Many American institutions have beclowned themselves in the last 10 years — too many to list. To count the right-leaning institutions that have not succumbed to Trumpian populism takes only one hand. But the decline of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has been particularly galling because, compared to the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College or the Claremont Institute, it had farther to fall.
In the pre-Trump era, the paper had some integrity. While the board was broadly aligned with the Republican Party, its editorials didn’t hesitate to differ with Republicans on major questions.
In the Trump era, the Journal has become, if not Pravda, then something like the Nation. The Nation reliably whitewashed the sins of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes because it regarded anti-communism as a greater threat to the world than communism itself. Similarly, The Wall Street Journal has gradually become a parody of itself on the grounds that Democrats are always and forever the greatest threat to the country.
With that guiding principle, there is simply no Republican, no matter how deranged or unfit, whom the Journal will not prefer to a Democratic opponent. In 2022, the Journal advised its Arizona readers to choose Kari Lake for governor despite the fact that Lake had called for the 2020 election to be decertified, denounced mask-wearing and encouraged the use of hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic, promised to criminally pursue journalists who “dupe the public,” and pronounced the nation “rotten to the core” when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago. The Journal didn’t mention most of that in its endorsement, claiming, hilariously, that Arizona’s election was primarily about school choice.
This week, commenting on the drone kerfuffle, the Journal intoned that it couldn’t be sure what people were seeing — but it was certain that the whole thing could be attributed to the erosion of trust in government.
Noting that “non-cranks” have reported seeing things that move strangely in the dark, the Journal quoted Jon Bramnick, a GOP state senator from New Jersey, who said, “It must be something going on that they can’t tell us because they are so fearful of what the public’s gonna do when they hear what the drones are doing.”
You might think the paper would rebuke this state senator for getting out over his skis and encouraging conspiratorial thinking, but no, the editorial notes that “This is how deep the suspicion runs. And when that happens, conspiracy theories fill the air as much as drones do.”
And guess who’s responsible for this erosion of trust?
Spy balloons, drones, FEMA and more
The Biden administration has squandered its credibility to the point that it’s rational not to believe what it says. Remember the Chinese spy balloon that traveled across the continental U.S.? The administration downplayed its importance while it was courting better relations with Beijing, only to shoot it down over the Atlantic Ocean.
Whoa. If you want to cite relations with Beijing as a source of mistrust, the Trump administration offers far more dire examples. While he was chasing a “great trade agreement” with Xi Jinping (the terms of which were never honored, by the way), Donald Trump repeatedly lied about and minimized the risk of COVID-19, which had far more serious consequences for Americans’ lives than waiting until the big spy balloon was over the ocean before shooting it down.
Nor did the Journal see fit to mention that Trump is, right on schedule and very on-brand, stoking conspiracies of government malfeasance about the drones. He popped off: “Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge. I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”
This is not to excuse President Joe Biden’s betrayal of trust in repeatedly promising that he would not pardon his son and then doing so, or misleading the public about the degree of his physical and mental decline. But for the Journal to look at the world of 2024 and conclude that the erosion of trust in government is due to Biden without ever once mentioning that Trump and his minions are the most prolific bilge-spillers imaginable, is to be completely without scruple. Just in the last few weeks of the campaign, Trump falsely alleged that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was purposely withholding hurricane assistance in order to funnel funds to illegal immigrants, that the Congo was emptying its prisons to send convicts to the United States and that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trust is crucial to the successful functioning of society. Many social science studies have found that nations with high trust have less corruption and greater prosperity than those with low trust. It makes sense. If you believe that most people are untrustworthy, you will rely only on those within your own family or tribe and be less likely to engage with outsiders.
The drone affair is fluff and will doubtless be forgotten in a month if not sooner. But the spectacle of the Journal chastising the Biden administration without a solitary word about Trump and his enablers (in whose ranks they stand) is breath-taking.
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the “Beg to Differ” podcast.
DEAR ABBY: When my son got married in 2003, we had many good times with him and his wife. Things have changed now that we have cellphones. It’s nearly impossible to have a relationship with her because when they come to our home, she’s always on her phone! My son talks to his dad, and I’m left sitting there wondering what I should do.
Would you say anything to your daughter-in-law about this? She immediately gets on the phone when she arrives and stays on it most of the time. It wasn’t like this when cellphones weren’t as prolific. It hurts my feelings that she comes all the way to my house only to socialize with her Facebook friends and not us, because we rarely see them.
Should I speak up? I don’t want to start trouble and I don’t want to isolate them. I love them, but I think it’s rude that she’s on her phone the whole time they’re here. It makes me feel like I’m not good enough for her to talk to me. I have two other daughters-in-law who may get on their phones occasionally, but not like this one. — OFF THE PHONE IN KENTUCKY
DEAR OFF: Of course what your daughter-in-law is doing is rude. It is also insensitive. It won’t stop unless you and your husband say something. When you do, do not couch your message in terms of being “rude.” Instead, tell her it hurts your feelings and gives you the impression that she doesn’t value your company as much as you do hers. It also impedes high-quality visiting. If you express it this way, it may make her less defensive, because it is the truth.
DEAR ABBY: My fiance and I have been together for many years. I have never really liked his mother — for valid reasons. She belittles and is disrespectful to her son. The last straw was when she came by two months ago and made a derogatory comment about him to me. (He was not present.) It was false, and I called her out on it. She, of course, had no rebuttal. She is negative even in her personal life and often lies.
