22
Heroin Addiction
“public health and public safety crisis.” To underscore the severity of the
problem, he shared a disturbing statistic with the group: Between 2006
and 2010 heroin overdose deaths in the United States increased 45 percent.
Holder also explained that the rising incidence of heroin abuse is directly
linked to a spike in the abuse of prescription opioids. “This staggering
rise,” he said, “is a tragic, but hardly unpredictable, symptom of the signifi-
cant increase in prescription drug abuse we’ve seen over the past decade.
And it has impelled law enforcement leaders to fight back aggressively.”
23
From Pain Pills to the Needle
The relationship between abuse of prescription painkiller drugs and
heroin is an issue of grave concern to health officials, addiction experts,
and law enforcement professionals across the United States. Research has
clearly established that a strong link exists, as Leonhart explains: “We
have this exploding prescription drug and heroin problem. In the body
and the brain, there’s no difference between taking an opiate in pill form
and shooting heroin. Either way, you can become an opium addict. . . .
And the reason you’re seeing this on the streets in your communities is
that people switch to heroin because it is cheaper and more easily avail-
able than prescription opiates on the street.”
24
The heroin/prescription painkiller abuse link was the focus of a study
led by addiction expert Theodore J. Cicero, who is a psychiatry profes-
sor and vice chairman for research at Washington University School of
Medicine. Published in the May 2014 issue of medical journal
JAMA
Psychiatry
, the study examines two factors related to heroin abuse: how
user demographics have changed over the past twenty years, and whether
these changes have resulted from people switching to heroin after becom-
ing addicted to prescription painkillers. The published report states:
In recent years, there have been a number of mainstream
media reports that the abuse of heroin has migrated from
low-income urban areas with large minority populations
to more affluent suburban and rural areas with primarily
white populations. . . . Part of this increase in heroin use
and apparent migration to a new class of users appears to
be due to the coincidental increase in the abuse of pre-
scription opioids over the last 20 years, arguably acceler-
ated by the release of OxyContin in the mid-1990s.
25
