Heroin in small towns
May 20, 2015 at 11:08 PM Thread Starter Post #1 of 8

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Headphoneus Supremus
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I just read a report that there is a serious heroin epidemic in small towns in New England (which is an area in the United States). To me it is one of the strangest things and it probably even baffles many residents there too. I've been to small towns in New England and the people there are generally very nice and down to earth minded. It is strange to imagine it especially since I've seen the drug problem in big cities but to hear about it happening in far off distant small towns is wierd to my thinking.

Yeah, I know there's lots of explanations or theories but I don't want to make this post too long. Typically the stereotype of a heroin addict is a person living in a large city in a bad neighborhood with rats and stray cats and I've seen this stereotype since I used to live in a large city. But this is a relatively new problem in America in quiet small towns where the local lady working at the grocery store or the friendly mail man is now the new face of the heroin addict. It seems that so many people there have at least one family member who is facing this problem of serious addiction and numbers of people are dying from over doses.

Rural small towns fascinate me. You drive through them and it looks like everything is cozy and fine but there can be at times, some troubling issues.
 
May 20, 2015 at 11:39 PM Post #2 of 8
I've read some sociology papers before about people who leave their small towns not for a sense of adventure or dreams of hitting it big in the big city, but because the small town populations are smaller, more conservative, and highly judgmental. It's mostly gay people who do this; these and other sort of "outcasts" in small towns who don't feel like they have a physical way out may resort to drugs for a way out as far as brief mental episodes go.
 
In the case of the US, veterans suffering PTSD that the veterans' administration screwed over may be the ones who started the addiction; and in some cases, maybe even those who weren't totally screwed over started with prescription drugs like painkillers and anti-depressants, then their supply got cut off and they went into heroin.
 
May 20, 2015 at 11:53 PM Post #3 of 8
It seems over the years that the drug of choice fluxes between uppers and downers. I've always wanted to write a paper on how that reflects on the culture of each generation, but that's for another day when I'm not sitting here writing about cloud computing 
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May 21, 2015 at 12:01 AM Post #4 of 8
  It seems over the years that the drug of choice fluxes between uppers and downers. I've always wanted to write a paper on how that reflects on the culture of each generation, but that's for another day when I'm not sitting here writing about cloud computing 
wink.gif

 
You'd want to look up that paper where they traced a pattern on how the US president's party affiliation determines whether zombies or vampires are more popular in the media 
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May 22, 2015 at 9:50 PM Post #5 of 8
My town was one heavily hit by this; New Milford, CT, quite a small town, mostly quiet and tight-knit, has been plagued by heroin and other drugs. We've had many assemblies in school trying to show he dangers of drugs, focusing on heroin. Most of my school smokes pot, unfortunately, which, in our town, is leading to more intense and addictive drugs like heroin. It really is a scary thing; kids have been caught in school with pot and pills I know, and while I haven't heard of anyone caught with heroin in school, there's a high chance it's been there. It's quite sad.
 
I've read some sociology papers before about people who leave their small towns not for a sense of adventure or dreams of hitting it big in the big city, but because the small town populations are smaller, more conservative, and highly judgmental. It's mostly gay people who do this; these and other sort of "outcasts" in small towns who don't feel like they have a physical way out may resort to drugs for a way out as far as brief mental episodes go.

From experience in my school, it's quite the opposite. The more popular kids all do drugs, while those of us who aren't quite as popular stay away from such things. It's possible that the larger amount of not-very-popular kids in our school allows for anyone who is an "outcast" to feel much more accepted and instead of turning to drugs, they turn to their friends and away from the popular kids who do drugs.
 
May 22, 2015 at 10:58 PM Post #6 of 8
  From experience in my school, it's quite the opposite. The more popular kids all do drugs, while those of us who aren't quite as popular stay away from such things. It's possible that the larger amount of not-very-popular kids in our school allows for anyone who is an "outcast" to feel much more accepted and instead of turning to drugs, they turn to their friends and away from the popular kids who do drugs.

 
In the high school I attended it tended to be either kind of kid. There actually were a lot more of the cool kids doing drugs, but at that time it was marijuana and some prescription drugs like sleeping pills they steal from their parents' medicine cabinets. Heroin isn't a thing over here until now presumably because those who can afford drugs are iffy about needles. The thing is that despite there being fewer of the outcasts doing drugs is that when they do end up doing drugs they're more likely to be seen walking around like an incoherent zombie at some point, while the popular kids never really get too deep in it (that, or before they do, their parents stash them away in some posh rehab joint).
 
