Rise In Heroin Use Highest Among White People

Television shows and movies may portray people of color as the ones who use drugs most often, but this is not the case in reality. Meanwhile, it seems that in the last few years, numbers of people dying from drug overdose are at an all-time high, with at least 63 percent involving the use of opoid.

According to CNN, more people actually die from drug overdose than from guns or from drug accidents. For instance, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic in 1995, as many as 43,115 people in the U.S. died from the disease. However, this did not compare to 2015's toll over drugs, which killed 52,404 people due to overdose. This is especially alarming considering that since 1999, the number of overdoses from opoids and illicit drugs has quadrupled. With this, heroin accounts for one in four overdose deaths in the U.S.

In a study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, researchers found that since 2001, the number of people using heroin has increased nearly fivefold, while the number of those who abuse the same drug has tripled.

For the study, the authors evaluated the responses of over 79,000 individuals in 2001 and 2002, and again in 2012 and 2013. Heroin use among whites and non-whites was fairly similar in the early years, at 0.34 percent and 0.32 percent, respectively. However, by 2012-2013, the percentage of whites who use the drug jumped to 1.90 percent, as opposed to the 1.05 percent of non-whites. Another observation noted is that heroin use remarkably rose among people with a high school education or less, or among people who lived at less than 100 percent of the federal poverty line.

Not all news is bad, though. According to Caleb Banta-Green, an associate professor of health services and the University of Washington, said that among all kinds of drug abuse, heroin and opoids have by far the best treatment medications available.

The Guardian, however, took note that the growing epidemic of opoid and heroin abuse in the U.S. should be addressed. Recent figures showed that 91 Americans die from an opoid-related overdose every day. This is as alarming as the rise in number of heroin-related overdose between the years 2002 and 2013.