I was happy to hear that Donald Trump declared the opioid epidemic a health emergency. It is a medical problem. But after reflecting I got upset because the crack epidemic was not given similar ‘coddling.’ I explain in the video below why it will do well if we use this reality to understand that these addictions are based on national pain created by our politicians.
Trump declares the opioid epidemic. Remember the crack epidemic?
Lornet Turnbull wrote an excellent piece titled “Opioid Addicts Get Compassion. Crack Addicts Get Mass Incarceration” that is a must-read. She writes the following.
President Trump on Thursday declared opioid addiction a public health emergency, a move that will free up some resources for treatment and bring new focus on this growing public scourge.
But those same images are familiar to many who remember another era, when a different drug crisis seized cities, hollowing out neighborhoods and destroying lives. Unlike the heroin and prescription drug-addiction that today affects mostly suburban and rural whites, the crack cocaine rage of the 1980s and 90s ravaged the African-American community.
Back then the response wasn’t rehabilitation centers and overdose treatment but prison cells and “Just Say No.” The crack cocaine epidemic was treated as a war, not a public health crisis. And young African Americans—the addicts as well as those who preyed on them—were swept up, prosecuted, and sent away.
“It shows the remarkable difference in how we are viewing this,” said Ekow Yankah, a Cardozo School of Law professor whose work focuses on questions of criminal theory and punishment. “There was no wave of national compassion. Some liberals and representatives of minority communities in particular were desperate for America to take a public health view of drug addiction in the 1980s and 1990s.”
In fact, Yankah says America’s willingness to embrace the drug epidemic’s newest addicts with compassion is a perfect example of racism. “Confronted by two people facing the exact same problem, one of whom looks like your child or your neighbor’s child: Is it fundamentally you?” he asked. “When it is a black face, we don’t see the same humanity.”
What are your thoughts?
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