The South Bronx, New York City's poorest neighborhood, has been dealing with a deadly heroin epidemic for generations. Meanwhile, in the mostly white, working-class borough of Staten Island, a new opioid crisis has taken hold, as it has in New England and across America. Now these two epidemics – old and new – exist just miles apart from one another in New York.
The latest season of the podcast "GroundTruth", from WGBH and The GroundTruth Project, explores the origins of the epidemic, residents' efforts to handle the crisis, and the birth of a stigma that continues to kill, as opioid abuse spreads to the suburbs and beyond.
Chapter 1, which you can hear above, charts the history from hundreds of years back, when opioids like morphine and heroin weren't regulated in America and the stigma around opioid addiction didn't exist yet. The next four chapters will come out weekly.
