Ambush on Path to Recovery
It was late in the evening when Michael Key landed on skid row in downtown Los Angeles. He had just been booted from a South Los Angeles drug program for getting high and was on his way to a detox center on Crocker Street when he passed a tent pitched on a grimy sidewalk where several people were doing drugs.
Key was invited in and, after a couple of hits of marijuana laced with crack cocaine, rehab seemed less urgent. He spent the night craving more dope.
"I was literally at my wits' end," Key recalled. "You talk in terms of hitting bottom, but addicts like to say that every bottom has a trap door."
Key managed to get clean eventually. But his long battle to kick his habit while living on skid row is depressingly familiar to recovery experts, who know that the concentration of their own programs has sown the seeds of temptation on every corner.
Skid row has the city's biggest concentration of drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, with space for more than 1,400 resident clients. But more drug arrests are made in the 50 square blocks of this squalid patch than anywhere else in the city. It is a mecca for dealers from all over the region, many of them gang members who set up temporary abode in nearby hotels and establish drug-selling turf.
They go to skid row because the area has a reputation as a place where anything goes and because of the ready-made market. Nearly 10,000 people live on the streets or in emergency shelters, hotels and efficiency apartments on skid row, and as many as 40% are estimated to be substance abusers.
Skid row pushers and their customers form a combustible mix, spawning a cycle of lawlessness and desperation that no one quite knows how to stop.
It is a drug bazaar of temptations that addicts who are financially better off can avoid by going to rehab centers in less challenging surroundings.
"With all of the narcotics sales in skid row, it strikes me as nearly impossible to get clean. The expression I hear is that the wolves are not at the door, they're in the living room," said Los Angeles Police Capt. Andy Smith, who commands the Central Division downtown.
City officials want services more evenly dispersed throughout the county, but no communities have stepped forward to serve as sites for rehab centers.
With the support of police and the Los Angeles city attorney's office, state Sen. Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles), who represents the skid row area, is working on legislation that would increase penalties for drug sales within 1,000 feet of a treatment facility or homeless shelter.
- Taking It to the Streets - Anti-AIDS program deserves support from the county board Mar 26, 1991
- Near Downtown's Glitter Lies a Civic Problem Aug 24, 2005
- The Lesson on Skid Row Feb 15, 1989
