Horse Race

While America's rapidly growing heroin epidemic is getting plenty of attention at the federal level, perceptions of drug use continue to be limited by an unwillingness to confront the issue from the ground-level. After all, it's bad PR. 

Writing in today's Baltimore Sun, columnist Dan Rodricks takes stock of a Wednesday night episode of National Geographic TV's Drugs Inc. that focused on Baltimore. Rodrick looks back at the 70s, when a National Geographic writer was Charmed by Baltimore.

Kline found charm in things now gone (the aroma of McCormick spices along Light Street, Haussner's Restaurant, Hamburger's clothing store) or things that a travel writer probably would leave out today (Charles Center Plaza, the "new-town-in-town" called Coldspring.

The article was a love letter to the city, and Baltimore could not buy better publicity.

The 2014 National Geographic treatment focused more on a piece of societal fabric that is not gone. Heroin use remains high. And to quantify it, National Geographic relied on a stat that said 60,000 Baltimore residents. But, wait! Turns out, that number is wrong, and has been wrong for almost a decade.

In 2005, a Baltimore Sun reporter dug deep into data to determine if 60,000 addicts number had any validity, and the result was negative. "The number is almost certainly wrong," The Sun concluded. "It was, at best, a hit-or-miss guess to begin with."

Rodricks rightfully points out that relying on bad data only leads to sensationalism, which is likely what Drugs Inc. is guilty of here -- at least when it comes to statistics.

But when it comes to looking at the recent nationwide resurgence of heroin use, it doesn't matter whether the opiate "capital" is Baltimore or actual longtime heroin overdose death leader, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. Now that Attorney General Eric Holder and other authorities have acknowledged that heroin use is an epidemic, any attempt to look into the deadly drug use is valuable. Reporting of the sort that Drugs Inc. engages in is tough to come by. A Drugs Inc. episode that focused on New Orleans equated the city's party culture to its drug use. That's a connection that's likely accurate, but rarely made -- even, in the HBO series Treme, by the likes of underbelly-scratcher David Simon.

The drug trafficking web that includes street-level dealers, law enforcement agents and the users in between takes a lot of time and human capital to weave, and our understanding is only better for the time the show spent -- even if TV news production temptations get in the way. As a woman who lost a friend to heroin in New Orleans told me earlier this year for an article that appeared in NOLA Defender, the new version of heroin use is all around us, but often hidden.

“They go to work, they pay their bills, a lot of them are moms and dads,” she said of heroin users. “They could be the people cooking your breakfast in the morning or your bartender, and you would never know.”

The act of reporting can even claim its own toll. In Rio Arriba County, where I started my reporting career, one of the reporters who worked at the small but mighty Rio Grande Sun following my tenure ended up in the throes of addiction himself. He did the important work of documenting overdoses and abuse.

One morning, early last year, I spied a nice-sized ball of black tar in the police department's evidence room. Police had seized it during the bust-up of a fencing operation the night before. I caught a whiff of its nasty, vinegary odor and couldn't stop thinking about how much I had enjoyed using the stuff years earlier.


By then we had been crushing painkillers on and off for several months. A couple Sarah met at work had turned us on to them and, before even realizing it, we would hurt for the candy, as it was called. It wasn't long before the pills no longer hit like they used to, with the first casualty being Sarah's grades.

Tragically, Sarah later died as a result of an overdose. If communities truly want to confront the realities that produce labels like "heroin capital," they are better off digging into stories like Sarah's than arguing about statistics.