Dr. Mutulu Shakur and the Holistic Healing of Acupuncture and Political Education: A Review of Dope is Death

Have you seen the skinny little boy That chases the white ghost at night? Face puffed up

Tracks in his arm and his mind blown His momma somewhere drinking

And talking about survival

Pop’s in jail or downtown in the Y

The little boy chases the white ghost with his friend And they get high

And they get high Like cloud nine

Where everything is

-The Last Poets (excerpt from Two Little Boys)

Documentary film, Dope is Death, chronicles the Lincoln Hospital takeover in the South Bronx, New York on July 14, 1970. In direct response to the growing heroin epidemic and deplorable condition of the hospital, members of The Young Lords, The Black Panther Party (BPP), the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), and the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement collectively decided to “seize the hospital to serve the people. Writer, editor and director, Mia Donovan, dedicates the film to Dr. Mutulu Shakur who was a key leader in the development and management of the Lincoln Detox Program and the use of acupuncture and political education to heal heroin, cocaine, and methadone addiction in New York’s Black and Brown communities.

“What struck me about this film is how little has changed in this country in almost fifty years said Suroosh Alvi, Canadian journalist, filmmaker, and cofounder of Vice Media, the broadcasting home of the film. “We got police brutality, a lack of healthcare, opioid epidemics, and chaos. [The film] captures an important part of New York and American History that hasn’t been told before he continued. Alvi is correct in his assertion that many aspects of this history have not been told before. What is equally significant is Donovan’s capturing of the history from a unique grassroots perspective. With an explicit intent to reframe Shakur as a community healer rather than a criminal, the filmmaker centers firsthand accounts, archival media, and personal narratives of revolutionaries and activists who directly participated in the hospital takeover and the holistic health movement that followed. These perspectives counter the racially biased white media accounts of this history that persist today. In efforts to discredit and disrupt the undeniable progress of the movement, white media along with the FBI’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) targeted and harassed healers and patients, as well as their associates, family, and friends to destroy what they deemed as oppositional threats to the United States government.

In the opening scene of the film, the viewer is brought into the world of the Community Acupuncture Walk-In Clinic in Harlem, a supportive service and initiative offered by New York Harm Reduction Educators, Inc. Holistic health specialist, Juan Cortez is seen performing acupuncture on a patient. Juxtaposed to his description of how and where he is applying acupuncture needles is the image of a Chinese auriculotherapy chart that outlines major pressure points in the ear. He encourages his patients to relax and breathe while receiving the treatment. One of the patients, an elder Black woman, who briefly mentions using drugs in the past shares, “I’ve been doing this over about seven/eight years now … it helps me with a lot of things. It calms my breathing, it calms my heart down, it keeps me relaxed, and it just makes me happy, I’m a happy person anyway and with this, it makes me extra happy. Another patient discusses the role of acupuncture in helping him with anger management, releasing emotional pain, and refraining from alcohol and illegal substance abuse.

Much like his acupuncturist predecessors who developed and operated the Lincoln Detox Program, Cortez uses The National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA) protocol, which is a standard 5-point ear acupuncture treatment for addiction, stress, and trauma. It involves the gentle placement of up to five small, sterilized disposable needles into specific sites on each ear. The predetermined points on the ear are sympathetic, Shen Men, kidney, liver, and lung points. According to NADA, these points have been shown to produce neurophysiologic, biochemical, endocrine, emotional, and cognitive effects including 1) reduced cravings for alcohol and drugs, including nicotine; 2) minimized withdrawal symptoms; 3) increased calmness, better sleep, and less agitation; 4) relief from stress and emotional trauma; 5) an easier connection with counseling and 6) discovery of inner quiet and strength To date, there have been over 25,000 people trained to provide this treatment in over 40 countries

“Dope Plus Capitalism Equals Genocide”

Day breaks

Got the shakes Nose running Joint dripping Mind slipping Body aches

Jones coming down Got an attitude Fighting mad Feeling bad Funeral sad

Another 24-hour drag Damn, I needs me some scag Pawn my brother’s doo-rag

To cop me a transparent thin bag

You see, you see, cause I’m strung out, strung out on a white witch My timeless bitch

