II. America's Drug Use Profile
Heroin Abuse: A Resurgent Menace
Overall usage. In the United States, approximately 325,000 current past-month users in the household population and 810,000 chronic users consume heroin.73 Injection remains the most efficient means of administration, particularly for low-purity heroin. However, the increased availability of high-purity heroin has made snorting and smoking the drug more common and has profoundly altered the pattern of heroin use. With high purity heroin, a user can snort or smoke the drug and get a very potent effect without ever having to inject it. Among heroin users (those who have used heroin at sometime during their lifetime), those who have smoked or snorted it -- vice those who have injected it -- has risen from 55 percent in 1994 to 71 percent in 1997.74 However, it appears that recent public information efforts on the threat of heroin, regardless of the route of administration, may be having some effect. From 1996 to 1997, the percentage people in the U.S. population aged twelve and older who had ever smoked heroin declined by about 40 percent, and the percentage of those who had ever snorted it declined by about 50 percent.75
Source: 1997 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse |
Use among youth. While relatively low, rates of heroin use among teenagers rose significantly among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders during the 1990s. The ability to snort or smoke, instead of injecting heroin, undoubtedly played a major role in increasing use of this drug. The 1998 MTF survey found no change between 1997 and 1998 among 10th graders, but concluded that use among 8th and 12th graders has leveled-off and may have declined. Certainly the upward trend has been arrested. Youth attitudes towards heroin remained statistically constant, with the highest perceived risk among 10th graders. The 1997 NHSDA found that the mean age of initiation declined from 27.3 years in 1988 to 18.1 in 1996, a drop from 19.4 in 1995 and the lowest since 1972.76 It appears as though America's youth have yet to understand fully the danger and the devastation caused by heroin and heroin abuse. While disapproval of heroin use among 12th graders is currently at a twenty-three-year high, with 57.8 percent seeing "great risk" in trying heroin, that number is still too low.77 Ethnographers noted a disturbing increase in teenage heroin use in San Francisco, Newark, Miami, and Atlanta, with users starting in some cities at age thirteen and becoming chronic users by the time they were aged fifteen to seventeen.78
Source: Household Survey |
Availability. Information about the price and purity of heroin is imprecise. In 1998 the average retail price for a pure gram of heroin was approximately $1,799; the wholesale price was $318. These prices were significantly lower than in 1981, when the retail price per gram was estimated to be $3,115 and the wholesale price $1,194.79 9 The System to Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence (STRIDE) found that the average purity for retail heroin in 1998 was 25 percent, much higher than the average of 19 percent reported one decade ago and equaled in 1991.80
Source: Abt Associates for ONDCP |
Ethnographers suggest that heroin is increasingly available in many cities. For example, ONDCP's summer 1998 Pulse Check found that heroin use rose in some cities (San Francisco, Newark, Atlanta, and Baltimore), remained stable at high levels in others (Bridgeport and Chicago) and stabilized in a few other cities (San Diego and Seattle). No city experienced a decline.81 This may signal increased availability. South American heroin became common in the Northeast in 1997, leading to speculation that cocaine trafficking and distribution organizations may be using existing cocaine distribution and sales networks to sell heroin. Analysis of seized heroin as well as arrest rates and intelligence data indicated that there are two distinct heroin markets in the United States, demarcated along the Mississippi River. In the East, high-purity white powdered heroin from South America was predominantly available. In the West, lower purity Mexican "black tar" and brown heroin were the predominant forms available.82
Source: DAWN |
