HEROIN CHIC

"War on Drugs Ends: Drugs Win!"

This recent headline from The Onion, a lampoon newspaper based in Chicago,
is perhaps closer to reality than most of the hallucinatory missives issued
by the government's optimistic drug warriors.

After years of the War on Drugs, formally declared in 1982 by President
Ronald Reagan, the net result has been not a drug-free America, but an
America free to sample more drugs than ever before.

Not only has the quantity of street drugs actually increased, but purity
and price are the best in years, according to Steven Wisotsky, a member of
the Drug Policy Foundation and author of Beyond the War on Drugs.

Heroin's market advantages over crack cocaine figure into the larger
picture. The drug is cheaper and the high longer lasting, a fact that
hasn't escaped users or dealers, who have begun emphasizing heroin sales
over cocaine in recent years.

The federal Drug Enforcement Agency agrees, saying in a recent report: "The
typical heroin user today consumes more heroin than a typical user did a
decade ago, which is not surprising given the higher purity currently
available on the street level."

Along with availability and purity have come new cultures of drug users
previously thought unimaginable, as well as new methods of ingesting the
drugs. Heroin, the original bogeyman of illicit substances, has a peculiar
cultural history, coming and going in fashion, enjoying a certain chic in
one historical moment and a disreputable image the next.

First derived from morphine in 1874, heroin enjoyed a wide popularity as a
legal pain remedy until the federal Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914.

Despite its well-known addictive properties, said to be more insidious than
even crack cocaine, heroin has nonetheless been glamorized in popular songs
and books, associated with artists and Bohemians of all eras.

Horse, an old slang term for heroin, pokes its mangy head up each decade as
the ride of choice for doomed and unaccountably not-so-doomed artists.
William S. Burroughs, Kurt Cobain, Keith Richards, Bela Lugosi, Courtney
Love, John Lennon.... the list of famous heroin users is long indeed.

Today's heroin user is more likely to snort than shoot and more often than
not is employed and educated. Heroin, a longtime wannabe, has arrived in
true democratic fashion, elbowing its way up the class ladder into every
strata of society.

According to a recent report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration, a division of the federal Department of Health and
Human Services, the number of people seeking help for heroin addiction has,
for the first time in recent memory, surpassed those seeking recovery from
cocaine.

Users tend to be younger than ever before, and when older, predominantly
middle-class and professional. One report even states there has been a
four-fold increase in teenage use since the early '80s. The government
estimates there are currently 350,000 heroin addicts nationally, or roughly
two-tenths of 1 percent of the population.

Chances are if you live in the Northeast, you or someone next to you is
riding the horse. And as the drug goes middle class, more and more
suburbanites will become oblivious to their neighbors and instead be
keeping up with their own Joneses.