America's Drug Addiction In Black And White
Drug addiction in America used to be a "black problem". Now white communities are suffering, the media is covering it completely differently.
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by Justin Rosario
I'm old enough to remember when drug addiction was due to "moral failure." Drug addicts were "junkies" who should be shunned by society and treated like scum, or locked up by the thousands for being dangerous parasites. Drugs were bad, you see, and the people who did drugs were, by extension, just as bad.
I never entirely internalized that message because I knew several addicts growing up. I was related to some of them. None of them were bad people. They seemed sad and hurting, but they weren't dangerous parasites and certainly not a threat to my life.
Still, my entire childhood was spent listening to people, mostly white people, tell me that drugs were bad and drug users, who were always somehow depicted as black, were bad and morally weak. I was told that they deserved to be punished for using drugs and that society could not tolerate their continued freedom. They had to be locked up, possibly for life, even for something as minor as smoking marijuana.
The ‘Gateway’ Drug
By the time I was a teenager, I knew something was deeply wrong with this attitude. I'm sure you're thinking, "That's what every teen who smokes pot says." But I didn't smoke pot. I've never smoked pot. I was never interested and I don't have the strongest set of lungs so inhaling smoke seemed like a particularly stupid thing to do (which is why I've never smoked a cigarette, either). Maybe if edibles had been more widespread, I might have tried that but, honestly, I doubt it.
On the other hand, almost every one I knew smoked pot. My father. My mother. My brothers. My aunts. My uncles. My cousins. All of my brothers' friends. Most of the kids in the neighborhood. My parents' friends. Etc. Etc. I was like a breath of fresh air in a cloud of marijuana smoke. I didn't care that they smoked, I just didn't join in. And, for the most part, no one pressured me to try.
This is how I knew that marijuana was harmless. Literally years of watching dozens of people smoke who knows how much of it resulted in not one of them becoming addicted to pot. And some of them were pretty heavy smokers. But when they needed to stop, for whatever reason, they just stopped. Of all the younger people I know that smoked regularly, only several tried heavier drugs (the adults that had grown up in the 50s and 60s were a different story but that was a very different time). That's why I know marijuana is not a "gateway drug."
No one ever got violent or crazy when they were high. They were far more in control than when they were drunk. No one ever got sick from smoking too much and I learned later that the amount of marijuana needed to overdose is so large it would require a deliberate effort and a herculean one at that.
And yet, people were going to jail for life for smoking marijuana. But mostly for smoking marijuana while black (although I was not entirely aware of that at the time).
The Crack Epidemic
The crack epidemic came and, oh boy, did the press and politicians have a field day railing against the evils of junkies. We just had to get "tough on crime" and tear apart black communities by locking up millions of black men. Had to. No choice. Couldn't be helped. Drugs are bad and drug users are irredeemable, you see.
Fast forward a few decades and a new drug epidemic is sweeping the nation. Or rather, specific parts of the nation.
Rates of deaths from suicides, drug overdoses and alcohol have reached an all-time high in the United States, but some states have been hit far harder than others, according to a report released Wednesday by the Commonwealth Fund.
"When we look at what’s going on in mid-Atlantic states — West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania — those are the states that have the highest rates of drug overdose deaths in the country," David Radley, a senior scientist for the Commonwealth Fund, said. Rates in those states are at least double the national average of fatal drug overdose rates.
New England is also getting its ass kicked by the opioid epidemic and most of the same areas being crushed by drugs are also suffering from spikes in deaths from alcohol abuse and suicide. 20 plus years ago, this kind of body count was attributed to moral rot. Communities ravaged by drugs and alcohol were dismissed as cesspits filled with savages and subhumans not worth our pity or help. Jail and militant policing were the only solutions and if that lead to even more misery? Tough shit. ‘Those People’ had brought it on themselves with their degenerate culture.
A New Perspective On Addiction
Nowadays, we're singing a much different tune. All of these deaths are no longer the result of moral turpitude or a broken culture or even criminal behavior. Now they're, I kid you not, "deaths of despair."
You'll be absolutely stunned to realize that all of the areas because devastated are lily white.
Death rates from suicide and alcohol also showed regional disparities. People died at higher rates by suicide or from alcohol than from drugs in Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Oregon and Wyoming.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's happening in both white communities and how the media covers them.