Riding a white horse into my main vein Damn baby, got to kill this pain

But I’m gon’ get slick

And get my woman to pull a trick She don’t care

She’s on welfare

Going to steal her check And cop me a deck And deal me some stuff

When the going gets

Jalal Mansur Nuriddin of The Last Poets vividly describes heroin addiction symptoms in the above excerpt from his poem, Jones Comin’ Down. In the film, Donovan brilliantly pairs an audio clip of this poem with white letter lyrics etched on the screen against a red blood-stained background. This juxtaposition enables the viewer to imagine what the lyrics describe and to have a visceral understanding of the harrowing impact of heroin use in urban communities. One of the film’s interviewees, Walter Bosque, acupuncturist, and veteran member of The Young Lords, describes growing up in the South Bronx at the height of the heroin epidemic and seeing addicts nodding on the corners. He says, “we just didn’t drop out of the sky addicted to heroin, we became addicted to heroin because of the situation and our environment exposed us to heroin, you could buy a bag of heroin for three dollars … at one point there were 100,000 addicts in New York, so I wanted to do something.

Bosque was not the only one who wanted to change the social conditions of his community. Other individuals featured in the film like former political prisoner Maliki Shakur Latine of the BPP’s Bronx Chapter and Cleo Silvers, BPP member, and Lincoln Hospital Mental Health Worker, discuss their involvement with the BPP to foster radical change. They participated in the Party’s efforts to combat police brutality and provide resources for the community including political education, martial arts classes, survival training, free lunch programs, and child-care services. After work, Silvers sold BPP newspapers across the street from the hospital. She would engage and educate folks on the street as young as fifteen who were visibly addicted to heroin. “I would give them the whole spill, she said. “The system is keeping you down by making sure that you stay addicted, and you don’t stand up and fight against all the exploitation and all the horrible conditions that we live in.

Felipe Luciano, a co-founder of The Young Lords and member of The Last Poets, similarly states “you don’t want to fight when you’re on heroin … you just stay there and nod yourself into oblivion. As the chairman of The Young Lords, an organization of Puerto Ricans out of East Harlem, Luciano wanted to serve the holistic needs of the people and modeled the organization’s political action, community engagement, and organizing practices after the BPP.

Together with the steady increase of heroin use in Black and Brown communities was a rise in “people’s personal economy from selling drugs, which interfered with the harmonious community living that the BPP sought to foster. Therefore, before participating in the hospital take-over, BPP members took to the streets to tackle the drug issue by approaching drug distributors and sellers to ask that they stop. According to Latine, those who refused to stop “were kindly removed from the community. A powerfully moving scene in the film shows BPP member, Lumumba Shakur, emptying bags of drugs into the street. Shakur exclaims “the pigs is the one who brings heroin into our community. If it wasn’t for the pigs, heroin wouldn’t be saturated through the Black community. What they do, when the police make a big narcotic raid, and he gets like a kilo of heroin he would turn in a pound of it and then he put the other pound that’s left back in the community and let somebody sell it for him.

“Seize the Hospital to Serve the People

Donovan effectively utilizes archival footage from a Young Lords demonstration that preceded the takeover which includes demonstrators occupying the streets outside of the hospital and Young Lords’ Deputy Minister of Education, Iris Morales speaking about its horrid conditions. The film then cuts to Juan Gonzalez of The Young Lords and current co-host of Democracy Now, speaking about the ongoing violence inflicted on Black and Brown people by government institutions. He eloquently states,

you have to make a differentiation between the open and direct violence that very often is attributed to revolutionaries and the type of violence that happens every day on a regular basis among poor people, whether it’s the violence of having to go all winter in an apartment that has no heat, or whether it’s the violence of having to go to a hospital that doesn’t give you service and you end up dying anyway. You don’t die with a bullet necessarily, but you die in other ways. That type of violence takes a lot more lives

