If you’d like to know why people are so misinformed, you need look no further than your local news. Noah Bond of ABC4 in Salt Lake City recently reported on a new heroin epidemic:
A strong batch of heroin is killing addicts in Salt Lake County. At least four people are dead and two others are critically injured.
Part of the reason is access. Heroin has never been so cheap. It’s selling for as little as $10. Cottonwood Heights Police Officer Beau Babka is extremely concerned. “We’ve seen a peak in heroine use lately,” he said.
(that’s his spelling mistake, not mine – there isn’t a peak in female hero use)
Here’s the first problem Noah: Heroin has always been this cheap. Always.
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| The Jambar, May 29, 1970 |
A quick google search showed that The Harvard Crimson reported on $10 bags of heroin seized by Cambridge police back in february of 1971. And according to a Special Edition of The Jambar, a Youngstown State University newspaper from May 29, 1970, a hit of heroin costs between $7 to $10. This has remained the average price of heroin through four decades, and there have been 40 excruciating years of stories reporting on the lure of cheap heroin. (although in some places it can be bought for $5 a bag)
Let’s look carefully at what newsman Noah Bond is suggesting. He’s saying that the reason people are being killed by heroin is because it’s so cheap.
This is a dangerously idiotic view, because it ignores the true reasons people abuse substances, and if it’s correct, then Mr Bond is killing people too by acting as an advertiser for the drug. Imagine a happy housewife watching the local news as she prepares dinner. All is well in her life, she’s happy raising her children, communicates well in her relationship with her husband, and has a small successful party planning business on the side. Everything is great in her life. Noah Bond reports that heroin is available in Salt Lake City for the cheap price of only $10 a bag and this otherwise happy normal person drops everything, and runs out to get a bag of heroin because she can’t resist the lure of a discount. Sound like bullshit? It is. Cheap prices would never have ANYTHING to do with someone becoming a heroin user. This is pure nonsense.
Mr Bond is not the first person to utter such bullshit. To be fair to him, he’s only repeating a point he’s heard from the journalists in the big leagues. They’ve been reporting on this new cheaper purer heroin for years now – but the price has remained the same. To have written such a story 10 or 20 years ago would have been somewhat excusable, but it’s so tired at this point and the $10 figure has been reported so many times that it’s now unforgivable.
Bond also writes:
Now the addicts are now dying. Heroin sold to Salt Lake County is usually only 30 percent pure because it’s diluted with other substances. Police think the deadly batch is 90 percent pure, which is so powerful many user stop breathing.
(again, this is directly quoted, the grammar mistakes are not mine)
The supposed purity of street heroin has been going up for as long as $10 bags of heroin have been a new phenomena. While researching this story, I found that I’m not the first one to notice this nonsense – Matt Harvey of the New York Press recently covered both these points, and he found that purity levels are in a constant state of flux (check the article, he also digs into the constant alarmism about heroin reaching suburban white kids). The problem is that the media is continually reporting a sharp rise in purity and that if we took their reports at face value then street heroin would be 500% pure by now!
Then there’s this all too familiar point:
Packets of heroin now come stamped with characters from pop culture including the Twilight Movies to entice young teens to buy. Users can get the drug dirt cheap with drug lords peddling it for even less than marijuana.
This is actually infuriatingly moronic.
When I started using heroin in 1995 there were bags stamped with pictures of Bart Simpson. These stamps are for branding purposes, so that dealers and users can have some idea of the quality of a batch. Yet the stamps have constantly been reported as if they’ll somehow lure otherwise well-adjusted children into becoming heroin users. Can you imagine the absurdity of some drug dealer showing a bag stamped with the image of a Twilight character to a kid who has no interest in heroin and all of a sudden he can’t resist both the cheap price and the lure of his teen idol, and becomes a heroin addict? I’m sorry, but if your kid were to start doing heroin simply for the reason that there is a crude drawing of a cartoon character or teen idol on the bag, then he’s got BIG problems which you should be addressing and heroin is actually the least of them.
So, to review – heroin has come in $10 bags forever, it has been getting purer forever, the bags have been stamped with cute images forever – none of this is a new threat! Furthermore it’s absurd that we waste our time and mental energy discussing such transparently empty issues. But why do we talk about this nonsense in the public arena again and again? The reason is that we’re NOT allowed to talk about the issues that matter. The PC police have stepped in and proclaimed that addiction is a disease, that it has nothing to do with an individuals beliefs, values, morality, free will, or choice. If you discuss any of this you will be painted as a heartless judgmental son-of-a-bitch. These topics are off limits in the public debate. So we talk about nonsense. We actually pretend that a lower heroin price (which is never actually lower!) contributes to addiction. We pretend that the branding on the bags contributes to addiction. But what about the addicts themselves? We can’t discuss them in any other terms than as victims. We can’t discuss what’s going on in their life in terms of values & morality. Addicts feel empty. They are unfulfilled in life. As a result they obsessively chase a fake form of happiness strung together with the cheap thrills of drug use. Why are our youth feeling so empty that they do this? I wish we could discuss that, but we’d have to talk about values & morality to do so, and that’s off limits.
