News / Foreign Policy

Heroin use, addiction up sharply among white Americans: Study

Friday, 31 March 2017 9:40 AM [ Last Update: Saturday, 01 April 2017 7:12 AM ]

Two homeless heroin addicts prepare to inject heroin in a car park in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Daily Mail)

Heroin use in the United States has increased five-fold in the past 10 years and dependence on the drug has more than tripled, with the largest increase among whites and men with low incomes and little education, according to a new study.

A major study released Wednesday by researchers at Columbia University found that whites aged 18 to 44 accounted for the biggest rise in heroin addiction.

The findings, published online in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, are troubling because the people most affected have few resources to treat the problem, said Dr. Silvia Martins, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

"We are seeing that heroin use has increased in the past 10 years," Martins said in a phone interview. "It is more prominent among whites with lower incomes and education and young adults."

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Martins and her colleagues discovered the trend by surveying more than 79,000 people and analyzing two studies, one from 2001-2002 and another from 2012-2013, and data from 43,000 long-term heroin users.

"A nation awash with prescription opioids has led to a large increase in addiction, overdose deaths and transition to heroin-fentanyl [a powerful synthetic opioid]," said Bertha Madras, a professor of psychobiology at Harvard Medical School. She wrote an editorial that accompanied the study.

Last month, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that rates of fatal drug overdoses have dramatically increased since 1999, rising from 6.1 deaths per 100,000 people to 16.3 deaths per 100,000 in 2015.

Opioids killed more than 33,000 Americans in 2015, more than any year on record, the CDC said, which estimates that 91 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.

The number of heroin users in the US reached around one million in 2014, almost three times as many as in 2003, according to the UN's annual World Drug Report released on Thursday.

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