Updated September 19, 2005.

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, media coverage was rife with tales of looting and violence that appalled the nation. As television viewers struggled to understand what would drive people to take not only food but electronics and other "non-survival" items, Louisiana  Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin were ready with answers: it was the drug addicts.
 
They shrank from examining potentially deep-rooted and hard to resolve factors, such as poverty and racial inequality, that could create a sense of desperation and abandonment compelling people to disregard the normal social order. Instead, these politicians fell back on further dehumanizing a population already faced with social stigma every day.
 
This problem is, of course, not unique to New Orleans. All over the country substance abusers are routinely blamed for crime and other social ills - there is little discussion of the notion that prohibitionist drug policies themselves contribute to just these sorts of problems. It is far more politically popular to point to "drug addicts" as the bogeymen.
 
Now that the most immediate finger-pointing has begun to subside, some media attention is finally starting to be devoted to an important, and more legitimate, aspect of the relationship between Hurricane Katrina and drug users: the difficult situation for people who are in heroin replacement therapy. The Chicago Tribune reports that a treatment center in Baton Rouge is one of the few places left in the state providing methadone for evacuees. The newspaper also cites the medical director of the Chicago Recovery Alliance (CRA), a harm reduction outreach organization, as saying she is seeking federal permission to distribute $50,000 worth of buprenorphine released by a drug manufacturer to hurricane evacuees. A team of harm reduction and addiction treatment specialists from Chicago has driven the CRA's Mobile Opiate Substitution Therapies van to Baton Rouge to support treatment programs there and provide outreach services.
 
As treatment providers from all over the country make commitments to help Gulf coast residents, the Alliance hopes to see more media coverage acknowledging drug users as people rather than subhuman scapegoats. The reality is that people who struggle with drugs have been as harshly impacted by the storm as any other population.