Philip Seymour Hoffman Was Taught To Be Helpless Before Drugs

This item appears at Reason.com -

"There has been an upsurge in reported heroin use in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) leading USA Today (among many media outlets) to declare that Hoffman's death "is shining a spotlight on an epidemic of opiate addiction that has soared over the past decade...The number of regular heroin users soared from 239,000 in 2010 to 335,000 in 2012, the survey found." But that's in a nation of roughly 300 million people, meaning that there are roughly one in 1,000 Americans who use heroin regularly (that's a tenth of one percent)—which means using as frequently as once a month! (USA Today has shuffled the NSDUH definition from "current," meaning use in the past month, to "regular.") Heroin users are too few to include in a line graph of illicit drug users in NSDUH. Of course, five million Americans are using pharmaceutical pain relievers off-label currently, or roughly two percent (20 times those using heroin)."

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