Heroin is Everywhere Now, and It’s Everyone’s Problem
<p>Heroin’s enduring association with the city has helped forge a highly racialised and individualised notion of urban decay. At the same time, it has obscured a whole history of production and distribution that reaches far beyond the urban core, encompassing large and often very rural parts of East, South-East and Southwest Asia where the opium poppy could be cultivated. This association continues to distract us from the fact that heroin users can no longer support themselves in urban centres, because our modern economy has long since forced all but the most productive subjects from the centre of cities, and out to the periphery, while at the same time still managing to support supply chains that can bring heroin, and all manner of other pain-relieving drugs to even the most far-flung places.</p> <p>In view of this extremely narrow conception of the drug’s impact on society, for this episode we’re going to try to connect the dots between some of the disparate spaces and places that have been touched by heroin, exploring some of the main historical shifts in where heroin is produced, who uses it, how it gets to the places where it’s used, and why it ends up in these places.</p>
Authors: Charlie Clemoes
Contributors: Sonja Groot Obbink, Sam Quinones, Andrew Hussey
Editors: Chiara Dorbolo, Daphne Bakker, Joshua McWhirter, Mark Minkjan, Charlie Clemoes, René Boer
Part of: Failed Architecture Podcast