I talked to my fiance about this, and he does address the issues with her, but not in a way that makes her understand she must either respect him or risk no longer having a relationship with him. She uses others, is two-faced and rarely bathes. I am considering breaking off our engagement at this point. I’m tired of this woman’s lack of respect. Should I walk away from this relationship? — DISGUSTED AND APPALLED IN THE EAST
DEAR DISGUSTED: If your tolerance level has reached its limit, you may have to walk away. However, I do not think you should give your fiance an ultimatum in which he must decide between you and his mother. As obnoxious and odiferous as she is, she is still his mother. I do think you should suggest that he talk with a licensed psychotherapist about his relationship with her. If it is as unhealthy as you have described, he might then, on his own, decide to distance himself from her.
Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.
Abby shares more than 100 of her favorite recipes in two booklets: “Abby’s Favorite Recipes” and “More Favorite Recipes by Dear Abby.” Send your name and mailing address, plus check or money order for $16 (U.S. funds), to: Dear Abby, Cookbooklet Set, P.O. Box 447, Mount Morris, IL 61054-0447. (Shipping and handling are included in the price.)
One of the Bears’ biggest problems in their 30-12 loss to the Vikings on Monday was their pass protection, and two starting offensive linemen have been out with injuries this week.
The Bears will give a final status on left tackle Braxton Jones (concussion) and left guard Teven Jenkins (calf) after their walk-through Friday. If Jones is out again, the team will have to start backup Larry Borom or rookie Kiran Amegadjie.
The Bears go into the game on an eight-game losing streak, and if they fall again, they’ll stand alone with a nine-game losing streak second in franchise history only to their 14-game losing streak spanning the 2022 and ’23 seasons.
The Lions, meanwhile, are tied with the Eagles and Vikings for first place in the NFC at 12-2. The Lions beat the Bears 23-20 on Thanksgiving in the game that proved to be the last straw for former coach Matt Eberflus.
The top executive of a food and beverage concessionaire at O’Hare and Midway airports — whose business operations there are regulated by City Hall — contributed $1,000 to Mayor Brandon Johnson’s campaign fund, elections records show.
But mayoral aides won’t discuss whether the contribution from Hyde Park Hospitality CEO Marc Brooks to Friends of Brandon Johnson in August 2023 several months after the new mayor was sworn in violates an executive order that bans city contractors from giving to a mayor’s campaign and, if so, what consequences the Chicago company might face.
Signed in 2011 as then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office, the ethics order that’s still on the books prohibits “city contractors, owners of city contractors, spouses or domestic partners of owners of city contractors, subcontractors to a city contractor on a city contract, owners of subcontractors to a city contractor on a city contract, and spouses or domestic partners of owners of subcontractors to a city contractor on a city contract from making contributions of any amount to the mayor.”
That prohibition is mentioned in written concessions agreements still in effect governing Hyde Park Hospitality’s airport business, including one signed in 2018 in which City Hall allows Hyde Park Hospitality to serve as event caterer for the city-owned Hilton Chicago O’Hare Airport hotel, records show.
The agreement says neither Hyde Park Hospitality nor “any person or entity who directly or indirectly has an ownership or beneficial interest” in the company “of more than 7.5%” can make a contribution “of any amount to the Mayor of the City of Chicago . . . or to his or her political fundraising committee.”
Part of a 2018 concessions agreement between Hyde Park Hospitality and City Hall.
Chicago Department of Aviation
The concessions deal, signed by Emanuel not long before he left office, says the contribution ban is in effect while “this agreement or any other contract” between the firm and city “is executory,” and “during any period while an extension of this agreement or any other contract is being sought or negotiated.”
The concessions agreement says a violation of this executive order “constitutes a breach and default” that “entitles the city to all remedies,” including “termination for default.”
Hyde Park Hospitality is currently involved in several other concessions arrangements at the airports, including for a Chick-fil-A at O’Hare and The Club MDW at Midway.
“Additionally, Hyde Park Hospitality is a part of a joint venture that plans to open Bronzeville Bar & Bites in Terminal 5” in 2025, says a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Aviation, the arm of City Hall that operates the airports. “The lease was approved by City Council in July 2024.”
The company is also “part of the joint venture that operates the mobile ordering platform at O’Hare, called Grab,” the spokesman says, adding that each agreement was “awarded following a competitive process.”
Records showing a campaign contribution from a Chicago airports concessionaire executive to Mayor Brandon Johnson’s campaign committee.
Illinois State Board of Elections
Asked about the campaign contribution, Brooks says: “We always try to be supportive of the people at the top of the helm.”
“We always adhere to the rules” and “that’d be on them if they thought it was inappropriate.”
Later, he said of a possible ethics violation: “I don’t believe this to be the case as I’m aware of other similar organizations that have donated, that being said, I’ve asked the city to return my donation.”
Brooks gave $2,500 to the campaign fund of Johnson’s predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, in 2022, and $250 in 2014 to her predecessor, Emanuel, elections records show.
Other City Hall officials wouldn’t comment either, even to say who enforces the contractor contribution ban. Officials with the city’s Board of Ethics says it’s not them.
Johnson’s campaign has had problems adhering to the rule previously, as the Chicago Sun-Times has reported.
