While media coverage hints at this differential treatment among White users, an almost exclusive focus on racial inequality in drug policy has been repeated without question by both drug policy reformers and scholars. As in suburban America, opiates are the culprit, but the response is markedly different. The story of opiates in Vermont is the opposite of innocence and community cohesion. And two state troopers are pictured searching a suspect’s car for drugs. Alfred Hickey, looking tired and disheveled, is captioned to cast doubt: “ said he quit heroin.” Twenty-year-old Hailey Clark, here depicted as someone’s mother rather than daughter, is crying after losing custody of her son because of a heroin conviction. Stephanie Predel, with dark circles under her eyes, is smoking a cigarette (itself a symbol of disrepute) in front of a ramshackle and dirty house. The images accompanying these stories show a different tale of White drug use. In regional coverage of the opiate panic in Vermont, for example, the “crisis” of opiate use is framed as a “scourge” in quaint Bennington and in Rutland, a “blue-collar” town filled with addicts and drug dealers. They subtly remind the reader that non-White addicts get punishment and harshness when they refer to the White opiate crisis as a “new era” characterized by “striking shifts… some local police departments have stopped punishing many heroin users.” It is only because the users are White that a redemptive narrative of families and police coming together to stop opiate use can gain traction in print and in legislative bodies.Īnd yet, this same media inadvertently invites a disruption to the dominant reading. And yet, the Times is also savvy enough to contextualize this new drug panic when they write, “In Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs” (Oct. Photos of attractive and smiling teenagers-someone’s children-remind us of the promise and potential extinguished by an overdose. The accompanying pictures to these articles show white people hugging as they leave drug treatment and well-dressed parents looking at pictures of the son or daughter they’ve lost to heroin. For example, the New York Times’ coverage of suburban drug users has invited sympathy and identification with the people in the stories, encouraging the reader to see themselves, their child, or someone they know in the stories of good people raised in loving families who became opiate addicts almost by accident. Again.Ī cursory reading of national media seems to confirm this long-standing narrative of White, middle-class drug users as victims, not criminals. White people get treatment and poor people of color get punishment. The hypocrisy of this response is not lost on a range of commentators: the reported move away from criminalization, they argue, is yet another example of racist drug policy. As America’s opiate epidemic rages on, calls for “treatment not punishment” dominate the national media.
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