...and stay away from our children.
Posted on 12/19/2002 7:44:47 AM PST by MrLeRoy
Low prices and increased purity have caused heroin use to skyrocket in Massachusetts, with a new study showing the drug is the No. 1 reason for admissions to treatment programs and hospital detox units as well as overdose deaths.
"This is a drug epidemic permeating every corner of our commonwealth, and as a society, we need to aggressively fight to end the human suffering," said Dr. Howard Koh, commissioner of the Department of Public Health, which issued the report yesterday.
"Heroin deaths are suffocating our society," he said.
The DPH report showed heroin is the most common drug for which people in the state are seeking substance abuse treatment, with 37 percent of those entering treatment last year saying it was for heroin addiction.
In fiscal year 2002, which ended June 30, some 42 percent of the people entering state-supported substance abuse treatment programs reported using heroin within the past year, compared with 19 percent in 1992.
And 60 percent of the people entering detox programs reported using heroin within the past year, the same percentage as for alcohol.
"Heroin use has increased dramatically over the past 10 years," said Teresa Anderson of the agency's Bureau of Substance Abuse Services.
Since 1996, rates of opioid-related hospitalizations soared 74 percent, including a 230 percent rise among those in the 15-24 age group and a 150 percent jump among those aged 45-54.
The highest rates were among men aged 25-44, however.
Opioids include heroin, codeine, morphine and oxycodone.
Fatal heroin overdoses jumped 156 percent from 1990 to 1998 and another 10 percent between 1999 and 2000, the report said. Fatality rates were highest for those aged 35-44.
Deborah Klein Walker, associate commissioner for programs and prevention, cited lower prices and increased purity as reasons why heroin use is soaring.
"Heroin use has continued to rise over the last few years," said Daniel Mumbauer, president of the Highpoint Treatment Center in Plymouth and New Bedford.
"More than half of all folks admitted to inpatient units for detox, their drug of choice is heroin," he said.
"It's cheap and accessible," he said.
A bag of heroin now costs only about $4, Mumbauer said.
"It's cheaper than a six-pack of beer," he said.
That makes it attractive to younger people, he noted.
And the fact that the heroin these days is very pure allows people to get high from snorting it instead of shooting it - at least at first.
That's another reason why younger people are willing to try it, Mumbauer said.
In the end, however, "intravenous is still the most popular way of getting high from heroin," he said.
Intravenous use of drugs is linked to transmission of HIV and hepatitis C, Klein Walker said.
State police Sgt. Al Zani of the Essex County Drug Task Force in Lynn said a bag of heroin that cost $20 in the 1970s now costs $4 - and the purity is up from about 5 percent to anywhere from 30 to 80 percent.
"We're seeing the consequences," he said. "You're seeing teenagers doing it. You see a lot of high school students."
DPH officials said they hope to use the report to improve programs aimed at prevention and treatment.
"Treatment works," Koh said.
Everyone of the heroin deaths is a blessing which makes me happy, and they serve as a beautiful object example for our youth of what not to do. Dear drug czar - kiss my a$$!
So you have nothing to say but you can't shut up. Very sad.
...and stay away from our children.
That's impossible. Czar Walters said the same thing about MJ just last week. The idiots need to get their lies straight.
Legalization would make the supply of available heroin even cheaper and even more pure. The crisis reported here is a result of the existing low price and high purity. Consider the possibility that legalization would drive the crisis even deeper.
If your position is that, on principle, people should be able to do what they want vis-a-vis drugs regardless of the empirical evidence, I don't agree, but I understand your position. No need to get into an argument about that, which we will never resolve.
But if your position is that the empirical result of legalizing hard drugs would be good (or at least not too bad), I think it is dubious. While I think a good (not compelling argument) can be made that legalization of pot would not cause a crisis (it would just produce a lot of stupid, slow people who accomplish virtually nothing in their lives--but most of them are already stoners), the empirical case on hard drugs seems to me to compel the opposite conclusion.
Reducing support for legalization one death at a time...... better then the threat of imprisonment I guess.
Yeah, having to repeat those pesky facts so that people like you will finally get it is boring and repetitious. But we keep hoping you guys will wake up.
Just to do my duty, here are numbers from an 1993 concerning preventable deaths per year from several causes. Here's the heart of the data:
"Substance abuse is a major contributor to preventable death in the US (Fig 1). 400,000 deaths each year are caused by tobacco, and 100,000 by alcohol. An additional 20,000 deaths are caused by illicit drug use."
Notice that the 20,000 figure is for all illegal drugs combined.
So you condemn those destructive, "evil" drugs but you're fine with 100,000 alcohol-related deaths per year?
Cheaper than the New York tax on a pack of cigarettes.
There's where your analogy falls flat. ALL heroin is "tainted" in your sense of being potentially lethal to its consumer; if ALL beef were tainted people would have no reason to think "it couldn't happen to them."
If Pakistan were to flood the United States with cheap, potent heroin, is that an act of aggression?
It might be intended as such---just as Radio Marti is (was?) in a sense "aggression" against the Cuban government---but selling people things they want to buy is intrinsically nonaggressive.
If you believe this, you have never been exposed to substance abusers. I have done a fair amount of rehab counseling. I can tell you without any question or hesitation that meth, cocaine and PCP GREATLY increase violent behavior. Meth and cocaine turn folks into paranoid schizophreics. I don't know what it is PCP does in clinical terms--but its REALLY ugly. Long-term alcohol use (many years) is ugly. But cocaine for two months, meth for a week, and PCP for 30 minutes make ethanol look like a walk in the park.
Go to your local county hospital (the one where the indigent go and get free treatment) and volunteer to work in the detox or mental unit for a week. (The mental unit will give you a good cross-section too because it will be full of detoxing or detoxed druggies and depressed teenagers.) It will open your eyes.
Do you ever read objectively or do we have to explain this in detail everytime it comes up? With lower prices comes lower profits for dealers, which leads to no incentives for dealers to push the stuff, which leads to fewer people trying it, which leads to less dependency. Yawn!
And you're factually incorrect in your assertion that legality would lead to a higher purity of drugs. The opposite is true. When drugs are illegal, dealers look for a higher purity in greater concentration because it's easier to smuggle.
Think about the prohibition era and ask yourself, which was easier to transport undetected, 100 bottles of beer, or it's intoxicating equivalent - 8 bottles of whisky, or even better, 3 bottles of pure grain alcohol. The answer is obvious.
Exactly!
...in any systematic manner."
Besides, it doesn't matter what I or you or the poster "believes", because these are the stats from the government. You know, the government who employees a man who said that marijuana is more dangerous than heroin.
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