9781422274279

generation takes a cavalier attitude toward heroin. The high schoolers he interviewed were not embarrassed to give their names as they offered their stories of drug abuse. The problem will not get better, Woliver says, until “the young public’s idea of heroin changes.” According to the most recent statistics available from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), about 25 percent of all heroin users in the United States are teenagers or young adults. In 2016, HSDUH found that 13,000 kids between the ages of twelve and seventeen had used heroin in the previous year, while 227,000 young adults (age eighteen to twenty-five) had used heroin in the past year. Over 700,000 adults age twenty-six or older used heroin in the past year. Easy to Obtain Another study, the annual Monitoring the Future Survey conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, reported in 2018 that almost 30 percent of high school seniors say they find heroin easy to obtain. A significant number of young teens—12.6 percent of eighth graders—say they had no problem finding heroin in their first try. Why did heroin become so accessible? A growing number of experts point to an increase in the prescription of opioid painkillers during the late 1990s and 2000s as a driving force behind the resurgence in heroin use. Drugs like oxycodone (sold under the brand name OxyContin) and hydrocodone (Vicodin) were used to treat all types of pain, thanks to intense marketing campaigns by Purdue Pharma (the manufacturer of OxyContin) and other major pharmaceutical companies. Their misleading statements to doctors about the effectiveness and safety of opioid drugs triggered a public health epidemic that claims tens of thousands of lives a year.

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Heroin: Devastating our Communities