After accepting numerous contributions from city contractors and others — money that probably shouldn’t have been accepted under city ethics rules — Johnson’s campaign fund refunded more than $50,000 late last year.
Brooks was involved in two companies that were part of a losing bid for a janitorial contract at Chicago Public Schools, which also falls under the mayor’s control but not the campaign money ban.
Johnson has refused to say whether he would ever support including the so-called sister agencies such as CPS under the same prohibition that exists for City Hall contractors.
Despite Mayor Brandon Johnson pushing to oust Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez, the two men were polite on the first day of classes in August as they stood together outside schools ringing oversized gold bells.
But as the weeks progressed, no resolution came to pass — instead, controversies piled up and the tension grew. Four months later, the pleasantries have subsided. And Johnson’s Board of Education is set to take action on Martinez on a Friday night five days before Christmas.
So why is the drawn out saga coming to a head now? And how did the process become so messy?
There’s the financial answer: The Chicago Teachers Union, the mayor’s staunch ally and former employer who vaulted him to office, wants to settle its contract negotiations with ambitious ideas that could reshape an underfunded school district — and the assurance that layoffs and furloughs won’t follow in the spring as a result.
The costs of even a modest CTU contract, plus a pension payment for non-teacher CPS employees that Martinez has refused to take on from City Hall, are still expected to cause a mid-year budget deficit. A record tax increment financing surplus is helping fill some of that gap. But without an additional solution, an estimated $140 million hole will remain, and budget cuts could come in the second half of the school year.
That’s why the mayor and CTU have pushed for a short-term, high-interest loan to make up the difference this school year, and they’ve criticized Martinez for blocking that plan without finding options other than staffing cuts.
“He (Martinez) still has a budget deficit,” said CTU President Stacy Davis Gates on Wednesday, suggesting once again that CPS would have to take out a loan. “The only thing he will close it with is layoffs and furlough days. … We need a revenue plan.”
Martinez has said it would be fiscally irresponsible to fill a budget deficit using a loan before additional funding is secured. Unable to win him over, the CTU has pushed for a resolution this month before the new 21-member partially elected board takes office in January and brings new dynamics — angering some newly elected members who feel sidelined.
That argument about financial responsibility has contributed to the answer of how this got so messy: It has turned the school system’s budget struggle into an ideological and political battleground — one pitting more conservative, business-oriented corners that have long opposed high spending and the CTU — against a progressive mayor who sees those groups as quick to adopt austerity austere measures, leaving poor families and schools vulnerable.
Ensuing missteps from the mayor’s office and his school board heightened scrutiny, and Martinez’s unprecedented rejections of Johnson’s wishes for the loan and pension payment, bucking traditional dynamics between a mayor and CPS CEO.
Even some of Johnson’s allies criticize his approach. Johnson didn’t bring in his own schools chief, hoping to show his independence from the CTU.
But by the time he decided to push out Martinez this year, Johnson had waited to act until a pressure-packed moment and invited the optics he tried to avoid: that he was taking action to land a contract for his old union.
The traditional opponents of the CTU’s progressive education movement, some of whom have criticized Johnson since he took office, have taken advantage and quickly lined up behind Martinez. They include more conservative and moderate members of the City Council and charter school and business groups.
When Johnson’s entire school board resigned in October under scrutiny and feeling rushed and nervous about being sued, the stunning move expanded the critical voices to include most of the City Council, including some progressive.
Most recently, former CPS CEOs weighed in — people who Johnson and the CTU have long fought against. They included Arne Duncan, Jesse Ruiz and Martinez’s predecessor Janice Jackson, who called the move to fire Martinez “dirty Chicago politics at its worst.”
“These shameful and drastic actions will sacrifice our future instead of investing in it,” Jackson said.
No matter how the process has played out, Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th), chair of the City Council’s education committee, said the mayor “gets to choose to do what is best for young people, period.
“Every mayor has had the right to put in that position who they wanted to. When a person expects you to do a job and you don’t do it, what do you think is supposed to happen?” she asked.
“Why is it different for [Johnson]? You all are literally doing this man the same way you did Harold Washington,” Taylor said of the mayor’s opponents.
Taylor, a longtime CPS parent activist, has at times been publicly critical of her allies in the mayor’s office and the CTU’s progressive education movement. But she has called supporters of Martinez hypocritical and questioned “where was the outrage” from those corners when CPS closed dozens of schools, dropped busing for students and didn’t properly clean schools.
The situation has left some parents bewildered and upset.
Katrina Adams, whose three daughters attend Burnside Elementary on the South Side, said she doesn’t want to see cuts, nor does she want the school district to take out a high-interest loan that will “mess up the future.”
“If you cut into positions … or some students need [help] and the only thing you’re thinking about is money, you’re not thinking about the future of the students,” Adams said. “It’s so political, and the only people that suffer are the parents and the students.”
Hendrix Skylan, a singer and songwriter known as Hendi Sky, wears a clown nose and a hat she made herself on Amtrak’s Train 41, the Floridian, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024. Skylan hopped on the train in Chicago, Ill. and is going to Orland, Fla. for a music festival. “It’s nice to be down here where it kind of is like, it shifts your perspective as like to how big the world is… It’s almost like a blip in time…You like, open your eyes and you’re in a different state and you step out for a second and you’re there and then you get back on the train and then you’re somewhere else,” Skylan said.
