From roughly 2000-2015 I lived in a comfy class Mercedes & McMansion suburb in Missouri. The big scandal at the time was the vast amount of heroin being consumed by all the middle- and high-schoolers attending the fatcat-only schools in the area. My next door neighbor’s kids were of that age and vouched for the reality of it.
This is not a new problem. It might be different in detail now. ODing on street drugs has been going on since forever. What’s different now is the idea of doing something besides calling an ambulance.
I feel old, remembering the good old days in the 80s when we met in the high school parking lot before classes to buy and share pot, speed and LSD. Ahhh, nostalgia!
Oh, yeah, in the early 1990s I worked with a woman who was from the Waterloo, IA area. Everyone was blaming the drug problem there on the poor black kids who lived in east Waterloo, but she said that if the rich white people in south Waterloo would stop giving their kids so much money, the gang and drug problem would dry up and blow away overnight. I always knew the same thing about Des Moines, and all the trust fund kids who went to Drake.
During that era, I remember seeing some TV special about “Heroin Addiction in Suburbia”, that kind of thing, and they went to a parents’ support group, where a group of moms were talking about their kids’ drug problems. The narrator said, “Fathers can attend, but they’ve never seen one.” That spoke volumes to me.
I’m going to add that I have absolutely no desire to read any books or watch any documentaries about the Sacklers. I saw the writing on the wall ca. 2000 when all that publicity came out about OxyContin having a low addictive potential - and that is true, if it’s used properly! Most people who take narcotics of any kind take only enough to combat their pain, and have no desire to stay on it when the pain goes away.
Crooked doctors also saw the writing on the wall, and caught that ball and ran with it, and while pill mills and complicit pharmacies have always existed, the phenomenon really took off.
In the 2000s I was involved in some research on drug use in kids. One of our datasets was a normative sample recruited from schools. The study worked very hard to make sure they had a representative sample of kids in the US. So most didn’t use drugs, but some did, at similar rates as found in other population based samples, like Monitoring the Future.
The “surprising” (if you only pay attention to scare mongering media) thing I found was that most drug use was happening mostly in white kids in the middle and higher socioeconomic strata. More research, reading the literature, and consulting with experts the simple answer seemed to be that only kids with money were buying drugs. A seemingly obvious conclusion, though I can’t remember how completely it was backed up by data.
Contrast that with a different sample we had, where we specifically collected data from kids with drug problems. This was a group that had been given the option by the courts of going to jail or going to treatment. This group of kids were notably mostly minorities and lower SES.
One could draw the conclusion that poor minority kids are more likely to get in trouble, perhaps instead of smoking in their basement they do it in places that bring their drug use to the attention of law enforcement; or that when they do get caught they are more likely to wind up in front of a judge. Maybe the poor minority kids are just out of control? Any or all of these things are possible.
Oh, yeah, when I started high school in 1978, a lot of people were disappointed that other kids weren’t walking up to them saying, “Hey, you wanna try drugs?” People also weren’t having sex in the hallways, or smoking pot in class, or any of the other outrageous stories we heard.
I do remember when the history teacher walked in, addressed a girl, and told her, “I saw you smoking out on the sidewalk before school this morning.” She replied, "That couldn’t have been me; I don’t smoke. You probably saw my twin sister - " and before the teacher could get out "And since when - " those of us who knew them said, “No, she really does.” They were not identical, but were about the same height and weight and had similar hairstyles, so they did look very alike from a distance. The teacher said, “So, that explains why I seemed to see you so much around here.”
They’re getting them from the medicine cabinets in their own homes.
Legal fatanyl is not impossible to get and yu cqan get this stuff online… but that said, “Feeeetanylllll!” cries in the media are often not true, and tales of fetanyl are often wrong and it was just the regular old crap.
Did you know you can get a contact high if a room has at any point had fetanyl in it in the last week? Police officers are saying it so it must be true!