Federal Insider: The color of heroin a ddiction — why war then, treatment now?

The nation’s heroin epidemic found its way from the shadows of America to Capitol Hill on Tuesday as lawmakers and experts struggled with a raging disease that is leaving an increasing number of bodies behind.

Heroin deaths have almost tripled since 2010, Louis J. Milione, a Drug Enforcement Administration deputy assistant administrator, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. “Today’s heroin at the retail level costs less and is more potent than the heroin that DEA encountered two decades ago,” he said.

The surge in overdose deaths is one reason Congress now is examining heroin addiction. Another reason is the complexion of the addicted.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who has seen the effects of drug abuse in his Madison Park neighborhood in West Baltimore, pointed to the difference in the way heroin addiction is dealt with now compared with years ago.

The difference between a war on drugs and drug treatment is like the difference between black and white.

“In Baltimore, where many of the victims were poor and black … our nation treated this issue like a war rather than a public health emergency,” said Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the panel. “We incarcerated a generation rather than giving them the treatment they needed.”

“Now, things are changing,” he noted. “Between 2006 and 2013, the number of first-time heroin users nearly doubled, and about 90 percent of these first-time users were white.”

While the hearing heard from knowledgeable medical, law enforcement and policy experts, it lacked the testimony of those who reek of the poison in their arms, those who have tried to kick only to relapse, those who have stolen from their families to feed a deadly habit.

Leana Wen, Baltimore’s health commissioner, made heroin addiction real with a story from her emergency-room experiences.

“I remember well my patient, a 24-year-old mother of two who came to the ER nearly every week requesting addiction treatment,” Wen recalled. “She would be told there was nowhere for her to go that day or the next, and would be offered an appointment in three weeks time. Because she lacked housing and other supportive services, she would relapse. One day, her family found her unresponsive and not breathing. By the time she arrived in the ER, it was too late for us to save her, and she died.”

Stories like that repeat, increasingly in places not like Baltimore, whose many troubles are well chronicled.

Take Orange County, Fla., which includes Orlando. It’s becoming known for more than Mickey Mouse at Walt Disney World.