How the Heroin Epidemic Differs in Communities of Color | Chasing Heroin | FRONTLINE | PBS
▻http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-the-heroin-epidemic-differs-in-communities-of-color
ost of the media attention in the current nationwide heroin epidemic has focused on the uptick in overdose deaths among suburban, white, middle-class users — many of whom turned to the drug after experimenting with prescription painkillers.
And it’s among whites where the most dramatic effect has been seen — a rise of more than 260 percent in the last five years, according to the Centers for Disease Control."
But the epidemic has also been seeping into communities of color, where heroin overdose death rates have more than doubled among African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans, but gone largely overlooked by the media.
People develop addictions for a variety of reasons, which makes it difficult to gather concrete data on what’s happening in each community, said Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director at the National Institute of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse. “To a certain extent, these are hidden behaviors, and we only notice people at the end of their lives sometimes,” he said. “So we don’t always know all of the pathways that lead to this.”
Are State-Sanctioned Heroin Shooting Galleries a Good Idea?
▻http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2016/03/11/are-state-sanctioned-heroin-shooting-galleries-a-good-idea
Studies of safe injection sites, largely in Canada and Australia, have found that they help reduce overdoses and don’t increase drug use or trafficking in the communities where they’re located.
Sites in the United States could violate the federal Controlled Substances Act, which prohibits possession of drugs such as heroin or cocaine or operating a place where people use them. But Congress could change the law or the U.S. Justice Department could make exceptions for the sites, said Leo Beletsky, a law and health sciences professor at Northeastern University.
Most state laws mirror the federal act and would also need to be amended to allow injection sites to operate legally, he said. Though if states begin legalizing them, the federal government could choose not to prosecute people who run and use them — just as the Justice Department has decided not to enforce federal laws for possessing, processing or selling marijuana in states that have legalized it.