[caption id=”attachment_147043″ align=”aligncenter” width=”1024″]In this July 10, 2015, photo, a woman walks from the police station in Gloucester, Mass., for her ride to an area detox facility. The woman voluntarily came to the police for help kicking her heroin addiction. Gloucester is taking a novel approach to the war on drugs, making the police station a first stop for addicts on the road to recovery. Addicts can turn in their drugs to police, no questions asked, and officers, volunteers and trained clinicians help connect them with detox and treatment services. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
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As heroin use and addiction reaches the suburbs, states have partially shifted their approach from prison sentences to health care.
Virginia, for instance, unanimously passed a law that grants legal immunity to anyone who helps someone overdosing, even if they’re on drugs too.
Gloucester, Mass. and Cook County, Ill. use similar approaches, preferring to usher users into treatment programs instead of jail cells, according to the Washington Post. Illinois, however, has reduced funds for treating drug addiction statewide.
Efforts to reduce the use of prescription opiates –painkillers– has led to the uptick in heroin use, according to the Mountain Xpress in Asheville, N.C.
Cracking down on the availability of painkillers has made them more expensive, so users shifted to heroin, a cheaper drug. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that “between 2002 and 2013, the rate of heroin-related overdose deaths nearly quadrupled.”
Prescription drug abuse, however, remains more common than heroin abuse. Deaths from prescription drugs still dwarf heroin and cocaine deaths combined.
Recently, the Obama administration announced a $5 million plan to address heroin use and trafficking. The Midwest and the Northeast have had the greatest increases in heroin abuse by region.
Efforts in the war on drugs face more pressure to try new approaches. The decades-long failure to stem drug use is difficult to deny, and that gives law-enforcement agencies –and reform groups– political capital to advocate new approaches.
However, the shift might be less about a desire for evidence-based reforms. A driving force seems to be the drug affecting a whiter, more affluent group of Americans.
When addiction and overdose deaths affect families with social and political power, drug users become harder to demonize. Instead of demands to throw drug users in prison, they are seen as people who made a mistake. Instead of a prison cot, voters are more open to hospital beds.
“With the changing demographics, there is the ability to frame this as a public health issue because many policy makers and law enforcement folks seem to relate to white users who are experiencing heroin use disorders more than people of color,” Kathie Kane-Willis, director of the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy, said in a Pew Charitable Trust report.
When it becomes difficult to shrug off the problem as affecting groups outside of a person’s everyday life, individual blame is overridden in favor of a more forgiving public policy. For now, demand for heroin doesn’t look like it’s on the decline, and the negative effects of the drug – and public policy – will continue to harm the towns and cities it infiltrates.
