Hacker News Reader

In the 90s high schoolers were dying every weekend in Plano TX when heroin rolled through. MTV even made a show about it.

High schools have thousands of students, three overdoses in a year doesn’t seem that high to me. (As depressing as that is)

View on HN

I think it’s very region and socioeconomic class dependent. During my four years in the late aughts, at a high school of 1,500 in a wealthy LA suburb, we had one person drown in a bathtub after a seizure, one fell to his death climbing a waterfall, and one died from cardiac arrest playing tennis in the heat of summer. We didn’t have a single fatal overdose despite a significant amount of drug abuse, both illicit and prescription (mountains of amphetamines and benzos especially).

A student overdosing at school would have been nothing short of shocking and would have brought down the entire town on the school

Well sure, but now fentanyl is everywhere. The game has changed entirely.

Plano was (and still is AFAIK) a wealthy suburb of Dallas at the time it became famous for heroin. That was part of the national narrative about it, in fact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com