Philadelphia crack

New policies were set in motion— policies that curbed the importation of Turkish heroin, established drug testing for returning GIs, and created a network of methadone clinics to treat addicts. Increased federal enforcement and negotiations with other nations reduced the availability of heroin. How prevalent was heroin addiction in Mantua? We learn the following snippets of information from newspaper accounts. In , Philadelphia was home to an estimated 10, heroin addicts.

Gosnell, treated them with methadone. Crack was devastatingly addictive. And the behavior of crack addicts was volatile, desperate, and often violent. The crack phenomenon destroyed lives, disrupted families, and undercut traditional values. The hardest-hit cities were in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic 1 , specifically the tinderbox areas of concentrated poverty, high unemployment, and easily available guns.

Crack cocaine reached epidemic proportions in Philadelphia between and , a period that saw some dealers indicted by federal, state, and local authorities. Police Commissioner Willie L. A neighborhood in decline, Mantua was a microcosm of the national crack epidemic. Though these reports were for the most part factually accurate in areas where crack was prevalent, they had a harmful racial effect of reinforcing negative stereotypes of poor African American males as inherently dangerous and crack addicts as beyond redemption.

Over time, as crack took hold in Mantua, yet another blow to the fictive kinship networks of old heads took place: the distancing of older African Americans from younger generations in the neighborhood.

They sold large quantities of drugs at a discount to mid-level dealers aged seventeen to late-twenties. The Colombia-to-New York City connection was likely the most important point of origin. Following the lead of the Dominican drug peddlers, crack gangs began to form along ethnic lines in Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens, and other areas of the city.

By late , only New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, major ports of entry, were disrupted by the crack epidemic. These loosely organized gangs—previously outlawed in Jamaica—operated in North, South, and West Philadelphia, where they marketed crack and defended their turf violently; indeed, the Philadelphia police attributed some 30 killings between and to Jamaicans.

The drug hierarchy in North Philadelphia resembled the structure of narcotics trafficking in Mantua and other West Philadelphia neighborhoods. Taiwan was the major international supplier of vials, with a retail price on U. Crack played a prominent role in the spiking national homicide rate between and , with drive-by shootings committed by rival drug gangs becoming a staple of city streets.

And a staggering number of the perpetrators and victims were teenagers the adolescent homicide rate doubled in these years.

While preppy, un-streetwise University of Pennsylvania students were especially vulnerable targets for late-night teen marauders, in two cases fatally, most crack-era violence was black-on-black crime. The street culture he described exhibited the same characteristics in most poor African American neighborhoods west of the Schuylkill River.

The wide "crack" in the Liberty Bell is actually the repair job! Look carefully and you'll see over 40 drill bit marks in that wide "crack".

But, the repair was not successful. The Public Ledger newspaper reported that the repair failed when another fissure developed. This second crack, running from the abbreviation for "Philadelphia" up through the word "Liberty", silenced the bell forever.

No one living today has heard the bell ring freely with its clapper, but computer modeling provides some clues into the sound of the Liberty Bell. Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly Isaac Norris chose this inscription for the State House bell in , possibly to commemorate the 50th anniversary of William Penn's Charter of Privileges which granted religious liberties and political self-government to the people of Pennsylvania.

The inscription of liberty on the State House bell now known as the Liberty Bell went unnoticed during the Revolutionary War. After the war, abolitionists seeking to end slavery in America were inspired by the bell's message. The Meaning The State House bell became a herald of liberty in the 19th century. The Anti-Slavery Record, an abolitionist publication, first referred to the bell as the Liberty Bell in , but that name was not widely adopted until years later.

Millions of Americans became familiar with the bell in popular culture through George Lippard's fictional story "Ring, Grandfather, Ring", when the bell came to symbolize pride in a new nation.

Beginning in the late s, the Liberty Bell traveled across the country for display at expositions and fairs, stopping in towns small and large along the way. For a nation recovering from wounds of the Civil War, the bell served to remind Americans of a time when they fought together for independence.

Pennsylvania suffragists commissioned a replica of the Liberty Bell. Their "Justice Bell" traveled across Pennsylvania in to encourage support for women's voting rights legislation. It then sat chained in silence until the passage of the 19th Amendment in After the British invasion of Philadelphia, the bell was hidden in a church until it could be safely returned to the State House.

So when did the Liberty Bell get its famous crack? According to one of many stories, it first cracked back in , during the visit of the Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette. Another story holds that it fractured later that year, while tolling to signal a fire. One of the most popular legends claims that the bell cracked during the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall in , but newspaper accounts of the funeral do not mention such an incident. Though attempts were made to repair an existing fracture in the bell for the occasion, and the bell reportedly tolled loud and clear at first, it subsequently cracked beyond repair and had to be taken out of service.