Heroin: New markets for an old scourge

Michael E. Ross Reporter • Profile • E-mail

As Afghan president Hamid Karzai prepares to meet with President Bush on Monday to discuss topics including the narcotic aspect of the war on terrorism, reports from the United Nations and various agencies point to the continuing persistence of opium and its offspring, heroin.

That drug's growing and purer supply, amid recent efforts to tailor it to the middle class, have led to what some health officials in the United States and abroad fear may be a deadly new trend of addiction in America.

The city of Chicago may well illustrate the complexity of what some call a high-purity heroin epidemic and its impact on the nation as a whole. For one scholar studying heroin use there, it's time to adjust the popular perception of exactly who heroin addicts are.

“The user of today is not the user of the 1970s,” said Kathleen Kane-Willis, assistant director of Roosevelt University's Institute for Metropolitan Affairs and lead author of a study last year on heroin use in Chicago. “The user of today defies the traditional stereotype of being minority, urban, male and poor.”

In Chicago, ‘demographics have shifted’
The Roosevelt study found that in 2002 there were almost 13,000 heroin-related visits to Chicago-area hospital emergency rooms — the highest number in the United States for the fifth straight year.

“What I've seen in the Chicago area is there is a rise in middle-class users,” she said in a May 2004 interview. “The demographics have shifted. ... It's no longer just an inner-city urban problem.”

Other cities with recent or emerging heroin consumption problems include Rochester, N.Y.; Vancouver, Canada; Baltimore; Lewisburg, Pa.; and New York City.

For Kane-Willis, social forces have defused the aura of danger surrounding heroin. “I've heard of heroin showing up at rave parties,“ she said. “The ability to be able to inhale it removes the ‘junky’ stigma. It becomes just another drug choice, in a sense.”

The rise of heroin use in America follows “heroin chic,” the name given in the late 90's to pop culture's fascination with hard-drug use — an allure reflected in the “waif look” of gaunt runway models and the popularity of such films as “Pulp Fiction,” “Trainspotting” and “The Basketball Diaries.” Pop-culture's appeal persists today; New York federal authorities recently told NBC affiliate WNBC of a Bronx-based heroin ring that adopted pop culture-inspired brand names for its wares, names like “Sean John” and “J. Lo.”

Generational amnesia
“Because it's been so long since we had the last heroin epidemic, we might be in a process of generational forgetting,” Kane-Willis said, alluding to the drug epidemic of the late '60s and early '70s.

“Middle-class users were probably never exposed to the epidemic of the 1970s. They might not know that the consequence of using can be addiction and death,” Kane-Willis said. “That forgetting makes perfect sense if you live in an area where there aren't active drug users and it hasn't been made clear in your drug education. If you got it in fifth grade, do you remember it now?”

She also cites the current crop of anti-drug ads on TV. “They're not specific to heroin, they're specific to marijuana,“ she said. “I don't know that there's been much education about heroin use.”

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