Complete Story
09/14/2017
Behind Enquirer’s heroin epic: ‘We wanted a normal week. It was terrible enough.’
From Columbia Journalism Review
THE HEROIN EPIDEMIC HAS BEEN my full-time beat at The Cincinnati Enquirer for two years, but I’ve covered it for five. I read comments regularly from parents who belong to Kentucky Parents Against Heroin, a private Facebook page for help and support, and talk to those same parents. Their kids are sick, dying, and can’t get treatment quickly enough, if at all. Those who get treatment aren’t likely to get the best kind.
Paramedics and police are exhausted from responding to overdoses, and they’re suffering from compassion fatigue. Hospital neonatal intensive care units are filling with babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome, and social workers are removing children day after day from heroin-addicted parents. Courts, jails, the methadone clinic, and rehab centers are filled with the addicted. It seems as though everyone I talk to has a connection to the epidemic.
As a story, “Seven Days of Heroin”—the Enquirer’s September 10 feature, a week in the life of my region’s opioid crisis as documented by more than 60 journalists—was there all along. We just had to do it. So we picked a week.
I called dozens of sources and laid out the idea. Former Enquirer editor Peter Bhatia (who is headed to the Detroit Free Press) supported our idea full-on, and put Amy Wilson, our storytelling editor, at the helm. Dan Horn, an outstanding writer on our team, had talked with me years earlier about the idea of covering the epidemic over a period of days, and jumped right in. Ultimately, every editor, photographer, and reporter did the same.
