THE GRAYING HEROIN EPIDEMIC                                   october 27, 2007

America's rapidly growing drug overdose crisis is centered in middle-aged men and whites, a top epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control told Congress in October 24 testimony.

The statement, the most important by a federal official on America's drug abuse crisis, was ignored by the news media and has received no attention from drug-war agencies or lobbies. Virtually all news media reports and major interest groups have relentlessly blamed drug overdoses, particularly heroin and prescription drug abuse, on teenagers, young adults, and inner-city minorities.

"The group at highest risk for drug poisoning death is middle-aged men, the same demographic group that historically has had high rates of fatal heroin overdoses," Leonard J. Paulozzi, Medical Epidemiologist for the National Center for Injury Prevention, Control Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Committee. "Rates were higher for whites (7.2 per 100,000) than for African Americans (6.6 per 100,000)."

"Unintentional poisonings" 96% of which involve drug overdoses, "are now the second leading cause of unintentional injury death, exceeded only by motor vehicle fatalities" Paulozzi told Congress."The mortality rates from drug poisoning (not including alcohol) have risen steadily since the early 1970s.

"Over the past ten years they have reached historic highs.  Rates are currently more than twice what they were during the peak years of crack cocaine mortality in the early 1990s, and 4 to 5 times higher than the rates during the year of heroin mortality peak in 1975." Further increases are projected for 2005 and 2006, he said.

"By 2004, at least 20,000 unintentional drug poisoning deaths occurred annually in the United States," Paulozzi said, exceeding homicides and all other accidental death categories except traffic accidents. In particular, "the number of deaths involving prescription opioid analgesics" such as Oxycontin and Hydrocodone "increased from roughly 2,900 in 1999 to 7,500 in 2004, an increase of 160% in just 5 years," Paulozzi said. 

Prescription drugs are now "driving the upward trend in drug poisoning mortality," he added.   States in which more opioid analgesics were prescribed had the highest rates of overdose deaths.

"Mortality statistics suggest that these deaths are largely due to the misuse and abuse of prescription drugs," he said, not toddlers or older folks who make a mistake.  "...Studies consistently report that a high percentage of people who die of prescription drug overdoses have a history of substance abuse."

Mike Males, www.YouthFacts.org