Illinois drivers can now update their license plate sticker from the driver’s seat.
The state’s first drive-thru DMV kiosk opened this week at the Lombard driver services facility at 837 Westmore-Meters Road, offering 24/7 access to renew registrations and licenses, and to obtain license plate stickers.
“This creates a better environment for folks who visit our office, and just adds a new level of convenience for people to fit things into their busy schedules,” Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias said ahead of Friday’s grand opening.
Other drive-thrus will eventually be launched in Chicago, Giannoulias said. More than 100 are slated to be installed statewide over the next 18 months.
A new drive-thru DMV kiosk is available in Lombard.
Provided by the Illinois Secretary of State’s office
Fifteen similar kiosks were installed inside grocery stores earlier this fall, including six in Chicago, but they’re limited to stores’ business hours.
The 24/7 drive-thru comes as part of this week’s reopening of the Lombard DMV, which relocated within the Eastgate Shopping Center. It has long been one of the state’s busiest facilities, with 134,000 vehicle transactions and 125,000 driver-related services completed last year.
It’s also the state’s latest “one-stop shop” DMV, with employees cross-trained on both driver and vehicle service, and with more payment stations for fewer lines. The first one in the Chicago area opened over the summer in Melrose Park.
The Lombard location will also host administrative hearings on suspended licenses, and is expected to launch 18 electric vehicle charging stations next year.
Appointments are required for driver services inside the building — not the drive-thru — and can be scheduled at ilsos.gov.
When he exits the White House on Jan. 20 next year, President Joe Biden will close the door on one of the most storied political careers in American history. But if he leaves without granting clemency to people who have been penalized disproportionately, especially those on federal death row, his legacy will be incomplete.
The National Urban League has long opposed the death penalty, which has proven to be wildly discriminatory in every aspect. This is true in the federal system, just as in the states.
During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden openly acknowledged the racially disparate impact of the death penalty and committed to ending it on the federal level. His Department of Justice paused executions, a welcome reprieve after the first Trump administration’s gruesome execution spree: 13 federal executions during the last six months of his presidency. The Biden DOJ also has since demonstrated restraint in pursuing new death sentences. While these have been positive developments, Biden now must go further.
As Biden’s time in the White House draws to a close, there are still 40 men on federal death row as well as thousands of others who would benefit from clemency, including thousands who received harsher penalties due to crack versus powder cocaine sentencing disparities. For those on federal death row, if the president does not grant them clemency, they remain at risk for execution under the incoming administration, even though their cases manifest all the profound flaws that inevitably mar the death penalty, including significant racial disparities.
More than half of those on federal death row — 55% — are people of color and nearly 40% are Black men. There are Black men on federal death row today who were prosecuted by almost exclusively white attorneys and convicted by all-white juries. And while the majority of homicide victims in America are Black, the people sentenced to death in federal court overwhelmingly were convicted in cases with white victims.
A ‘broken system’ at risk of executing the innocent
In addition to these indicia of racial bias, there are people on federal death row with an intellectual disability, serious mental illness, or brain damage; those who face execution though they did not personally kill anyone; and people whose convictions or death sentences were secured through the use of misleading or unreliable scientific evidence. Nearly a quarter were 21 or younger at the time of the crime, and virtually all grew up in profoundly adverse circumstances. In other words, just as we see in the states, those under federal death sentence are impaired and vulnerable individuals trapped under the weight of a broken system.
The death penalty has already ensnared hundreds of innocent defendants. Of the 200 defendants who have been exonerated of the charges that put them on death row, more than half were Black. Black Americans are seven times more likely to be falsely convicted of serious crimes compared to white Americans. As long as the death penalty remains in use, we risk executing innocent people.
In the last several months, this risk has taken a terrifyingly tangible shape. In September, Missouri executed Marcellus Williams even though concerns about his innocence were so significant that the local prosecutor sought to vacate his conviction. In October, Robert Roberson was nearly executed in Texas despite overwhelming evidence not only that he is innocent, but also that no crime occurred in his case. The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in the case of Richard Glossip, who remains on death row in Oklahoma despite the state attorney general’s admission of significant prosecutorial misconduct and attempt to grant him a new trial.
Biden is a man of faith, courage, and principle. By providing relief to those serving disproportionately long sentences and commuting federal death row, he will manifest all of those qualities. He will also secure his legacy as a champion of justice, civil rights, and racial reconciliation. I urge him to make that historic decision.
Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban Leagueandwas mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Sun-Times.
For as long as most of us can remember, Chicago has struggled with gun violence. In fact, we have not had under 400 homicides in a single year since 1965, and we remain the gun violence capital of America with more shootings than any other city.
In recent years, however, Chicago has begun to recognize gun violence as a public health problem as much as a crime problem and has begun “treating” it with preventive measures, including community violence intervention, or CVI, and proactive policing. There is still one big missing piece of the answer, however, and that is helping each other learn how to resolve conflicts safely and peacefully.
Well-to-do couples spend billions of dollars on therapy to learn how to resolve their differences. Corporations spend billions teaching college-educated adults from stable, middle-class backgrounds how to resolve conflicts and work in teams. We as a society spend little to nothing teaching individuals from difficult and challenging backgrounds to do the same.
In the last decade, a network of community violence intervention organizations in Chicago have begun to engage with “high-risk/high-promise” individuals — the ones who are most likely to shoot or be shot. Through a variety of services, including trauma treatment, life coaching and job training, we help them escape the street life and transition into the legal economy.
