Frontline's 'Chasing Heroin' Is Painfully Important TV
Early on in Chasing Heroin, Kristina, a 21 year-old heroin addict, offers a striking image of the insidiousness of the drug. High on camera and groping for words, she emerges with something eloquent: “This drug, it has a brain, and it shares mine.”
It’s no secret that there’s a heroin epidemic in America, and one of the points of the exceptional, two-hour Frontline report airing on Tuesday night is that it was only when this drug plague extended well into white suburban neighborhoods that it began to receive greater notice and concern from the government and the media.
But Chasing Heroin is less about placing blame than providing context and enlightenment about current methods of dealing with the problem. The episode quickly traces the history of the massive increase in opioid painkillers such as Oxycontin starting at the turn of this century — a big pharma push in which Oxy was promoted as less prone to cause addiction, despite no evidence to back up that claim (and indeed, some to contradict it). From there, it was a matter of time before people addicted to opioids but unable to get enough of them through legal medical prescriptions turned to street drugs, foremost among them heroin. Frontline suggests that Mexican drug cartels foresaw the present years ago, establishing contacts in upper-middle-class neighborhoods to disseminate black tar heroin.
The stereotype that this is a career path for skeevy types lurking in the shadows is immediately destroyed in Chasing Heroin by its profile of Cari, a middle-aged mother who looks as though she’d be as comfortable leading Girl Scouts on a cookie-selling expedition as she is at what she’s actually done. Cari’s path — legally prescribed painkillers leading to addiction leading to selling heroin — is an appallingly clear demonstration of a problem that has left law enforcement and drug counselors scrambling.
Producer Marcela Gaviria and correspondent Martin Smith explore a Seattle program called LEAD — “law enforcement assisted diversion” — which declines to arrest low-level addicts but instead channels them into a system that points them toward help (rehab, temporary housing, counseling, methadone treatment). Like everything else to do with the drug problem, it’s controversial, and Smith does a good job of playing devil’s advocate, putting forth the stern concerns many viewers will have about what can be perceived as coddling criminals and wondering why tossing law-breakers in jail isn’t enough.
The short answer to this is summed up by one addiction expert who asserts that until we stop approaching the drug plague “as a lifestyle or a moral issue, we’re going to continue to pay the price” — in lost lives, in millions of wasted dollars spent on incarceration, in countless hours of squandered law-enforcement efforts. You walk away from Chasing Heroin not depressed, but invigorated — engaged — by the efforts being made by valiant people to help stem the tide of this dreadful situation.
Frontline: Chasing Heroin airs Tuesday night on PBS. Check your local listings.