HOW CAN CITY REBUILD IN AN OPEN DRUG MARKET?

The singing - that's what one man who lives in the neighborhood calls it -
is audible over the traffic noise of morning rush hour. It carries on all
day, except for occasional breaks when a police car passes or parks nearby.
It sounds cheerful, upbeat - a teen-aged tenor so full of entrepreneurial
energy that you almost forget this song might as well be a funeral dirge
for the city.

Knockdown! Get your Knockdown! Got that Knockdown!

Knockdown is heroin.

Like other salespeople, drug dealers use catchy brand names that hype the
supposed quality of their product. Heroin addicts are lured by the power of
the drug to send them nodding into biochemical bliss, even if it means
flirting with a lethal overdose.

I am working for a few days in the West Baltimore neighborhood of Sandtown
with my 15-year-old daughter. We are volunteering our very limited skills
to Habitat for Humanity, which has built or renovated about 160 rowhouses
in the area. The concentrated effort of various city and nonprofit agencies
in this neighborhood was rewarded by the latest U.S. Census data, which
showed home ownership in Sandtown up and vacancies down, countering the
trend in most of the city.

Still, Sandtown resembles a patient hooked to a heart-lung machine, its
progress made possible only by huge, steady injections of money and labor
from outside. Even when the hammers are banging and the power saws whining
with the sounds of housing resurrection, the drug dealers' siren song can
be heard, too.

We are on Calhoun Street today, priming and caulking the woodwork on a
house that Habitat is rushing to finish for an Aug. 2 dedication. The
heroin hawker is a block away. I can't see him, but he sounds like a boy
about my daughter's age. For a while, another, younger kid - 11 or 12 at
the most, from the voice - joins in, and the Knockdown solo becomes a duet.

And then there's a third voice, a friendly competitor peddling a different
escape. Rock! Rock! Got that Rock!

Rock is crack cocaine, the smokeable drug that tore the heart out of
Baltimore and many other American cities in the late 1980s and '90s. Its
cycle of high and low was much faster than heroin's, and it pulled down
many working people who had avoided the older drug, sucking jobs and
families into the abyss.

The cocaine boom brought unprecedented violence, too. Heroin was
traditionally controlled by organizations whose kingpins became household
names. Cocaine sales were more democratic, since any teen-ager could buy a
quarter-kilo in New York City and return to set up shop on an unoccupied
corner. Flush with cash for handguns, hundreds of young men jostled for
street space, and shootings and murders soared.

Back around 1950, when the first hipsters in the clubs on Pennsylvania
Avenue began to experiment with heroin, Baltimore's population was nearly 1
million. Today it's 650,000, and the result of that plunge can be seen in
the boarded houses pocking every demoralized neighborhood. Many of the
boards bear the city's dreary stencil, advising passers-by whom to call if
an animal is trapped inside.

But in the poorest neighborhoods, it is often the people who feel trapped.
Drugs are both cause and effect in the chicken-and-egg conundrum of the
city's slide: People who can't get decent jobs take drugs. People who take
drugs can't get decent jobs.

Whatever the psychic malaise that drives a person to addiction, it has
little to do with laziness. A few days ago we were on Presstman Street,
tearing out an old chimney and then laying a brick wall - one mercifully to
be hidden by drywall before Habitat is through. For about two hours one
day, a man of about 30 wrestled feverishly with a roll of heavy electrical
cable on the sidewalk, pulling off the spiral steel casing and the plastic
insulation to get at the copper core. He could sell that to the scrap metal
man for a few dollars (I'm making an assumption here, but I think it's a
safe one) toward his next high.

No one works harder than a junkie because no one has so relentless an overseer.

When we stopped work each day at Presstman Street, our Habitat bosses would
spend 20 minutes or more re-boarding windows and nailing 2-by-4s to brace
already locked doors. Since all the tools were taken away each night, it
seemed at first like overkill - particularly since we'd begin the next day
by prying off the boards.

But sure enough, despite all the nailing, one night somebody got the
plywood loose from a first-floor rear window. The thief made off with a few
2-by-8s - the only portable items in this shell of a house.

If all the human energy that goes into the quest to sell and buy drugs
could be turned to more creative work, every one of the 42,481 vacant
houses the Census Bureau counted last year could be rehabilitated in a year.

While we work on Calhoun Street, the city has mounted a blitz to battle the
train tunnel blaze a few miles to the east. Hundreds of firefighters,
engineers and experts are working feverishly to assess the hazards,
extinguish the flames and get everything back to normal.

Over here in Sandtown, it's considered quite normal that the Knockdown boys
and the Rock boys are out singing their perpetual song. The smoldering fire
of addiction is blighting and ending far more lives than a mere tunnel
disaster ever could, but there is no panic, no blitz, just the slow-motion
emergency that is hollowing out a great city.