'Chasing Heroin': 'Frontline' tackles 'quietest epidemic'
PBS newsmagazine looks at how a pill problem helped pave the way for a street drug and what's being done to deal with it.
FRONTLINE: CHASING HEROIN
9 p.m. Tuesday, WHYY12
It's no secret this country has a drug problem, and not just with the kind peddled on street corners to vacant-eyed addicts.
Do we also have a pain problem?
Many of our TV shows are brought to us by products with fanciful names promising relief from ailments large and small, and, perhaps most of all, from pain.
And as PBS's Frontline reports Tuesday in a two-hour presentation, Chasing Heroin, it's the search for pain relief - as well as for profits - that helped lead to a national problem with heroin that's not always fully acknowledged.
"This epidemic is also the quietest epidemic. It's filled with shame," says Sam Quinones, author of Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Epidemic. "People die alone in a McDonald's bathroom toilet. And then when the people die, when the kids die, the parents are so mortified. So ashamed that they keep quiet, too. And the thing is left to perpetuate and spread."
Quinones and others describe how the marketing to doctors of painkillers, followed by a crackdown on overprescribing, helped create a new class of opiate addicts: mostly white, living in towns and suburbs, not inner cities, and targeted by drug cartels that set up shop in areas where prescription-drug users live.
Their customers may be people like Cari Creasia of Kent, Wash., who was prescribed Vicodin for pain after giving birth to her second child and who became addicted. After years of obtaining pills, first from her doctor and then through a variety of scams, she moved on to meth and eventually to heroin, leaving her family behind in the process.
Not surprisingly, these new addicts have put officials on less of a wartime footing: We're beginning to hear more about treatment and less about incarceration.
Or, as Frontline's Martin Smith notes in an interview with former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who worked to change the government's approach to nonviolent drug crimes, "Richard Pryor said, you know, famously - about cocaine - that it's an epidemic now because white people are doin' it."
"Well, you know, when things seep into the majority community, the nation pays a greater amount of attention than when it is confined to minority communities. And so, yeah, there's an element of truth ... to that," Holder replies.
The search for solutions took Frontline to Seattle, where it spent a year observing a program in which police and social workers work with addicts to improve their lives and reduce their contact with the criminal justice system without necessarily expecting them to stop using drugs.
"You can't make somebody stop using. So not allowing them to use [before agreeing to help them] is absurd," social worker Mikel Kowalcyk tells Smith. "The goal is to reduce overdose, to reduce theft, nuisance, trespassing, reduce recidivism."
Two hours isn't enough to cover a problem that's at least three decades in the making, but there's plenty to think about here, including the apparent absurdity of a drug policy that places greater restrictions on the prescribing of methadone and Suboxone - drugs used to help manage addiction - than on OxyContin.
graye@phillynews.com
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