Plan B Forum

How a heroin epidemic among white Americans led to a softer war on drugs

Updated by German Lopez on November 1, 2015, 9:00 a.m. ET @germanrlopez german.lopez@vox.com

Public officials have by and large responded to the ongoing opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic with a softer approach than previous drug crises. Part of that is states trying to save money after decades of expensive tough-on-crime policies. But some critics have pointed to two very different factors: race and class.

In light of that, the New York Times on Friday published a revealing story by Katharine Seelye about how race and class are driving a different reaction to the opioid epidemic compared with previous drug crises. Take, for instance, this quote from a police officer:

So officers like Eric Adams, a white former undercover narcotics detective in Laconia, are finding new ways to respond. He is deployed full time now by the Police Department to reach out to people who have overdosed and help them get treatment.

"The way I look at addiction now is completely different," Mr. Adams said. "I can't tell you what changed inside of me, but these are people and they have a purpose in life and we can't as law enforcement look at them any other way. They are committing crimes to feed their addiction, plain and simple. They need help."

Adams can't explain what changed inside of him. But it's possible that race could have played a factor: Maybe Adams and other police officers are more likely to see a heroin addict as a victim simply because the addict is now more likely to be white and middle-class.
How race and class matter with drug epidemics

As Marc Mauer, executive director of the criminal justice reform group the Sentencing Project, told the Times, "Both the image and reality is that this is a white and often middle-class problem. And appropriately so, we're having a much broader conversation about prevention and treatment, and trying to be constructive in responding to this problem. This is good. I don't think we should lock up white kids to show we're being equal."

Mauer isn't alone in his thinking. The focus on race and class is something I've heard time and time again from drug policy experts and activists. It's one of the common responses I get when I write about the opioid epidemic.

It's true that the current opioid epidemic has affected predominantly white victims in less urban areas: Research published by JAMA Psychiatry shows, for example, that nearly 90 percent of people who began using heroin in the previous decade were white. And it's true that the public and police generally possess subconscious biases that make them more likely to view black people and other minorities as less innocent and more criminal. So there's solid evidence behind this belief — it's not just people looking for a scapegoat.

The history of past drug epidemics also tells the story. During the 1970s and 1980s, federal and state lawmakers reacted to the heroin and crack cocaine epidemics of those times with punitive tough-on-crime policies, including the launch of the war on drugs. And those older epidemics primarily hurt lower-class, minority groups in urban areas — not the middle-class and wealthier white people in rural and suburban places mostly hurt by the opioid epidemic of today.

Race and class also may play a role even for someone who's free of subconscious or overt racial bias. Since lawmakers tend to be whiter and wealthier, they may not have had personal contact with victims of past drug crises. But they do today — and many of them even share personal stories in their push for drug policy and criminal justice reform. By simply having more personal contact with addicts, lawmakers have been driven to treat the current epidemic as a public health, not criminal justice, issue.

This is essentially what Michael Botticelli, head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the Times: "Because the demographic of people affected are more white, more middle class, these are parents who are empowered. They know how to call a legislator, they know how to get angry with their insurance company, they know how to advocate. They have been so instrumental in changing the conversation."
Race and class probably don't explain the entire story

There is one caveat to the race and class explanation: The opioid epidemic coincides with a criminal justice reform effort that largely began before the current drug crisis was well-known in the mainstream. The reform effort by and large started, particularly in conservative states, as an attempt to cut the costs states were facing from locking up so many people. So while race and class have likely played a role in the softer public health approach to drugs, there are other factors, too.

Of course, that caveat doesn't do anything for the millions of minority Americans who were disproportionately arrested and incarcerated for their addiction in previous decades. For them, it increasingly looks like if they had been born at a different time or of a different class and race, their lives wouldn't have been ruined by an approach to justice that the public and political leaders now by and large see as far too harsh.

bigskygal wrote:I agree, but better late than never. I'm sorry to see the epidemic of heroin use/overdose that grew out of the prescribing of pain pills (when will the doctors be held accountable? Oh wait, one was just convicted of murder in CA for overprescribing pain meds that led to overdose deaths), but if it takes the addiction/deaths of middle class white kids to change the way the system treats addicts, it is what it is.