Secondary Sources:

Lassiter, Matthew D. The Suburban Crisis White America and the War on Drugs.
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2023.
https://a.co/d/059BJsJi 
A comparative case study between suburban and urban spaces to discuss the war on drugs within the context of the suburban environment through youths. Lassiter does this through three key stages: fear of urban and foreign “pushers,” placing marijuana and LSD in their own drug categories to prosecute the “real criminals” in urban centers, and coercive campaigns in suburban areas for rehabilitation and militarized interdiction in nonwhite urban areas. This study provided a basis for understanding the differences between urban and suburban areas and for examining attitudes toward the drug crisis. Paterson is surrounded by suburban spaces like those in Bergen County and cities like Wayne and Clifton. Understanding why there were two different approaches to the drug epidemic will help frame why the urban environment was connected with crime.

McLean, Katherine. “‘There’s nothing here’: Deindustrialization as risk environment for
overdose.” International Journal of Drug Policy, vol. 29 (2016): 19-26. Accessed
October 17, 2026. 10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.01.009 
“There’s nothing here”: Deindustrialization as risk environment for overdose – ScienceDirect
McLean applies the “risk environment” in her study regarding drug overdoses in the deindustrialized region of the Monongahela Valley in Pennsylvania. This study conducts interviews with people who have experienced or witnessed an overdose and then connects it with the culture of drug abuse in the area. The focus on the environment as a criterion for overdose risk offers a different perspective from my study, as it shifts the lens slightly away from purely economic reasoning toward a connection between environment and behavior. It helps raise questions about the spatiality of drug abuse in Paterson and how it possibly affected people’s behavior.

McCubbins, Amanda. “American Drug Story: How Racialized Media Depictions of Drug Crises
Shape Policy Agendas.” Master thesis, Arizona State University, May 2020. Accessed October 17, 2026.
https://login.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fdissertations-theses%2Famerican-drug-story-how-racialized-media%2Fdocview%2F2408511458%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D13626 

McCubbins’ study looks into the relationship between media coverage and the impact it had on policy regarding the drug crisis, the crack epidemic, and the opioid crisis. She tracks periodicals and news coverage and their intended audiences from 1986 to the 2000s to extract information about race, class, policy, and social construction (in which people are categorized as deviant/criminal or deserving/patient). This study addresses a weakness in my study: how keywords such as “crack,” “epidemic,” or even “city” are used to mark people and environments. By bridging this gap, my study will provide a deeper understanding of why the inner-city urban environment was portrayed as it was.

Murch, Donna. “Crack In Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late
Twentieth-Century War on Drugs.” Journal of American History, vol. 102, issue 1 (June
2015): 162-173. Accessed October 17, 2026.
https://doi-org.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/10.1093/jahist/jav260 
Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs | Journal of American History | Oxford Academic
Murch addresses the challenge for scholarship on the drug crisis, where the aim is to “disentangle the social history of drug use, informal economy, and poverty from law-and-order narratives rationalizing punitive campaigns.” Using Los Angeles as a case study, Murch seeks to draw attention to African Americans and their resistance to the hypermilitarization of police and to establishing community aid groups to help drug abusers and to address the carceral state. While the study took place in a larger city than Paterson, it provides insight into a community response to the drug crisis and policing that took place. It raises questions about the possible community response that occurred in Paterson to address what was done in response to the drug crisis.

Owusu, Thomas Y. “Economic Transition in the City of Paterson, New Jersey (America’s First
Planned Industrial City): Causes, Impacts, and Urban Policy Implications.” Urban
Studies Research, vol. 2014 (2014). Accessed October 17, 2026.
DOI:10.1155/2014/672794 
https://login.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fscholarly-journals%2Feconomic-transition-city-paterson-new-jersey%2Fdocview%2F1561940042%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D13626 
Thomas Y. Owusu examines the “dynamics of economic change” in Paterson from its founding up to 1990. This ambitious undertaking allows for a broader understanding of Paterson’s economy from its founding as America’s first industrial city to its unique economic decline despite its population growth. Owusu argues that Paterson now serves as a labor-supply site rather than a place of work, drawing on surrounding markets, such as malls and New York City, to sustain it. This acts as an environmental analysis of the labor market: how the removal industry was relocated to surrounding suburbs and larger cities like New York, thus creating the commuter culture we now see.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
London: Zed Press, 1983. Reprinted by University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
https://a.co/d/0aso0tRc 
A book about the concept of “Black Radicalism,” where Robinson seeks to frame capitalism as a closed system for Europeans in which it created racial fabrications. In chapter 5, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Labor,” Robinson provides the framework that capitalism has always relied on a racial hierarchy in which it exploited Africans for European gains, leading to the abandonment of groups and spaces once the cycle of capitalism ends. This framework helps capture the African American labor experience during the collapse of Paterson’s industry and the conditions they were left with in the lead-up to the 1980s. I aim to take Paterson out of the dominant narrative of industrial decline leading to the “tragedy” of the drug crisis; I seek to frame Paterson as a feature of the cycle of capitalism’s nature to exploit racial groups, then abandon them, leading to social decline wherein it constructed the basis for the drug crisis.

Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005.
https://a.co/d/0j95F1u3

The book provides a basis for analyzing mid-sized industrial cities, in which Sugrue uses economic and spatial context to discuss the onset of urban inequality, using Detroit as the subject of his study. It addresses the unresolved problems of capitalism as a vehicle for inequality and the fact that African Americans historically bore the inequality that it generated. Origins of the Urban Crisis helps my project by providing much-needed background on the history of mid-sized cities in the Rust Belt, which is essential for discussing the onset of urban poverty in cities that were once economic powerhouses. Paterson was once known as “Silk City,” where textiles and industry defined northern New Jersey alongside Newark; this book provides the background needed to understand the decline of the mid-sized city and to grasp the racial experience during this period.

Urban decay and the drug epidemics have been studied and discussed extensively. Recurring themes include environmental racism, sociocultural effects of deindustrialization, and the wider implications of the war on drugs and its effects on people of color. The literature uses case studies of larger industrialized cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York to trace the decline of urban centers from the mid-20th century to the present, with these problems still persisting in some communities. The focal point of each case study centers on state-community power dynamics and how community groups manage to push back against inequality while also facing the challenges of drug abuse.
However, the aforementioned case studies are a methodological limitation of the current field. Major cities are often used to reflect broader themes and national trends. This study reorients the focus away from primary metropolises toward mid-sized urban centers like Paterson and discusses the effects of spatial disinvestment, in which these spaces bore the brunt of deindustrialization and served as sacrificial zones for the reallocation of funding to other areas. In doing so, I seek to expand the work of Thomas J. Sugrue to include Paterson, whose historiography is extremely dated and, like that of many other cities, flattened into standard narratives of deindustrialized tragedy.