Irma Serrata
Julie Garza-Horne
ENGL-1302-3705
03/06/2016
On March 6, 2016, The New York Times published Katharine Seelye’s “Heroin Epidemic Increasingly Seeps Into Public View”. It states that finally people are finally starting to notice heroin users and they’re overdosing in public places everywhere. Police officers are routinely finding drug users — unconscious or dead — in cars, in the bathrooms of fast-food restaurants, on mass transit and in parks, hospitals and libraries (Seelye). It’s an epidemic.
In Philadelphia last spring, a man riding a city bus at rush hour injected heroin into his hand, in full view of other passengers, including one who captured the scene on video (Seelye). Users need the fix as quickly as they can get it,” said Edward James Walsh, chief of police in Taunton, Mass., a city 40 miles south of here that has been plagued with heroin overdoses in recent years. “The physical and psychological need is so great for an addict that they will use it at the earliest opportunity” (Seelye). It was all over the media. You can watch the video over and over, the man shooting himself up and just falling over. Nationally, 125 people a day die from overdosing on heroin and painkillers, and many more are revived, brought back from the brink of death — often in full public view (Seelye).
In Cincinnati, a woman died in January after she and her husband overdosed in their baby’s room at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. The husband was found unconscious with a gun in his pocket, a syringe in his arm and needles strewn around the sink (Seelye). Also, in Cincinnati in 2014, an Indiana couple overdosed on heroin at a McDonald’s, collapsing in front of their children in the restaurant’s play area (Seelye). Also, in Niagara Falls, N.Y., a man was accused in October of leaving a 5-year-old boy unattended in a Dairy Queen while he went to the