Heroin use in region at highest level ever

No longer are heroin addicts mostly poor African-Americans in an economically deprived inner city neighborhood, he said. Now, they are Caucasians, primarily well-educated professionals and students from well-heeled city neighborhoods and suburbs, whose powerful addictions make them jeopardize careers, families and friends in search of the next fix.

"A lot of people think only bad things happen in the city, but there's no bubble to keep them out of the suburbs," said Mt. Lebanon Police Lt. Aaron Lauth. "The drug of choice right now is heroin. We see it all of the time.

"We're not seeing the violent crime but that doesn't mean there is any less use of drugs. The users in our neighborhood aren't out robbing and stealing. They have money, at least for a while, to support their habits. When we investigate property crime ... it's [usually] drug-related.

"It's that serious, that prevalent, that it is necessary for us to dedicate one officer full time to narcotics investigations."

............


Two decades ago, he would see a couple of heroin users a month. Now, he sees five to 10 a day.

"I just saw an 18-year-old girl from a good middle-class family, a good school district, who has been using heroin for a year and half," he said. "Several have come in at 14 years old. Parents are fooled, communities are fooled because it's not on their radar screen in good areas.

"One mother said to me, 'I don't know how this could happen to my son. I went to all of his soccer games.' "

While Pittsburgh normally lags years behind national drug abuse trends, such as with crack cocaine, it was at the forefront of increased heroin addiction because of what Dr. Capretto called a "perfect storm."

One element was the development of OxyContin, which, like other opioid drugs such as Percocet, Vicodin and Dilaudid, possess some properties characteristic of opiate narcotics like heroin, but are not derived from the opium poppy. The powerful drug is prescribed here more than in other areas because of the region's large elderly population and the large number of former industrial workers who suffered work-related injuries.

Click to expand...

"One mother said to me, 'I don't know how this could happen to my son. I went to all of his soccer games.'

Click to expand...

Khadijah said:

Oh whoa whoa, hold the fuck up--

"no longer are heroin addicts mostly poor african americans in inner cities"

Wat the FUCK is that shit?

Heroin addicts were NEVER majority black folks in cities. Where the fuck do these fools get their information at?

Heroin has ALWAYS been overwhelmingly a drug mostly used by white folks.

"Oh, it use to be a black, ghetto drug but now white ppl doin it too" BULLSHIT! Thats how it always been from the beginning, you dumb ass mutha fuckas. Damn these reporters is ignorant as hell.

Dope creepin up on your white daughters in the night and rapin em in their sleep. Take all the old stories about black men 'ruining' white women from the 40s n 50s and replace black men with "dope" and you got the majority of these news stories.

Click to expand...

Khadijah said:

Oh whoa whoa, hold the fuck up--

"no longer are heroin addicts mostly poor african americans in inner cities"

Wat the FUCK is that shit?

Heroin addicts were NEVER majority black folks in cities. Where the fuck do these fools get their information at?

Heroin has ALWAYS been overwhelmingly a drug mostly used by white folks.

"Oh, it use to be a black, ghetto drug but now white ppl doin it too" BULLSHIT! Thats how it always been from the beginning, you dumb ass mutha fuckas. Damn these reporters is ignorant as hell.

Dope creepin up on your white daughters in the night and rapin em in their sleep. Take all the old stories about black men 'ruining' white women from the 40s n 50s and replace black men with "dope" and you got the majority of these news stories.

Click to expand...

ResinTeeth said:

Hey, you guys remember that African-American heroin scourge? - Me either

Click to expand...

khadijah said:

heroin addicts were never majority black folks in cities. Where the fuck do these fools get their information at?


heroin has always been overwhelmingly a drug mostly used by white folks.

Click to expand...

Bricks & Stacks said:

Haha how fuckin classic. These "heroin is invading your neighborhood" stories never get old to me no matter how many I read.

Click to expand...

Khadijah said:

Also memphixx3, I aint sure wat you sayin...are you disagreein with ME or the quote in my post?

.

Click to expand...

Khadijah said:

^^LOL yo, funny you say that, I remember in like 2005 sayin "looks like the glory days of dope in 2001-2003 is over with", all the long term dopeheads will tell you that in jersey at least shit was straiight FIRE in 02 and 03, th shit in the past few years aint nothin compared to that, but i guess compared to the ish out now the 2008 dope looks good lol...and for somebody who wasnt usin D back then an only started in te past few years then thats all u got to compare with...

I do hear wat you sayin tho Tommy but the point aint the QUALITY of dope , all that means is that all the new kids with new dope habits wont get to experience the real fire dope that used to be in every single bag you got anytime of day back a few years ago. Dont mean theres less ppl doin it tho. Lately if you ask me there IS a huge amount of new dope users.

Dont get me wrong the story is old as time itself. I remmeber readin stories like this in the Bergen record in like 1998, you feel me? Shit aint new, never has been but alot of times people would put those stories in the news when like 3 local kids got caught with dope. And theyd play the whole "dope epidemic" style story when there really WASNT one and there was just a small increase , a few local kids on dope, cuz you know anytime theres "ghetto drugs" in the suburbs, the shit is a epidemic.

