“It’s Not Harlem, Governor, It’s Heroin”: Father Peter G. Young Sets the Record Straight

Father Peter G. Young spent more than fifty years working with people fighting addiction, and one of his favorite stories starts with him correcting a governor. In this Magic Hook from The Slingin Podcast, he remembers the day Governor Nelson Rockefeller asked him about “the Harlem drug,” and why he told him straight up that the problem had a different name.

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Watch: “A Conversation with the Governor About Heroin in Harlem”, Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast, Hoodz Radio.

Father Peter G. Young died on December 9, 2020, at age 90. Kay Bond recorded this conversation with him for The Slingin Podcast on Hoodz Radio.

In His Words

“The governor said ‘Harlem.’ And I said, ‘It’s not Harlem, Governor, it’s heroin. It’s the heroin drug.’ … So they get caught and then they take a craving, because the craving is what really has got them.”

Two moves in a few seconds. First, he takes the drug off one neighborhood’s back. Then he points at what actually holds people: the craving. In the clip he explains it as a need for a painkiller. The body breaks down, everything hurts, and people turn to whatever takes the pain away. For Father Young, that was never a question of bad character. It was a question of sickness.

The Drug With the Wrong Name

Back then the newspapers called heroin “the Harlem drug” because it was popular only in the inner city. In the clip, Father Young names Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx. Rockefeller was reading those stories, he was worried, and he used the same name the press did when he talked to the priest he knew from his appointments secretary’s office.

Father Young wasn’t guessing. In the memoir he writes that Albany had heroin dens of its own, operating under supervision with police cooperation so the city could get the information it needed. He had been working those streets in the South End, and in 1959 his shelter treated heroin withdrawal the same way it treated withdrawal from alcohol. Same disease, different substance.

Calling it “the Harlem drug” made it somebody else’s problem, a story about one community. Calling it heroin made it a drug, with a history and a hold on the body that didn’t care what zip code you lived in.

From the Memoir

From Chapter 9, “When Governor Rockefeller Asked About the ‘Harlem Drug,'” in his memoir Fifty Years Young, he recalls the moment like this:

“I politely told him, ‘No, Governor, it’s the heroin drug, not the Harlem drug, the way the press describes it.'”

In the same chapter he goes further and suggests that, “if I’m honest,” it might more accurately be called the Rensselaer drug. As he understands the history, a German pharmaceutical company came to Rensselaer during the Civil War to make the morphine-type pain relievers doctors needed, and in 1898 Bayer introduced a new cough suppressant that quickly led to addiction. In his telling, the story of the “Harlem drug” starts in a factory, not on a corner.

His understanding of the craving goes back to a nurse named Mary. From Chapter 10, “Green Street: Brothels, Heroin and Booze”:

“As she was dying in 1959, she told me I would never be able to understand the craving for alcohol once someone has been exposed to the disease. That is a big part of why I went to the Capitol day after day to have the law treat it as a disease.”

Then came the turn. In Chapter 9 he describes the January 3, 1973 State of the State address, when Rockefeller, with an eye on the presidency, said of the rehab programs, “This has to stop,” and proposed the mandatory sentences that became the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Father Young writes that the state’s prisons held 13,000 people when the laws passed and later rose to nearly 73,000. His verdict:

“It was rehabilitation versus incarceration. Let the punishment suit the crime, and let the individual be considered, instead of a block of mandatory sentences.”

And his last word on the man he once had coffee with: “If Nelson were here today, I’m sure he would be embarrassed by the laws that bear his name.”

Why It Matters Now

Words shape policy. When a drug gets tagged with a neighborhood’s name, the response tends to aim at the neighborhood. When it gets called what it is, a substance that hooks the brain and the body, the response can aim at treatment. Father Young saw both roads up close, and he saw what it cost when New York picked the wrong one.

That’s the legacy: a priest willing to correct the most powerful man in the state to his face, respectfully and without flinching. The movement is ours to carry. Name the disease. Push back when a whole community gets blamed for it. Talk about the craving and the pain underneath it, so people can stop asking “what’s wrong with them?” and start asking “how do we help?”

Watch the full conversation with Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast at HoodzRadio.com, follow Hoodz Radio for every clip, and look out for the 10-part series 50 Years Young.

Respect the Legacy. Amplify the Movement.