In no country other than the United States have prescription opioid misuse, abuse, and death rates reached epidemic proportions. These problems increased in parallel with increased prescribing for chronic pain. More and more pain conditions were being treated with opioids using higher and higher doses. Prescription opioid misuse was called out as an epidemic in 2012, but this was only the first wave of the current opioid epidemic in the United States.

There’s one final great cruelty in the glaring racial double standard on drugs. The reports and statistics on opioid and heroin addiction, the wrath of news stories and features on it, and the calls for legislative action to deal with the problem, have not changed one whit the deeply embedded perception that drugs in America invariably come with a young, black face.