Los Angeles

Drug rehabs play an essential role in helping those struggling with substance abuse. As is accurate of many significant centers in the U.S., dependency addiction has been a frequent struggle within Los Angeles for decades. The city’s vicinity to the Mexican boundary may be partially condemned, as it makes LA a prime neighborhood for Central and South American drug traffickers to convey and administer prohibited drug use.

The crack cocaine pandemic that mopped the nation in the 1980s destroyed innumerable lives and relationships across the U.S. The epidemic is considered to have begun in South Central Los Angeles, where conveyed Colombian cocaine was transformed to crack and exchanged in poverty-stricken, black neighborhoods. Evidence of the drug’s devastation is still plausible in those neighborhoods currently.

In low-income communities of South Los Angeles, the permanent lure of the cheap, potent drug ‘has shifted the community’s architecture,’ in the words of Los Angeles Police Department Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger. “The crack pandemic pressed through some lives like a wildfire and fired slowly through others over the decades. Crack drove fathers to jail, lured mothers into the highways, and left children to support themselves in neighborhoods swarming with desperation and frustration. Their families and neighborhoods were left burned and, in many cases, still fuming.”