The enemies in East Baltimore, historically one of the most violent stretches of city territory, are poverty, ignorance, addictions and crime. It's the lack of jobs and opportunity, the limited academic achievements of children, the chronic use of heroin and cocaine by three generations of adults, the dysfunction of families with males with histories of incarceration.
Community leaders should ask what, besides serving as local redevelopment authority, Hopkins has been doing to improve the lives of its most distressed neighbors. We have the leading hospital and public health school in the world in the midst one of the most violent and drug-addicted sections of urban America. Let Hopkins and the Bloomberg faculty and staff launch the medical equivalent of the war on drugs, with treatment on demand, multiple therapies and holistic recovery. Let Bloomberg show the world that a medical war can work where the law enforcement one failed.
Now that would be something to think about.
