Heroin NYC New York City

heroin NYC

New York City and Heroin: A Cultural Addiction

For a time in New York City, heroin was a cultural lightning rod. Amongst the great musicians, artists and scene-makers that helped to elevate the visibility of New York to the world over, heroin enjoyed a place of particular appeal. During a period that stretched across forty years, heroin was seen as a choice for the creative vanguard of a city which prides itself on possessing the most diverse, progressive and bold of such cultural subsets. Indeed, names such as Charlie Parker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dee Ramone and Tim Hardin make the gravestones of those who shot their last dose of heroin in the city which they'd made their home. Glorified and demonized in the mercurial inspiration of the jazz scene, the revolutionary work of the beatnik writers, the expansive music of the Velvet Underground and the antics of the CBGB punks, heroin is stitched throughout the fabric of New York's culture and history. Its allure is matched only by its horrors, to which a long list of prominent fatalities well beyond New York can attest. It is thus that heroin holds a specific place in our culture of drug treatment, prevention and policy-enforcement. The fascinating properties of addiction that eclipse the balance of hedonistic pleasure make heroin amongst the most powerful drugs, both for the individual struggling to be freed from its grasp and for a society with little sense of how best to redress this amongst its litany of drug problems.

So denotes the following research discussion, which recontextualizes New York's heroin problem with a focus on its presence on the city streets. The cultural cachet of heroin may be said to have fallen significantly since the punk boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The drug culture was at a critical height during the 1970s -- with the excesses of disco and the spare brutality of punk finding common ground in excessive recreational drug use. Likewise, both cultures used New York City as their playground, ultimately helping to take heroin from the art galleries and music studios and redistribute it to the back alleys, tenement buildings and housing projects. Based on the research available to us both in the form of published findings and the first-hand report of a case study subject, it may be argued that this redistribution was grimly successful. New York's struggles with the heroin epidemic today are simultaneously cultural and practical, with law enforcement, rehabilitation facilities, prisons and public officials sharing in an uncertainty on how best to move forward.

Largely representative of this pattern are such case examples as Ms. Stone, a 46-year-old woman who has struggled with heroin addiction her entire life. Her first-hand account was acquired as she serves her three-year sentence in a Bedford Hills prison facility for 3rd Degree robbery. The case discussion conducted in the following account will consider the specifics of Ms. Stone's case as these reflect the realities of the heroin problem in New York City. This may be expected to reveal the deeply nuanced challenged of extricating the city from the grip of a culturally ingrained and deeply powerful drug.

Background:

Before proceeding to a more direct discussion on Ms. Stone's case, it is appropriate to consider some of the basic facts and implications of heroin use and addiction in New York. First and foremost, we consider that New York's importance as a center for global commerce is the very same feature that makes it so prominent in the heroin market. It is not simply a matter of cultural prevalence that New York struggles uniquely with the permeation of heroin. According to the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) (2002), it is also a reality that New York's geographical location and its centrality for business enterprising have made it a crossing point for heroin cartels as well. According to the NDIC, "New York City is a primary transportation hub and distribution center for significant quantities of heroin. Heroin is transported into New York from source countries by air, land, and maritime conveyances." (NDIC, 1)

The NDIC identifies these source countries as largely being South American in origin, with Mexican, Dominican and Colombian groups taking a particularly prominent role in smuggling heroin into the city. That said, New York's status as an ethnic melting pot also makes it particularly vulnerable to the heroin trade. Its openness to people migrating from throughout the world means that the established heroin market is a magnet to dealers from China, Nigeria and Pakistan to name just a few of the more prominent points of origin. (NDIC, 1)

And particularly, during the last two decades, where trade liberalization has opened major port cities like New York to evermore international shipping and trafficking, the transition for heroin from a counter-culture substance to a major public health problem would be accelerated. According to the statistics provided by the NDIC,

"the number of heroin-related treatment admissions to publicly funded facilities in New York increased steadily from 29,279 in 1997 to 35,314 in 2001. Heroin-related treatment admissions surpassed cocaine-related admissions in 2001." (NDIC, 1) This denotes that in spite of a thirty year 'War on Drugs,' practical economic realities had made heroin addiction yet more prominent and pervasive in those contexts where it had become readily available. As the NDIC indicates, New York had indeed become just such a context.

It may be readily noted that New York City is historically an outlier to most statistical assessments. Its unique population makeup and cultural landscape make it a hotbed for certain activities and socio-cultural patterns in a way that may be expected to exceed most other American settings. However, the patterns relating to its heroin use in the last two decades demonstrate it to be well ahead of the curve with respect to the drug's population permeation. Accordingly, the NDIC reports that "the number of heroin-related treatment admissions per 100,000 population in New York (199) dramatically exceeded the number per 100,000 population nationwide (105) in 1999." (NDIC, 1)

Certainly, this imbalance should be taken with the concession that this may not provide an accurate scope of the comparative presence of heroin addiction in New York vs. other cities. Factors which might impact this perception are those relating to the size and availability of treatment facilities, which may be less readily available in other contexts. Still, the particular strength of the relationship between New York and heroin is a troubling one which has unquestionably made its presence apparent within the general population. Indeed, in spite of its grisly reputation, heroin continues to hold its ground in New York as both a cultural and criminal element. These tend to converge in troubling ways denotes an article by Ngo (2009). Here, Ngo reports that "New York drug dealers hoping for a bite of the lucrative 'Twilight' franchise are preying on young fans already addicted to the vampire phenomenon, officials said yesterday. Baggies of heroin stamped 'Twilight' and featuring a cartoon likeness of actor Robert Pattinson surfaced in Hempstead, Long Island, and are making their way through New York City, Drug Enforcement Administration officials said." (Ngo, 1) This reflects an interest on the part of heroin traffickers in cultivating use amongst adolescents, a danger distinctly highlighted by the details of our case study.