First, after decades of benefiting from a rigged system that disadvantaged blacks at every economic level, white people are finally discovering that the system was not set up for them, after all. This rigged system was set up for the benefit of the rich and powerful who don't give the slightest damn about white people. To the rich, white people were a convenient group of useful idiots that would give them political power to continue rigging the system as long as they promised to keep black people in their place.
And now that they have most of the money and most of the power, they don't really need to worry about the financial wellbeing of their idiots. Especially now that the rich have so many white Republican voters so thoroughly brainwashed that even as their future burns before their eyes, they're still supporting the people lighting the fire and pouring gasoline on it.
Black Vs White, Or Rich vs Poor?
But all of the right wing propaganda in the world won't bring jobs back to the communities the rich have destroyed with their greed. It doesn't matter how much Fox News white Republican voters watch, when they can't put food on the table, most of them fall into despair. That's why drugs, alcohol, and suicide are rampant in all of these white communities.
It's exactly the same thing that's been happening to black communities longer than I've been alive. With no future left, they turned to vices and violence. White people blamed them for their suffering because we didn't want to talk about what we were intentionally doing to them.
We will not, of course, blame ourselves for what is happening in white communities now. Nor will we blame the rich, the actual cause. Some of us try to blame immigrants or Jews or Muslims or whatever minority we pick that day. But it's hard to blame them for the local factory closing down and moving to Asia so the owners can buy a third super-yacht.
Instead of blaming someone, most of us now say the addicts are "victims" and that they need our compassion and help. My my my...how the times have changed! America sure has evolved in a nation of caring and thoughtful people, has it not?
Oh, wait. Donald Trump, a white nationalist fascist, is the president and we put brown children in cages for fun while Nazis march in the street looking to start riots and murder homosexuals with the protection of the police.
This brings us to the media, its role in perpetrating the hoax of the drug war, and its sudden concern for drug addicts. The New York Times spilled a lot of ink in the 80s about "crack babies" and how despicable drug addicted (black) mothers were. But last year, they practically printed their story about white mothers addicted to opioids in the tears of babies and perfumed the page with baby powder.
Go back to newscasts from the 70s (and 60s and 80s and 90s and the aughts, and even today) and, magically, you will find that most of the criminals shown are black, particularly when the topic of drugs come up. This is despite the fact that white drug use is on par with everyone else's drug use.
Or, at least it used to be. Opioid abuse is mostly confined to white communities and now that white communities are falling into the same despair that we've inflicted on black communities for generations, drug use is wildly out of control.
Let's not kid ourselves, though, we're only "concerned" about the victims of opioids because they're white. And we're not really concerned in the sense we want to help them (if we were, we wouldn't keep electing Republicans to cut taxes for the rich and cut the social safety net for the rest of us); we're concerned that we don't want the same thing to happen to white communities.
We're worried that our prisons are going to fill up with white men. That hundreds of thousands of them will lose their right to vote. That their communities will fall into the same cycle of broken families that lead to crime and more drugs and violence and poverty. The war on drugs was meant to cripple black communities, not white ones.
Yet, the DEA is still on a hiring binge, filling its ranks with thousands of new agents. At a time when marijuana is becoming legalized across the country, who will they arrest? The crack epidemic is not really a thing any more and the DEA will go where the drugs are. The police, deprived of their easy pot busts, will start arresting the exploding population of poor white drug users because drug arrests are lucrative for the department.
Racism, Profit And Despair
It remains to be seen which will win out; the inherent racism of the drug war or the perverse financial incentives of it. We'll know the answer if and when Republicans start screaming about the price tag and begin to claw back the budget of the DEA and other federal agencies pouring billions into arresting drug addicts. Excuse me, I mean "victims."
None of this is say that the media is not currently correct about the underlying cause of the mounting death toll or that these people are, in fact, victims. They are victims of despair and they do need our help. Real help that cannot be provided by tax cuts for billionaires and empty promises to "bring coal jobs back." It would be nice if the media focused on the cause of that despair, who is responsible for it, and maybe, just maybe, extend the same compassion to the black communities they spent literally decades spitting on for the behaving exactly the same way as these wounded white communities for exactly the same reasons. And an apology for decades of media racism wouldn't be out of order, either.
But I shan't be holding my breath.
(image via NBC News)
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