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FeedAddressing Addiction
Kristen Schmidt, Editor
He was just a kid, renting a house with his buddies in the small town where he’d grown up. He’d started using heroin. After a night out with friends, seeing his brother’s band play at a local bar, he overdosed and died on a sofa in the living room.
I spent a few weeks in 2005 writing about him and a trend that was alarming health officials in the suburban Chicago county where I covered crime and courts: People were dying of heroin overdoses.
I still can’t reconcile the word “heroin” with the photos of this young man on his funeral card, cuddling a kitten and messing around on his skateboard. He just didn’t fit the type—the image pop culture has given us of people who use so-called hard drugs. They live a hard life, in a hard city, somewhere else.
It’s just not true.
Heroin—like any drug—knows no economic, age, gender or racial barrier. And it’s affecting more people in Central Ohio, law enforcement and public health officials told writer Jane Hawes for her story “The New Gateway Drugs” (page 44). A years-long rise in prescription drug abuse is giving way to increased heroin abuse, as law enforcement puts “pill mills” out of business, making painkillers harder to find. Heroin, a more potent and potentially deadly cousin to those synthetic opiates, is cheap and accessible, Jane writes. The problem has become most evident not in the “inner city,” but in the outer suburbs. Jane’s story is eye-opening, and it’s a call to action for all of us.
We can’t catch the bad guys—we’ll leave that to the pros. But we can accept that abuse of these drugs is our problem, because it’s happening in our communities. And it can start in our medicine cabinets.
BREAKING BREAD
A note to give credit where credit is due: That gorgeous brioche burger bun on the cover of our October issue was the work of Daniel Riesenberger, aka Dan the Baker.
Dan sent me a message on Oct. 9 saying he was delighted we featured his handiwork—and mystified that we had identified Omega Bakery as the Skillet Burger’s bun-maker.
We investigated and found that our local-food loving friends at Skillet changed bun-makers while we were working on the story. We ate and photographed an Omega-bunned burger one week and returned the next to photograph the burger again for our cover—this time with Dan’s bun, which looked nearly identical to the first one. We didn’t catch the change, but we’re grateful that he did.
Lesson learned, Dan. And nice job on that brioche!
Kristen Schmidt
kschmidt@columbusmonthly.com
@MonthlyEditor
