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| FILE - In this Monday, May 6, 2013 file photo, a drug addict prepares a needle to inject himself with heroin in front of a church in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. It's not a rare scene on Skid Row to spot addicts using drugs in the open, even when police patrol the area. Jim Hall, an epidemiologist who studies substance abuse at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. says, the striking thing about heroin’s most recent incarnation in the early 21st Century, is that a drug that was once largely confined to major cities is spreading into suburban and rural towns across America, where it is used predominantly by young adults between the ages of 18 and 29. "We haven’t really seen something this rapid since probably the spread of cocaine and crack in the mid-1980s," Hall said. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- Heroin was supposed to be an obsolete evil, a blurry memory of a
dangerous drug that dwelled in some dark recess of American culture.
But
smack never really disappeared. It comes in waves, and one such swell
is cresting across the nation, sparking widespread worry among
government officials and driving up overdose deaths - including, it
appears, that of Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Fueled
by a crackdown on prescription pain killers and an abundant supply of
cheap heroin that's more potent than ever, the drug that has killed
famous rock stars and everyday Americans alike is making
headlines
again.
"Heroin has this sort of dark allure to
it that's part of its mystique," said Eric Schneider, a professor at
the University of Pennsylvania who wrote the book "Smack: Heroin in the
City," a historical account of the drug. "What I've heard from heroin
users is that flirting with addiction is part of the allure: to sort of
see how close to that edge you can get and still pull back."
Medical
examiners have not made an official determination of the cause of the
46-year-old actor's death, but police have been investigating it as an
overdose. Hoffman was found in a bathroom with a syringe in his arm.
Authorities
say a number of factors are fueling the drug's use, including
relatively low prices and a less demonized image than it once had.
Rather than seeing heroin as the point-of-no-return drug of strung-out
junkies - in his 1967 song "Heroin," Lou Reed called it "my wife and ...
my life" - some users now see it as an inexpensive alternative to
oxycodone and other prescription opiate drugs.
"People
think that it is someone who is a bum, who's homeless, who has no money
and who is sort of living at the very bottom," said Michael Clune, a
former addict who wrote the memoir `White Out: The Secret Life of
Heroin.' "When the truth is, it really is everywhere."
The
number of recorded heroin overdose deaths nearly doubled from 1,842 in
2000 to 3,036 in 2010, according to the most recent statistics available
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Heroin deaths
still account for a relatively small percentage of total drug overdose
deaths: less than 10 percent in 2010, for example.
Last
month, the governor of Vermont devoted almost his entire State of the
State address to the state's heroin problem, calling on the Legislature
to pass laws encouraging treatment and seek ideas on the best way to
prevent people from becoming addicted.
The
striking thing about heroin's most recent incarnation is that a drug
that was once largely confined to major cities is spreading into
suburban and rural towns across America, where it is used predominantly
by young adults between the ages of 18 and 29, said Jim Hall, an
epidemiologist who studies substance abuse at Nova Southeastern
University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
"We haven't really seen something this rapid since probably the spread of cocaine and crack in the mid-1980s," Hall said.
The
very first American heroin users in the early 20th century were white,
working-class residents of New
York City, which was the epicenter of
heroin use for much of the century and the key entry point to the U.S.
market.
Heroin is processed from morphine,
which itself is derived from the opium poppy. It originated in
inner-city Chinese opium dens in the late 1800s, when people switched
from opium smoking to heroin because it was much easier to smuggle. The
drug was even marketed by the Bayer Co. in 1898 as the "wonder drug" of
the arriving 20th century, sold as a cure for the wracking cough caused
by tuberculosis.
Schneider said after World
War II, heroin became a drug primarily used by blacks and Puerto Ricans
in the Northeast and by Mexican Americans in the West. In the late
1960s, at the height of the hippie drug experimentation era, there was a
surge of heroin use among young white people in New York's East Village
and in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. Crime spiked among
heroin users who were desperate to keep up the habit.
Heroin's
reputation in the 1970s was "a really hard-core, dangerous street drug,
a killer drug, but there's a whole generation who didn't grow up with
that kind of experience with heroin," said New York City Special
Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan, whose office was created in 1971
in response to heroin use and related crime. "It's been glamorized,
certainly much more than it was during the `70s."
In
the 1990s, there was another wave of attention when the term "heroin
chic" became ubiquitous as a description for pale, thin supermodels like
Kate Moss.
The earliest heroin came to the
U.S. from Chinese opium fields, Schneider said, and then Turkey became
the leading source after World War II. After that, U.S. servicemen began
smuggling the drug back from Southeast Asia and drug traffickers opened
up a supply from Latin America. Today, Afghanistan is the
world's
largest heroin producer.
In the past, the
people who were most susceptible to heroin use were the ones who didn't
have to go to work every day, from the very poor to the very wealthy,
Schneider said. Heroin was the drug of choice for 1950s bebop jazz
musicians who used heroin in Manhattan swing clubs, he said, followed
decades later by rock stars like Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain.
That's
not the case anymore. Most heroin addicts at Maryhaven, a substance
abuse treatment center in Columbus, Ohio, got hooked on prescription
painkillers like oxycodone after sustaining some type of injury, said
Paul H. Coleman, the center's president and CEO. When the cost of buying
prescription opiates became prohibitive, and those drugs were
reformulated in ways that made them harder to abuse, they turned to
heroin.
About half of the center's patients - it treated 7,000 people last year - are heroin addicts.
"I've had several patients tell me, `I never thought I would end up putting a needle in my arm,'" Coleman said.
Heroin
never loses its freshness and intensity, which is why it's so
addictive, said Clune, who first tried the drug at a Manhattan party in
1998 and was addicted for four years before getting clean. He was lured
in by the idea that trying heroin was an extreme life experience, like
skydiving. His brain changed forever after just one try.
"Insofar
as heroin is a romance, it's a totally phantom romance. It's
imaginary," Clune said. "It's an allure that promises you something that
you can never really get."
