DRUG ARRESTS NAB MINORITIES

A crowd gathered around Dan Bigg on a recent Sunday afternoon as he sat in
the back of an oversized, silver-gray van parked with the engine running in
Uptown's "Blood Alley," an area off West Wilson Avenue. For two hours, Bigg
talked to drug users, handed out supplies and performed about 10 HIV
tests-just some of the services offered by the Chicago Recovery Alliance, a
group poor and minorities without provoking much public outcry.

The young African American male, he said, has become the accepted image of
drugs in America. "If all the poor people in the U.S. were white, as they
are in Sweden and Denmark, there would be much less tolerance for [the
arrests] of drug offenders," he said. "The law enforcement system is simply
constructed so that it's the powerless that are always going to be the raw
materials for keeping it going."

Tarshel Beards, Concethia D. Campbell, Josh Drobnyk, Rachel Kanter, Audra
Martin, Chloe Mister, Cyril Mychalejko, Elizabeth Olsson and Jocelyn Prince
helped research this article.