OPIOID EPIDEMIC VS. THE CRACK ERA

Thirty years ago, at the height of this country’s crack era, America chose to deal with the urban community plague with more arrests and longer prison sentences. Hundreds of thousands of young lives in communities like Bedford Stuyvesant and Harlem were lost to either addiction or incarceration. Families torn apart, children ripped from their parents and forced to be raised by both strangers and the system.

Today, the country is facing another narcotic epidemic. Replacing crack is now pills, specifically opioids. The difference is pills aren’t ravaging the neighborhoods of brown people like cooked cocaine did decades ago. Opioids are suffering white people more than any other race. So how is this administration handling this particular drug issue? Will we see more pill pushers and addicts behind bars like we did in the late eighties and early nineties? Nope. The Surgeon General feels we need to view and treat the opioid issue as a “disease and not as a moral failing.”

Interesting that in 1989 President George W. Bush’s answer to the crack (black) problem was “more jails, more prisons, more courts and more prosecutors,” but, today, the prescription to combat (white) America’s opioid addiction is compassion and medical attention.

Is this a simple case of America learning from past mistakes while attempting to solve a drug problem or America, per usual, making its majority race and any issues that may greatly impact it the priority? Check out this Washington Post piece and let us know.