard said, “Are you serious, really?” I asked, “Can I do it?” He said, “No, put it in the trash.” The guard said, “You a little old for this,
ain’t you?” I was about 46. I said, “Damn. I am.”
That’s when I finally got the sense of time flying by. I almost died. I was so dehydrated, diabetic and had high
blood pressure. I didn’t know it. The infirmary asked me who to contact,
because I was almost ready to die. The
lady started singing a song to me. A
black lady, she was so motherly. It was
so weird. She kept me awake. Once I felt hydrated, I started to think that
I could get out of this. I’ve had other
occasions. Once I was sick, this old man
on the street woke up and said to me, “What are you doing out here? You don’t belong here.” He could have been talking to a mouse, but he
was talking to me. He went right back to
sleep.God will give you a lot of rope to go and do and see and learn and he’ll drop parachutes and set up situations to attend, but you have to go do it. I’ve had so many different opportunities in my life that I walked past while I was doing what I was doing.
Was there any
particular event or revelation that pushed you to decide to quit drugs?
It is hard to say that.
There were a bunch of different revelations. The situation with the drunk guy, going to
jail. It started to trickle down. I went to treatment and came out of that and
used. That was what stopped me. I went through the six months and thought I
was ready. I’ve got my certificates and
I’m going to get a job and do right. I
walked past a spot that had some good dope and I knew it. Physically, I was a clean slate, but my mind
was still dirty. I hadn’t prepared my
mind enough. I thought, so what, let me
go get this blast. It felt like it
always did, but I didn’t like it anymore.
There was no clarity. There was
no point to doing it. Why am I doing it? I left it alone and started to find different
places to help me and I went to Baltimore Community Resource Center, the
Courage House is one of their houses.Please describe the effect of drug use on your life. Include how you believe your history has impacted your current status.
Well, um, the whole thing about using all that time, you are
not able to see the time passing. You
are working. I never really was out of
work, maybe about a month. I didn’t use the
money for anything but getting high.
There was an accumulation of time and money that disappeared. Whatever I accumulated at that time is gone. After 26 years, I have nothing. I’m 51 and I am now doing what I should have
done when I was 21. I’m coming into my
talents. I knew when I was 21 that I was
a pretty good writer. I always talked
about maybe one day I was gonna write a book.
People on drugs always talk about what “I’m gonna do.” No, you can’t you sittin’ here with us. When I look back, technology took us through
typewriters, word processors, huge oversized computers, then laptops that all
passed me by before I sat down to do what I said I was going to do. That goes to say that you could be the
brightest, most intelligent person, but heroin pulls a veil over your
head. You don’t receive and you don’t
radiate.
Even at my worst addiction, I always felt like God was
knocking. Are you ready? You are ready
now, c’mon now. There was
never… It was always very loving. I kinda reached these points, getting a little recognition from my writing. I felt very alone. I know that I’m not alone, but it is hard sometimes to remember that you have friends, that people are concerned about you. The thing about addicts, you always feel like you have to get things done; that you have to make up that time. The most dangerous thing an addict can do is dwell on the past, what I could have done, what I should have done. You get overwhelmed. That can send an addict back out there. An addict is most excellent at saying, “Fuck it.” It is a lot easier to be oblivious. It’s not like you don’t have responsibilities, “Fuck it”. That’s what you say. To suddenly be clean and try to live a productive life, you sometimes say, “Is this why I stopped getting high?” You run around and nobody wants to give you money (pointing fingers), “You’re a druggie.” It’s my fault. “Oh, you were an addict.” No, I am an addict. It doesn’t go away. You’re damn right. You should have been taking care of this and that. Just because I am an addict, does not mean I don’t recognize. Your mind says, “I did this.” I did this to myself. If someone wants to buy me lunch, “ I say, I did that.”
Please describe how you pushed forward to recapture your life?
