Heroin in Gated Communities?

Heroin, in the US, has traditionally been associated with the poor, criminals, black communities, back alleys, hippies, AIDS, dirty needles and such. Actually, heroin use among middle class and affluent whites is nothing new. Here is an excerpt from a Washington Post article, Five Myths About Heroin:

In an article headlined “In Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs,” the New York Times recently claimed that “today’s heroin crisis is different,” because it is not “based in poor, predominantly black urban areas” and because use “has skyrocketed among whites.” NPR, the Atlantic and other major media outlets have run similar stories, often citing a study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, which found that 90 percent of new heroin users in the past decade were white.

What most of them omit is that the same study showed that whites have made up more than half of all heroin addicts since the early 1970s and hit 80 percent before 2000. In 1981, Newsweek panicked about a new wave of “middle-class junkies,” and in 2003, a Times headline read “Heroin’s New Generation: Young, White and Middle Class.” White heroin users are nothing new.