Community-Coalition On Drug Awareness

America's Opiate Epidemic

The relentless marketing of pain pills.  Crews from one small Mexican town selling heroin like pizza.  The collision has led to America's greatest drug scourge.

This epidemic involved more users and far more death than crack plague of the 1990s, or the heroin plague in the 19702; but it was happening quietly. 

In a country where doctors once feared opiates, a culture of aggressive opiate use was emerging by the mid-1990s.

The new addicts were football players and cheerleaders; football was almost a gateway to opiate addiction.  Wounded soldiers returned from Afghanistan hooked on pain pills and died in America.  Kids got hooked in college and died there.  Some of these addicts were from rough corners of rural Appalachia.  But many more were from the U.S. middle Class.  They lived in communities where the driveways were clean, the cars were new, and the shopping centers attracted congregations of Starbucks, Home Depot, CVS, and Applebee's.  They were the daughters of preachers, the sons of cops and doctors, the children of contractors and teachers and business owners, and bankers. 

As heroin and OxyContin addiction consumed the children of America's white middle classes, parents hid the truth and fought the scourge alone.