ALIQUIPPA, Pa. (AP) - Amid the bleak, run-down brick buildings, drug dealers drive around in shiny sport utility vehicles, Cadillacs and convertibles, the sun glinting off their chrome-plated spinning hubs.
Drugs and money are exchanged on street corners. Addicts crash in crack houses, some of them right downtown. Gunfights erupt between drug dealers jealously guarding their territory. Rival gangs — the L’s and the G’s — deal the crack that flows into this riverfront town from New Jersey, New York, Detroit and Washington.
In Rust Belt cities like Aliquippa, drugs moved in after steel moved out.
In 10 of 14 Rust Belt towns in six states surveyed by the Associated Press, all with populations of 30,000 or less, drug-related arrests more than doubled in the past 15 to 20 years, even as the number of residents declined.
The closing of the mills and factories in the industrial Midwest and the layoffs of thousands of workers created “a niche in the economy for drug dealing,” said Rick Matthews, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis. “The immediate response is, ’I can make a lot more money swinging crack than working at Wal-Mart.’ ”
Aliquippa, about 30 miles from Pittsburgh, was once a steel-making powerhouse. The big Jones & Laughlin Steel Co. mill was practically the only game in town, employing more than 10,000 people at its peak in the late 1960s and early ’70s, after which it went into a long, painful slide. By the late 1980s, LTV Steel Mining Co., which had taken over the mill, had all but closed the plant. It now stands empty.
Aliquippa’s population is now down to 11,000, half of what it was in 1970, and law-enforcement officials estimate drug dealers did $30 million in business in Beaver County in 2006, with this woeful city at the center of the trade.
Today in Aliquippa, the seven-mile riverfront stretch where the steel mill operated is desolate. A drywall factory and a trucking company are among the few businesses in town. A $200 million ethanol plant is coming, but will provide only about 70 full-time jobs. More than 21 percent of Aliquippa residents live in poverty, almost double the national rate.
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