Heroin is not the epidemic. Opioids are the epidemic. They have been for over a decade. It seems that people care more when their kids are buying it on a street corner than they do when they're getting it out of their medicine cabinet or a "pain clinic".
Correctamundo!!! This is absolutely true.
An incredible number of Americans have become habitual opioid users in the past 20-25 years. Most of them got hooked on Rx meds. Remember Brett Favre's Vicodin abuse issue? That was in 1995.
Docs used to prescribe narcotic pain meds like candy. They were in part driven to it by activists who wanted hospitals and doctors to be punished for failing to "adequately address pain", and their lawyers, who successfully sued docs who tried to limit or prohibit patient narcotic use. By Y2K, unless you had balls of steel, no clinic doc could avoid having to write way more opioid Rx's than s/he really wanted to.
So more and more people have got used to having a bottle of Percocet or Vicodin in the medicine chest "just in case". Kids got in the habit of stealing a couple of oxy's on a Friday night to get "high" with their pals... grind 'em up and snort 'em, usually, but some would inject subcutaneously ("skin-popping") or intravenously. Most were recreational, but some became addicts. And as Pat says, most folks didn't get all that upset bout it, because "it's just a pill". My ex's 25-year-old son was a habitual hydrocodone abuser--he was not addicted so far as I know, but would pop a couple on weekends for kicks when he went out clubbing with his buddies--and my ex thought it wasn't a big deal. Even when I told her that a bottle of hydrocodone I kept in my medical bag had gone missing during one of her son's visits.
Then the DEA moved oxycodone and then hydrocodone to the Schedule II list, which meant that doctors had to meet a much higher standard to prescribe those meds. And as a result, the street supply of those drugs dried up, and prices went through the roof. Street price for a 10 mg tablet of oxycodone (Percocet) was about 15 bucks 5 years ago, but now it's more than $50.
So people who are already habituated to narcotics are migrating to heroin. What a surprise.
