Motherboard: The Number of Heroin Users in America Grew Five Times in a Decade

Last week we wrote about how rampant opioid addiction is lowering the lifespan of poor, white men in rural America. This week a new study from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health looked at the rising number of heroin users in the country, and most of them, again, are middle-aged white men without a college education.

According to the JAMA Psychiatry study, heroin use increased around five-fold, from .33 percent of the population between between 2001 and 2002, to 1.60 percent of the population between 2012 and 2013. Within that uptick, heroin use was higher among white Americans than non-white Americans, 1.9 versus 1.1 percent, respectively. The people most vulnerable to heroin use and heroin disorders were single white men in their thirties and forties who had either no degree or just a high school degree.

There are several reasons white men could be increasingly turning to heroin. For one, the middle class is shrinking, and white Americans, men and single people have made fewer economic gains than in previous decades, according to Pew Research Center. This dismal economic state has also fueled a mental health problem, and men are less likely to seek social support or medical care, instead turning to drugs to self-medicate, said Silvia Martens, author of the study and an epidemiologist at Columbia University.

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The Atlantic: Make the Anti-War Movement Great Again

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been at war, the longest continuous conflict in its history. Its citizens have witnessed a failed surge into Afghanistan, a catastrophe in Iraq that helped destabilize vast swaths of the Middle East, an unconstitutional war in Libya that created a power vacuum exploited by ISIS, and a drone war that has killed hundreds of innocents in a half-dozen countries. The last two presidents campaigned against dumb wars and won. The more interventionist candidate has lost every election since 2008. [...]

Meanwhile, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Trump has escalated the 16-year-old core premise of America’s foreign policy—that it has the right to bomb any country in the world where people it regards as terrorists are found—and in doing so, has fulfilled the warped campaign pledges he repeatedly expressed. The most recent atrocity was the killing of as many as 200 Iraqi civilians from U.S. airstrikes in Mosul. That was preceded a few days earlier by the killing of dozens of Syrian civilians in Raqqa province when the United States targeted a school where people had taken refuge, which itself was preceded a week earlier by the U.S. destruction of a mosque near Aleppo that also killed dozens. And one of Trump’s first military actions was what can only be described as a massacre carried out by Navy SEALs, in which 30 Yemenis were killed; among the children killed was an eight-year-old American girl (whose 16-year-old American brother was killed by a drone under Obama).” [...]

But Congress won’t assert itself absent a political angle. “The frustrating reality is that both the Obama and Trump administrations have been able to back the war without ever having to face much serious scrutiny from Congress or most of the media, and so they have not had to defend a policy that has shamefully encountered relatively little criticism and minimal resistance,” Daniel Larison writes. “Even when the U.S. role in fueling and arming the coalition’s planes has been acknowledged in reports, it is often mentioned only in passing and then minimized. It is very difficult to organize opposition to a policy that most people in the country may not even know is happening. I suppose it is good that our officers are sickened by what the U.S. has been helping the Saudis and their allies do, but most of our politicians and policymakers don’t appear to be bothered in the least.”

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BBC4: The Origins of the American Dream

The American Dream is back. President Donald Trump says so. Once again every American, regardless of background, race, gender or education, can, through sheer hard work, make it to the very top and become rich. Did the idea of the America Dream, in which nothing is impossible as long as you work hard, evolve with the 'founding fathers' of the nation? Is it intrinsic to the country's identity? Professor Sarah Churchwell argues that the American Dream is much younger than we realise, and it was born as a response to the 'Roaring Twenties' and the devastating stock market crash of 1929, and Depression that followed. She uses history, literature and music to explore the original meaning of The American Dream - which was an appeal for much more modest dreams of a better life for all, not riches for some.

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The New York Times: From Slavery to Freedom: Revealing the Underground Railroad

A clandestine and loosely organized network of activists, safe houses and secret routes, the actual Underground Railroad shepherded as many as 100,000 slaves to freedom in the six decades before the Civil War. Its route would eventually traverse free states from Maine to Iowa, extending as far north as Canada. [...]

Ms. Michna-Bales’s quest has led to an evocative book, “Through Darkness to Light: Photographs along the Underground Railroad” (Princeton Architectural Press). While much has been written about the subject, there has been little visual documentation, an absence that makes the book even more consequential, both from the standpoint of history and of our contemporary understanding of slavery in pre-Civil War America. The book also includes a foreword by Andrew J. Young, a civil rights leader, a history of the Railroad by the historian Fergus M. Bordewich, and a recounting of the journeys of three former slaves, including Frederick Douglass, by the scholar Eric R. Jackson. [...]

Her photo essay progresses dramatically: a ramshackle cabin on the Magnolia Plantation in Louisiana glows against the backdrop of the night sky; a slave cemetery in Jefferson County, Miss.; an upward and hopeful glance at a star-filled sky in Colbert County, Ala.; twisted thicket emerging from the forest floor in Tennessee; the first view of a free state, the gently rolling hills along the Ohio River crossing into Indiana; the “Old Slave House,” which belonged to the Rev. Guy Beckley in Lower Town, Mich.; and finally, freedom, represented as verdant trees photographed against a bright but cloudy sky in Sarnia, Ontario.

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Morii: The Desire to Capture a Fleeting Experience