Moses’ First Experience with the Drug Epidemic
Moses: ….it was about 1988, 1989, my mom’s aunt, we went to see her, she lived two houses down from my grandmother, it’s my grandmother’s sister, she’s sweating profusely and she told my mom that she was going to die. She’s like, “Maybe I’m going to die tonight.” She didn’t want to go to the hospital, because she was afraid she was going to get arrested, and she had a son that had down syndrome. But she had shot up and I don’t know if it was a bad batch of heroin, later on that night she died. She died and my mom told me the next day. But that was my first experience with the drug epidemic. It hit our family hard, it hit both sides of my family.
The First Time Moses Saw a Relative Using Drugs
Moses: About the first time I ever saw anybody using was my Uncle Harold, he was shooting up heroin in my grandma’s basement after his wife left him for heroin, because he was using heroin. But I didn’t understand, I was about six years old.
Yeah, I was six or seven. I looked into the basement where we used to live, I was being a nosy little kid, I looked into the basement and I saw him put the needle in his arm. My grandma just so happen to come out at the same time from the house and asked if I saw my Uncle Harold. So me trying to protect my Uncle Harold, because I knew he was doing something that in my mind he wasn’t supposed to do, I told my grandma, “He’s downstairs putting a bandaid on his arm.” So my grandma freaked out, she’s like, “What?” Because I didn’t know, I was a little kid. So she goes down there, tears into him, he’s “I’m sorry. I got this disease.”
My Uncle Harold ended up one day stealing all of my toys from my grandma’s basement. But again, because he was my uncle, and I loved him to death… … I didn’t say anything about it. My dad was really upset, “He stole all your toys.” I was like, “It’s okay, he probably needed them.” Being an innocent little kid.
… He was just saying, to Puerto Ricans, everything’s a disease… So he says, “I have a disease. I’m sick.” But this was prior to anybody saying drug addiction is a disease. In our family, growing up in an Afro-Puerto Rican family, we took care of our family members that were on drugs.
From Uncle Taedo to His Grandson: Cross Generational Deaths
Moses: So just like my Uncle Tadeo just died. In fact, I’ve got a story to tell you about his grandson, to show you how this is generational, the impact. My Uncle Tadeo, a couple years ago, he was killed by one of my cousins in Florida. He was a heroin addict since he was 15 years old, he died when he was 42.
When he lived here in Philadelphia, at 15 he started using heroin. His kids in turn, his kids don’t use drugs, stay away from drugs, they still live in the same neighborhood as they did when their father was alive and they were born, on Swanson and Somerset. Last week, his grandson was killed…. … Kid was 18 years old and he suffered from generational, I call it generational trauma, because of the things that were happening in their neighborhood. Now there’s a bunch of other little kids left behind, my little cousin that just died, they range from the age of 16 all the way down to seven. Now all these kids are traumatized by the death of this older cousin…
But my Uncle Tadeo didn’t have any resources as a kid, he didn’t have any resources as an adult. The resource he had was getting put in jail and them making him go cold turkey, and he would come right back out and be good for about two weeks, and then get right back into the loop… … Incarcerated on and off from the time he was 15 until he died, he was 32.
Paul: Did he ever go to rehab?
Moses: He did. Funny story, my Uncle Marco… he has a rehab [center].
But he [Marco] was a heroin addict and he was a coke dealer. Someone set him up, shot him 38 times, he survived, turned his life around. Opened up a drug rehab, but it was faith based, so he had a lot of people that are forced to change while they were there. But then would leave and they would end up back in the same place two years down the road. My Uncle Tadeo went through my uncle’s drug rehab, and he was in and out of it until he died. So I’m not too big on faith based drug rehabs, because they don’t base it around mental health, they base it around faith.
….And I saw the world, came back, so my whole view on the world is totally different. I try to get these kids to see that, but when you’re stuck in a bubble … with Plato in the cave, that’s the type of life they live. They’re looking at a wall, that’s all they see, so they don’t know what’s behind them. So to me, it really hurt me because it was generational. His grandfather was killed, his father was a drug dealer, and he gets killed. It hurt me to the core, because I’m looking at this kid and he’s just a year older than my son. I’m telling my son, “Your cousin got killed.” My son’s looking at me like, “What are you talking about? What do you mean he got killed?”
So it hurts me because it’s my blood, but it also hurts me because it’s just a kid that didn’t get a chance to live. He had no chance at anything in the condition that he was in. When I say condition, I mean like his stance in the world or in society, he just didn’t stand a chance.
The School System’s Role in the Death of Moses’ Nephew
Moses: …my nephew. He died, I don’t know if he was selling drugs, I think they were fighting over turf.
My kids, in fact, my kids just met this cousin[Moses’ nephew]like maybe a month ago, so they were pretty distraught about it. The way I feel, I’m hurt, because he was a kid. He just turned 18, had his whole life ahead of him, but at the same time, I feel like he was set up to fail. He was set up to fail. The schools that he went to, below any standard that you can imagine.
The school, on every corner of the school there’s pockets of drug dealers. All around the school there’s people using. They can’t use in their homes, because most of them are homeless. So they go into this neighborhood, this is right off of Cambria, they go into this neighborhood and there’s people there high on the corners, high on the streets, and the kids are going to school. But a lot of these people there is their family members. But the schools, they’re not where they need to be. To me, the schools in particular, if the schools are not doing well, the neighborhood’s not going to do well.
This affected them to the point where the only thing they know and the only thing they see is what’s in front of them. I’m just giving you the psychology of it all. What they see and what they have is all they’re going to ever have, so they’re going to fight for what they have tooth and nail, even if it means that they’re going to die. I didn’t even think about prohibition and what my cousin was fighting for that got him killed. But think about the way it hurt me, the reason it hurt me is because I knew that there was no other choice for him. A lot of these kids, there is no other choice for them.
Moses Leaving North Philadelphia to Join the Army
Moses: Me, I got out, because I said, “I’m leaving.” My parents didn’t want me to leave, I was like, “I’m leaving. I’m going somewhere else.”… …. My path was literally I wanted to get out, I had to get … I was a troubled teenager, I was always getting into trouble, always getting into fights. So one day my mom told me, she was like, “You’re going to end up in jail or you’re going to end up dead. You need to figure it out.” My parents didn’t really push college, because we’re poor. Nobody pushed college. Everybody was like, “If you can’t make it, you don’t got no money. You got to get a job or you got to go to the Army.” I chose the Army and I left.
Moses’ Father Joining the Police Force
Moses: So this one sergeant working in narcotics got into a fight with my father, my father was pretty new to the [police] force, he was on the force a year or two. Got into a fight with my father, they pulled them apart, the guy gets loose and beats up my mom. My mom, mind you, had a mouth full of braces. The next day, she had the whole inside of her mouth was cut open, she had bruises on her face, bruises all over her body. So two narcotics’ officers come to my house, tell my father, “We want to push this under the rug, what can we do? Because the sergeant was going to retire in a year, we don’t want to mess up his career.”
He was like, “No. We’re going to press charges.” So the narcotics’ officers put drugs in my dad’s car. Set him up. He almost won the case, but because he was broke and he’s black and he became poor, never got a job again. My father has been without work, legitimate work since 1996.
Ruined his life. I went to become a police officer a few years back, and my father’s information popped up… … I was like, “That’s my dad.” They were like, “You’ve got to go talk to this guy.” I had to go talk to Internal Affairs.
Paul: What happened?
Moses: I didn’t become a cop. But that’s the way it works. That’s another thing I want to fix.