[LINK] "Heroin, U.S.A.: How the middle class got addicted"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Daniel Dale wrote about the devastating growth of heroin usage by middle-class Americans, looking at small-town New England.

More than 1,200 people in Massachusetts died from overdoses of heroin or prescription opioids last year. That is double the number who died four years ago, four times the number who died in car crashes.

The picture is just as ugly in the postcard towns of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. The killer drug once associated with urban poverty is more popular in the United States than ever before — especially among white people, women and the middle class, especially in the suburbs and the country, especially in the Midwest and northeast.

A weeklong tour of the Massachusetts wreckage revealed glimmers of hope: families starting to speak out without shame, once-oblivious political and medical leaders innovating to save lives, a small-town police chief putting addicts in treatment rather than handcuffs.

But the body count is staggering and rising. Haverhill, an unremarkable town of 60,000, had three overdose deaths in 2011, more than 20 deaths in 2014. In most of the state, this year will be just as bad as last. Thousands of families, many of them prosperous, have been left to puzzle out how they ended up here.