President Barack Obama recently visited Atlanta to discuss an initiative to propose a $1.1 billion in funding to address the prescription opioid abuse and heroin use.
The event was held at the AmeriMart, a building that’s nestled in downtown Atlanta near Centennial Olympic Park, CNN Center, and Philip’s Arena. But only a few minutes drive beyond the glitz of that particular block exist an also well known area of Atlanta, called the Bluff, where drugs, crime, and poverty is rampant.
The Bluff has been known as a prime location for the heroin trade in Atlanta for decades. Mona Bennett knows the area well. As the co-founder of the Atlanta Harm Reduction Coalition, Bennett runs Georgia’s only needle exchange program and has served the Bluff (English Avenue community), for over 20 years.
Bennett has witnessed a change in the individuals who exchange used needles. Although English Avenue is a predominantly Black neighborhood, more White individuals visit the area to exchange needles.
“I’d say in the last five years, we’ve seen an uptick in suburban zip codes,” Bennett says. “White people driving in from Cobb, Clayton, Cherokee, and Henry County. We’re seeing more and more suburban zip codes and that seems to have happened in the last five years. Even more steadily in the last three years.”
Many of the White heroin users who live outside of the Atlanta area began their addiction by taking painkillers and opioids.
“Opioids are effective pain killers,” Bennett says. “But what kind of pain are people in where they are needing to come to the Bluff, come to English Avenue, to try to find something to relieve that pain? What physical and mental issues are going undiagnosed and causing this self medication? Let’s start there. And then Georgia has cracked down on pills in the last few years, so the pills are getting more expensive anyway and are getting even harder to find. Well, that’s when a $10 bag of heroin starts to look pretty darn good.”
But as the face of drug abuse changes, the level of crime that is being associated with it has changed also. During the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, Blacks were often viewed as the primary drug abusers and legislation was created to place harsh jail sentences on the users and sellers of illegal drugs. John Ehrlicman, former Chief advisor to President Richard Nixon, revealed that the war on drugs was actually a war on Black people. For decades, Blacks have been incarcerated for major and minor drug offenses. But now that there is an epidemic in the White community, there seems to be a push to help instead of incarcerate. President Obama even discussed the racial dynamics in his speech in Atlanta.
“Part of what has made it previously difficult to emphasize treatment over the criminal justice system has to do with the fact that the populations affected in the past were viewed as, or stereotypically identified as poor, minority, and as a consequence, the thinking was it is often a character flaw in those individuals who live in those communities, and it’s not our problem they’re just being locked up,” President Obama said.
Bennett echoes President Obama’s statement be revealing how she has seen how race has changed the discussion when it comes to drugs and crime.
“We didn’t start seeing an emphasis on treatment or medical amnesty laws until it started affecting middle class, upper middle class white people,” she says. “Until then, the answer to drug use was lock them up. But now that more and more white people, especially those with political power, have friends and family who are being affected by addiction, well now it’s time to slow the roll and make it kinder, gentler. So he is absolutely telling the truth. He could’ve went even further. Yes, race was the thing that is beginning to turn the conversations and the actions around addiction. Until then, it was lock up those people who don’t matter anyway. But now that addiction it touching a whole lot of people who know their law makers, their policy makers by name, know how to write their congress people, their elective representatives, now it’s a different story. It’s my job, and the job of the Atlanta Harm Reduction Coalition to use that momentum to help everybody and we are and we will.”
But while President Obama has vowed to help drug users seek treatment, Bennett believes that more can be done by lawmakers to decrease the death rates of heroin users.
“Drug overdoses are preventable,” Bennett says. “There’s a medication call Narcan that can reverse opium overdose. Let’s get more of that to the people. That’s one of the things that I wished President Obama would go further on. He wants to get Narcan in to the hands of first responders like law enforcement. I want to see Narcan in the hands of the true first responders, the other drug users who first encounter the opium overdoses or any drug related emergency. And also family, friends, loved ones, who encounter the opioid overdoses.”