In response to the inhospitable practices of Lincoln Hospital, known locally at the time as “The Butcher Shop, Young Lords and BPP members along with hospital workers and patients set up a community complaint table through which they gathered 2,000 complaints. They submitted the complaints to the hospital administration but to no avail. The hospital did nothing to address the concerns the community raised. It was at this time that members of The Young Lords, BPP, RNA, and Health Revolutionary Unity Movement (organization of Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Jewish Americans), collectively decided to take over the hospital. “It was an occupation that came straight out of the Normandy invasion … I knew that we were ready because I was expecting [the others] to look to me for confirmation, not one person looked at me, they knew exactly what their roles were, said Luciano. “The building is eleven stories; we took it in seven and a half minutes. We secured it in fifteen. That morning the Puerto Rican flag is flying over Lincoln Hospital he continued. Other markers of the takeover were placed around the outside of the building including signs that read “Bienvenidos Al El Hospital De La Gente” and “Welcome to the People’s Hospital.

During the twelve-hour occupation, the activists held a press conference and shared that they were open to negotiation with hospital administration based on a list of specific demands for patients and workers. While the local government reported concern that hospital patients could not receive proper care during this time, Silvers, who participated in the takeover, maintains that there was "not one minute of disruption of the delivery of health care. At the end of the negotiations, the hospital administration agreed to address concerns expressed in the community complaints they received and to open a drug detox center. Donovan captures the triumph of this moment in a clip that shows dozens of Black and Brown organizers in the hospital hallways laughing, cheering, and rejoicing in their victory.

The Lincoln Hospital drug detoxification program

On the opening day of the new detox center, hundreds of addicts showed up. Bosque, who was a nursing school student at the time, volunteered his services. He first served as a Spanish translator before moving on to providing nursing services. The center began to operate with a full staff including doctors, nurses, and counselors. Silvers recounts, “once we had doctors from Lincoln Hospital who said that they were going to be responsible, that’s when we brought Mutulu in. We had a medical director and we wanted to have a director that had revolutionary consciousness. Mutulu Shakur, who had been politically active since he was a teen, led Political Education (PE) classes within the program to provide workers and patients with historical, social, cultural, and political context for their economic and health struggles. Those who attended his classes learned about Africa, China, and Puerto Rico, systemic oppression, and healing as a holistic process centered within conscious awareness and transformation.

An archival media clip of Richard Nixon’s infamous 1971 declaration that “America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse” and that “in order to fight and defeat this enemy it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive signals a shift in the film’s narrative that impacts the work of the Lincoln Detox program. Nixon and his administration linked what they referred to as “Black street crime” to drug use. The belief was that drug addicts going through withdrawal would commit a crime (including theft, robbery, and assault) to relieve themselves of withdrawal symptoms. By 1972 regulations were proposed and issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to use methadone as treatment for heroin addiction. As Peter Bourne, MD and US drug czar under Jimmy Carter, states in the film, addicts who used methadone had no withdrawal symptoms, therefore “the more people on methadone, the lower crime rate. From a white middle and upper-class perspective, the problem of crime is seemingly solved. However, film interviewee, Dr. Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr., Associate Professor of History and Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University, shared a different perspective. Heroin addicts, Robert explains, who used several times a day could now use methadone once a day indefinitely to maintain not detox from the drug. He goes on to say, “if you’re coming from a place that is very critical of federal, state, and local government and how it treats Black people, Brown people, poor people, Asian people, you understandably might come to regard methadone maintenance with some suspicion because it is regulated and in large part dispensed by the government. Donovan advances this idea of suspicion regarding federally regulated methadone by introducing a clip of Puerto Rican World War II veterans discussing their experiences with battling drug addiction upon their return to the US and being mandated to enroll in a methadone treatment program to receive government assistance.

