Last month, NBC News ran a series of stories about the United States’ “growing heroin epidemic.” Two things stand out in the reports: One is their sympathetic tone; the other is that almost everyone depicted is white.

Drug users and their families aren’t vilified; there is no panicked call for police enforcement. Instead, and appropriately, there is a call for treatment and rehabilitation. Parents of drug addicts express love for their children, and everyone agrees they need support to get clean.

In one NBC report, a drug court judge kindly cajoles and encourages people into getting treatment to avoid jail time. Another shows a teacher who was shooting up in the school bathroom now off drugs and happily married. Parents talk passionately about the need to have access to Naloxone, a drug that can counteract heroin overdoses. Every user is treated as a human being who made a mistake and who, with the proper support, can go on to live a productive life.

The heroin epidemic has exploded in white America. The Post has reported on its arrival in affluent Fairfax County, where “young people are jeopardizing their futures with a drug that for decades was seen as the choice of only the most desperate and hardened city junkies.” Peter Shumlin (D), the governor of Vermont — one of the whitest states — devoted his entire State of the State address this year to the effect of opiate addiction on Vermonters and what government could do to help them.

Clearly, new attention to heroin use in white, affluent areas is changing the perceptions and politics of drug addiction.

http://m.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-heroin-use-hit-the-suburbs-everything-changed/2014/05/16/187dcce2-d79e-11e3-95d3-3bcd77cd4e11_story.html