Eagerly anticipating the next installment in this series!

Not being from the USA myself, my knowledge of the alleged “War on Drugs” has largely come from television, and to a lesser extent, the publications of prison reformers who have firmly established the barbarism of mass incarceration for non-violent drug crimes.

What has been less widely broadcast is what you describe here: the nature of addiction, be that regionally or across racial lines. That heroin has become an emerging crisis in white America was something that I had heard about as an acute issue in Utah. The story was covered by Lisa Ling; apparently when you can’t drink, prescription drugs are a really appealing option, and as established, the jump from Oxy to heroin isn’t a massive one. However, I had heard nothing to the effect of its national emergence, even as the population afflicted grows and grows whiter.

I wonder if some measure of shame is the reason for this muted coverage. After all, it’s easy for people to sleep at night when drug issues can be attributed to the “moral failings” of “those people” (hey, that’s the publication name!), but they cannot apply the same logic to their own children. That level of racist cognitive dissonance is profound. Can it even be overcome?

As an aside, it is incredibly fascinating and heartening to learn that the crack babies grew up healthier than expected. Here in Canada we have a significant rate of fetal alcohol syndrome (about 9 afflicted children per 1,000 live births, by comparison with 3–4 per 1,000 in the USA.) It is a difficult, expensive, and heartbreaking issue to deal with, and the fact that any community was spared drug-induced birth defects on a mass scale is a triumph in and of itself.