Why so harsh??? I looked at Noah’s original story and it’s just fine. You obviously have a grudge against something. Any writer who posts a story like this, especially with no name, has a motive. What is it admin???
Noah’s story is a short snap shot about the heroin problem in Salt Lake County. Take a chill pill and let the reporter do his job.
“Civility is worth the finest gold on earth as it continues to become more rare,” author unknown
Hi Cal,
“Admin” is me, Steven Slate, thus far, I have authored everything on this site, I basically state us much on the front page. I am not trying to anonymously criticize. I don’t think the reporter is doing his job when he’s reporting the average price of heroin and claiming it to be newly cheap – especially when a google search so easily disproves this claim.
My motive is clearly summed up in the last paragraph of this piece, and all over this site, I’ll clarify it for you here though:
I don’t want misinformation about addiction to cause people to suffer longer than they already have.
This piece illuminates one small example of the misinformation and irrelevant discussions that detract from the truth about addiction. The truth is that people abuse substances because they think the high is better than the happiness available to them through their own achievements. Little do they know, that even if heroin cost only a dollar a dose, and you could stay high all day for 10 or 20 bucks, it still wouldn’t be worth it. It would never compare to the feeling you get from living a productive life, achieving goals, and experiencing personal progress. If we could help people to get on that path, we wouldn’t even need to worry if drugs were totally legal and available at every corner store. This is what we’re not discussing, when we’re wasting our time fearing that cheap strong heroin is the cause of addiction and overdose.
-Steven Slate
Author, The Clean Slate Addiction Blog
Amen Steven
Non-sense websites like this are dangerous. Ummm ask any real dealer on the street and they’ll tell you heroin is making a comeback. Please get a clue before you write crap.
Please show me where I’ve presented nonsense.
I haven’t been disputing whether or not heroin is “making a comeback”, but now that you mention it – to make a comeback, it would have had to go away first. To get cheaper, it would have to previously been more expensive, as I discussed in the post.
The story about heroin’s comeback is also a well worn path. Heroin’s had more comebacks than farewell tours. Here are some search results on “heroin comeback” from google news, from 1990 thru 2000. It appears from the first page that heroin made a comeback in 1991, 1995, 1997, and 2000. Heroin comebacks were also “feared” in 1992, 1993, and 1994.
google “Heroin Comeback” results for yrs 1990-2000
It’s funny how the comebacks are always so close together. For example, there was a heroin comeback in 95 and then another one in 97. When did it go away, 96? How long was it gone for? Is a year out of the spotlight long enough to consider a return to the spotlight as a “comeback”? I just saw Barbra Streisand in “Little Fockers”, her last movie was “meet The Fockers” in 2004, is that considered a comeback?
Do you get the point?
I also think it’s interesting that heroin addictions are assumed to always be chronic lifelong conditions, yet the same people who tell us this also expect us to believe that heroin just goes away every 2 years and then makes a comeback. What are these hopeless lifelong addicts doing in the meantime, twiddling their thumbs?
Now please tell me where is my dangerous nonsense?
There is No Dangerous Nonsense.
These gentlemen are clearly some sort of Shills, who probably never been high in their life!
Dont You just love how “Non Addicts” Have all the answers about addiction?
Do you know two people died just before the ABC 4 report was issued and another on their death bed. ABC 4’s report likely saved lives.
The reporter has many good sources in the Valley and does a lot of good for this area.
Use Salt Lake City sources if you want to correct a Salt Lake City story NOT Google. Steven Slate, I think you are the “Know-Nothing Numbskull.”
I will continue watching ABC 4 and stop looking at this cynical and incorrect website!
I don’t doubt this reporter probably does some good reporting and may do good for the area, nor do I deny that there is a place for reports about tainted or abnormally strong heroin. Such reports usually give information that identifies the “brand” or “stamp” of the heroin though, so that users may beware of the drugs in question – such as the “twilight” stamped bags noted in Mr Bond’s report.
The problem is that his report was not aimed at warning heroin users of a particular brand that was tainted or abnormally pure. He mentioned “Twilight” stamped bags, but only as a means of getting out the absurd fear based message that this brand would convince otherwise well balanced but twilight obsessed teens to use heroin – and I quote from Bond’s report:
“Packets of heroin now come stamped with characters from pop culture including the Twilight Movies to entice young teens to buy.”