We had one classmate before who we all thought would go all Jeremy spoke in class today (he was literally drawing pictures of mountaintops with him on top, arms raised in a V, the dead lay in pools of maroon below) and last we heard he had extremely long hair (in a Catholic school with a "no hair long enough to get pulled down beyond your eyebrows" rule, that was big), walking around somewhere with really, really, really red eyes. I was the one riffing on a guitar all the time and they thought I'd look like that at some point considering the kind of music I listen to (more so when the "cool" kids all listened to 90s RnB, although it's not like we don't all hang out together anyway), but no.
 
May 22, 2015 at 11:09 PM Post #7 of 8
 
 
In the high school I attended it tended to be either kind of kid. There actually were a lot more of the cool kids doing drugs, but at that time it was marijuana and some prescription drugs like sleeping pills they steal from their parents' medicine cabinets. Heroin isn't a thing over here until now presumably because those who can afford drugs are iffy about needles. The thing is that despite there being fewer of the outcasts doing drugs is that when they do end up doing drugs they're more likely to be seen walking around like an incoherent zombie at some point, while the popular kids never really get too deep in it (that, or before they do, their parents stash them away in some posh rehab joint).
 
We had one classmate before who we all thought would go all Jeremy spoke in class today (he was literally drawing pictures of mountaintops with him on top, arms raised in a V, the dead lay in pools of maroon below) and last we heard he had extremely long hair (in a Catholic school with a "no hair long enough to get pulled down beyond your eyebrows" rule, that was big), walking around somewhere with really, really, really red eyes. I was the one riffing on a guitar all the time and they thought I'd look like that at some point considering the kind of music I listen to (more so when the "cool" kids all listened to 90s RnB, although it's not like we don't all hang out together anyway), but no.

See, the kids at this town are mostly rich and can afford whatever drugs they want. Few kids do heroin I believe, but most smoke pot, and they do tons of it because they have the money. School administration is trying hard to keep kids away from heroin, and they're starting to care less about pot I think. It's impossible to stop everyone at my school to stop, sadly; too many do it. Even kids you wouldn't expect, like smarter kids and kids who seem like very good, innocent people. Usually only the guys really invested in drugs (total potheads, the ones kind of obsessed with it) go on to try other drugs. 
 
I hang around with the slightly less popular kids and the average kids, and while most of the less popular kids don't touch drugs, many of the average kids do. Before I got into high school, I thought pot was something only for the real delinquents; here, it's accepted as normal to do it. 
 
May 22, 2015 at 11:36 PM Post #8 of 8
  See, the kids at this town are mostly rich and can afford whatever drugs they want. Few kids do heroin I believe, but most smoke pot, and they do tons of it because they have the money. School administration is trying hard to keep kids away from heroin, and they're starting to care less about pot I think. It's impossible to stop everyone at my school to stop, sadly; too many do it. Even kids you wouldn't expect, like smarter kids and kids who seem like very good, innocent people. Usually only the guys really invested in drugs (total potheads, the ones kind of obsessed with it) go on to try other drugs. 
 
I hang around with the slightly less popular kids and the average kids, and while most of the less popular kids don't touch drugs, many of the average kids do. Before I got into high school, I thought pot was something only for the real delinquents; here, it's accepted as normal to do it. 

 
Oh, over here the "retail" mentality goes down to drugs so being well isn't a requirement to get into the habit. We might not have heroin, but in some shanty towns people sell a dose of meth for less than $5. You go into the shack, pay, they hand you a square cut of tin foil with the meth equivalent of a "dime(bag)" (approximately anyway), a lighter, and then you find a seat and get high. Addicts don't have to buy in bulk so the poorer ones get easy access (initially, until the addiction kicks in; never mind the dental bills) and they don't need to worry about their stash; if they get caught high they usually get a slap on the wrist, and it wasn't until sometime in the late 1990s that Congress finally got off its ass and made a law on "intoxicated or high is not an excuse for whatever else you did, and in fact we might add to your sentence if the first charge is murder or sexual assault." 
 
Some other kids didn't even start with meth - a lot of kids in shanty towns beg for food, then instead of buying bread at the bakery they go into hardware stores and buy some contact cement (like Gorilla Glue), splitting the cost of the smallest bottle they can afford, pour out a bit of it into a plastic bag for each of them, and then huff the hell out of it. Cops don't stop them anymore because the social welfare department doesn't have a budget proportional to what they actually need, and given our over-enthusiastic legislator who penned all those children offender rights, cops are more likely to get slapped with administrative charges than actually helping them out. Worse, some of these kids found another way of stealing from people - instead of taking one wallet or mobile phone at a time (when wallets barely have cash nowadays and they have no idea how to steal from digital credit or cash accounts) they walk between cars stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, throw open unlocked doors, and steal the passenger's bag - which they gamble on having a Macbook or Thinkpad inside that they can sell.
 

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