Separate, Unequal and Overlooked [usnews.com]

CHICAGO – AS BEST AS HE can recall, the first time Daniel James used heroin was in 2009 or 2010, when he was in his late 30s. It was shortly after he'd been released from prison for the second or third time, resettling not far from West Garfield Park, the hardscrabble neighborhood where he grew up.

A high school dropout scraping by as a part-time forklift operator, James was partial to smoking pot or sniffing cocaine in his free time, hoping to numb a lifetime of pain. He'd been sexually abused by his father, who later killed himself, and his unstable mother soothed her demons with crack cocaine. There was rejection, depression and almost as many years spent incarcerated as on the outside.

In West Garfield Park, a once vibrant African-American community crippled in the violence and destruction unleashed after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, opportunities to get a quality education, a decent-paying job or away for good are rarer than hen's teeth. Mind-altering substances, however – from booze to the harder, illegal stuff that can instantly replace misery with euphoria – are as common as the boarded-up businesses along nearby West Chicago Avenue.