In the early 2000s, Juan Cortez was living in New York City and battling a years-long addiction to drugs, when he noticed a crowd of people standing outside a building on East 140th Street in the Bronx. Recognizing the group as fellow users, he approached and asked what was inside the building. Cortez, who was in his late 20s, with a lean build and ever-present Yankees hat on his shaved head, was told it was a recovery program. Part of the treatment involved getting acupuncture every morning.
At Lincoln Hospital’s Recovery Center, Cortez eventually succeeded in overcoming his addiction, using a combination of acupuncture and other therapies. He went on to become a trained acupuncturist and is now manager of holistic services at New York Harm Reduction Educators, a nonprofit social-service organization that provides walk-in and mobile holistic services to the city’s houseless or marginalized residents.
“When you think about acupuncture, massage therapy, Reiki, yoga, sound therapy, you think about a ‘spa day,’ you think about people that have money who are able to attain those services,” Cortez says. “Not poor people in the projects.”
While there remains ongoing scientific debate as to the efficacy of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine in treating addiction, some practitioners believe it has myriad benefits, particularly in helping with anxiety, inflammation, and stress. But the story of how acupuncture came to be a widespread treatment in the United States—sometimes associated most commonly with privilege—begins nearly 50 years ago, in New York’s South Bronx, with a subversive alliance of Black and brown activists.
On November 10, 1970, more than two dozen members of the Puerto Rican activist group Young Lords, alongside members of the Black Panther Party, occupied the sixth floor of Lincoln Hospital, in the South Bronx. With heroin devastating Harlem and the South Bronx, the protestors demanded a long-promised drug treatment program, staffed by former users, that would “serve the community effectively and be run by the community.”
The following day, the People’s Program was informally established, and within hours, 200 people had formed a line outside the building seeking methadone, an opioid that helps ease the symptoms of heroin withdrawal. After days of tense negotiations between the Young Lords and hospital administrators, the drug detoxification program was granted funding and recognition. Staffed largely by volunteers, the People’s Program operated out of Lincoln Hospital’s auditorium, meagerly furnished with about 40 chairs, 20 tables, and a few cubicle curtains for privacy. The walls were decorated with posters of Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Chairman Mao. It looked less like a clinic than a community center for young leftists—which, in a way, it was.
Cleo Silvers was then a 20-year-old community mental health worker at Lincoln Hospital and former organizer with VISTA, or Volunteers in Service to America. She was also co-chair of the activist group Health Revolutionary Unity Movement and a member of the Black Panther Party’s Harlem chapter. “In the Constitution, you are supposed to have the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Silvers says. “But you cannot have life if you don’t have health.”
While Black Panthers are today commonly associated with armed protest and the rhetoric of self-defense, the party was just as invested in community outreach and wellness. “It’s at the core of demands for people who are disenfranchised, who are poor, who don’t have access to the possibility of living a good life because they are subject to all of these illnesses that can be prevented,” Silvers says. She conducted neighborhood health surveys, door-to-door sickle cell anemia testing, and helped to initiate a ban on lead-based paint in residential buildings. She later joined the Young Lords, supported the occupation of Lincoln Hospital, and assisted with the detox program.
“Healthcare was very difficult for poor people to get,” says Tolbert Small, who worked as a physician for the Black Panthers in the 1970s. “The people who went on to make radical changes in our society felt that healthcare, food, and education were all important.”
Black and brown Americans historically have received substandard health services compared with white Americans, including for cancer, HIV, prenatal, and preventive care. Patients of color have also been under-treated for pain symptoms compared to white patients. Bias and unequal access to healthcare continue to contribute to higher rates of illness, including COVID-19, in Black and brown communities.
“They were seeing what was happening in their community—the social injustice, the lack of medical care, the lack of resources,” says Cortez. “While other communities were thriving, the community of the South Bronx and other poor communities around the country were deteriorating, and there was nothing being invested in these communities, nothing being invested for the people. So they did what they had to do for the people.”
In tandem with its drug-addiction treatment, the People’s Program held political education classes and distributed illustrated posters and newsletters featuring a clenched fist destroying a syringe, or a skull-and-crossbones wearing an Uncle Sam hat. They portrayed heroin as a form of chemical warfare that pacified Black and brown resistance against the substandard conditions they were living in, and the social injustices they routinely faced.
The activists reported that police themselves sometimes brought heroin into Harlem and the Bronx. Once, Silvers says, she was out selling Black Panther newspapers and started chatting with two teenage boys who were nodding off from the effects of heroin. She says that a police officer drove up, parked nearby, and began selling heroin out of the squad car. These illicit deals were documented by the Knapp Commission, which investigated corruption in the NYPD.
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