But, for every one person that we save, there are several more we have not reached — some as young as 10 years old. Generally, we don’t identify them early enough to intervene before they get in trouble.
By the time they arrive at our community and faith-based organization or, God forbid, our emergency room with a gunshot wound, they have suffered so much trauma that the investment required to help them heal is astronomical.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
A ‘captive audience’ in classrooms, youth sports
The disinvestment and neglect that is a root cause of our gun violence problems are costing us billions of dollars each year in direct services and lost opportunity for the thousands of young people who don’t live long enough to enjoy the blessings of life that we all take for granted.
It’s not hard to predict which children will grow up into at-risk adults. They often come from struggling families. They move around a lot as kids, shuttling between schools, homes and neighborhoods. They have repeated disciplinary infractions. They often have adult family members with challenges like drug abuse.
What would it take to bring conflict resolution into our schools? We have a captive audience of children in our classrooms filled with curiosity and hunger for love and support and peer leaders to be present in their lives By starting early, we can have so much more impact on them and on their communities.
What would it take if our youth sports programs integrated conflict resolution into athletics? Could our job training programs be tailored to include conflict resolution as one of the core skills needed to thrive in the workplace? Could our faith-based and community-based programs also make conflict resolution a priority?
There is a lot of pressure on our city, county and state to balance budgets and meet our many challenges, and we are all grateful for what our public sector partners have done in recent years to support violence prevention. But if we really want to achieve a dramatic and enduring reduction in gun violence, we should consider bringing conflict resolution training into more dimensions of our work.
Needless to say, conflict resolution alone won’t end gun violence. Sadly, we are still a society with more guns in private hands than people. Economic and racial isolation, along with decades of disinvestment, have perpetuated economic inequity. Substandard education continues to hold back whole segments of our society.
But we need a comprehensive approach to public safety that reaches people of all ages. It should include community violence intervention, more effective policing, greater investment in crime-plagued communities, and a serious strategy to stop the flow of illegal guns into our cities. But it should also include efforts to help us all get better at resolving our differences safely and peacefully.
Father Michael Pfleger is pastor of St. Sabina Church. Bryan Samuels is executive director of Chapin Hall. Selwyn Rogers, MD is founding director of the University of Chicago Medicine Trauma Center. Arne Duncan is the founder of Chicago CRED.
The views and opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Chicago Sun-Times or any of its affiliates.
The Sun-Times welcomes letters to the editor and op-eds. See our guidelines.
Life was a party then. He was in his early 20s, playing basketball and hustling drugs on the West Side. He experimented with cough syrup and other drugs. And he tried heroin.
His body started to change. He was addicted. Soon, the party was over. And people he knew kept overdosing.
“They’ve been dying along the way,” says Stewart, who’s 60.
Stewart says he was using heroin to keep from feeling sick — even as he held down a job loading freight trains. He says he was a “functional addict.”
He’s sober now, working at the Haymarket Center for addiction treatment after graduating from a Cook County drug court that offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse: Quit heroin, and you won’t go to jail for drug possession.
He’s one of the lucky ones. In Chicago and other U.S. cities, Black men in Stewart’s generation, born from 1951 through 1970, have been dying of opioid poisoning at a greater rate than any other segment of society. And that’s been true for decades. This group hasbeen at the highest risk of dying as a result of overdoses even when they were in their 20s, 30s and 40s.
That’s true in Chicago. And it’s also the case in other cities including Baltimore, Washington, San Francisco, Milwaukee and Newark, N.J., according to a data analysis by The Baltimore Banner, which collaborated with the Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Times, Big Local News at Stanford University and other news organizations to investigate this particular generation of Black men’s sky-high vulnerability to opioid deaths.
The partnership identified dozens of U.S. counties where this generation of Black men have died of overdose at astronomical rates in the last five years. Among them, Cook County was ranked fourth highest, with Black men from this group dying at rates nearly 10 times higher than the county average and nearly 15 times higher than the national average.
And this year in Cook County through Nov. 10, Black men born from 1951 through 1970 accounted for nearly one in four of all opioid overdose deaths, the Sun-Times found. Nearly all overdosed on super-potent fentanyl — often in a cocktail of other drugs, such as heroin or cocaine.
Despite this longstanding risk to this group, government and private agencies in Chicago, in the rest of Cook County and across Illinois have done little to target these particular men for help, the Sun-Times found.
Instead, prevention efforts in Chicago have been aimed more broadly at five neighborhoods with the worst problems. None of these programs specifically targets this vulnerable group because government and private agencies largely haven’t recognized the need. All aim to serve adults of every age, race and gender.
Medical experts say Black men with opioid addictions tend to receive less care than the general population. They are half as likely to be offered medications to treat their addictions as white patients are. When they do get prescriptions, they typically are for lower doses of those medications. And, health experts say, they often feel disrespected by health care providers, so they frequently don’t seek help to begin with.
Across the country, billions of dollars are pouring in to state governments from lawsuits they’ve filed against pharmaceutical giants including Johnson & Johnson and retailers like Walgreens, accusing them of contributing to America’s opioid crisis. Illinois expects to collect more than $1.3 billion from settlements of those lawsuits. Most of the money is supposed to pay for what’s termed “remediation” of the opioid crisis.
