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The New York Times
Serving All
Your Heroin Needs
By Sam Quinones
April 17, 2015
FATAL heroin overdoses in America have almost tripled in three years.
More than 8,250 people a year now die from heroin. At the same time,
roughly double that number are dying from prescription opioid
painkillers, which are molecularly similar. Heroin has become the
fallback dope when an addict can’t afford, or find, pills. Total
overdose deaths, most often from pills and heroin, now surpass traffic
fatalities.
If these deaths are the measure, we are arguably in the middle of our
worst drug plague ever, apart from cigarettes and alcohol.
And yet this is also our quietest drug plague. Strikingly little public
violence accompanies it. This has muted public outrage. Meanwhile, the
victims — mostly white, well-off and often young — are mourned in
silence, because their parents are loath to talk publicly about how a
cheerleader daughter hooked for dope, or their once-star athlete son
overdosed in a fast-food restaurant bathroom.
The problem “is worse than it’s ever been, and young people are dying,”
an addiction doctor in Columbus, Ohio — one of our many new heroin hot
spots — wrote me last month. “This past Friday I saw 23 patients, all
heroin addicts recently diagnosed.”
Jesse Draxler
So we are at a strange new place. We enjoy blissfully low crime rates,
yet every year the drug-overdose toll grows. People from the most
privileged groups in one of the wealthiest countries in the world have
been getting hooked and dying in almost epidemic numbers from
substances meant to numb pain. Street crime is no longer the clearest
barometer of our drug problem; corpses are...
Read the rest of the article at The New York Times
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