Lincoln Detox Program staff were not only suspicious of the government’s regulation and issuing of methadone to addicts, but they also knew that addicts who used methadone were tragically replacing one addiction with another. Another acupuncturist featured in the film, Urayoana Trinidad, shares that the Lincoln Detox staff became invested in a chemical-free way of detoxing addicts from both heroin and methadone. By 1972, they began actively seeking alternatives to methadone. It was Shakur who found a newspaper article that discussed the use of acupuncture to cure withdrawal symptoms and shared it with other staff. Upon collectively reading and discussing the article the staff became interested in using acupuncture in the clinic. According to Bosque, “if it wasn’t for Mutulu’s leadership I don’t think we ever would’ve done what we did. Donovan connects this pivotal moment in the Lincoln Detox Program with a present-day look at the Acupuncture Detox Specialists (ADS) Collective in Washington, D.C. Its founder, Dr. Winston Kokayi Patterson, shares his experience with the program. At 18 years old he voluntarily went to the Lincoln Detox clinic to detox himself from drugs, politicized himself through the political education classes, and began to study acupuncture under Shakur. In the clip, Dr. Patterson is speaking to a room of younger people who are presumably students of acupuncture. He shows them a video of Shakur who recalls his experience with introducing acupuncture to patients,

Patients would come up and we would say well listen, we not gonna give you no methadone today but what we’re gonna do is massage your feet, massage your back and massage your ears. And what we would use, we’re gonna use our finger and so before we even got needles people would come up to the Bronx, dope fiends, hardened dope victims, we would massage their ears and massage their hands and their legs and we would stand there with our fingers in their ears or in the different points and we’d do deep breathing and they’d fall right out to sleep and just relax and the next day they’d be back for that treatment. And we were detoxifying people off of heroin, cocaine, and methadone with acupressure, a lot of love, a lot of commitment to it. It was some of the most rewarding times of our lives. It was great. Very Spirited. We then began to get the needles and learn needle insertion

When the video is paused the focus returns to ADS students performing acupuncture on Dr. Patterson who asks the students to explain the treatment they are administering. At ADS, Dr. Patterson trains younger generations in acupuncture healing, understanding needle insertion, and pressure points. He explains that the purpose of the collective is to empower individuals so that they can take care of themselves and their families.

By 1973, Shakur and the Lincoln Detox Program staff were using an electrical stimulator to stimulate pressure points. Patients would come every day and within a week or so be detoxed. After this success, they decided to stop using the machine and use more needles. John Lichtenstein, MD, and former Lincoln Detox medical doctor reflects on his work within the program, “I remember when we did acupuncture and people got off heroin and to see them moving on it was like a joy. It was like seeing people being born he said. Program staff educated themselves as much as they could on acupuncture and overall practices of holistic medical treatment. “Everything we did was on the slogan of love the people, exclaims Silvers. Staff members studied both politics and medical services in China and wanted to create a medical cadre as they did. Lincoln Detox health workers were offered six scholarships to attend the Quebec Acupuncture Institute in Montreal to become acupuncturists. The staff, including Mutulu Shakur and Walter Bosque, accepted the offer and studied under Drs. Oscar and Mario Wexu, the first doctors to perform acupuncture in Montreal, particularly for poor people.

In addition to their work in the Lincoln Detox program, staff continued their organizing efforts and were joined by former patients to protest social inequities, police brutality, and the firing of Black and Brown Lincoln Hospital employees. Since the film briefly addresses just some of these organizing efforts and all requests to record Shakur for the film were denied by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, I have included in this review commentary from a 1992 radio interview with Shakur about the role of acupuncture in the liberation struggle to provide additional insight to the film’s narrative. In the interview, he states:

[W]e demanded better healthcare, we fought in the welfare department for proper treatment of welfare recipients, we had a legal defense fund and helped indigenous people who couldn’t afford legal services. These are the kinds of people services that were developed out of a revolutionary context from Lincoln Detox Drug Program as a result of politicizing victims of drug addiction and educating the community about chemical warfare

In the film, Bosque supports this claim when he similarly states, “we became an issue in the South Bronx and a threat to the establishment.