But health care professionals watching how the money is doled out in Illinois say they haven’t seen any proposals that focus on older Black men who use opioids.
“I know they’re working to make sure that, in every application, we discuss how we’re reaching groups that are underserved, with Black men being an underserved group,” says Dr. Tanya Sorrell, director of Rush University Medical Center’s Substance Use Disorder/Center of Excellence. “I haven’t seen a specific, targeted group for Black men.”
At a recent meeting of the West Side Heroin and Opioid Task Force, Jim Wilkerson, the statewide opioid settlement administrator for Illinois, encouraged the group to come up with ideas to address the lack of services targeting people hardest hit by the opioid crisis.
Fanya Burford-Berry, the task force’s director, told members they need to find a way to address the needs of Black men.
“It seems like there’s a blind spot when it comes to prioritizing Black men — older Black men — and drug usage,” Burford-Berry says.
According to the Illinois Opioid Settlements Initiative, which oversees the money, telehealth services and prisoners have been among the early targets of the spending.
‘You can see the impact of racism’
Why have these older Black men always died of overdoses more often than anyone else? In part, this stems from their having been born during the racial tumult of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle says she tells her staff that some of society’s worst inequities, from overdoses to low school achievement, are concentrated in the same areas of Chicago and the south suburbs — places that are home largely to Black and Brown people.
“It’s one of the most physical ways in which you can see the impact of racism in our communities,” Preckwinkle says.
In Chicago, as in many other U.S. cities, Black people were segregated from the white population — literally, with expressways walling off neighborhoods from each other.
The riots that followed the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. left big swaths of the West Side burned out. And jobs were harder to get after the closings of the Sears catalog center on the West Side — where Stewart’s mother worked for more than 20 years — and the steel mills on the South Side in the 1980s and 1990s.
Heroin, increasingly plentiful in those low-income communities through what health-care experts call “predatory marketing,” offered people a temporary escape from those problems. But the drug also became one of the greatest problems in those communities.
An aerial view of the Garfield Park Fieldhouse in West Garfield Park, one of two West Side neighborhoods, along with Austin, that together are now the No. 1 part of Chicago for deaths of older Black men from opioid poisoning.
Austin and West Garfield Park on the West Side together now account for the most deaths of older Black men in Chicago from opioid poisoning.
Chatham, once a middle-class African American bastion, also has been hit this year with a cluster of overdose deaths. For years, Chatham was viewed by some as being immune from many of the problems associated with poverty. This year through September, though, Chatham was No. 5 in Chicago in the number of overdose deaths among Black men in this older age group. At least eight of them died in Chatham of overdoses.
The South Side neighborhood could be seeing the impact of drug sales in nearby areas, including Auburn Gresham, Grand Crossing and along Cottage Grove Avenue, health care workers say.
The high incidence of opioid deaths is just one of the factors contributing to a large disparity in life expectancy for all Black Chicagoans. Homicides, infant and maternal mortality and chronic and infectious diseases also contribute to the life expectancy gap between Black and non-Black Chicagoans now standing at 11.4 years.
“Black Chicagoans are not having the same type of health outcomes as other parts of the city,” says Dr. Olusimbo “Simbo” Ige, the city’s health commissioner. “Every single other population seems to be improving in health outcomes — except for Black Chicago.”
Black patients are half as likely as their white counterparts to be offered medications to treat opioid addictions while in an emergency room, and that’s the case even if they have private health insurance or Medicaid, Rush’s Sorrell says.
And when they are prescribed those medications, studies show they get lower doses, which might not be enough to cover opioid symptoms, she says.
“Most people who may finally succumb to an overdose death have had about four to six emergency department overdose visits before they finally pass from an opioid overdose,” Sorrell says. “So we have opportunities to reach them, get them treatment, get them on buprenorphine and get them into care before an overdose happens.”
Buprenorphine is a medication used to treat opioid addiction and is an ingredient in the treatment drug Suboxone.
James Stewart, a recovering heroin user who has had a lifelong addiction, says he has seen the toll that opioid overdoses has taken. He says friends and acquaintances “have been dying along the way.”
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere / Sun-Times
But one challenge with using that drug is that some people, like James Stewart, are leery of it.
“I always went cold turkey,” Stewart says. “I’ve seen people get on Suboxone for years, decades. Even now, in my mind, it’s like transferring your addiction.”
Stewart says many Black opioid users in his older age group often experience a fear of getting sober and facing other underlying health conditions.
“I had high blood pressure because I hadn’t checked on my health,” he says.
Michael Huyck, a nurse practitioner at the Mile Square Health Center on the Near West Side, says mistrust is also an issue among older Black opioid users.
“It takes me, as a white male, a while to build up a rapport and trust because they’ve been mistreated and marginalized in the health care system,” Huyck says. “A lot of people maybe are not taking advantage of the resources just because they don’t want to come in here and be disrespected.”
Huyck and Tondalaya Henry, an addiction counselor at the center, say they try to remove hurdles to getting treatment. For example, the clinic provides free bus passes to patients.
Stewart says many of his acquaintances are unwilling to stop using drugs but thinks they could benefit from guidance from those who’ve been addicted.
Stewart and former heroin user James “Jo Jo” Russell, 56, both say they’d be interested in doing outreach in jails.
“We can’t save everybody,” Russell says. “But I bet you one or two or three people may get the understanding.”
