Heroin use seems to be spiraling out of control! Apparently, the number of people who have tried heroin within a year has doubled from since 2005 until 2012 (and who knows how much more since!) Heroin related deaths have quintupled in the past 10 years!

That’s really bad and now people are starting to pay attention, of course as humans we have to do something and finally, it seems this problem is affecting policy.

BUT, after all the drug epidemics why now, why is heroin suddenly on the minds of administration and politicians? Why do they suddenly care!

It may be correlation without causation to say this but fact is that 90 percent of new heroin users are white! This isn’t a predominately black problem like crack was!

So you have to wonder why this is getting the ears of the elite? Why those who stamp the policy papers suddenly care…. Is it because it’s a white persons problem?

Eric Holder seems to think so.

Salon went into this discussing the documentary on Frontline, Chasing Heroin, they wrote:

The documentary extracts admissions from top policymakers of how race has altered our perception of heroin. In a startling scene from the documentary, Frontline correspondent Martin Smith, who is white, asks Attorney General Eric Holder, “Not to be too glib, but isn’t [the new public health response to addiction] because a lot of white kids are doing heroin?” Holder, who is the first African-American attorney general, struggles to be diplomatic. Smith presses him further. “Richard Pryor said, you know, famously—about cocaine—that it’s an epidemic now ‘cause white people are doin’ it.” Holder responds, “There’s an element of truth to that.”

The documentary also interviews the director of the Centers for Disease Control, Tom Frieden, and a former senior White House advisor on drug policy, Keith Humphreys, who explain how deliberately they chose to start using the word “epidemic” around heroin abuse, a term that was quickly picked up by the media. Humphreys points out that politcians pay more attention to drugs when they begin to affect the white middle class. “It’s not fair, and it’s not right, but that’s the kinda country that we’re living in.” Public health lawyer Scott Burris adds, “Stereotypes turn out to be so very important to people’s attitudes towards drug use, and the war on drugs, and drug users.”
What “Chasing Heroin” wants to focus on, and for good reason, is an initiative in downtown Seattle that is a radically different methodology for handling a massive population of addicts. The program is called LEAD (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion), and was founded just a couple years ago; it effectively decriminalizes heroin at the discretion of law enforcement, building towards the idea of treating addiction as something other than a crime. For fans of “The Wire,” LEAD’s model feels something like “Hamsterdam,” the policing workaround from the third season that quarantines drug use to a few city blocks to allow the rest of Baltimore to breathe. As productive as LEAD appears to be, it only came to exist after white addiction became prominent. “Chasing Heroin” points out years of Seattle waging war against its addicts of color through brutal policing. Now, all the addicts that the documentary follows to chart their journeys are white addicts, many from stable, middle-class backgrounds.

But in some ways the real story of “Chasing Heroin” is not the somewhat successful story of LEAD but instead the story of little Bremerton, Washington—a town of less than 40,000 just across the sound from Seattle. The first sign of a local problem with heroin was that the town’s toilets were clogged with used needles. A resident describes seeing hypodermic needles in gutters and in playgrounds. But when the mayor tried to open up a methadone clinic—a major waystation on the path to recovery for heroin addicts—Bremerton citizens pushed back. The fears cited were essentially the full gamut of hand-wringing paranoia; Frontline’s narrator diagnoses it, rightly, as a full-blown case of “Not In My Backyard.” But what is truly sad is that the epidemic is already happening in Bremerton’s backyard; the citizens were just blocking the first step towards fixing it. One prominent opponent of the clinic went on to discover that his own child was addicted to heroin.

Read more here and let us know your thoughts.