University of Virginia Library

Heroin In Suburbia

Once safely isolated as part of the
destructive funkiness of the black ghetto,
heroin has suddenly spread out into Middle
America, becoming as much a part of suburbia
as the Saturday barbecue.

This has gained it the attention it otherwise
never would have had. President Nixon himself
says it is spreading with "pandemic virulence."
People are becoming aware that teenagers are
shooting up at lunchtime in schools and
returning to classrooms to nod the day away.

But what they don't know — and what no
one is telling them — is that neither the volcanic
eruption of addiction in this country nor the
crimes it causes would be possible without the
age-old international trade in opium (from
which heroin is derived), or that heroin
addiction like inflation, unemployment, and
most of the other chaotic forces in American
society today — is directly related to the U.S.
war in Indochina.

The connection between war and opium in
Asia is as old as empire itself. But the
relationship has never been so symbiotic, so
intricate in its networks and so vast in its
implication.

Never before has the trail of tragedy been so
clearly marked as in the present phase of U.S.
involvement in Southeast Asia. For the
international traffic in opium has expanded in
lockstep with the expanding U.S. military
presence there, just as heroin has stalked the
same young people in U.S. high schools who
will also be called on to fight that war.