At 33 years old, Jamie is trying to get clean.
The native Bostonian started at a young age: drinking, then smoking pot, then taking pain pills and eventually heroin.
“I never thought in my wildest dreams I would stick a needle in my arm,” said Jamie, who didn’t want his last name revealed. “Not in a million years.”
But the low cost, the readily availability and the prescription pill-like high makes heroin a draw that’s hard to resist.
“It’s a monkey on your back that you can’t shake,” he says.
If autopsy results bear out what officials suspect, actor Philip Seymour Hoffman will be the latest in a growing list of substance abusers who paid a deadly price for using heroin.
In July, heroin (mixed with alcohol) took the life of “Glee” star Cory Monteith.
In August, Emylee Lonczak, a 16-year-old Virginia high school student who’d never injected heroin before, died when a friend shot it into a vein for her.
And last week, Maryland officials said that heroin tainted with fentanyl had claimed at least 37 lives since September. Another 22 cases were reported in Pittsburgh and other towns in western Pennsylvania.
To be sure, heroin has been a scourge for a long, long time. But lately, it’s showing an uptick that has authorities, health officials and parents disturbed.
“Heroin is pummeling the Northeast, leaving addiction, overdoses and fear in its wake,” said James Hunt of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York Office.
A 2012 survey by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (PDF) found that about 669,000 people over age 12 had used heroin at some point in the year. About 156,000 of those were first-time users, and roughly 467,000 were considered heroin-dependent — more than double the number in 2002.
“I’ve been here over six years, and literally this is the first year that I can remember seeing this many people coming in here with an addiction to heroin,” said Robert Parkinson, director of the Beachcomber Rehabilitation Center in Delray Beach, Florida.
It’s not at an epidemic level yet, he says, but “it’s going to be there. … It’s that bad.”
Heroin remains comparatively rare, according to administration figures. By comparison, more than 31 million people used marijuana or hashish in 2012 alone, and another 4.7 million used some form of cocaine that year.
But about 4.6 million people — about 1.8% of the teenage and adult population — reported using heroin at some point in their lives, the survey found. The average first-time user was 23.
Here, we examine the reasons behind the rise in heroin use and its fatal draw:
It’s cheap. Bill Patrianakos was hooked on OxyContin, a prescription pain reliever. He didn’t just like it; he loved it. The problem was, he couldn’t afford it.
“I was pawning things: stealing from my parents, my sister, everyone who cared about me,” he said. “Even that wasn’t enough.”
So he moved on to heroin. It gave him the same high, he said, but at a fraction of the cost.
“I started out snorting,” he said. “And, of course, to conserve my money, I moved on to shooting it.”
The bottom line for users: Heroin is cheap.
Part of the reason is the nationwide crackdown on prescription pill abuse, which has made those drugs harder and more expensive to obtain.
In the first two weeks of 2014, police in Delray Beach, Florida, say, they seized more heroin than they did in the past 10 years combined.
“People were getting pills for $10 around here, and now it’s much more expensive,” said Delray Beach Police Sgt. Nicole Guerriero. “People are now turning to heroin to get their high.”