Just make sure I'm around when you've finally got something to say.--Toad the Wet Sprocket

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

The Black and White of Heroin


These days politicians are talking about treating the disease of drug use with treatment rather than jail time and police and judges are starting to back that up---but it seems to only be applicable if you are from a white affluent neighborhood. These days heroin use is up. The largest number of heroin users though is among whites from middle and upper-class families. A rise in a death rate of 260% over the last five years among whites, while the overdose rate among people of color has doubled and no one has noticed. Maybe it was a white person who got hooked by taking pain pills for an injury or a teen who started taking pills as a party drug. Drugs like Oxy, Percocet, and Vicodin are from the same family as heroin. They are all made from the poppy plant.  Oxy is virtually the same thing as heroin and Percocet is right up there too. Vicodin is a slightly less strong drug.  Just because they can be prescribed to you by your doctor does not make them any less dangerous. But with the color of the user changing, suddenly everyone wants to treat the users--certain ones--with special care.

In the suburbs of Chicago, Rolling Meadows began a program where you can walk into a police station, or if you are picked up for a drug offense, you can turn over your drugs in exchange for getting put into a program. Lake County and Naperville have also joined in on this idea. The common denominator? They are all affluent and white with Lake County at 75% ,Naperville at 76%, and Rolling Meadow 62% white.


In the poverty stricken inner city nine out of ten arrested on drug offenses will end up in Cook County Jail and of those arrested one in six had used drugs in the days leading up to their arrest. Blacks were also eight times more likely to be stopped and frisked by police and of 1400 heroin users in jail, only a fraction will get help.  State sponsored programs have been cut in half, which disproportionately affects blacks, but there is finally an addiction program in jail called Division 6 that is only open to low-level offenders.

In Seatle, they have a program called Law Enforcement Assistant Diversion (LEAD) that allow police to assign drug users to case workers for low-level offenses. 36% of those in the LEAD program were arrested after entering the program compared to a control group where 59% were and they were less likely to be charged with a felony. It has been implemented in such cities as Albany, Atlanta, Portland, Maine, Baltimore, Fayetteville, NC, San Fransico, and Louisville. The last I heard, Hartford, Connecticut was considering LEAD. Lorezo Jones, co-director and co-founder of the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice had this to say:
 “We support LEAD, not because we think the police and courts are going to do the right thing,” Jones said. “They have never done the right thing by poor and marginalized people. This is not an answer but a lever that the have-nots can pull, a new door that the have-nots can go through.”

But for those who can't get help or for those who slide, 80% of drug offenders are reincarcerated for future offenses, whether it be to support their bag or two a day habit or what they have to do to get the money to pay for the $10 a bag habit (A single opioid pill costs $20 or $30 by contrast). The difference is in who gets the help and who goes to jail.  Right now two-thirds of those in jail on drug offenses are people of color. The white drug use has flooded the inner city with cheap heroin that makes it tempting for those who possibly grew up seeing family members or friends use.  It's a rigged game against those in the inner cities who are put in a position to sell it in order to be able to use it or to be able to afford to put food on the table for their families even as a young teen or a kid. And those who sell it end up going to jail under a felony and then cannot get a real job or any job, for that matter, when they get out and are stuck in a trap, while the white users get put in treatment centers and don't get charged with a crime and therefore have no criminal record to hinder them in the future.  Until we are helping everybody we are not actually fixing the problem we are part of the problem.

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