Recently, there has been widespread panic over the opioid epidemic in the United States. Trump recently called it a "Health Emergency", calling for the end of this scourge on our nation. However, one thing's for certain is that the US has never responded to drug abuse the way it has now, and it only goes to show that institutionalized racism is a problem.

Since Opioid abuse has become a problem, statistics show that it's an increasing issue in white communities. 27,056 out of the 33,091 opioid overdoses were white individuals. Here's my issue, it feels as though the country was more care for individuals abusing opioids because most of them were white. Back in the 80's, when crack abuse devastated minority communities, Nixon called for the "War on Drugs". His policies called for harsher sanctions against those using the drug, and he swayed the Nation to believe that the drug made "Super Predators" out of its users or it "rid women of their maternal instincts and made them sexual deviants" which learned to be false propaganda used to turn the public away from the abuse that minorities were receiving from the government during their drug crisis.

Why is it that when an issue plagues the black community, we are met with cruelty, but when issues like opioids and even the heroin epidemic plague the white community, the country is up in arms for them. Having heard stories from my family about people we loved being addicted to crack and having the media paint them as monsters that deserved the worst kind of punishment was heartbreaking. Cocaine caused for a lighter sentencing than crack, while being a purer form of the drug, and being used by predominately wealthier white people. This only furthers the fact of the racial divide within our country.

There still has not been reparations for the evil doings by Nixon. A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, following the war on drugs, later admitted: “You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Opioids, Heroin, and Crack/cocaine are terrible drugs that terribly affect the lives of many, but all of their users do not deserve neither harsh punishment, nor vast amounts of sympathy. At the end of the day we all make choices, knowing fully well what the consequences may be, it is for us to provide resources to help those individuals make the necessary changes they need to get back on track.

The country has yet to admit to the way minorities have been treated, how they were turned away and demonized for a drug that already has crippling consequences of it's own. In no way am I saying that we should sympathize with drug abuse, as I personally feel that there is always a choice to do differently. However, to treat drug abuse differently based on race only continues to add to the list of reasons why our country remains divided.