As we proceed to a case discussion on Ms. Stone, it is with the understanding that the prevalence of heroin addiction in New York City is directly reflective of the failed efforts relating to the War on Drugs. In fact, the affiliation between drug use and criminal behavior is a claim which helped to justify the policy-offensive first spearheaded by President Richard Nixon. The delineation of this connection may be argued to be a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways. To the point, Epstein (2006) reports that "the mobilization of public fears and anxieties to support the president's offensive was based not on the damage heroin addicts inflicted on themselves but on the damage they presumably inflicted on innocent members of society. 'The real problem is that heroin addicts steal, rob, and commit every other kind of crime,' Ambrose told U.S. News & World Report in 1971, 'so we have this terrible problem of crime in the cities, much of which is related to heroin addiction.'" (Epstein, VI)

This perception would help to criminalize addiction in such a manner as to ultimately render addicts as enemies of the city and state. This marked a turning point in contending with narcotics in the United States, with an emphasis on incarceration rather than treatment now approaching heroin users with harsh prison penalties. In many ways, this may be connected to the relative inherency of both addictive and criminal recidivism for those who have been largely shuffled through the prison system with no real emphasis on proper treatment methods. So denotes the case of Ms. Stone, who is a victim of heroin's power and permeation.

Case Discussion:

Ms. Stone's case is comprised of conditions which are commonly associated with heroin addiction and therefore provide extremely pertinent demonstrations as to why this problem is so difficult to resolve. First and foremost is the recurrence of addiction with which Ms. Stone has struggled her entire life. This reflects the powerful dependency which is a distinct feature of heroin as is this compares to other substances. Indeed, Ms. Stone makes explicit mention of the intense physical and emotional rigors of withdrawal that are associated with detoxification. The number of times that Ms. Stone has engaged in detox and relapsed back into heroin use is startling. According to her own report, she has undergone the painful process of detox ten times. This underscores on an anecdotal level what is true for New York on a general scale. Namely, the continued availability of heroin combined with the relative lack of effectiveness of programs aimed at rehabilitation tend to make addiction relapse a highly probable occurrence.

Ms. Stone's case is rendered yet more persistent due to what seems an apparent failure to address that which is at the root of her addiction. This statement is made with the caveat that Ms. Stone has been addicted to heroin use since she was thirteen years of age. Again, by her own report, the 33 years which were to follow would include only 2 total years of sobriety. Thus, it can be said that her addiction is deeply ingrained and that she represents a particularly challenging individual case.

That said, it does seem clear that the sexual abuse suffered at the hands of her stepfather as a child have contributed directly to both her heroin addiction and the manner in which this substance has been used to numb and repress the pain caused by this childhood trauma. Her stepfather had reportedly forced heroin upon her beginning at the age of thirteen in order to gain her compliance during repeated episodes of rape. Though Ms. Stone reports that she had made her mother aware of these actions, her mother refused to intervene. Upon fleeing from these circumstances at age 15, Ms. Stone entered into a cycle of addiction, homelessness, prostitution, robbery and incarceration. This cycle reflects a condition for many of the heroin-addicted inhabitants of New York City, whose numbers coincide directly with the homeless and prison populations.

For Ms. Stone, it is clear that the emphasis on incarceration rather than treatment has had a direct impact on her circumstances. Namely, she declares that her relapses are part of the inherent relationship established in her psyche between the traumas of her childhood and the relief provided by heroin. Even following the physical rigors of rehabilitation, Ms. Stone finds herself emotionally incapable of being released from these connections. The emphasis on incarceration over treatment bears a close relationship to Ms. Stone's personal disposition. The presence of her addiction and the need for money are directly responsible for her recurrent tendencies toward prostitution and robbery. These have only helped to further confound the prospects of her recovery by leading to the contraction of HIV and Hepatitis C

Analysis:

Ms. Stone's case could serve effectively as an analogy for New York's own recurrent struggles with heroin addiction. As a city, its desire to be removed of this condition is constantly beset by its own dependencies. Indeed, evidence in its current efforts to address the issue of heroin suggest that its public health agencies are no closer today to unlocking its addictive mysteries than they had been in Nixon's time. Particularly, a recent flap in New York between the city government and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) reflects a great uncertainty as to how heroin addiction should best be approached. For the former, the priority of limiting its role in the spread of HIV / AIDS and Hepatitis would be elevated as a priority.