• 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.

    • When Heroin Hits the White Suburbs | The Marshall Project
      https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/08/12/when-heroin-hits-the-white-suburbs
      https://d1n0c1ufntxbvh.cloudfront.net/photo/88e254e1/10841/1200x

      Clearly policymakers know more today than they did then about the societal costs of waging a war on drugs, and dispatching low-level, nonviolent drug offenders to prison for decades. The contemporary criminal-justice system places more emphasis on treatment and reform than it did, say, during the Reagan years or when New York’s draconian “Rockefeller laws” were passed in the 1970s. But there may be another explanation for the less hysterical reaction, one that few policymakers have been willing to acknowledge: race.

      Some experts and researchers see in the different responses to these drug epidemics further proof of America’s racial divide. Are policymakers going easier today on heroin users (white and often affluent) than their elected predecessors did a generation ago when confronted with crack addicts who were largely black, disenfranchised, and economically bereft? Can we explain the disparate response to the “black” heroin epidemic of the 1960s, in which its use and violent crime were commingled in the public consciousness, and the white heroin “epidemic” today, in which its use is considered a disease to be treated or cured, without using race as part of our explanation?

      Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a group that targets racial disparities in the criminal-justice system, has been following this issue closely for decades. He agrees there is strong historical precedent for comparing the crises through the prism of race:

      The response to the rise in heroin use follows patterns we’ve seen over decades of drug scares. When the perception of the user population is primarily people of color, then the response is to demonize and punish. When it’s white, then we search for answers. Think of the difference between marijuana attitudes in the “reefer madness” days of the 1930s when the drug was perceived to be used in the “racy” parts of town, and then the 1960s (white) college town explosion in use.