So it’s just a novelty he’s reporting on. In reality, in the street drug-trade in Salt Lake, there are probably many different batches of heroin going around with many different identifying stamps. Had one of these batches had a problem, and he identified the associated stamp, then he could potentially help save some lives, but that’s not what he did nor was it what his report was about.
His report was about repeating an unoriginal, unimportant, irrelevant, alarmist message, and nothing else. It’s debatable whether minor fluctuations of the heroin market are news, but I know that I would never consider such reports as “lifesaving”.
BTW, the fake email address you used in your reply was hilarious, thanks for that, I got a good chuckle.
Also, I can see that I have obviously personally offended you by using Noah Bond as an example, and you obviously personally know him, and that’s why you’re anonymously carrying on this argument under several different identities. For this I apologize, however I must explain the post to you. He is one example of someone using this boilerplate story that many other reporters have used. I’m picking apart his report not so much to discredit him as to discredit a story I’ve heard countless times. I feel like that’s self-evident in my writing, but if not, then I’m explicitly stating it now.
As I mentioned, and provided a link, I’m not the first person to recognize this boilerplate report. This report could be, and has been, done in virtually every other urban or suburban (and even some rural) community across the United States. The first time I personally heard it was around 10 years ago, living in Western MA. I had been doing a lot of heroin for 3-5 years, buying it for $10 a bag the whole time (and sometimes $5), and I saw reports on the news how it was all of a sudden making a comeback and newly priced at the low rate of $10 a bag.
Mainstream Media is 100% Lies!
You keep believing your mainstream media there chappy!
You are misled like the rest of the masses.
Sounds like ABC is pushing heroin, to me.
Sounds like they WANT people to go out and buy it, rather than not.
But thats just my opinion.
$10 in 1971 = about $54 today, according to this inflation calculator (based on the Consumer Price index)*. If the price for a given amount of something has remained $10 for 40 years despite inflation, that thing has gotten much cheaper.
* http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
Finally, a smart challenge. Thank you.
Yes there has been inflation since the 70’s, but the storyline has always been “heroin is now selling for only $10 a bag” – the storyline has never been “with heroin selling consistently at a price of $10 per unit, this is much cheaper now as an effect of inflation than it was 40 years ago”. The $10 price point is always presented as a new phenomenon, and cheaper than usual.
So if the story is that $10 is not much money today due to inflation (even though that’s not the story), then what year are we comparing the dollars to? Let’s say we’re trying to appeal to the parents of a 20 year old. In 1990 these parents just finished college and had their first child, and knew some friends who used heroin at a price of $10 a bag, in 1990 dollars, which wasn’t much money back then. That $10 in 1990 is equivalent to $16.74 today – which still isn’t much money. What if the unit price of a bag rose with inflation, would kids of today not be able to come up with $16.74? That’s the price of a movie ticket and maybe a soda. In reality though we would have to adjust for inflation from only 1 or 2 years earlier, since that would have been the last time that someone else in our local media would have done the same story about cheap $10 bags of heroin.
One of my problems is that this story has been told, literally, thousands of times, and it’s very hollow. Worse than the annoyance factor though, is the fact that, however unintentional, it’s a distraction from the issues we should be talking about (as I already stated in the conclusion of the piece). I would rather we talk about the real reasons our children are turning to substance abuse, and I don’t think those reasons have to do with price or pop culture figures stamped on the bags. Less than 1 in 4 people who try heroin actually go on to become regular users of the drug. But it takes a special kind of recklessness to even try heroin, and I suspect that even if the price were doubled to $20 a bag, the same people who were willing to try it at $10, would still lay out $20 to try it, and if it were Lawrence Welk’s face on the bag rather than Kristin Stewart of Twilight, they would still try it – or do you honestly believe it’s just the price and the pretty pictures on the bags that people go for?
People who become heroin abusers are trying to hide from their own mind and from having to deal with reality, heroin is efficient for this purpose. Can we help our children learn to have better lives and deal with reality constructively rather than just blacking out from it? That’s the issue which is really important here. Unfortunately, such discussions are off the table, and instead we blame the drug, the prices, and an imaginary disease. Let’s talk about what really counts, please.
Nevertheless, you’ve raised an interesting point. If the quantity contained in the bag has gone down (weight, not purity, which we’re constantly told has gone up) then with inflation, it could be a wash. But if it hasn’t, then heroin users of today are getting more for the buck. The important point remains though, that their parents wouldn’t have paid much more.