Study: Heroin addiction tripled
Increase over a decade mostly by young, white men
Heroin use — which has been at the epicenter of a ruthless and relentless opioid epidemic sweeping the country — has increased fivefold over a decade, and dependence on the drug has tripled, researchers say.
A major study released last week found that the sharpest increase in heroin use and addiction was among young, white men with lower education and income levels.
The findings come as much of the focus surrounding the opioid crisis has been on the mortality rates among middle-aged white women since the turn of this century.
But researchers now say younger white men are being hit even harder — at least by heroin.
In fact, men ages 25 to 44 accounted for the highest heroin-related death rate (13.2 per 100,000) in 2015 — a 22 percent rise from the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Silvia Martins, the lead author of the new study, said increases in heroin use and addiction may be related to several factors, including prescription opioid abuse and market forces that favor cheaper alternatives to pills — such as heroin.
“We saw that most of them had already used prescription opioids,” Martins, associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said in a phone interview. “We saw that in 2001-2002, only 36 percent of white heroin users reported they had already used prescription opioids before. Now, more than half of them — 53 percent — said they had used prescription opioids before. So we believe there is a link to the prescription opioid epidemic.
“Other potential reasons for that are the fact that heroin has become cheaper in recent years in the U.S.”
Or, as Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Rusty Payne said, “The world is filled with addicts who got a legitimate prescription for an opioid and then became dependent on that and continued long after their recovery. Pill addiction is extremely expensive, so they move to heroin because it’s cheaper and easier to get.”
Payne added that the DEA is “seeing a lot of the traffickers who have substituted fentanyl for heroin, and so it’s just a vicious cycle of addiction we’ve seen with a lot of people.”
The study, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, looked at data from two nationally representative household surveys from 2001-2002 and 2012-2013, analyzing responses from nearly 80,000 respondents. It showed that the number of people who reported using heroin at some point in their lives has climbed over the decade from 0.33 percent of the adult population to 1.61 percent, or roughly 3.8 million Americans.
The number of those who met the criteria for heroin use disorder, or addiction, more than tripled from 0.21 percent in 20012002 to 0.69 percent in 2012-2013.
Researchers say they also discovered a widening of the gender gap among heroin users.
“There are more men than women that are heroin users and that also have problems like heroin-use disorder,” Martins said. “And that is different from what we see happening with other drugs and alcohol, so that was a surprising finding.”
The research also revealed that the most notable increases were among whites, climbing from 0.34 percent to 1.9 percent over the decade, as well as among those with lower levels of education and income.