Joseph “Jo Jo” Russell, a former heroin user, says outreach in jails to others might prevent some opioid overdose deaths. “We can’t save everybody,” Russell says. “But I bet you one or two or three people may get the understanding.”
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere / Sun-Times
Employing former drug users is part of the strategy for Community Outreach Intervention Projects, which sends mobile units around the city to provide Suboxone to people in Chicago.
“I think that’s the best model,” says Albert Murphy, who works for the organization. “It just seems like the bureaucracy is challenging just to get people in those spaces to do that type of work. I just think that maybe they need some special funding.”
Younger generation was scared of heroin
Stewart has a theory about why people his age have always been at a high risk of dying from opioid poisoning: a lack of fear about using heroin. He says he wasn’t scared of fooling with heroin when he was in his 20s. Neither were many of his friends.
But the generations who grew up after him generally were more leery of getting hooked on heroin. They stuck with other things like marijuana, cocaine and pills. The rampant use of crack cocaine in the 1980s and 1990s and the prescription-pill crisis that began in the 1990s took a huge toll in Chicago, too.
The number of opioid deaths peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic and has declined this year in Cook County and across the country. Through the end of September, there were more than 800 opioid-related deaths in Cook County this year, compared with more than 1,300 over the same period of 2023.
City officials say one reason for the decline is their expanded outreach to drug users.
Also, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials say they’ve seized lower quantities of fentanyl this year. That could mean less of the deadly drug is available for gangs to mix with heroin, cocaine and other drugs in Chicago.
To get a better idea of what’s contributed to the deaths, the Sun-Times reviewed those of 90 Black men 54 to 73 years old who have overdosed from opioids this year in Cook County through mid-April. Autopsy reports showed some common things, factors that might help policymakers target help for this particular age group of drug users:
Almost every autopsy found fentanyl among the drugs that contributed to the man’s death. Perhaps surprisingly, heroin was a factor in fewer than one-quarter of the deaths, and cocaine was a factor in more than half of the deaths. A few cases involved both heroin and cocaine. And Xylazine, an animal tranquilizer that can’t be reversed by Narcan and is considered particularly lethal, was listed in 13 of the 90 autopsy reports.
Nearly all of the men suffered from heart disease and other ailments, including hypertension and diabetes.
Most died where they overdosed: Fewer than one-third were taken to a hospital.
In only four cases, a friend or family member had given the dying man naloxone, commonly known by the brand name Narcan, which reverses the immediate effects of opioids.
Usually, the men were found unresponsive in an apartment where they were staying with a friend or relative, though some were living on their own.
Only three of the autopsy reports explicitly said the men were unhoused, including a man found in a tent, a man living in an apartment hallway and a man in a homeless shelter. One man was found unresponsive on a CTA Red Line L train and one at a CTA bus stop in Bronzeville, but their housing status was not mentioned.
Another man overdosed in a south suburban nursing home. His relatives told investigators they suspected the nursing staff covered up evidence of drugs in his room. No Narcan was administered because the man was on a “do not resuscitate” list.
John Gutenso cleans a truck at the Chicago Recovery Alliance headquarters on the West Side in 2019. The Chicago Recovery Alliance was using the truck to distribute fentanyl test kits, snorting and smoking kits and HIV tests.
Increasing access to Narcan, the overdose-reversal drug, is at the center of efforts these days to keep opioid users from dying.
On a recent Saturday, eight outreach workers from the West Side Heroin and Opioid Task Force loaded into a small white bus carrying navy tote bags each filled with two doses of Narcan.
“Let’s save lives,” they cheered.
They were guided by a city map showing blocks with a high number of 911 calls for opioid-related overdoses.
Francisco Herrera (left) and Deneika Puryear, outreach workers with the West Side Heroin and Opioid Task Force, canvassing on the West Side.
One of the stops was the 4800 block of West Congress Parkway, less than half a mile from the Eisenhower Expressway in Austin. Single-family homes and apartment buildings line the block that leads to bustling Cicero Avenue.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” Latricia Walker-West asked an older Black man standing outside a house in that block. “We’re providing everyone with Narcan.”
The man said he never uses opioids but pointed down the street to people who do.
“I have a girlfriend who overdosed, I didn’t know what to do,” the man said, adding that a neighbor overdosed, and another man overdosed in a car in that same block.
Walker-West and the other outreach workers have memorized a speech they give outlining steps to take after seeing signs of an overdose: Call 911, administer the first dose of Narcan, and then give the second dose if the person doesn’t regain consciousness.By then, an ambulance should be arriving to treat the person.
After she breezed through her spiel, a group of skeptical men decided to take totes from Walker-West. A man walking by said he had Narcan in his pocket and grabbed a tote without stopping.
Posters with information about overdose prevention in the window of the West Side Heroin and Opioid Task Force in Austin.
The Austin-based West Side Heroin and Opioid Task Force was created in 2016 by state Rep. La Shawn Ford, D-Chicago. That was after research had shown that Narcan wasn’t getting to the people who needed it most.
Each month now, the task force goes through about 100 cases of Narcan, which is sprayed into the nostril.
“Typically for Black drug users, we don’t do syringes,” says Burford-Berry, the task force director. “It is not our choice of delivery for usage. It’s snorting or smoking. So, for us to even have syringes, it would have been something we wouldn’t have used even if it was saving our lives.”
