With the recent revelations that heroin use is now more commonly seen affecting middle-class suburban white adults in their early 20s, at least one U.S. city police force will be taking to the streets with medical kits to instantly treat heroin overdoses.
The office of the New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently announced that nearly 20,000 New York Police Department officers will now be equipped with and trained to use medical kits to instantly treat heroin overdoses. The initiative will cost some $1.2 million, with funding coming from the Attorney General's Community Overdose Prevention (COP) program, and uses the heroin antidote naloxone as the main part of the kit.
Other cities around the country may also be following New York's lead as, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), heroin use in the United States has been rising since 2007, growing from 373,000 yearly users to 669,000 in 2012.
The number of deaths from heroin overdose is also on the rise, according to recent data from the Drug Enforcement Administration, increasing 45 percent from 2006 to 2010.
"The COP program is an essential part of our effort to combat the spike in heroin overdoses that is plaguing communities and families here in New York City and across the state," says Schneiderman. "This program will literally save lives."
Once thought to be a strictly urban problem, law enforcement and public health officials around the country are reporting an uptick in suburban and rural users.
An earlier Tech Times story on the subject of heroin use examined report by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. Their study analyzed data from more than 150 drug treatment centers around the U.S., where patients agreeing to take part in the survey were quizzed on their usage of heroin and of prescription opiate drugs.
This research discovered that by the last decade, whites accounted for 90 percent of new heroin users, the researchers found.
The Washington University in St. Louis report theorized that wealthy, white suburban adults more often have access to doctors and can obtain prescriptions for, and eventually develop an addiction to, the pharmaceutical opioids, he says. Many of them then eventually turn from prescription opioids to heroin because the drug, although illegal, is more affordable and can be obtained more easily.
Regarding the New York initiative to use medical kits to instantly treat heroin overdoses, more than 150 law enforcement agencies around the state have already applied to the program since it was launched last month.
