Research Seed Grant | 2008-2009

The seed grant will be used to support work investigating the early history of city-coordinated addiction rehabilitative services, focusing specifically upon New York City’s Addiction Services Agency (ASA),1966-1977. This is the first researched part of a larger book project on the history race politics in New York City addiction policy, research, and treatment from 1950 to the 1990s, focusing particularly on the community of Harlem.

The general research questions deal with the historical development of treatment options in this period; the influence which sociological, social/political, medical, and epidemiological understandings of narcotic addiction had (or did not have) over the development of treatment policy and various treatment modalities; the constraining or enabling circumstances (political, social, fiscal) under which treatment options were developed; and the experiences and perceptions of treatment professionals and policymakers.