The first time I was back since the storm ... drugs were everywhere

[dogday]

March 6, 2007 | NEW ORLEANS -- In midwinter in New Orleans' Hollygrove neighborhood, the weeds in some yards along Olive Street are 6 feet tall. A few blocks from the golf links of the New Orleans Country Club, abandoned buildings with open doors and windows face the street like blank skulls. Much of this 17th Ward neighborhood still looks as it did 18 months ago after Hurricane Katrina struck and it was submerged in 9 feet of water.

Ronald Jones, 34, who grew up in Hollygrove, comes by several times a week to visit his mother, who is living in a FEMA trailer while her home is being gutted and repaired. But as the 17th Ward and other areas devastated by the flood struggle to come back to life, an almost daily litany of violence and death has become the city's latest crisis. Jones has seen four friends from Hollygrove buried in the past year, all young black men between the ages of 22 and 26, all of whom he says were killed in drug-related murders.

New Orleans has long been plagued by drugs and violence, but many who returned after Katrina hoped for a new start for the city -- for about six months after the disaster, crime had declined dramatically. In the past year, however, with the rebuilding process still sluggish in many ways, a sharp upturn in violent crime has shaken confidence in many neighborhoods and emerged as a major obstacle to the city's recovery.

According to federal law enforcement officials and government-funded researchers, a resurgent drug trade -- in some ways more diverse, chaotic and violent than what existed before the storm -- is largely responsible. It has found fertile ground in once flooded neighborhoods that just a year ago were mostly vacant, and has spread to what used to be relatively safe and well-policed neighborhoods and parishes.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/06/new_orleans/