Heroin was once the scourge of the urban poor, but today the typical user is a young, white suburbanite, a study finds. And the path to addiction usually starts with prescription painkillers.
A survey of 9,000 patients at treatment centers around the country found that 90 percent of heroin users were white men and women. Most were relatively young ”” their average age was 23. And three-quarters said they first started not with heroin but with prescription opioids like OxyContin.
In contrast, when heroin first became popular in the ’60s and ’70s, most users were young minority men who lived in cities. “Heroin is not an inner-city problem anymore,” says , a psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who led the study.
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(NPR) Today's Heroin Addict Is Young, White And Suburban
Heroin was once the scourge of the urban poor, but today the typical user is a young, white suburbanite, a study finds. And the path to addiction usually starts with prescription painkillers.
A survey of 9,000 patients at treatment centers around the country found that 90 percent of heroin users were white men and women. Most were relatively young ”” their average age was 23. And three-quarters said they first started not with heroin but with prescription opioids like OxyContin.
In contrast, when heroin first became popular in the ’60s and ’70s, most users were young minority men who lived in cities. “Heroin is not an inner-city problem anymore,” says , a psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who led the study.
Read it all.