Opinion: A Dream Deferred: How Opioids Captured a Community

	By Marlena Wadley, Reporter, The Real Chi

When I was a little girl I lived on the South Side of Chicago. My family and I would wake up early every Sunday morning and trudge our way to Austin Church of Christ, my papa’s small little church on the West Side, wearing our Sunday’s best clothes. On our way there we always passed this hotel planted on the corner of W. Jackson Blvd. and S. Sacramento Blvd. 

Fast-forward to a few days ago, on my way home, I passed the hotel again. I completely forgot about its existence until I saw the huge sign “JR PLAZA HOTEL” which reminded me of those early Sunday mornings. It also sparked a huge curiosity within me on the history of this hotel. As a kid, I often felt it was misplaced and didn’t glimmer like the hotels lined up like diamond displays downtown. As an adult, I made up stories in my mind to what I’d hoped the cause of that reality would be. In my mind, I imagined the JR Plaza being one of the only hotels on the West Side that housed famous Black stars in the 1960s because those fancy ones downtown “didn’t take colored folks.”

I envisioned the JR Plaza as the first and only Black owned hotel run by a Black woman on the West Side of Chicago. She’d wear long red acrylics, a honey blonde wig that was a little too big, and loved to pop her gum. To my disappointment, the only thing I could find associated with this hotel was numerous opioid overdoses, hazardous conditions, and complaints from nearby residents and churches.

The J.R Plaza was opened in 1998. J.R. Plaza owner William Dunmore fought for hotel licenses in 1997, but was denied due to previous convictions. After an appeal and three character witnesses, he was granted to run the hotel as single room occupancies.

I felt disappointed that what I envisioned for the hotel was destroyed. I felt disappointed in the horrors of an opioid crisis seeping into the reputation of this hotel.

Just in the last year, the West Side had the highest concentration of opioid deaths. Experts are stating that the pandemic has also caused an increase in drug use over the years. As of recently, people are either using fentanyl or drugs cut with fentanyl, a synthetic drug 10 times stronger than heroin.

There have been 20 overdoses in 5 years at the JR Plaza. Since November of 2014, at least 15 people have died of an opioid overdose. Between November 2014 and July 2019, the Chicago Fire Department has responded to at least twelve nonfatal overdoses at the SRO. As well as residents recalling numerous paramedic visits.

I could list so many statistics detailing this crisis, but I refuse to oversaturate. Although opioids are destroying the West Side community, there are infrastructures being put in place to rebuild a new foundation.

The West Side Opioid and Heroin Task Force, created in 2016 by Illinois state representative LaShawn Ford, has used outreach as a means to reduce harm from drug use. Since the increase in overdoses in 2020, the task force has been supplying “hot spots” with care kits and training on how to use Narcan and naloxone.

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker recently announced the state is launching the Illinois Overdose Action Plan to aid initiatives like the West Side Opioid and Heroin Task Force and create new ways to tackle behavioral health issues. It plans to expand harm reduction initiatives like Narcan training, a West Side Community Triage and wellness center whose primary focus is to keep people with serious mental health issues and substance disorders out of jail. This plan also allowed the Triage to add services like street outreach, trauma-informed therapy, and mobile crisis intervention.

A part of me is still disappointed that my curiosity on the J.R. Plaza led me to discover that the opioid crisis is taking place on the West Side, but I can also rest knowing that there are things being put in place to tackle these issues. The West Side deserves it.