S.J.B.
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2011
- Messages
- 6,887
We're Really Starting to Panic About Heroin in America
Michael Tracy
Vice
June 9th, 2014
Read the full story here.
Michael Tracy
Vice
June 9th, 2014
Last week offered a window into the steadily intensifying collective freak-out over heroin use in America. Republican Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana signed into law a bill raising the maximum penalty for heroin distribution in his state to 99 years of imprisonment. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ed FitzGerald, a Democrat, proclaimed that users of heroin were not being punished severely enough. New Jersey law enforcement officials announced that a sweeping 1.5-month multi-agency anti-heroin “initiative” had yielded at least 325 arrests, 280 of which were apparently “users” only. And Texas authorities said that the amount of heroin seized in the state has exploded by 500 percent since 2013.
What the hell is going on here?
In this era of purported Twitter enlightenment, a notion is sometimes propagated that respectable society has finally transcended the bad old days of reactionary, anti-empirical drug policy, marked by buffoonish, overheated anti-drug rhetoric and an emphasis on meting out retributive justice for relatively minor offenses. Public figures today profess to advocate a more “compassion”-based approach. And it’s true that there has been some degree of transcendence, insofar as the laughably insane rhetoric of the 1980s is heard less frequently today. Yet somehow, right now, in June 2014, we find ourselves in the midst of what can only be described as a classic, full-fledged moral panic, this time over heroin—the kind of panic that inevitably wreaks massive suffering on society’s most vulnerable. To which I respond: Are we really going down this road again?
Considering the United States’ record of enacting spectacularly damaging public policy in response to perceived drug “epidemics“—i.e., erecting a regime of mass incarceration and punishment to counter the alleged scourge of crack—perhaps we are at a moment when our collective sense of skepticism should be especially heightened. Politicians are increasingly advancing proposals to expand law enforcement powers and resources on the basis of questionable statistical inferences; we’ve seen this movie before. Predictably, media are by and large reporting on the issue in the familiar language of fraught moralism, with tacit acceptance of the government’s premises thrown in for good measure. On May 28, even the estimable public radio outfit WNYC matter-of-factly tweeted, “NY Senate Task Force Moves to Attack Heroin Epidemic.”
Wait just a sec, please: It seems a little strange to simply take as established fact that the state of New York is currently beset by a heroin “epidemic”—and even if a heroin epidemic did exist, whether “attacking” is called for would be an entirely separate question. First, we ought to clarify what exactly is meant by “epidemic.” The term is colloquially associated with viral outbreaks and other epidemiological trends. Heroin is, of course, not a communicable disease, but an opioid that happens to be prohibited by the government; no one can “catch” heroin in the way they could catch a virus or a rash. Thus the term is at the very least imprecise, and at worst wildly misleading. And if there were ever circumstances under which journalistic precision should be most demanded, you’d think it would be with respect to declarations of public health crises.
Read the full story here.