Targeting 5 worst areas for overdoses
Some treatment programs target people in the criminal justice system.
For instance, there’s the Cook County drug court that Stewart sees as having been his salvation. Many participants in the program are Black men around his age or older, though it’s open to adults of any age.
And every Chicago police district allows most people arrested with a small amount of drugs to enter treatment instead of going to jail. More than 3,000 people have participated since that program started in 2018. The average age for Black men in the program is 40, meaning many are Stewart’s age or older, a Better Government Association analysis found. But the program is also open to adults of any age, gender and race.
The Chicago Department of Public Health has been targeting the five neighborhoods that have the most opioid-related emergency responses: Austin, East Garfield Park, Humboldt Park, North Lawndale and West Garfield Park. They’re the same places where many of Chicago’s older Black men suffer fatal overdoses, though the city’s response doesn’t specifically target that group.
Last summer, the department says, it tested the drug supply for adulterants, distributed naloxone as well as fentanyl and xylazine test strips, coordinated overdose education and connected people to medication-assisted recovery through the MAR NOW telemedicine hotline.
The city agency also is aiming to address long-term needs, such as stable housing.
Ige, the city health commissioner, points to city initiatives such as The Haven on Lincoln, a 40-unit housing facility in Lincoln Square where people with substance-use disorder can live while receiving health care and social services.
“People need jobs, people need homes, people need food,” she says.
Algie Woods,53, who was a heroin user, says he’s drug-free since going through treatment. His first of a long string of drug-related arrests came in 1986. “I remember thinking, ‘Why do I keep putting this garbage in my system knowing I’m going to go through that metamorphosis,’ you know? Like, I’m sick, and I see people see it in me, but I kept doing it.”
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere / Sun-Times
‘Some of us have to die for others to live’
Algie Woods,53, was born in 1971. He says he was raised by his mother after his father died as a result of gang violence. He says he still managed to have a normal childhood but got “pulled into negativity” as an adult.
“I did all the right things coming up,” he says. “But I went to a party, and I just never left.”
He faced the first of a long string of drug-related arrests in 1986. He remembers his mother visiting him in jail. He thought of the singer Sade’s lyrics: “Like the scar of age written all over your face.”
Not only was his mother worrying about the crimes Woods was committing because of his heroin habit, but she was struggling with her own substance abuse.
“I remember thinking, ‘Why do I keep putting this garbage in my system knowing I’m going to go through that metamorphosis,’ you know? Like, I’m sick, and I see people see it in me, but I kept doing it.”
Woods says he’s been drug-free after going through treatment. He did that, he says, because he realized, “I could be a productive citizen, leaving this behind me.”
Still, some people don’t seem to be able to be saved from their addictions to opioids, James Stewart says.
Stewart says about four years ago he gave heroin to a friend who had never taken it before but later wound up addicted. He quit. But, during a period of withdrawal, Stewart says he begged and begged him for heroin. Stewart says he caved in. He gave the man the drugs — and he died. His death inspired Stewart to change his life.
“It’s sad but true,” Stewart says. “Some of us gotta die for others to live.”
Among those who have died of opioid overdoses this year in the Chicago area was a 70-year-old Black man who had used heroin for decades before he was found unresponsive inside his unit in an Avalon Park senior building, his daughter says.
The Cook County medical examiner’s office determined that fentanyl and xylazine killed him.
His daughter agreed to talk about what happened only on the condition that the Sun-Times not publish her name or her father’s because his substance disorder remains a stigma in her family.
She says no one ever told her that her father used heroin, and she never saw him consuming it. Still, she always knew her father was using heroin regularly, even as he worked as a valet downtown and then for years as a packer at the United Parcel Service.
He lived most of his life with her grandmother.
“He was always content no matter where he was, in what situation,” she says. “I know, at one point, he was squatting in a building, and he was OK. He was still content.”
When her grandmother died, the Chicago-area woman became her father’s primary caregiver. By then, it seemed to her like he was more likely to die if he stopped using heroin since it had become a form of medication.
That meant ensuring doctors knew about his heroin usage when he underwent two surgeries to make sure he would heal without going through withdrawals.
She thinks her father started using heroin as a teenager — before she was born — and isn’t sure whether he started using the substance on his own or got it from his brother, who returned from military service using heroin.
The woman looks at her father’s school photo from 1969, about when he was in eighth grade. She also sees others in the photo who struggled with addiction like her father.
“Addiction almost seems like the only way out from the hell of life that they have to live, living in this neighborhood,” she says.
In the photo, he stands in the back of the group, wearing a white button-up shirt and a tie, showing off a slight smile. A small mustache is visible, like the one he kept into adulthood.
She doesn’t think her father’s story is reflected in the ways that most people think about the opioid crisis. She says it’s typically associated with younger white people.
She sees it as yet another example of how Black men are marginalized and made to feel like the addiction is their fault, rather than looking into the source of why they became addicted to the opioids.
“It’s very, very easy to make them invisible and not matter but they do,” she says. “We shouldn’t have ignored it in the ‘60s. We shouldn’t have ignored it in the ‘70s. And now that these guys are older, we’re still ignoring them.
“We are just waiting for them to not be our burden. The same way that he was my burden. It feels like everybody is waiting to be unburdened by this population. And I don’t think that should be the case.”
