Richard Farrell, the author of What's Left of Us: A Memoir, comments on a recent New York Times article about the spread of heroin in America's heartland.
I am white. I am middle class. And I’m heroin addict. Every morning, I pour white powder into a cooker, add water, heat it, wait for bubbles, and draw it into a syringe.
The secret is to alternate arms daily. If not the veins will collapse from overuse. Yesterday was right; today I’ll fire into my left right below the bicep. Both arms look like dartboards.
At this point, I anticipate the total euphoria just seconds away. My stomach begins to flip-flop. I insert the needle, there’s a little sting, pull back on the plunger, and a dash of red-blue blood snakes up the middle of the clear liquid. A direct hit, everything goes warm. I feel safe.
But that was twenty-two years ago when heroin was $30 to $40 and bag. Back then, heroin addiction lived primarily in America’s inner cities. Today, heroin is cheap. The drug cartels have multiplied. And the wheels have come off the United Sates economy. The ingredients are a perfect storm for the resurrection and escalation of heroin addiction.
Recently, the New York Times ran a story about a mother who had just lost her son to heroin. Her name was Dana Smith. Her son died in the upstairs bathroom of her home. Maybe while she was making coffee or reading the morning paper, she never heard a thing.
The facts are gruesome, horrific. This was Dana Smith’s third son lost to a heroin overdose. The Times article quotes her. She uses a disturbing metaphor. Dana Smith said her boys "fell like dominoes."
But what strikes me even harder is the place this all happened. Dana Smith didn’t raise her boys in New York City, Detroit, or Los Angeles. These kids died on the mean streets of Grove City, Ohio, the heartland of America.
The article brilliantly lays out the facts as to why this is becoming a serious problem in America. For the past three years, the state of Ohio has watched heroin related deaths spread into 18 new counties. Now the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency has Ohio on their radar because of the vast network of crisscrossing freeways, making it virtually impossible to adequately police. Drug-traffickers understand their advantage here and are mounting an all out war for control of America’s suburbs.
In Grove City, a suburb of Columbus, Federal investigators found that two legal immigrants from Mexico began distributing drugs throughout Ohio after they were unable to find jobs to support their families. Recent reports point to a rapidly growing financial problem within the struggling Mexican immigrant population of Ohio.
Therefore, the drug cartels are stepping up efforts to take advantage of poor Mexican legal immigrants. The cartels offer big money to mule their heroin or "black tar" death. Some immigrants can’t bear to watch their children starve and reluctantly accept the cartels’ offer.
Dana Smith’s boys found these poor Mexican immigrants. The New York Times reported that the last boy that died had a severe back injury. He was addicted to pain medication. Of course, the doctors could not prescribe enough to make his life comfortable. The only option for him was to buy the pills on the street for anywhere between $40 and $60.
Now consider this, some addicts need 2 or 3 of these pills a day to maintain. The price of heroin presently ranges between $7 and $20 per bag depending on the weight. In most cases, a bag will last an addict the entire day. Any questions?
I only took heroin once. And for three years after that moment, heroin took me for a ride most do not survive. I stole from loved ones, robbed drug dealers with water pistols, and emotionally paralyzed my three children. Finally, I tried to commit suicide. But I even failed at that.
It would be easy to write me off as a scum-bag or make my addiction a moral issue. But again, my roots are from middle class white American. I was an altar boy. Both my parents were teachers. My brother and I attending Austin Prep High School where I was a football star.
But my mother was one of the few lucky ones. She didn’t have to attend my wake and funeral. I got clean, became a journalist, and won the du-Pont Columbia for an HBO documentary I wrote and directed. I’m clueless as to why I survived and Dana Smith’s boys did not. However, I am undeniably certain of one fact—Heroin is the most evil and threatening drug on this planet. It’s low cost fuels death to America’s youth and it fuels the Taliban’s efforts to destroy freedom in Afganistan.
What we need in America is another war. Not one that sends young American boys and girls home in body bags or missing limbs. President Obama needs to declare a full scale war within our borders. The administration must step up to the plate so mothers like Dana Smith do not have to bury their children.
If we miss this as a nation, we will not have to worry about the Taliban, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Osama Bin Laden; our great nation will crumble from the heartland.