In the last two years, the director of an Islamic funeral home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, buried six young men. Heart attacks, some neighbors said, but the whispers and witnesses said something else: heroin. The families of the men would not discuss the causes of death.
“They tell us straight up, ‘Don’t say anything,’” the funeral director’s son, Kareem Elmatbagi, said. Drug overdose is considered suicide, a sin in Islam, and therefore a source of shame for many in the Arab-American community.
Among Russian-speaking immigrants in South Brooklyn, where heroin use has raged for more than two decades, a study showed that some young addicts were pilfering pills from their grandparents, with whom they lived in multigenerational households.
The country’s epidemic abuse of opioids — heroin, or prescription pills — is often seen as an affliction of white suburban and rural communities, but it has also spread to New York City’s immigrant neighborhoods. There is no city data that breaks down drug abuse by ethnicity, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is emerging or even worsening where it already has a foothold.
Experts and those enmeshed in the fight against drugs see many possible explanations. Immigrant parents are often unfamiliar with the signs of drug abuse and may not know how to navigate the world of treatment and recovery. Immigrant families, steeped in traditions, can also have an especially strong culture of shame around addiction that discourages asking for help.
“No group has a monopoly over stigma,” said Dr. Gary Belkin, the executive deputy commissioner for mental hygiene at the city health department, who oversees the city’s addiction services. “But we need to appreciate the different ways it plays out.”
In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, there were about 19 overdoses from opioids the last two years within the Arab-American community, according to Mohamed Elnashar, the director of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge. The drug epidemic, he said, “has hurt the whole community.”
Written by Liz Robbins for The New York Times.