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DRUG-ABUSE RESPONSE COULD HAVE BEEN SOONER

The Country Could Have Saved the Lives of a Lot of White People If We'd Adopted a Better Approach to Drug Abuse by People With Darker Skin.

While the country was focused on locking up black and brown people for drug-related offenses, an epidemic of drug use was building elsewhere, and ignoring it for years hasn't been a kindness to the people affected.

The Seattle Times recently ran a national story headlined, "Drug war shifts as heroin use soars among whites." A few days later that was followed by an article on a study that found death rates have been climbing for poorly educated, middle-aged white people.

Those two stories are related.  The study found that the main reason why middle-aged white people with the least education were dying in larger numbers while death rates continue to decline for other demographic groups is an increase in suicides and deaths caused by drug and alcohol abuse.

Officials across the country are asking why this is happening and looking for ways to help people recover from addiction or avoid it altogether, which is a dramatic shift from the response to the problem when most people's idea of a drug user was a black person in a big city.

Let me quote from a story that made note of the difference:

"When the nation's long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences.  But today's heroin crisis is different.  While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white."

That Oct.  30 story in The New York Times included a comment from the father of an addicted woman, who said he used to talk about junkies near his office, but he doesn't use that term now that his daughter is affected.  Public officials are offering understanding and calling for supportive programs.

I want people to be aware of the difference in response because understanding what that difference means might save someone pain in the future.  Across a whole range of social problems, Americans have a tendency to reserve the most humane and effective solutions until middle-class white people are affected.  That may seem to have short-term benefits, but in the long term the hurt often spreads.

By not seeing people as people, the country missed signs of deep problems that could affect anyone given the same circumstances.

What researchers found underlying suicides and drug abuse are disappearing work, growing pessimism about the financial future, and poor health that often included physical pain.  Sounds like conditions many black Americans have been dealing with for a very long time.

The black unemployment rate tends to be twice the white rate in good times or bad, and during the financial collapse in 2008, the unemployment rate for white Americans rose to the rate black people had experienced for years ( the black rate went even higher ).

White people in middle age whose education didn't get past high school were acutely affected, but the middle class as a whole suffered.

It was easier for white people to go to a doctor and get a legal prescription drug for their physical pain, and for too many that became a salve for psychological and emotional pain as well.  When officials saw what was happening and began to crack down on free-flowing prescriptions, patients turned to the streets for heroin or even meth.

Middle-class white families are getting the attention of officials and moving them to answer the needs of their relatives with compassion rather than punishment.  That's what's happening now.

Some change was already beginning, at first spurred by the cost of incarceration, and more recently by acceptance of bias in the criminal-justice system.  Michelle Alexander's book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," has had a huge impact.  But now that we see larger numbers of white Americans hurt by social and economic circumstances, problem-solving will accelerate.

We'd be further along that path if more people had been able to see the humanity of the Americans who first suffered from the ills that lead to drug abuse.