The decline of the steel industry and the former U.S. industrial heartland -- now known as the Rust Belt -- has left behind poverty, unemployment, hopelessness and drug abuse, the Associated Press reported Jan. 16.

In towns like Aliquippa, Pa., violent drug gangs inhabit a landscape dotted with decaying brick factories. In 10 of 14 Rust Belt cities studied, drug arrests have more than doubled in the past 15 to 20 years.

In Aliquippa, the now-closed Jones & Laughlin Steel Co. mill once employed more than 10,000 people. Since the mill was shuttered, the city has lost more than half of its population. The unemployment rate is 21 percent. In Sandusky, Ohio, drug arrests are up fivefold since the mid-1980s, when the city's two big auto plants began downsizing.

Experts like Rick Matthews, a sociology and criminal-justice professor at Carthage College, said closing factories and layoffs created "a niche in the economy for drug dealing."

"The immediate response is, 'I can make a lot more money swinging crack than working at Wal-Mart,'" he said.

Former Aliquippa police chief William F. Alston noticed that starting in the mid-1980s, police began arresting more and more middle-aged drug dealers, rather than teenagers. "That was a direct correlation to the decline of the steel industry," he said.

"People were not going to accept not having a good lifestyle, so if they had to sell drugs, they sell drugs, if they have to sell their bodies, they sell their bodies, yes," said Timothy Hollins, a former steel workers who has been addicted to crack and alcohol for the past 25 years.

"The American dream ain't here anymore," Hollins said.