They cried wolf so many times that now when they say that shit people is just like yea watever...but i can say from my own experience even bein mostly out the game, just readin the Obituaries and police blotter pages in the local paper lately, that like every single listing in the police and prosecutors report and there is usually like 20 arrest/sentencing reports, every single drug related one is about dope, and I been seein mad obit's for young kids OD'ing lately. A couple moths ago there was 3 or 4 kids who OD and died on dope under the age of 20 in 2 weeks in one of the suburbs. Thats alot for folks in those areas, you know? To them when ONE kid dies from a OD its a big deal so when theres kids steady droppin from that shit they get scared as hell.

It def. is gettin bigger tho if you ask me, its like every white kid I meet at probation is there for diesel. and you know its like if you listen to the newspapers, theres always some crazy dope problem but Im sayin, that from payin attention to the real shit thats happenin, talkin to ppl, etc, i can def. say that theres a increase in dope at least in the NJ area and especially in the suburbs.


Also memphixx3, I aint sure wat you sayin...are you disagreein with ME or the quote in my post?

Dope always been majority abused by white folks yo. Shit mighta been back in the day associated with the blues n jazz men and black folks but you can go look up the stats yourself dope is a majority white drug and for the past couple decades at least it been that way.

Click to expand...

kaywholed said:

1970s with frank lucas?

Click to expand...

ResinTeeth said:

Dammit, foiled again. The day is yours, sir. You win a complementary bag of blue magic.

Click to expand...

According to Treatment Episode Data Set, heroin accounted for 15.2% of all treatment admissions in 2000 (243,523 admissions). Males accounted for 66.9% of heroin treatment admissions. Treatment admissions by race/ethnicity ranged from 47.3% white, to 24.7% Hispanic, to 24.2% black.

Click to expand...

During 1970 and 1971, the mass media carried news of two new and distressing opiate trends. A growing number of white, middle-class young people, in suburbs as well as inner cities, were said to be mainlining heroin. And United States military personnel-primarily in Vietnam, but also at duty stations in the United States and throughout the world-were similarly said to be sniffing, smoking, or mainlining heroin in substantial numbers.

It was still much too early, as this Consumers Union Report was nearing completion, to evaluate these two new phenomena in detail, to ascertain their causes with precision, or to put forward specific policies for handling them. A few central points, however, can be established with reasonable confidence. Let us review the two new patterns of heroin use in turn.

Heroin among middle-class white young people. How common is heroin use in comfortable residential areas and suburbs? Nobody knows.*

* President Nixon's Message to Congress, June 17, 1971, stated: "Even now, there are no precise national statistics on drug use and drug addiction in the United States, the rate at which drug use is increasing, or where and how this increase is taking place. Most of what we think we know is extrapolated from those few states and cities where the dimensions of the problem have forced closer attention, including the maintenance of statistics."

Anecdotal evidence indicated that by 1971, heroin had become the most popular illicit drug (except for marijuana) among young people in at least a few suburbs. How many suburbs? Which suburbs? No one knew or could find out. Indeed, the only reliable source of information concerning heroin on the youth drug scene came from the free clinics and other indigenous institutions (see Chapter 65)-institutions to which youthful heroin users naturally turned when they realized that they were "hooked." These institutions could report only that heroin addiction was rapidly rising in certain neighborhoods.

One very distressing aspect of heroin's spread to the suburbs was that it seemed to signal a crumbling of the longstanding dividing line between heroin and the other drugs, licit and illicit. That line had been recognized and accepted by almost all middle-class white young people through all the years from 1914 till late in the 1960s. Young people might risk alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, hashish, LSD, and a variety of other drugs-but heroin? Certainly not-except, of course, for some poverty stricken denizens of inner cities and a few others.

This breakdown of the barrier against heroin use was at least in part, it should now be apparent, the natural and inevitable result of the official United States antidrug stance, which linked many illicit drugs-even marijuana-to heroin in antidrug pronouncements. Thus, marijuana was defined as a narcotic in many laws. The same penalties were decreed against the possession or sale of marijuana as against the possession or sale of heroin. Authorities mistakenly spoke of "marijuana addicts." The often repeated slogan, "Marijuana leads to heroin," further obscured the distinction between the two drugs. At the same time, the distinction between injecting a drug and swallowing, sniffing, or smoking it was also blurred; antidrug propaganda concealed the fact that sniffing, swallowing, or smoking a drug is much safer than mainlining it. As a result, the indigenous institutions report, many naive young people eventually responded to the propaganda and accepted the view that heroin mainlining must not be very different from marijuana-smoking, or "acid-dropping," or other accepted forms of illicit drug use.

Click to expand...

In the second major wave of American opiate addiction, heroin was integrated into the new cultural identity of the "hipster"(20), first through the Harlem jazz scene in the 1930s and 1940s and then through the Beatnik subculture of the 1950s. During this period the major supply of heroin entering the U.S. came through the "French Connection"--a collaboration between Corsican gangsters in Marseille and the Sicilian Mafia. In April 1971, Congressman Robert Steele (R-CT) investigated reports of rampant heroin abuse among U.S. servicemen in Vietnam. His fact-finding mission estimated an addiction rate of 10 to 15%. This alarming statistic, combined with emerging evidence linking heroin addiction to crime, pushed the heroin problem to the front of Nixon's drug policy agenda.

Click to expand...