Middle-class white kids overdosing on heroin will do for junkies what AIDs did for promiscuous gay men.

Goodbye, despised fringe group! Hello, sacred victims! Wear some kind of colored ribbon! Attend a candlelight vigil! Does Elton John feel like writing a weepy anthem, all proceeds to charity?

I headlined this column "A High School Athlete in Heroin's Deadly Grip," because that kind of headline springs onto the front page every time some white suburban kid spikes up and dies. That kid is an "addict" by the way. The guy who begs change from me at the convenience store two blocks from my house is a "junky."

I live in a city. You could buy heroin here in the 1940s. I know guys who were addicted in the 1970s. Alas, their families lived in apartments. Addiction is only a disease when it strikes people who own their own homes. If you live in the projects, forget sympathy. Though you are for more likely to be arrested on a drug charge than Johnny Straight Teeth out there in Lawnsville.

Same with homosexuality. If you're in a committed same-sex relationship with your cellmate and one of you dies of AIDs, you do not get a telethon to "find a cure." If you work on the Broadway stage and AIDs kills you dead, there is no end to the sadness, publicly expressed and set to music.

In my city neighborhood, we hate junkies, sometimes even our addicted relatives. You know why? Because they steal. They steal everything. They're the reason you can't take your kids to the park. They're not ex-high school football players who ruined their grades and didn't make it to medical school, causing a great gusher of tragedy to erupt. Daddy's insurance won't send 'em to rehab, a judge will.

People who own their own homes and wear collared shirts to work can't have a junky in the family. They can, however, have a relative who is "struggling with the disease of addiction." That makes it sound like multiple sclerosis or asthma, something terrible but non-volitional.

There are suburbs all around the city where I live. Out in the suburbs, you know your heroin habit is out of control when you move to the city, where there are homeless shelters and street begging is seldom stopped, where there are methadone clinics and homeless camps under the overpasses and behind the abandoned factories. Send us your tired, your newly poor, your huddled bundles of rags yearning to shoot up in the weeds behind the dollar store. Send us your tragic former high school athletes. We like a sad story when we're forking over spare change or a cigarette.

And if no one in our family ever graduated from high school? If you never met your father? If our mother has a neck tattoo and your grandmother is 40 years old? If the door of your house opens on to the sidewalk?

Then die, damn you, die.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, "Marc Dion, Vol. I" is a collection of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated columnist's best 2014 columns.