According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 2003-which actually may have underestimated the use of illicit opiates (heroin) – about 3.7 million people had used heroin at some point in their life, and more 119,000 of them reported having used in the month preceding the survey.
An estimated 314,000 Americans used heroin in the year preceding the survey, and the group with the largest number of users was that of those over 26 years.
The survey reported that from 1995 to 2002, the annual number of new heroin users ranged from 121,000 to 164,000. During this period, most new users (on average, 75 per cent) were aged 18 and older and most were male.
In 2003, 57.4 percent of those who had used heroin in the previous year could be classified as dependent or abusers of heroin and it is estimated that around 281,000 people received treatment for heroin abuse.
The Monitoring the Future Study, an annual survey sponsored by NIDA on drug use by students of the 8th, 10th and 12th grades across the country, reports that heroin use remained stable from 2003 to 2004 . The 1.6 percent of 8th grade students and 1.5 percent of students in both the 10th and the 12th graders had used heroin at some time in their lives.
According Alert Network on Drug Abuse (DAWN, by its initials in English), a system that collects data on visits to emergency rooms of hospitals in 21 metropolitan areas in which mentions the use of any drugs, in 2002 there were 93,519 episodes of hospital visits related to heroin.
The Working Group’s Community Epidemiology (CEWG, by its English acronym), sponsored by NIDA, provides information on the nature and patterns of drug use in 21 cities.
In its December 2003 publication, reported that heroin was the drug most frequently mentioned as the main drug of abuse in a large proportion of treatment admissions for drug abuse in the cities of Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, New York and San Francisco.
Tags: heroin, National Survey, Treatment for heroin