It is dangerous to try to recapture your life. You kinda have to start from where you
are. You have to start almost as if you
are a child and you have to learn everything new as if it is new to you. Addicts will say, “Fuck it.” Or “I
know”. That is a sign of an addict; that
they are on the way to relapse. You
cannot live as a regular person. You
cannot act as if you’ve done it before.
Your past has to stay back where it is.
Everything has to be face forward.
If you think back, it is a trigger.
It puts you right back to where you were the last time you had a
blast. You have to look forward.
What encouragement
can you share to help others dependent on drugs or recovering from dependency?
I have to be careful with that too, because I don’t want to
come off like a NA guru (Narcotics Anonymous).
Those type of people have a way of grabbing on to the NA program and
make it their life. What are they going
to do when they have to step out and deal with people? I will say, continue to pray and ask God to
help you with things you have difficulty with and to continue to move
forward. It is not lack of fear; it is
going on in spite of fear.
How did you meet our
friend Bob Jones? What did he do to help
you move toward your current success?
I met Bob at Healthcare for the Homeless at a writer’s group
that was established there. It wasn’t so
much what he said, but his energy. I
just watched him. He was moving
around. Everything was a grand sweeping
gesture. It was inspiring because I
wanted to move, but not. He asked me
about my poems. He gave me a poem and
told me to write a similar poem without copying. He was impressed by it. It wasn’t anything so much what he said, but how
he said it, his energy. “Oh, wow, we
need to sit down and write a book”. It
was matter of fact, like we just wrote books all the time. I was overwhelmed with his certainty. How can you be so certain? “Oh don’t worry about that, let’s just do
it. This is what is going to happen and
how it will happen. You will do it and
then I’ll take a look at it in a year.”
Bob was like the energy and Neil was like the
direction. Professor Neil Hertz of Johns
Hopkins and Bob Jones supervised the writing group. During the time while I was trying to get
something done with the book, Neil Hertz was in Palestine, but he spoke to Clarinda
Harriss with Brickhouse Books at Towson University. Professor Hertz sent her a manuscript and it
sat with her for a month or two. She got
back with him very energetically saying she wanted to do something with the
book. The book was published in January
2012.Your book, Needs, is based upon your experiences. How did those experiences shape the characters in the book?
I ran across many people who actually are the characters in
the book. My sister and
brother-in-law. Brenda is an
amalgamation of a bunch of different women.
Brenda is named after my oldest sister.
All the dancer, pimps and drug dealers were all people I encountered in
the streets. They are all a little of
each.
What are your goals
within the next five years?
I want to become a drug counselor, an addiction
counselor. I need to have my hands in
the situation in order to help. It will
be hard to help if I was in an ivory tower type of situation. It is not that I intend for one of my books
to be a best seller. I almost feel like
I’m being punished. I cannot divorce
myself from the drug community, not if I intend to help. If I win the lottery, I’m out. That says something to me about God’s
will. I am an addict, three years of
pain. If I won the lottery, I would
overdose. That’s the thing about being
an addict, you want to do the drugs. The
battle is not to do it.
Part of what keeps people clean is the lack of resources to
do drugs. If you were rich, you would be
eccentric. If you were rich, the consequences
don’t come down. If I popped up rich
right now, not having to worry about going to jail, being sick or what my
significant other thought, I would just buy a new girlfriend. A lot of what it is about an addict is
whether or not you are socially acceptable, society’s perception.
How do you feel?
Hopeful, determined.
Really, just full of wonder because there is a lot that I didn’t notice
opening out around me right now. It’s weird and I know that striving to achieve
society’s perception of social acceptability is a short path to relapse. Black Organic supports Mr. Brown’s efforts to live well and achieve his goals. Mr. Brown’s first novella Needs is on sale now. You may also find Mr. Brown in video. The book is an awesome read; shocking, disturbing and heart rending. Mr. Brown takes you deep into the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, a “view from the gutter looking up through the grates” - Mr. Brown. The book is also a learning experience. Readers will never look at the streets of Baltimore the same way again.