“The Pioneers Are Always Targeted

According to Shakur, “Lincoln Detox was (a) hot-bed for COINTELPRO. During the time from ’71, ’70 to ’77 we had suffered at least 3 or 4 assassinations. In 1974, there was a mysterious death of Richard Taft, Lincoln Detox doctor and supporter of revolutionary holistic healing along with a media attack on the Doctor’s Collective, a group of white doctors who supported the detox program, The Young Lords and The Black Panther Party. According to Bosque, this was a signal for program staff that they too would be targeted. “Acupuncture, in the hands of revolutionary thinking, Puerto Rican, Blacks, Progressive White people, was an intervention that the government was not willing to accept at the time because it attacked and exposed the intention of the government to impose chemical warfare on a certain segment of the community. And it exposed the fact that the government wanted to control the flow of drugs into the community, posits Shakur. By 1975, the Lincoln Hospital administration began complaining about the detox program. They wanted to conduct audits and observations and even fired some workers to establish more control of the program. After facing multiple threats of having the program shut down, select members of the detox program staff seized the health offices and Shakur negotiated with hospital officials, which delayed the hospital’s plans to fire staff and close the program.

Shakur’s involvement, influence, and leadership within the detox program, the Black Panther Party, and the Republic of New Afrika easily made him a target of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, designed in 1968 to discredit and neutralize organizations and individuals considered subversive to U.S. political stability. Keenly aware of this fact, Shakur states:

The concept of self-determination within the minimum context of community control and control of one’s own health, was too much of a significant barometer for our community to see the potential of freedom, the potential of self-determination, so we became the target. We had also caught them redhandedly providing a chemical addiction to a people that they alleged were trying to detoxify, to clean up the drugs. So, it wasn’t only that we were providing medical care, we were providing medical care and exposing chemical warfare. We were not only providing medical care and exposing chemical warfare, we were challenging western occidental medicine to eastern medicine and natural healing

Upon receiving his acupuncture degree in 1977, Dr. Shakur opened the Lincoln Detox Acupuncture School. Without permission or consultation with hospital officials, Dr. Shakur and other degreed acupuncturists opened the three-year program and held classes at the hospital. Dr. Oscar Wexu traveled from Montreal to give lectures at the school. His son, Dr. Mario Wexu, accompanied Dr. Shakur, Bosque, and students from the Lincoln Detox Acupuncture School on a trip to China to further their acupuncture study. According to one of Dr. Shakur’s students, Jackie Haught, the group was followed by the CIA during their entire trip to China. When the group returned to the US in 1978, hospital administration plans were already in motion to take control of the Lincoln Detox Program. It was not long before program staff arrived to work to find padlocked doors and riot police. “The day that I was fired they sent 200 policemen up to the clinic, surrounded the clinic … and just controlled the whole thing and fired all of us or told us that we were to be sent to other hospitals, said Dr. Shakur. The program staff’s demand of “free quality healthcare for all” was a threat to the corporate healthcare system and to the US government. Ed Koch, New York city’s mayor at the time, referred to program staff and organizers as thugs rather than healers. The program ultimately continued but under new and apolitical leadership.

In response to the program closure, Dr. Shakur created the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANAA) in Harlem. As a private enterprise, funding and access changed, which made it a social, political, and community project. Dr. Shakur and other licensed acupuncturists taught acupuncture to community members and certified them under the International Association of Acupuncture and the World Health Organization. Built on a similar structure as Lincoln Hospital, BAAANA was a community-based political enterprise. “Any person who was going to learn from our clinic had to be somewhat socially conscious and committed to fighting the ills of the community shares Dr. Shakur. Through BAAANA, hundreds of community members were trained as acupuncturists, and some even opened schools. Like Lincoln Detox, BAAANA became a target. The difference was that it was easier to focus on and isolate BAAANA as a threat to the US government especially because they were operating without any official New York state recognition. Just a few years into its operation BAAANA became a target in a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) conspiracy and was raided by the FBI in March of 1982. According to Dr. Shakur, “they alleged that the Black Liberation Army was robbing armored trucks in order to keep the acupuncture clinic alive as well as other organizations and facilities in the black nation. The film features Makini Shakur, Administrative Director of BAAANA, who describes the raid which occurred at night, “I heard this boom … they had blown the door off … and when I got up to look, I got up and I was on the 4th floor and looked over the railings all I could see were those black swat caps and lights on the end of their guns pointing at me coming up the stairs, you know, in the dark ‘cause they had cut the lights and everything. It was harrowing. Susan Rosenberg, acupuncturist and member of the May 19th Communist Organization, worked at the BAAANA clinic and described what she saw when she arrived in Harlem that morning, “it’s a very strange atmosphere … there was nobody on the street … as I am walking toward the clinic once again I look up and there are FBI, black ops people on the roofs all around the clinic … and as I’m walking there is literally a tank rolling down the street, coming in the wrong direction.

