When heroin use hit the suburbs, everything changed (warning: potential race thread)

[al audi]

Stephen Lerner is a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative and the architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign. Nelini Stamp is the youth engagement director for Working Families.

Last month, NBC News ran a series of stories about the United States’ “growing heroin epidemic.” Two things stand out in the reports: One is their sympathetic tone; the other is that almost everyone depicted is white.

Drug users and their families aren’t vilified; there is no panicked call for police enforcement. Instead, and appropriately, there is a call for treatment and rehabilitation. Parents of drug addicts express love for their children, and everyone agrees they need support to get clean.

In one NBC report, a drug court judge kindly cajoles and encourages people into getting treatment to avoid jail time. Another shows a teacher who was shooting up in the school bathroom now off drugs and happily married. Parents talk passionately about the need to have access to Naloxone, a drug that can counteract heroin overdoses. Every user is treated as a human being who made a mistake and who, with the proper support, can go on to live a productive life.

The heroin epidemic has exploded in white America. The Post has reported on its arrival in affluent Fairfax County, where “young people are jeopardizing their futures with a drug that for decades was seen as the choice of only the most desperate and hardened city junkies.” Peter Shumlin (D), the governor of Vermont — one of the whitest states — devoted his entire State of the State address this year to the effect of opiate addiction on Vermonters and what government could do to help them.

Clearly, new attention to heroin use in white, affluent areas is changing the perceptions and politics of drug addiction. No longer are the addicts “desperate and hardened.” Apparently, heroin use isn’t the result of bad parenting, the rise of single-parent families or something sick or deviant in white culture. It isn’t an incurable plague that is impossible to treat except with jail time. Drug addicts no longer are predatory monsters.

In short, the root problem is not the degeneracy of a group of Americans. The use of heroin has spread — the National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that America had 373,000 users in 2007 and 669,000 in 2012 — and the increase is largely attributed to heroin being much cheaper than prescription opiates, which are harder to get legally and increasingly expensive on the black market. Economics are driving white suburban addiction, not the dysfunction often attributed to communities of color when those young people abuse drugs.

You can’t help but wonder how the story of a black teacher in an inner-city school shooting drugs in the school bathroom would be characterized. Or how the heroin addiction of a single black mother with two sons would be depicted on the nightly news.

Actually, we don’t have to wonder: We know exactly how drug use has been depicted and responded to when it was perceived chiefly as a problem in communities of color. The 1973 Rockefeller drug laws in New York mandated a minimum sentence of 15 years to life in jail for selling two ounces or possessing four ounces of heroin. The federal government followed suit in the 1980s with mandatory minimum sentencing as part of its “war on drugs.”

The media responded to the 1980s crack epidemic with countless stories of incurable “crack babies” who would inevitably grow up to be criminals. The “culture of poverty” welfare queens and poor people were themselves the cause of drug abuse, and the only solution to protect society (read: white society) was swift, harsh and unrelenting punishment and long jail sentences.

We can only hope that the sympathy shown to white, often affluent, young heroin users will add momentum to the calls to roll back the wasteful incarceration policies that hurt the country as a whole and have disproportionately impacted communities of color. The district attorney for Brooklyn plans to stop prosecuting people arrested for possession of small amounts of marijuana, and marijuana is being decriminalized and legalized across the country. The Obama administration recently announced a pathway to clemency for some nonviolent drug offenders. These are baby steps in the right direction to slow and start to reverse one of the major causes of mass incarceration of people of color.

Disparate drug enforcement and sentencing is just one part of a larger story about growing economic and racial inequality in the U.S. legal system. If we want to live up to our creed of equal justice under the law, we either have to reform our drug laws or lock up all those nice Fairfax County kids and throw away the key.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...7dcce2-d79e-11e3-95d3-3bcd77cd4e11_story.html

 

[fontaine]

I might get Flack but...

Certain drug laws were created to beef up the prisons with minorities.

Cracking down on meth would hit many of these rich white guys' kids...

It's never going to become widespread because it will expose the rich folks' families.

Same goes for corporate taxing.

 

[rell826]

The result of popping painkillers. Can't afford the habit, so they find a cheaper fix. It's not just the burbs either. Heroin is back big time.

 

[al audi]

I know plenty of ppl who got in trouble for weed an all the white ppl I know have done way harsher drugs. Diff is......they don't get caught. Using or selling.

 

[calypso chanta]

I might get Flack but...

Certain drug laws were created to beef up the prisons with minorities.

Cracking down on meth would hit many of these rich white guys' kids...

It's never going to become widespread because it will expose the rich folks' families.

Same goes for corporate taxing.

Man, the whole anti-drug policies are skewed to persecute minorities. I thought this was widely known, no reason you should get flack bruh,

 

[yeah]

The result of popping painkillers. Can't afford the habit, so they find a cheaper fix. It's not just the burbs either. Heroin is back big time.

And that diablo blanco is pure, papi. Even at the street level they consistently get in the 90%+ purity range.

I have no other comment.

I know plenty of ppl who got in trouble for weed an all the white ppl I know have done way harsher drugs. Diff is......they don't get caught. Using or selling.

