80s Drug Epidemic

The Beginning

Fun Fact: During the 80s Drug Epidemic San Francisco was one of the cities with the highest crack index

• "Everybody was trying it and trying to figure out what the hype was about it, so a lot of people got involved in it" - from the interview

Interviewee

• Name: Telisha Molina
• DOB: 12/22/1981
• From: San Francisco, CA
• Has second hand experience of the 80s drug epidemic from seeing those around her affected by it
• Has worked at a community courthouse that dealt with a lot of people on drugs

Molina's Neighborhood

The place where Molina saw most of those affected by the epidemic. "I'm pretty sure every family had at least one family member that was on drugs."

The Middle of the Drug Epidemic

"What's Going On?"

• "You can’t walk a block and not see somebody that’s possibly addicted to a drug of some sort(Molina 2018)"
• There was great accessibility to crack and more drugs = more crime (Pearson)

The Tenderloin

Home to most of the city's drug use that's near the city's financial district that was and still is overrun with drugs, crime and prostitution.

The Epidemic Hits Home

Interviewee's Story

• She has an aunt who was very heavily using, she did as she pleased, mistreated her mother, and abandoned her kids. This is only one of many examples of what happened to families during the crack epidemic
• High School friends are now strung out and on the streets

What The Epidemic Did To Her Family

• her mother encouraged her father to try the drugs
• they were both still functioning normally
• "as a young child you don't know exactly what’s going on, but you know that there’s something different and that there is something different going on in the household" (Molina 2018).
• the drugs did cause more altercations and the two ended up getting a divorce

The Aftermath

After the 80s, people were either still using, recovering, fighting another addiction and/or their kids had been affected

Today's Opioid Crisis

Rebirth of the 80s Drug Era?

It seems as if opioids is today's crack because of the fact that opioids are the new epidemic and largely affecting people (Horn,Pack,Trestman)

Works Cited

• Molina, Telisha. Personal Interview. 29 October 2018
• Pearson-Nelson, Benjamin. Inter -City Variation in Homicide Trends: The Diffusion of the Homicide Epidemic of the Late 1980s and the Early 1990s. ProQuest, http://proxyhu.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/304950085?accountid=11490.
• Horn, K., Pack, R., Trestman, R., & Lawson, G. Almost Everything We Need to Better Serve Children of the Opioid Crisis We Learned in the 80s and 90s. Frontiers in Public Health. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2018.00289