On March 20th, 1982, Dr. Shakur was indicted under the RICO Act for the liberation of Assata Shakur since he had served as her legal assistant on many of her cases during the 1970s, using illegally gained funds to finance camp for Black children in Mississippi and the BAAANA clinic, as well as the robbery of six armored trucks beginning in 1976 and ending with the October 20, 1981, Brinks armored truck robbery in Nyack, New York that left two police officers and a guard dead. The RICO Act, created in response to the Mafia and organized group crime groups, allows the alleged leaders of a criminal enterprise to be tried for crimes that they did not personally commit. The US government alleged that Dr. Shakur and his political associates constituted a criminal enterprise. In addition to his arrest, members of the Radical Underground, Black Liberation Army, and the RNA were also arrested. Film interviewee, Sekou Odinga, recalls being tortured for about six hours when he was captured, “I still got burns, scars from where they burned me, pulled my toenail out, flushed my head in the toilet. That was their way of waterboarding me, sticking my head in the toilet and flushing it. Odinga spent the next thirty-three years in prison for this and other alleged crimes. Susan Rosenberg, among many others, was also indicted and imprisoned for sixteen years during which time she remained an organizer. Dr. Shakur’s associates, family, and friends were also targeted, harassed and some (including my mother, Fulani Sunni-Ali, a revolutionary nationalist who studied acupuncture with Dr. Shakur) were jailed, not for committing any actual crimes but for not producing hair and handwriting samples. Many who supported the politics of BAAANA and revolutionary nationalist organizations were targeted in the RICO conspiracy, placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list and as a result, decided to go into political exile within and outside of the United States to ensure their safety and survival. Even “our children,” says Dr. Shakur, “were targeted and harassed … were followed … were put in fearful situations … I was clandestine for many years so my daughter and my sons were always followed and [the FBI] would go into their schools. And so [our children] knew the reality of what this [was].

Over the past forty years of Dr. Shakur’s imprisonment, he has continued his work as an educator, healer, writer, organizer, and advocate for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address the issue of slavery and racial injustice in the United States. In 2019, Dr. Shakur was diagnosed with stage three bone marrow cancer. Sadly, he is being offered oxycodone medication, a dangerous and addictive opioid to manage pain associated with his condition. Unsurprisingly, he refuses to take the drug and his health continues to deteriorate. After several denials of petitions for his compassionate release, Family & Friends of Dr. Shakur along with human rights and social justice organizers, the acupuncture and natural healing community, and his legal team are working collectively to secure his freedom.

While several films tell the story of the twelve-hour Lincoln Hospital takeover what is distinct about Dope is Death is the careful exploration of the social, political, and economic climate that preceded the takeover and the historic transformation of Public Health by the hands of revolutionaries in its aftermath. Since the days of the Lincoln Detox Program and BAAANA, acupuncture and other alternative natural healing modalities have become more normalized and accepted in the US and around the world. In the words of Dr. Shakur, “all the fads and the health foods stores and all of the reflexology clinics and all of these things that [are] allow[ed] to function today would not exist if revolutionary men and women did not fight tooth and nail to spread the possibilities of another form of healthcare system to the third world grassroots community fifty years ago. This film is thus a must-see for new generations of natural medicine healers, activists, and revolutionaries. It is a deep and detailed study of liberation movement-building within and despite interlocking oppressive systems. It is a lesson on how everyday people can work in their own best interests within and outside of the political realm when local and federal governments fail to uphold basic human and civil rights. Most significantly, the film introduces audiences to names and faces of revolutionary giants who have long been unknown and/or criminalized in mainstream media and history. It rightfully pays homage to Dr. Mutulu Shakur and others who have sacrificed their lives to serve the people by any and all means necessary.