Nah, they do... I was an RA at a university that was 90% Caucasian. We got drug related calls all the time, just about any drug you can imagine short of crack. The law and people in places of authority are just much more lenient to folks who look like them, is all.

 

[Maximus Meridius]

I might get Flack but...

Certain drug laws were created to beef up the prisons with minorities.

Cracking down on meth would hit many of these rich white guys' kids...

It's never going to become widespread because it will expose the rich folks' families.

Same goes for corporate taxing.

This. Just look at the law they passed in 86 on crack. It wasn't a problem until it effected white folks too.

 

[SC kid]

Dat dog food |I

 

[kingkoopa]

Heroin hitting hard in white neighborhoods too around my way.

It's all over the local news like boy was just invented.

Kinda of funny to me.

 

[luckyluchiano]

Man I been banned from enough threads let me not add this one to the list because I know Doctor Toms are going to be in here shortly.

 

[dankenstien88]

Heroin supply and usage has been surging across the US since 2001, when he invaded Afghanistan. Afghanistans number one crop is poppy.... I'll let you do the math.

 

[Chopper]

Man I been banned from enough threads let me not add this one to the list because I know Doctor Toms are going to be in here shortly.

 So everyone who isn't pro-segregation is a _ Tom right? 

On subject - This should not be shocking to anyone. Cats been knew drug & prison laws associated with them have been used to pain certain demographics, and it's only really a problem when it starts to impact another demographic. 

 

[T Lo Sweater]

So the rebirth of the Crack epidemic of the 80s?

Brb finding a connect
Brb building empire
Brb become Scarface
Brb not ******* over sosa
Brb not icing manny
Brb brb

 

[feeture]

Is a epidemic in cleveland right now, as it is in many other cities. billboards, commercials, news coverage. the whole 9

for those that hustle Its honestly a get rich quick drug. people out here making dumb money off of it.

 

[jadakhanman]

Heroin hitting hard in white neighborhoods too around my way.

It's all over the local news like boy was just invented.

Kinda of funny to me.

This ain't no weed, Ray. And we ain't snorting no *****. This is boy. Boy'll make your *** null and void

 

[SC kid]

White people drivin round bumpin the velvet underground loud as hell b

 

[itshlittt]

So the rebirth of the Crack epidemic of the 80s?

Brb finding a connect
Brb building empire
Brb become Scarface
Brb not ******* over sosa
Brb not icing manny
Brb brb

brb finding lulu

 

[luckyluchiano]

 So everyone who isn't pro-segregation is a _ Tom right? 

On subject - This should not be shocking to anyone. Cats been knew drug & prison laws associated with them have been used to pain certain demographics, and it's only really a problem when it starts to impact another demographic. 

Any black that is anti Black nationalism but pro "integration" is a Tom, yes

 

[yeah]

Heroin supply and usage has been surging across the US since 2001, when he invaded Afghanistan. Afghanistans number one crop is poppy.... I'll let you do the math.

For those who need a little more help:

http://publicintelligence.net/usnato-troops-patrolling-opium-poppy-fields-in-afghanistan/

Wait.....

NT thugs didn't know boy is in harder then that girl?

NT? Thugs?
















View media item 971175

 

[flyny]

So her-on is hot again now huh ?

 

[kingkoopa]

Wait.....

NT thugs didn't know boy is in harder then that girl?

It's been like that for a min.

I always wondered why crack is so heavily rapped about when heroin has been the money maker for some time now.

(At least in ohio)

 

[shoelyesses]

Wait.....

NT thugs didn't know boy is in harder then that girl?

It's been like that for a min.

I always wondered why crack is so heavily rapped about when heroin has been the money maker for some time now.

(At least in ohio)

hell everywhere.... crack been took a backseat.. and its prelevant, not just in white suburbia but in the urban areas as well.... be it "water" in mississippi, alabama etc... tennesee...or be it getting "wet" midwest state...etc. Heroin has been big for at least a decade or more. Crack has become almost the older crowd/old heads vice of choice.

 

[301216baller]

Wait.....

NT thugs didn't know boy is in harder then that girl?

It's been like that for a min.

I always wondered why crack is so heavily rapped about when heroin has been the money maker for some time now.

(At least in ohio)

Yep heroin is huge in southern ohio especially in Scioto county

 

[luckyluchiano]

hell everywhere.... crack been took a backseat.. and its prelevant, not just in white suburbia but in the urban areas as well.... be it "water" in mississippi, alabama etc... tennesee...or be it getting "wet" midwest state...etc. Heroin has been big for at least a decade or more. Crack has become almost the older crowd/old heads vice of choice.

Lol hell majority of cash money was on that dope back of the day and proud of it, I always said I never seen someone who actually tried crack for the first time after 1993

 

[160jordansdeep]

Heroin supply and usage has been surging across the US since 2001, when he invaded Afghanistan. Afghanistans number one crop is poppy.... I'll let you do the math.

alot of the dope that makes it way to the US comes from Mexico Columbia ect

the heroin that comes from afghanistan makes its way to the rest of the middle east europe and russia

it's not easy to smuggle "horse" from the middle east to the US but possible

that's a mean dope lean










bottom line heroin is a terrible drug and its not going anywhere