Falling through the cracks: Heroin

Almost 200,000 Americans aged 25 years or younger are currently afflicted with heroin addiction. While this estimate seems a very small percentage of the 281,421,906 people measured in the United States by the Census 2000 project, the following selection sums up my feelings best:

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent,
a part of the main; if a clod be waded away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend or of thy own
were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And
therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne (1572-1631), Meditation XVII

During the mid-to-late 1990's, a rash of heroin overdoses occurred in a suburb of Dallas, Texas named Plano. From Janurary of 1994 until December of 2000, 23 heroin-related deaths occurred in this town of just 200,000 people. Worse, 20 of those deaths were of people between the ages of 12 and 22. Local hospital statistics estimate the number of people who came to the emergency room because of acute narcosis at over 200 people in the same time frame. Many teenagers wound up at the emergency room three, sometimes four times due to heroin. The problem in Plano was so severe that the two high schools - Plano Senior HS and Plano East Senior HS - both earned the nationally recognized moniker "Heroin High."

The irony of the entire situation is that Plano, Texas is a model community, with an excellent educational system - many of the schools are recognized as "Blue Ribbon" schools. Much of the city is upper-middle class, not at all the stereotypical setting for a heroin outbreak. Regardless, this just proves that youths can fall through the cracks anywhere.

One final thing. While a death related to a heroin overdose is classified as acute narcosis, it is a much more violent and disturbing death than such a name can possibly convey. Users high on heroin often find themselves hypersensitive to light, sound, and touch. Often, they will lock themselves in closets or in unoccupied rooms to prevent sometimes painful sensory overloads. One other side affect of all opiates is the loss of the gag reflex. Combined with the nausea provoked by heroin use, death usually occurs due to vomit which immediately enters the lungs. As with pneumonia, the victim suffocates, unable to draw a breath.

I'd like to reply to Inebriated Poet regarding his comment that Plano "is a model community, with an excellent educational system."

Okay, I'll somewhat concede the educational system. Plano Senior High School (PSHS) does have a good academic program, with a ton of AP classes, including both AP computer science programs, which isn't too common. However, PSHS is huge. My graduating class was around 1500 people, and the school as a whole was well over 3000 people (graduation held at Texas Stadium). It's like a small college campus, you can't even begin to hope to know everyone (not that that's necissarily a bad thing, this is just an observation), and the beaurocracy is huge. Senior year, i started printing up my own counselor passes and getting my somewhat artistic friends to forge counselor signatures. The beauty of this was that though the passes were supposed to go back to the counselling office, most of the time the teacher threw the thing away right in front of you. No way that much of a paper trail could be kept up, especially with the ever growing influx of new students to this town (did I mention that the vast majority of people I knew hadn't lived there more than 5 years?). By this same token, i also printed doctor's notes (modelled after my real ones), minus the phone number. I played the odds that some over worked secretary wouldn't bother corroborating the story of some kid who's not out that often and has no disciplinary problems (not on his record at least). But I digress. You get the point, good schools, but in a very corporatized, and not so nurturing environment (they even had mission and purpose statements).

But the model community part, that I won't buy. I don't know, maybe you're going from news reports. Maybe you lived there and you just got a totally different perspective than me and my group of friends. I'm not judging the whole town and marking each individual here, but I will say that attitudes of materialism, mindless ambition, and pretty much every other suburban cliche that movies and satire have beaten to death, were thoroughly present. This town was riding high on the mentality of the new economy, and damn if it wasn't going to be the model of efficiency and capitalistic comfort. The problem was, it was, like the recent dot-com bust showed us, running on a significant amount of vapor. Over 50% of cars in this town were leased. Upper-middle class, yes, but a significant thanks goes out to credit for that one.

This obsession with image made falling through the cracks that much easier. No one wanted to deal with it. It wasn't our problem. This is where I had my first discussion about the supply side dilemma in the drug war. See, the rhetoric, at least before say the first dozen kids died, was that this was a problem produced by East Plano, the more actual middle class part of the town. You know, a little bit of diversity, and a little less money is all it takes if you want to be looked down on. So PSHS parents, police, school administrators, etc, always blamed East Plano. Those fuckin mexicans. Bringing their dirty black tar heroin. Forcing our kids to shoot up. Yeah, ok. Guess where the demand comes from? You know, if I had the money, the (possibly an illusion) endless safety net, and the jadedness that comes from getting a BMW with your learner's permit, heroin would seem like a viable option as a new source of entertainment. That sort of thing doesn't seem like a big deal anymore. One more expensive hobby, but it's a little harder to get bored of than a lot of the other ones.

But more than that, heroin's such a time-honored tradition for really dropping out of society as far as life-style drugs go. A lot of these kids, I'm convinced saw the emptiness of what the community was pushing on them. That doesn't make heroin the correct choice by any means, but it makes the hopeless attitude a little more understandable. Self-medicating, trying to get the world around you to just shut the fuck up. It's tempting in a place like that.

I realize, this is sort of a rambling response, but there are a lot of small things (or not so small things) that added up to this heroin epedemic. I guess my point is that, in that very well-accepted, you-don't-think-before-you-give-this-response type of way, Plano was a model community. It had high SAT and TAAS scores (TAAS is the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, and the issues I have with that piece of work are a whole other node), it sent a lot of students to good schools, and the income levels were high. But the prices paid in a number of other areas were high, and all in all, it's not a community I'd want to model anything else after.

*It might interest you to know that the dissatisfaction with Plano's culture was it's own little subculture. I had friends that ranged from Ivy League nerds to burnouts, and among all groups there was a certain amount of discontent with the way things were. That may, in fact, have been a large part of my friendships at the time. Finding people who weren't pretentious was always a little victory for me.