Film Screening: Exploring the Impact of Methadone on Communities of Color
Next week!
Join “Swallow This” Directors in a fascinating conversation about how methadone has impacted communities of color like Harlem and East Harlem. The free film screening and discussion with the directors will be on Saturday, October 14th at 2:00 PM. All welcome.
COVID-19 changed everything. It opened up the closed world of methadone clinics across the U.S. For decades, clinics resisted any fundamental reforms to onerous regulations. The pandemic forced opioid treatment programs (OTPs) to offer 14 or 28 day take-home bottles of medicine to all patients. Many patients experienced a liberation they never knew was possible. Almost over night, the six-day a week drudgery of standing in line to get medicated was gone and lives no longer revolved around traveling to an OTP at 4am.
It was FREEDOM.
Swallow THIS: A Documentary About Methadone and COVID-19 uncovers what happened in opioid treatment programs during the pandemic.
Join the directors and The Greater Harlem Coalition in a free screening and conversation with the directors on Saturday, October 14th, at 2:00 PM in the Lakeview Apartments’s Community Room.
Lakeview Apartments 4 East 107th Street New York, NY 10029
In bracingly honest interviews with patients and clinic staff across the country, directors Marilena Marchetti and Helen Redmond learned that the new take-homes policy was adopted inconsistently and many OTPs had returned to daily, in-person dosing.
Methadone clinics were created in the 1970s during the Nixon presidency and were designed to control, surveil, and punish Black and brown patients. Now is the time to shut down these apartheid, carceral facilities and allow methadone to be picked up at the pharmacy. It is time to free people who take methadone. Swallow THIS is a call to action to abolish methadone clinics.
Marchetti and Redmond are co-directors of Liquid Handcuffs: A Documentary to Free Methadone.
Runtime: 27 mins.
Harlem of The West
Harlem of the West was in San Francisco, apparently:
They were just one of the many families displaced by San Francisco’s “urban renewal” program of the 1960s and 70s, in which entire blocks in predominantly Black neighborhoods were seized and demolished. The destruction was widespread: thousands of Black families lost their homes, Victorian walk-ups were replaced with high-rise housing projects, business owners lost their livelihoods and a cultural hub, commonly dubbed the “Harlem of the west”, was wiped out. Other marginalized groups, including Japanese Americans, also saw their neighborhoods razed.
San Francisco’s Black population peaked in 1970, at just over 13% of the city’s total population. Since then, it’s been in steady decline. In 2021, the city was just 5.7% Black. Many attribute this to the fallout of urban renewal, which James Lance Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of San Francisco who also sits on the city’s African American reparations advisory committee, described as “the single greatest injury inflicted on Black San Franciscans”.
